Hello,

I have probably started my topic at the wrong place ; sorry for that !

My goal is to extend the Daimon client and server to take into account other languages as follows :

1. Translate quests (when a quest is not translated into the client language it defaults to English)
    I will do some in French (I am French).
2. Translate Client interface
    - Font Bitmaps (that handle foreign chars). I also plan to create a matrix to convert foreign chars into English ones.
    - Translate all the UI text (in French)
    - Improve the keyboard handling (French keyboard)

I probably have forgotten some technical points (it is not a problem for me) but I am really annoyed by the legal side.

My purpose is not to deal with legal matter but to promote Daimonin.

Any advice ?

A noble goal, but I think you'll find it virtually impossible without doing a fairly major rewrite of both client and server.

My advice would to forget the quests for now (that will present it's own problems I think if you want to have multiple language quests running at the same time (so the server selects which language is displayed at runtime according to a client preference). Also, how do you plan to handle player input? For example, if my quest output is in French do I have to type '/talk bonjour', or will '/talk hello' still work? What about '/talk guten tag'? What if the quest script already recognises a form of input which just happens to conflict with another meaning in another language?

My humble and honest advice is to forget that goal and pick some better one...

Instead of re writing alot of things, why not just add another NPC at every quest, one for english, one for french?

Thank you all for your quick answer.

When I have posted this topic, I knew that I will have to rewrite many parts of the client and the server (and redraw some font bitmaps).

And you are right, I didn't take into account the "Quest scripts" and don't actually realize how far they can interfere into this project.

From my point of view, to be available from the server into another language, a quest has to be fully translated (I realize that in some case it may be difficult). Doing so we should not have any problem with the "/talk" issue.

Maybe you are right and I am wasting my time (and yours) with that goal.

Sorry to insist, but I still have the same question concerning the legal side regarding the quests, graphics and musics,...

Everything that is available on sourceforge is freely usable/modifiable within the terms of the specified license(s), primarly the GPL.  If you wish to modify a server/client for french you are free to do so.  All we ask is that you adhere to the licenses.  We would hope you would share your changes with us and we will provide what support we can.

Thank you. Now, I can investigate further.

Don't worry, I will share all my changes (when consistent). And I will probably have other questions.

I have started to develop the multilingual support on the client side.

I have also realized (some mmorpg games help me to do so) that hosting multilingual on the same logical server is not a good thing : I think it will decrease the realism and the playability of the game.

This observation leads me to think that there should be at least one logical server by handled language.

For me, "logical servers" means that the servers may be hosted on the same "physical server" (working on different ports).

i think the best you could hope for will be to have a translation layer in the client to translate the text on-demand, otherwise methinks it is going to be quite a headache for you to track everything down.

I don't want to write a translator (nor include one) ; it is a too difficult task for a contestable result.

I just want to write a multi-language Daimonin and translate some quests (not all the quests). I hope that if I manage to do so some players will also do some translation (and create quest in their language).

What do you mean by "track everything down" ? Do you mean that since I don't have the quest scripts that run on the official server, the quests will be difficult to translate ?

Where are located the quests contained in the "map maker package" ? In daimonin_mapmaker/maps/planes/human_plane/castle/guildhall ?

yup, .lua files in the maps directories. but honestly, translating quests is not going to be  useful. Putting proper language support in the server would be more useful, though practically impossible ATM. Also, the client (not sure about the server) only supports ASCII, not unicode so that's a bad start.

Thank you Smacky for your answer...

1. I knew that ASCII was used when I started this post and also that bitmaps were used in place of fonts (maybe preventing unicode).

Maybe utf-8 could be an alternative with some (many ?) adaptation.

Anyway this is not the way I have choosen since a lot of language character sets can fit into 8 bits (vs 16 bits for UNICODE and 8 up to 24 bits for utf-8) and use the current model (you just have to redraw the font bitmaps and remap some characters). Maybe at a later time, I will re-consider my opinion (and try to implement unicode or utf-8)

2. I do agree with you that translating quest is not so usefull (and I'd prefer not to do so, I have probably something more interesting to do !), but I need to understand the implications.

3. I would like you to explain why putting the proper language support in the server is practically impossible ; I didn't have a look yet at the server sources : I just managed to compiled it on UBUNTU (I have to patch my configure file).

4. Could someone confirm that most of the official server quests are not provided with the map maker package ? Is this due to legal issue ?

The maps and quests are owned by michtoen and/or their creators, and are used on the main server with permission of those peoples.  They stay proprietary because A) they distinguish us from any competing Forks; and B) It would be a shame for players to be able to find out how the quests work/ how to complete the quests without even having attempt them.

However, they may or may not be able to have some of them released by talking with their creators and/or michtoen.

The server is plain old C, written for performance. Mostly all Strings (except Text that comes from lua-scripts, like quests, and so on) ar hardcoded in the server, at the point they are needed. Then they are all the object like weapons, items, with its name and description. These informations are stored in external files parsed by the server.
The thing is now, to have multilanguage support you would first need the translations (for the server internal strings, and for all objects (im not sure, but i think its more than 1000 objects). The translation alone is only a manpower thing. The problematic point is that the server must not only held all these different langiages in memory, but also must check for every string that gets send to the client, the language of the player, chose the right string (with fallback to english if translation not exists), and send it. And that language check need much cpu (even with some sort of stringstore and pointer-magic) for the big amount of strings send.
It will later be possible to translate all the standard messages, because they will be moved client side, but that will be in 2 weeks(TM).

Then all the server would have to do would be to send message number and have the client interpret it. However you'd then need an updater for the language file repository for the client to download... More than 2 weeks I think