Community Translation - Ukrainian Language Add-On

[Lilly Blanche]

Wow, I had no idea that was possible I used the old printscreen method.

 

I used Paint.net. Clearly, that wasn't the best idea! -_-

 

Yeah, I know about the shadows... tried replicating that, failed miserably, decided to go without it XD

 

Oh, that'd be wonderful. I'm attaching the text file with all the unit names! The only extra thing to keep in mind here is the way I went about marking the "advanced" buildings: it's impossible to fit the Ukrainian word for "advanced" or "adv." into the picture, so I painted a letter "M" in the upper right corner of each "advanced" building. You can see how it's done by opening one of my original pictures I've sent earlier!

 

The text file is to be viewed using KOI8-U encoding!

Thanks in advance!

[Nyerguds]

Well, maybe there's some options in paint.net to avoid it changing the colour depth or the palette... but in gimp that's standard; if an image has a palette it becomes 100% impossible to even paint different colours on the image, and any content pasted on it will automatically adapt to the palette.

The shadow thing isn't too hard; Basically you make a copy of the text, make it black, move it one pixel to the right, and put that under your existing white text.

I see what you mean with the advanced buildings. Kind of like Red Alert's 2 "promoted" unit icons, hm? Of course, the original icons just say "Advanced Guard" and "Advanced Power" and "Advanced Com."; they don't even bother abbreviating that to "Adv." to get more of the rest of the name on there. The full name can be seen just by holding your mouse over it, after all

I already made a KOI8-U version of that sidebar font, though there's a few things I'm unsure of. Specifically, the difference between Э and З. You used a mirrored E for "З", but in that case I have no idea what Э would need to be. You also painted the С character as a square with one side missing, without any rounding; is that correct? As you can imagine, I have no idea about variants that can be made of these characters.

[edit]

By the way, from the guide:

Quote

If the image you saved lost its palette in the editing process, and is high-colour now, open the "View" menu in XCC Mixer, go to "Palet", and make sure "Use for conversion" is selected. Then, use [Ctrl]+P to select the correct palette to convert the graphics to. Once you have that set, the conversion should work even from high-colour images.

However, I don't think this works if the images are not high-colour, so those with reduced palette would still not work right. Since your icons converted more or less okay I suspect this option is enabled for you, however, then you still need to consistently switch to the correct palette before converting.

Since your screenshot isn't png I can't check this, but... was that gray on the icons the blinking animated white colour?

[Lilly Blanche]

I'm learning quite a lot by doing all this!

 

Yeah, kinda like that! In my translation of the icons, both the regular and the advanced buildings have the same name, but the advanced one is "promoted" with the special "M" symbol. It's better than shortening everything as much as possible

 

Ukrainian language has no "Э э" letter. The one that looks like reverted E or "3" is "З з", which, depending on the font, may look identical to the numeral. Just copy the way I made it look and it'll be alright if it's confusing. As for "C c", it can look like mine, and it can also look like the English "C c". There's no real difference, just stylistic choice.

 

UPDATE:

 

Yes. The engineer one had a couple of pulsating pixels!

[Nyerguds]

Ah, okay. It's just that there is a Э symbol in KOI8-U, and I just tried to fill them all, so I wasn't sure what to do with that

[Lilly Blanche]

Good God, this update nearly gave me a heart attack! First, the whole thing went down, I thought we've lost it all, then the system locked me out of my account for no reason whatsoever, then I had to try five (!) times to log in to no avail, then I had to reset my password, because it thought my previous one was incorrect, the amount of sheer horror I had to go through today was immense to say the least. All this work could have been lost so easily in just a matter of seconds! Thank God it's over, for now. I see that all the attachments are gone as well. Nice. 

Ahem, anyway... while the icons are in the making, I'm taking care of the audio part. We've got a pretty talented lady doing all the EVA lines, and almost all the infantry lines have already been recorded. Can't wait to see it all come together in the game once everything's done!

