On Dec 21, 2006, at 3:04 PM, Joel Uckelman wrote: > Thus spake =?iso-8859-1?q?Beno=EEt_Dumeaux?=: >> Hello >> I'm a new french user of VASSAL. Does a translate of this software is >> planned ? >> >> Dreadaxe >> > > Internationalization support is something we something we probably > should > add. (I'm not sure what facilities Java provides for this; some > toolkits > I've worked with give you a way of marking strings and replacing them > with translations depending on the user's locale.) However, it's > not very > useful to add support for alternate languages unless we have people > who > can create good, idiomatic translations...
The primary mechanism for doing this is to use Resources to get the strings for use in the User Interface. Some development environments provide nice support for that. Netbeans does. I would guess Eclipse does as well, but I haven't looked at that part in any detail. At a more fundamental level, though, internationalization for Vassal is a bit tougher to realize, since most of the actual text you would encounter comes from the modules rather than the engine itself. I don't think it would be nearly as useful to have the main menu items, say, in French and then all of the reports from the pieces in English. Now, that could be handled by resource files as well, but managing that would require some more work on the editor code in Vassal so that strings would be stored in resource files with the appropriate locale encoding.
