Localization. Start
I continue to express thoughts from my low altitude ...
What is needed for a good licensed localization?
- Programmer, remove information from the Localization Kit and stuff it into the game
- Translator (s), actually translate
- Artists, draw letters in a given game style
- Sound producer, write everything that actors will say
- Tester, mostly read, sometimes listen, even less often play
- Manager, give everyone a good kick to work better, i.e. create motivation :)
And if you have nothing but a disc with a finished game?
- A cool hacker and a reverse engineering specialist who, in a short amount of time, will sort everything out in pieces, and then be able to put everything back together.
- A translator who knows what variables are, has a good gaming experience, preferably knows what scripts are, i.e. will understand what needs to be translated and what is not.
- An artist who can draw a font, redraw the text on the finished picture to the desired one.
')
The rest, in general, remain the same ... Unless the manager of the pirate team should be much more careful. If anything, we work for ourselves. Sell? What do you mean! We just wanted to ... :)
This also adds an unreal motivation of the translation team, without it in any way, because the money for such a transfer will be paid less, and much more. There will be time constraints. Because pirated products should appear immediately after the release of the original, and, if possible, before.
In addition, you need to be what is called in the subject of the product being translated, i.e. know the translation context. And then it turns out that you play in FIFA'xx, for the team "Baer (Munich)." Although how can you not guess that this is the city of Munich, I do not know ... I take off my hat.
But there is little motivation alone, you still need the guy who will disassemble the game in one day and be able to assemble it back. And in some places, oh so easy ... It's good when the game developer, a normal and not lazy person, took care of the translation possibilities. Even better if the game has several languages. Then one can wipe Russian. Worse if this cool guy through the line of nahardkodil ... Then we get "EXIT", "START GAME" and similar costs of turning 33 Russian letters into 26 non-Russians. See the article from mikeSP here .
About the manager on purpose I am silent, because his work is out of competition. To negotiate, knock out, argue with the customer, this is his work ... Like so much more. Gather such a team of different people and make them work. And work motivated. This is not as easy as it seemed to me then. One thing is bad, I still don’t know how to fight with greed ... of my own or of any of the team members. After all, the claim to present fail.
I'll start the story from the end. Since the localization died for me.
It's simple. The market was full and the transfer was every raspaltsovany teenager. And three of the four transferred from bad to bad. BUT! They translated cheap, they agreed to work for a penny ...
When I was told that they would pay $ 1 per kilobyte of text, I felt sad. I remembered the same “wall”, remembered all the games that I translated ... And threw it. I did not want to tinker. I wanted to do well. And I could not do everything well for such money ... I wanted more money, but my opinion this hard labor deserved much better payment than I was offered. But bad luck, there were people who agreed to transfer and for less money. Yes, and did not want to spoil the game. It was disgusting to look at the next few translations of the team where I left ... not at all, of course ... But that was later, at first it was cool, very fun and informative.
It all started with the fact that we were given an ALIENS game for the first time like this, such as 199x, I find it difficult to give an exact name ... sorry. Lost through the ages.
It was said that as soon as we broke down, they were waiting for a visit. Broke a very long time, about 2 weeks ... Let's go to repent. And in response, they heard: “Wow! The previous guys broke a month and a half, and then they didn't break everything ... Cool guys! Let's work. ”
The first game was WarWind .
Such a strategy, a clone of WarCraft-II from DreamForge. With good graphics, voice acting and other delights of the product made by a big studio. There was nothing especially remarkable in the translation, it was all quite simple, as I recall. I remember that during the assembly almost a day was killed in bouncing letters in Russian font. Those. each letter was printed not nicely under the ruler, but jumped like a preschooler in a notebook :)
At the time when DirectX was just starting its countdown ... each developer, as he wanted, organized the text output to the screen. Created a texture with fonts as I wanted ... If the texture was created beautifully, in clear sections, everything went without problems. But if he wanted to show off and save space ... His brain began to draw insidious patterns of placing letters on the texture ...: (A programmer’s dream, which will then place Russian characters. Fortunately, everything was simple. One large texture per line for each font, which was easily expanded Russian characters, you just had to follow the numbering of the characters, i.e. put the Russian characters in the appropriate places in the ruler. However, not everything was so simple.The height of each letter and symbol was stored in a different place and by default was one tical, which was not acceptable to some Russian letters. What we have corrected a few hours later.
Separately, it is necessary to note the excellent, awesome work of a pro-sound producer, who agreed to help us. He created a voice with which the announcer speaks in the game, he is synthesized electronically.
Result, 7 days. Everyone is happy, including us.
