[interface] Warning for incompletely translated campaigns

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Viliam
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[interface] Warning for incompletely translated campaigns

Post by Viliam »

Target: Mainline campaigns. (Possibly extendable for some UMC.)


Problem description:

When a campaign is not fully translated to some language, and when the player does not understand English well, depending on the untranslated strings it may make the campaign unplayable. Even worse, this problem can appear after a few scenarios were completed by the player. This can damage the game experience.

This was reported in a mainline campaigns in a stable version, where it should not happen. (Alternative solution is to exclude languages without full translation, but it seems too harsh, especially with regard to growing number of mainline campaigns.) However, the proposed solution would work also for development versions.


Proposed solution:

During the build process a list of incomplete campaigns is generated automatically for each language, and distributed as part of game data. At least for mainline campaigns it is possible to generate the list relatively easily, because one "text domain" corresponds to one campaign. (Sometimes this mechanism could be also used for UMC campaigns.) The list would contain a campaign ID and a percent of "translated" phrases (rounded down so that any non-complete translation gets at most 99%).

In a game, when a user displays a list of campaigns, for each campaign the list is checked and if the campaign ID exists in the list and the ratio is less than 100% a visible warning icon is displayed in a campaign description. When the user clicks on this icon, a message is displayed "this campaign is only X% translated, the remaining texts will appear in English". (Alternatively: the message is used as a tooltip for the icon.) If the list does not exist for specific language or if the campaign ID is not in the list, the message is not displayed.


Problems:

Sometimes it is difficult to locate text domains for strings that may appear during a campaign. For example unit names appear in many campaigns and are defined in a separate text domain. A UMC package may contain multiple campaigns and it may use a UMC era. For these situations the solution will not work perfectly.

However, it is sufficient to make the solution work for mainline campaigns. And it is reasonable to expect that the campaign text domain is 1) in greater danger of incompleteness and 2) more relevant to campaign gameplay than shared mainline text domains. So it is safe to assume that for a decent translation the shared mainline text domains are complete, and ignore them.
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hhyloc
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Re: Warning for incompletely translated campaigns

Post by hhyloc »

Nice! This idea has my support. :)
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Mountain_King
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Re: Warning for incompletely translated campaigns

Post by Mountain_King »

This sounds like a good idea to me. We have many many players out there who do not have English as a first language. They should be aware that they might not fully understand the campaign they're playing.
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