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The free top-down online shooter!
Subvein is a free multiplayer action game. It has over 20 weapons, a strategic skills system, crazy vehicles and countless user-generated maps. It's tactical, fast-paced and most importantly, fun! Download and play Subvein now - it takes mere minutes to setup and best of all it's 100% FREE!
Today I'm going to add translations :)
Wed 11 Apr 2012, 11:57 by bencelot
So I was thinking to myself.. What does Subvein NEED before we 'go live' at v0.7 and start sharing it with the world? Does it need a flamethrower? No, I can add that after. A flamethrower would be fun but it won't fundamentally change anything. What we need is translations. If we have translations in the game the number of potential players we can attract increases dramatically. The success of v0.7's release is going to depend on having as many players possible. We want to rapidly build the community up to a critical mass where there's always a game going and the current players are constantly bringing new players in. I'm very excited for this critical moment and the more players we have the sooner it will come!
I remember once Zesty posted on a Chinese forum and the game crashed from having so many players! Unfortunately most of them left as they understandably had no idea what anything meant. The skills in Subvein are complex enough already so we want to make things as easy as possible for new players to pick things up. We also have a large Russian community who I'm sure could spread the word about Subvein if only their friends actually understood it! Anyway translations solve all this.
So this is what I'm going to code today. It shouldn't take me very long and the benefits will definitely be worth it. There will be a new data/xl directory where we'll have our translation files. 1 file per language. english.txt, russian.txt, chinese.txt, german.txt, etc.. Anyone can make a new file for a new language and the game will automatically detect it and add it to the list of languages to chose from. Once a file is complete I'll officially include it in future versions and over time our library of translations will grow and grow! Each file will have a huge list of codes and translations that look something like this:
LANGUAGE: English
XL_HOST_BUTTON: Host Game
XL_JOIN_BUTTON: Join Game
XL_VAMPIRISM_DESC: Vampiric mutations in your body restore your health blah blah..
XL_VAMPIRISM_1: HP Restored
XL_VAMPIRISM_2: Bullet Damage
//etc..
If a code isn't found then it'll just default to the english version, which I'll be hardcoding into the game. Anyway when I'm done coding this I'll give you guys the english.txt file and you can rename it and get cracking! I hope that the Russian community can work together to create a russian.txt file that is both amazing and beautiful at the same time, and I'll be able to include it in the next version. If there are any other multilingual players amongst us I'd really appreciate it if you could create some translations for other languages too. The more languages we have the more players we can attract! Anyway I'll let you know when it's ready.