Be sure to continue ...
What is needed for a good licensed localization?
- Programmer, remove information from the Localization Kit and stuff it into the game
- Translator (s), actually translate
- Artists, draw letters in a given game style
- Sound producer, write everything that actors will say
- Tester, mostly read, sometimes listen, even less often play
- Manager, give everyone a good kick to work better, i.e. create motivation :)
And if you have nothing but a disc with a finished game?
- A cool hacker and a reverse engineering specialist who, in a short amount of time, will sort everything out in pieces, and then be able to put everything back together.
- A translator who knows what variables are, has a good gaming experience, preferably knows what scripts are, i.e. will understand what needs to be translated and what is not.
- An artist who can draw a font, redraw the text on the finished picture to the desired one.
')
The rest, in general, remain the same ... Unless the manager of the pirate team should be much more careful. If anything, we work for ourselves. Sell? What do you mean! We just wanted to ... :)
This also adds an unreal motivation of the translation team, without it in any way, because the money for such a transfer will be paid less, and much more. There will be time constraints. Because pirated products should appear immediately after the release of the original, and, if possible, before.
In addition, you need to be what is called in the subject of the product being translated, i.e. know the translation context. And then it turns out that you play in FIFA'xx, for the team "Baer (Munich)." Although how can you not guess that this is the city of Munich, I do not know ... I take off my hat.
But there is little motivation alone, you still need the guy who will disassemble the game in one day and be able to assemble it back. And in some places, oh so easy ... It's good when the game developer, a normal and not lazy person, took care of the translation possibilities. Even better if the game has several languages. Then one can wipe Russian. Worse if this cool guy through the line of nahardkodil ... Then we get "EXIT", "START GAME" and similar costs of turning 33 Russian letters into 26 non-Russians. See the article from mikeSP here .
About the manager on purpose I am silent, because his work is out of competition. To negotiate, knock out, argue with the customer, this is his work ... Like so much more. Gather such a team of different people and make them work. And work motivated. This is not as easy as it seemed to me then. One thing is bad, I still don’t know how to fight with greed ... of my own or of any of the team members. After all, the claim to present fail.
I'll start the story from the end. Since the localization died for me.
It's simple. The market was full and the transfer was every raspaltsovany teenager. And three of the four transferred from bad to bad. BUT! They translated cheap, they agreed to work for a penny ...
When I was told that they would pay $ 1 per kilobyte of text, I felt sad. I remembered the same “wall”, remembered all the games that I translated ... And threw it. I did not want to tinker. I wanted to do well. And I could not do everything well for such money ... I wanted more money, but my opinion this hard labor deserved much better payment than I was offered. But bad luck, there were people who agreed to transfer and for less money. Yes, and did not want to spoil the game. It was disgusting to look at the next few translations of the team where I left ... not at all, of course ... But that was later, at first it was cool, very fun and informative.
It all started with the fact that we were given an ALIENS game for the first time like this, such as 199x, I find it difficult to give an exact name ... sorry. Lost through the ages.
It was said that as soon as we broke down, they were waiting for a visit. Broke a very long time, about 2 weeks ... Let's go to repent. And in response, they heard: “Wow! The previous guys broke a month and a half, and then they didn't break everything ... Cool guys! Let's work. ”
The first game was WarWind .
Such a strategy, a clone of WarCraft-II from DreamForge. With good graphics, voice acting and other delights of the product made by a big studio. There was nothing especially remarkable in the translation, it was all quite simple, as I recall. I remember that during the assembly almost a day was killed in bouncing letters in Russian font. Those. each letter was printed not nicely under the ruler, but jumped like a preschooler in a notebook :)
At the time when DirectX was just starting its countdown ... each developer, as he wanted, organized the text output to the screen. Created a texture with fonts as I wanted ... If the texture was created beautifully, in clear sections, everything went without problems. But if he wanted to show off and save space ... His brain began to draw insidious patterns of placing letters on the texture ...: (A programmer’s dream, which will then place Russian characters. Fortunately, everything was simple. One large texture per line for each font, which was easily expanded Russian characters, you just had to follow the numbering of the characters, i.e. put the Russian characters in the appropriate places in the ruler. However, not everything was so simple.The height of each letter and symbol was stored in a different place and by default was one tical, which was not acceptable to some Russian letters. What we have corrected a few hours later.
Separately, it is necessary to note the excellent, awesome work of a pro-sound producer, who agreed to help us. He created a voice with which the announcer speaks in the game, he is synthesized electronically.
Result, 7 days. Everyone is happy, including us.
Be sure to continue ...
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/61255/
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