[MUD-Dev] In-Game Languages

[David Bennett]

On 4/5/99, at 2:36 AM, Michael Hohensee wrote: 


>> How does someone with the given language skill read the output? Do they
>> simply get the untranslated version, and others get the translated
version?
>> Does this work for written material too? (It could - you would just have
>> to have a language flag on all text, and do the translation on final
>> output to the player, so that a player could carry around a Dwarvish
>> book, and finally read it after learning the skill.)

>One solution to this is to show ignorant players random gibberish
>whenever someone speaks, but that precludes the example of writing a
>book in dwarvish.  (What sort of book has different letters in it each
>time you look at it?)

I used word based translations to solve this problem.  I would use a
deterministic random number generator seeded on the length of the input
string, so a book will always appear the same.  Then I do a check based on
the length of the word and the persons skill, so shorter words tend to be
easier to translate (which makes sense to me).  This is a simple, but quite
effective, way of getting around the easy words are easier to translate and
making the translations consistant.

Each language does it's translation in quite different ways.  Some of the
languages (like djellian) translate differently in written text.  They use
a hyroglyphic language, so you get output like:
Double line Small pot Black cat
etc. Which looks quite cool and pretty effective :)

On names...  I found some code around a long time ago which takes an input
file consisting of patterns of word forms and then translates the word
forms into the resulting word.

ie:
:W:Y VF YF YF YXF YXF YXYF B:
:B:YNF YNXF YNXF YNXYF YXYNF:
:P:pre re con in anti de ad bi ambi dis a e i o u:
:Y:Ca Ce Ci Co Cu Cy Da De Di Do Dy:
:X:Ce Ci Co o:
:V:a e i o u y:
:F:Ca Ce Cy Cic Cous Cate Cal Cion Cent Cist Cian Cium:
:C:b c ch d g l m n p ph ps r s t th v x z Rr sH Ll:
:D:b c ch d g l m n p ph ps r s t th v x z Rr sH Ll h qu gn pt:
:R:b c ch g p ph t th:
:L:c ch p g f:
:H:c ch cl m n p ph pl pr qu t th:
:N:n c l r:


Format being:
:<translantion id>:<word forms and letters>

Anything in capitals is something to translate, and anything in lower case
is a real letter...  You keep doing a pass over your word till you run out
of capitals to translate.  This produces quite nice and consistant looking
randomised names which are in keeping with the specified language.  The
above one being a latin name generator.

You can see the results of this if you go onto discworld and look at the
random names in the new player login method.

Fluffy today, tomorrow and forever,
David.

PS Hope this doesn't look really badly formated, this mail program is
showing everything in bold, I don't know what that means...



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