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| Thread: How to work on a translation project? | |
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Fluffle
Tavern Dweller
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posted January 01, 2020 12:55 AM |
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How to work on a translation project?
Greetings,
I would like to know how to work on a translation for Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Could you give me any pointers where to start?
I have a friend who would like to update the Italian translation of the HoMM3 HD Edition.
Is that even possible for the HD Edition?
If not, then I'd like to know the answer for the COMPLETE Edition instead.
Is there some tool needed to extract the text files of the game?
And how can we make the game use the updated translation then?
Since both of us have zero experience in translating HoMM3 or modding, we would greatly appreciate your help.
Thank you in advance!
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zmudziak22
Supreme Hero
Heroes 3 Fan
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posted January 01, 2020 03:53 PM |
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you need MMArchive to extract text files from heroes 3 files. they are in h3bitmap.lod
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Baronus
Legendary Hero
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posted January 01, 2020 03:56 PM |
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All you need is here:
Grayface
Works perfectly.
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Fluffle
Tavern Dweller
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posted January 02, 2020 11:11 PM |
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First of all, a huge thank you to you two from both of us, my friend and I.
My friend has started to work with MMArchive v1.2.1 and according to him it works like a charm. Yet, there are two things he would like to know:
1.) When he extracts the texts from the game, he gets the English texts. However, my friend would like to work on the Italian texts.
Where and how can my friend find and extract the Italian translation of HoMM 3?
2.) Once his work has been finished, how can he distribute it to other players? Is he supposed to replace and share the h3bitmap.lod ?
Is there another way to share a custom, updated translation?
We would greatly appreciate your help for these new questions again 
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avatar
Promising
Supreme Hero
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posted January 02, 2020 11:23 PM |
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Edited by avatar at 23:25, 02 Jan 2020.
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If you don't want to distibute whole big h3bitmap/h3sprites lods with duplicate files, you can:
A.d. 1
The easiest way to get italian files is...buying italian version from for example ebay and extract and update appriopiate files.
https://www.ebay.it/itm/HEROES-OF-MIGHT-AND-MAGIC-III-3-COLLECTORS-EDITION-PC-CD-ROM-Italiano-Usato/264528267712?hash=item3d971d09c0:g:ukkAAOSwOIpdyA5R
Second option: download a pirate italian version of the game. In italian version, files inside lods are in italian language.
A.d.2. There is simple tool for inserting files into *.lod
https://grayface.github.io/wog/#SimpleLod
All you must do is to write simple batch file and tool will make appriopate inserting.
Alternatively - you can create plugin for hd-mod. Translation will work only with hd-mod and only for SoD, not HoTa.
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Merri
Tavern Dweller
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posted March 30, 2020 06:39 PM |
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Edited by Merri at 18:44, 30 Mar 2020.
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I'm working on Finnish translation. I have only worked on it for a bit over a week, but I have a lot of experience on translating games, modding, and I have a programmer background.
Here are some tips and information that I can give.
Use HD mod's plugin directory
Don't work with LOD files directly as it is adds an extra step into the process and it changes the existing game files. By making a folder into the plugins and placing the changed files there you can make the progress as neat as keeping the game open and restarting each time you have made a change that you want to test.
This allows for as quick of an iteration as possible. This is also the easiest redistribution as you can simply tell players to extract a ZIP file with all the folder contents to the plugins directory. Making an installer that auto-detects HoMM3 + HD Mod location is also an option (there are probably guides out there for that).
Use LibreOffice Calc
You can open the TXT files in LibreOffice Calc! Use tabulator as the (only) separator. You also want to go to Tools menu and check the auto-correct settings, or disable it entirely from messing up your input.
When editing you can't add new rows or remove existing ones, the language strings are used based on row indexes.
Technically the text files are CSV files that use CRLF as row change, TAB as column separator, and LF within single cell (or text item) as a line change. This last thing is why you CAN'T use most text editors to work with the files as they tend to enforce only one type of line change and interpret the line changes within a single cell item to start a new row.
Special characters and syntax
Curly braces {} simply highlight the text within in yellowish color. Changing them doesn't break anything and they're otherwise just regular text, not IDs or anything of that sort. This was one thing that confused me for a while until I experimented.
Then you encounter %d, %s, and %-d. The order of these CAN'T be changed.
The files contain non-language data
Being an old game the devs put real data mixed in with language strings. This is nasty, because language pack will then override possible fixes applied by HD Mod or any changes by HD Mod plugins. And other plugins may revert some of the language files back to English if they adjust something.
The only way around this would be to introduce a new separate abstracted language file format that HD Mod would support, and HD Mod would then deal with the language and data mixing issue so that editing data would not override language, and using custom language wouldn't override data fixes. But this would be a lot of work to standardize.
Broken fonts!
bigfont.fnt in the original game is corrupted so you need to provide another font if you need to use [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252]the last ~24 characters of Latin-1 (Windows-1252 / ISO-8859-1)[/url].
You may want to edit graphics too
This can be tricky as you need to work with palette and the graphics have to be aligned correctly, and probably need working with DEF files too. I haven't done this yet except for some simple cases where I haven't had a need to resize an image.
The tricky part with graphics is that you also need to remember there are HD Mod changes such as AdvMap_ru.bmp and AdvMap_ru_v2.bmp, which work in place of AdvMap.bmp when HD Mod is used. But you still probably want to change each of those files to reflect your changes.
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