[Nyerguds]

Ah... I knew they were working on an update behind the scenes, but I had no idea it was going to be deployed now. And it seems to have taken longer than expected, and because of that, Neogrant didn't have time to actually finish it when he had time, and thus he left it hanging in limbo for a few hours... was a bit of a mess. Ah well, it's solved now.

But, yea, I had already finished the icons... was just waiting for the forum to recover, lol.

Can't wait to hear those voices

 

 

ukr_icons_2.rar

[Lilly Blanche]

Awesome! Thank you! Though... I've copied your .mix files with icons and launched the game, and got this O_O: 

 

In English, too! Which is... weird. 
I wonder what went wrong?..

[Lilly Blanche]

I've solved this issue by repacking the .mix files on my end! It works as intended now, thank you!



The only small issue I've noticed while testing the icons is that the Obelisk of Light has no text for some reason. 

[Nyerguds]

Oh, bloody hell, I forgot exactly the step I warned you about. Didn't set them to TD type

In general, that "out of memory" message on startup is a very good indication it's trying to read a Tiberian Sun type mixfile.

Anyway, glad you got it working

[edit]

Ah, indeed, seems I forgot to copy that one's text onto the Desert version. Ugh. I'll fix it...
ukr_icons_3.rar
(With correct mix files, this time )

[Lilly Blanche]

Just had a quick desert NOD session - now everything looks great, and the Obelisk is sitting on the sidebar all pretty and happy to be named, practically screaming "build me, build me now!"  Thank you so much for everything you've done!  

The list of what's left for me to do is getting shorter.
The dubbing is purely a question of time at this point - it'll be done once I get all the files from all the actors, which may take a while depending on their schedule, but it will be done sooner or later. The guy doing the Commando voice is giving it everything he's got, some of his lines turn out rather... hilarious (in a good way) XD 

So, while that's being taken care of, I will turn my attention to translating the videos and testing what I already have. Might want to give the briefings another check or two to make sure the stuff there is clear and coherent, etc. But I feel like the core of the project is already there, thanks to you!  

Edited April 15, 2017 by Lilly Blanche

[Nyerguds]

Nice! What about the other details? Are you doing the attract.cps and the multiplayer score WSA too?

[Lilly Blanche]

Oh yes, there's no real reason not to do those files as well. I've checked your newest guide and noticed that there's a tool in there which makes WSA editing possible. As for attract.cps - I'm not sure what kind of an extension that is and how to make it. 

[Nyerguds]

It's really just one of the formats XCC Mixer can convert. Simply right click and "copy as CPS", and that's it. The only specific preprocessing for the image before you can do that is that it needs to be reduced to 256-colour paletted format.

In Gimp, you can do that by opening the "Image" menu, going to "Mode" and selecting "Indexed". In the "Indexed Color Conversion" dialog that pops up, select these options:

• Generate optimum palette (256 colours)
• Dithering: None

Of course, do this after adding your text, or the palette will not contain the red colours you need for that.

Anyway, that's useful feedback; I'll add this stuff to the guide

[Nyerguds]

By the way, here's the way I added text on icons using Gimp and the font editor.

Of couse, this starts after the included sidebar icons font has been edited to include all your new characters.

