Translating Legend of Grimrock 1 or 2

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lostprophet
Posts: 37
Joined: Sun Apr 08, 2012 2:23 am

Translating Legend of Grimrock 1 or 2

Post by lostprophet »

Hey all!

I've been lurking around to find a way to translate either or both Legend of Grimrock 1 and 2.
Has anyone found a way and would be willing to share their secrets?

(I've been translating videogames for 14 years now, and had my fair share of "complex" translations, but in this case I don't even know where to start.)
My Hungarian game translations @ http://lostprophet.weboldala.net
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Isaac
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Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 10:02 pm

Re: Translating Legend of Grimrock 1 or 2

Post by Isaac »

A few years ago I had an idea for a modding framework that could have allowed for players to select their language of choice—among those supported by the designer's mod. I managed a proof of concept. Later on Petri [architect of the game engine] introduced U-Mods support as a Steam Beta feature, and this allowed access to the game's internal (previously inaccessible) functions, and —presumably— a way to build new feature support (through scripts) almost into the game engine itself.

I don't have the Steam version, and AH never went forward with U-mods as a regular feature. :(

My proof of concept rendered a language selection menu that could be used with displaying translated subtitles for slideshows, and could have been used as a selector value for any modded game text to used a particular language choice.

https://vimeo.com/282737048
Image

At this point U-modding is far more capable of adding support for this feature, but it is only available to those with the Steam version, who have the beta enabled—and IIRC, that beta is behind a puzzle needing solved... so not many will have that enabled (or even know about it, I think).

____________

My mod menu script is for Grimrock 2, but the same could be done [differently] for Grimrock 1, and used similarly.

This is the menu mod: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xbc5elci ... go9fk&dl=1

It is only the menu feature itself, not the translated slides; these were baked image files, because I still haven't made the function to translate hudPrint statements in the selected language.

This is example of rendering a custom menu. The menu script records the user's choice of language in the local variable language_choice, to use as a table selector in outside scripts that would use the table sets of your translated text.

Every UI text element in the user's mod would need to reference the language table, or have a function that returns the text for the given language_choice.
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Komag
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Joined: Sat Jul 28, 2012 4:55 pm
Location: Boston, USA

Re: Translating Legend of Grimrock 1 or 2

Post by Komag »

Wow Isaac, you've really thought this through! I'm still crossing my fingers for an eventually Grimrock 3 whenever Petri comes out of retirement, and maybe you can suggest this more strongly to him at that point :)
Finished Dungeons - complete mods to play
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