So...what is Stoic up to these days?

[John]

The game is being worked on by the translators right now. They started work approximately March 5, and we expect the work to continue for another month or so before completion. We are translating into 6 languages:

German
French
Russian
Spanish
Polish
Portuguese

Thanks!
JW

Hey Guys, Hope you had a great Time with your Familys.

Can you says something about the actual State of the Translations? My English is not the best, so I wait to play TBS in German.

Greetings

[Arnie]

A direct hint at... playable Horseborn units?!? Can it be? PowerHorse Animation!

EDIT -- This Horseborn hint, reminded me of all that "2x1 sized unit" discussions, and how tricky that would be for moving around... Did you guys finally get anywhere? I am so tempted to propose "anisotropic" mechanics (e.g. a unit needs to spend separate points for moving and for changing orientation; a unit has different STR/ARM/AB stats when "viewed/attacked/attacking" from a different direction: face, sides, back)

I'll be avoiding the 'horseborn' topic for the time being ...but the directional topic I shall tackle! It sounds fun in theory but when we play tested it a long time ago it became a silly dance of each unit moving behind the other units and attacking and so on and so forth. Plus it adds another level of clicking complexity to the combat for players that bogs down the flow. Every turn would end with a decision on which way to face the character at the end of their turn. There are other related problems we had with it like AoE's and whatnot going off. At some point it would appear to the player (who is already having a hard enough time tracking all the stats) to be somewhat random as to why this unit took 3 more Str Dam than the unit next to them from AoE and whatnot. We want to keep the combat as streamlined as we can so we made the decision to bail on any facing rules and it really cleaned it up. Perhaps in the future we can look into really shaking up the mechanics (specially for something like Factions) but for now we don't want to iterate on the Saga combat to this degree. We're pretty happy with where base combat stands at the moment.

[YaK]

1) Is planned a translation to Italian? (Personally i prefer to play and watch *things* in their native languages if i could understand them, but there a lot of people out there that could enjoy a translation )
---2) If not, how do you realate to fanmade translations? Would you mind if i propose the project in a quite famous and serious forum (Oldgamesitalia)?
---3) How many lines of text there are in game, approximatively?

Thanks guys!

[Aleonymous]

...but the directional topic I shall tackle! It sounds fun in theory but when we play tested it a long time ago it became a silly dance of each unit moving behind the other units [...] it adds another level of clicking complexity to the combat for players that bogs down the flow [...] We want to keep the combat as streamlined as we can so we made the decision to bail on any facing rules and it really cleaned it up. Perhaps in the future we can look into really shaking up the mechanics (specially for something like Factions)

Yup. It surely adds another degree of potentially unwanted "complexity" to the battle system... All these stuff (this directional thing, or a full-pillage turn-queuing, battles-with-timer etc) could exist as optional "modes" in for a true hardcore experience

[celeir]

The game is being worked on by the translators right now. They started work approximately March 5, and we expect the work to continue for another month or so before completion.

Well, it looks like ZoG's fan-made-almost-done* Russian translation was started for nothing Or maybe it could be used somehow?

*because we all remember how long we was waiting for localization of Shadowrun Returns since Russian language was announced

[netnazgul]

Well, it looks like ZoG's fan-made-almost-done* Russian translation was started for nothing Or maybe it could be used somehow?

*because we all remember how long we was waiting for localization of Shadowrun Returns since Russian language was announced

Translation was announced and promised long ago, but some people just can't wait and force some other people to do unneeded and duplicate work

[celeir]

but some people just can't wait

Did you read texts after * ? Translation for Shadowrun was announced soon after game's release but was added in a year - and this is not an exception from sad rule.

[franknarf]

Glad you hear you've got A Plan, even if it puts Factions on the back burner. Personally, I'm pretty satisfied with Factions as-is, but simply don't have much of a draw to play. It might not be Chess, but it's pretty well balanced and interface- and performance-optimized already.

Good luck with the next steps! And I hope you maintain "open development" (or whatever it's called) going forward.

[Henly]

The game is being worked on by the translators right now. They started work approximately March 5, and we expect the work to continue for another month or so before completion. We are translating into 6 languages:

German
French
Russian
Spanish
Polish
Portuguese

Thanks!
JW

) You will not make it in two month or so, belive me. There to many strings in app.game-saga1.air.swf, my favorite is checking Yes No button by =="Yes". what you will do in other language)? Many string in msg:"" in files over all game directory. Many strings have too small place to write something not in Enlglish.
and we have over 5 hundred png file with text on it.
I'm pretty sure testing will take several month.

sorry for bad english.

[John]

Fortunately I have already removed all the hard-coded strings from the game, including from the SWF, and including the Yes/No problem that you mentioned.

Regarding the too small places for non-english text, we have a system that automatically makes the text fit by shrinking it. We'll have to test that part to make sure nothing gets shrunk too much

Also, the PNG with text should only contain 'proper names' like 'The Banner Saga', 'Vedrfell', 'Skogr', etc... and those will not be translated.

So, hopefully the hard parts are complete and we are just waiting on the translations.

JW

) You will not make it in two month or so, belive me. There to many strings in app.game-saga1.air.swf, my favorite is checking Yes No button by =="Yes". what you will do in other language)? Many string in msg:"" in files over all game directory. Many strings have too small place to write something not in Enlglish.
and we have over 5 hundred png file with text on it.
I'm pretty sure testing will take several month.

sorry for bad english.

[Henly]

Glad to hear it

[celeir]

Well, it looks like ZoG's fan-made-almost-done* Russian translation was started for nothing

Hurray, ZoG's full translation has been finished, tested and approved by happy community! (And there is no official localization (still))

[Aleonymous]

Hurray, ZoG's full translation has been finished, tested and approved by happy community! (And there is no official localization (still))

Aye. Here is a recording of a Twitch-streamer playing that translated version: https://www.twitch.tv/ripper_and/b/526614686 that I fell upon the other day (that guy had like 100+ live-viewers). It looks complete to me, but some Russian friends expressed an opinion that the translation felt a little "crude" at certain points...

[celeir]

Aye. Here is a recording of a Twitch-streamer playing that translated version: https://www.twitch.tv/ripper_and/b/526614686 that I fell upon the other day (that guy had like 100+ live-viewers). It looks complete to me, but some Russian friends expressed an opinion that the translation felt a little "crude" at certain points...

And they may be completely right at some points. For example, descriptions on the global map still have not been reviewed.