01. Copy from font: load your font, set the character encoding, type your text in the preview pane, then right click the preview image and select "Copy".
02. Paste as new layer: Paste onto the image in Gimp and you'll see it appear in the Layers tool window (you can open that with Ctrl+L). Right click the temporary 'pasted content' layer and make it into a real new layer.
03. Fix text width, move to position: The text might need some reducing in width. Move the layer so all the extra pixels at the right side are visible, and reduce it to the left by cutting the content from the right side and pasting it one pixel closer to the left, and moving the layer further to the right as you work on until everything fits. Move the final layer into position at the bottom of the image. (You can ignore the fact the now-empty right-side part sticks out to the right side.)
04. Color select to clear background: You can use the "Select by Color" tool to clear the background easily, as long as you make sure it's not black or white like the text. You can edit the palette in the font editor in the first step to make sure it's an easily selectable colour, but do note that anything pasted on the icon in gimp will immediately adapt to the icon's 256-colour palette, so the colour might change if it's not on the icon's palette.
05. Expand to image size: This will ensure that when you copy and paste the final edited text onto the other-theater version (so you have it on both the Temperate and Desert versions), it will behave as if the pasted content is the size of the whole icon, and not just the size of that text, meaning that when you paste it, the text part will not be centered in the middle, but will immediately end up on the correct spot at the bottom.
06. Paste on second image: Copy the new layer you created on the first image. Normal Ctrl+C will only copy the current layer in gimp, not the whole visible image, so that's perfect for this. Then select the other image (desert or Temperate, whichever one you didn't do the original edit on) and paste it there too.

Then save both images back to their original file using the "Overwrite" function in the File menu. You can assign shortcuts to these functions to execute them faster; I use Ctrl+Alt+S for the "overwrite" one.

When you try to close them, Gimp will complain the images are "not saved", but that's just because you didn't save them as Gimp projects, so you can completely ignore that. The window bar of the program will say "Overwritten" if you saved the image back to PNG, and that's enough.

[Lilly Blanche]

Got it!..
Or, uhm, I think I got it. I hope I got it XD

I'll get back to editing graphics as soon as I'm done with videos - I need a distraction from all them fonts and pixels  
Speaking of which, I'm almost done with the GDI campaign-related videos (talking purely about translation here). Once it's done, I'll start trying to put the subtitles in, which... I have a feeling, is gonna be almost as hard as making a game from scratch XD 

[Nyerguds]

Ah, I wasn't sure whether you were going for subs or dubs with that; you talked about voice actors, but I wasn't sure if that applied to the videos as well (the Russians did it, but the quality was... kind of bad)

[Lilly Blanche]

The first public release of the translation will feature full text translation including subtitled videos + dubbed unit and EVA voices. If it is well received by people and there's sufficient demand, we might invest into dubbing the cutscenes as well. The reason for this is that it's one thing to dub the units (basically, you just get a bunch of people with nice voices who can read out loud and act, and voila), and an entirely different thing to dub videos. We can deliver the first at practically no cost, the second will require a lot of work all across the board and if there's no interest towards the project upon release, there's no real necessity to invest into cutscenes. 

That, and I'm planning to work on Red Alert and Tiberian Sun next, using the same approach - full text, unit + EVA / Cabal voices, subtitles, if successful - dubs. I'm a huge TS fan by the way - I think the atmosphere there is fantastic, and I'd love to translate it into my native language as well.

[Nyerguds]

Hehe. Well, I literally made the language addon system for this game, so I know it quite well, but besides the general techniques of the modding, I can't really help you with the other games.

Though my font editor can edit the formats for those games, so that's something, no?  

One request, though: can I host the language pack (and the videos pack when you're done with it) on the official site of the 1.06 patch? It's handy if there's a central place where everything is hosted. The pack will need my patch anyway; as I said I created this translation system.

This doesn't mean you can't host it anywhere else, or anything like that. I just like to have all packs available on the official site.

[Lilly Blanche]

Oh, I will not dare bother you with all that RA and TS stuff! In fact, I know my way around TS and its files, years ago I tried making a translation for it but couldn't, because I had no idea how to make fonts. That was the only thing stopping me. Everything else - images, unit names, mission texts, audio and video files - I got figured out. Funny thing - TS uses a very peculiar menu system which makes it so the original menu can be translated only by editing a couple of very specific files in a rather... unusual way. And Firestorm uses graphics for its menu, which is a pain in the butt. So yeah, the fonts were the main issue. Perhaps, now I could create Ukrainian fonts for TS by using your font editor and finally make it all work. Who knows?

Absolutely! I'll send you everything once it's done. It's the least I can do, after all, you've spent so much time helping me with this thing! And I agree - it's better to have it available there. This patch is IMO the best way to play TD today, so I'll be redirecting people to it's official site anyway  

[Nyerguds]

Well, I've had some odd experiences with that; I actually implemented all of the font support for the Russian language pack... which never actually got released, because Siberian_GRemlin, who was making it, decided to instead replace the English language in the game with his Russian files and just put that modded version of the whole game on his website. Without even telling me anything :-\

On a related note, Siberian_GRemlin has had a working font editor for 8 years. And there's only a public one now because I got really tired of that and made my own.

[Lilly Blanche]

Here's a "fun" story: when I was trying to make that TS translation of mine ages ago, I actually contacted that guy asking for help. I even wrote him a nice and professional letter in Russian with all the fluff, very respectful. You know what kind of a reply I received? Without going into the specific details and lexical constructions contained in the body of his "letter", he told me to go and have sex with myself in many different poses, ending his message with something along the lines of "go crawl somewhere and die". I am not kidding. In fact, I might still have that exchange saved somewhere in my mail box. Not 100% sure since it was so long ago. I guess he really hates my nation or something. So, yeah, I'm not surprised at all  

[Nyerguds]

Wow. I wish I could be surprised.

[Lilly Blanche]

Going back to the topic of video cutscenes... I went through some stuff and managed to put my subtitled video in the game, and it looks more or less fine, aside from those weird white borders: 

 

My steps were as follows: 

1. Used XCC Mixer to "copy as PNG". 
2. Used RADTools to turn it into .avi, raw data, 15 frames. cropping's "top" value to -22, and the cropping width and height to 320x200.
3. Used Virtualdub to add subtitles, saved. 
4. Used XCC Mixer to extract the audio file. 
5. Used RADTools to turn the .avi into a bunch of .pcx files, 256 colors, Windows system colors - never, halftoning - never. 
6. Used VQA Enc 0.5b2 to turn the .pcx files back into .vqa and .vqp. 
7. Tested the .vqa in XCC Mixer - works like it should. 
8. Played the game, saw the thing I showed you

Any ideas?  

[Nyerguds]

Oh, very nice work!

I know what causes that, yes; C&C uses the first colour on the video's colour palette for filling the area around the video.

In your 5th step, reduce to 255 colours instead of 256, starting from index 2. This will make the first colour on the palette always be black.

(the line at the right edge is just the result of the game's stretching mechanism. It doesn't do real stretching; it just spreads out the available pixels with one in between, and then fills these in-between pixels with colour averages. So it technically stretches 320x200 to 639x399)

This is the general "cheat sheet" I use to convert videos to vqa, though the actual scaling to 320x200 is of course not needed in your case:

By the way, if you have trouble getting all the text in that small black bar, you can of course just not use -22 crop, so you got twice the amount of space below it. I think the Spanish subs were done that way.

[Nyerguds]

A note on potential dubbing, later:

The thing that takes a lot of time in VQA Enc is the actual encoding to video. The adding of audio is actually really fast.

Because of this, if you are going to experiment with adding audio to videos, and you got the video to convert right (which might need some tweaking of the palettes around transition areas, and of the key frames value in the converter), check the "Keep UGM" option. Then you keep the encoded video work saved in a .ugm file, which is not playable, but which is ready to instantly be converted to the final VQA with the audio file of your choice. So for experimenting with syncing the audio, that could help to really speed things up.

In fact, I might see if I can make ugm files for all videos anyway, so the palette problems mentioned in the video threads I linked are not an issue and you can just concentrate on getting the audio right.

I actually have done stuff like that before, on a limited scale, when making the uncensored German videos pack, and the GDI ending for Japanese

(I got the Japanese videos from the Sega Saturn CD, which luckily has them as VQA format, but which don't contain the "collapsed temple" GDI ending, only the "ion cannon" one. The differences in these videos don't contain any spoken text, so I could make the other one just using the English version for the missing sound )