Foreign Language support

[krishkrush]

Hi,

first I want to say that I'm really enjoying forge. The AI is decent for a free application and the quest mode extremely addicting.
However, there's one thing that is bugging me with magic software as a whole. It's always in english. While I'm not having problems with the english language (at least I try ), I know a lot of people who do (I'm from Germany), including my girlfriend. As I'm playing Magic with her all the time, the language barrier is keeping her from enjoying forge.
I tried getting german scans from the cards, but those are hard to find and also far from complete (less than 30% of all cards afaik). A short while ago, I found Virtual Playtable. It was the first magic software I know of that supported foreign languages (though there was a bug that was fixed just recently). Although Virtual Playtable is a great application, it's still lacking in many ways, most importantly the non-existant AI.
So I thought: The best Magic software ever would be Forge with the foreign language support of Virtual Playtable. I know that Detonator started to sell VPT recently, so I don't know if he would be willing to share his code or if it is that hard to figure out for yourself. He's using a database to automatically create the cards so that it isn't necessary to have the full card scans. Would this be possible to implement in forge?
I know there are a lot of more important things for you to work on, as most magic players use english language cards, so this is only a suggestion. But I'm sure there are more magic players in this world that like to play the game in their language.

Sorry for this wall of text and thanks for reading. Keep up the great work guys!

krishkrush

edit: I have to correct myself. The best magic software ever would also include multiplayer

[moomarc]

Hi,

first I want to say that I'm really enjoying forge. The AI is decent for a free application and the quest mode extremely addicting.
However, there's one thing that is bugging me with magic software as a whole. It's always in english. While I'm not having problems with the english language (at least I try ), I know a lot of people who do (I'm from Germany), including my girlfriend. As I'm playing Magic with her all the time, the language barrier is keeping her from enjoying forge.
I tried getting german scans from the cards, but those are hard to find and also far from complete (less than 30% of all cards afaik). A short while ago, I found Virtual Playtable. It was the first magic software I know of that supported foreign languages (though there was a bug that was fixed just recently). Although Virtual Playtable is a great application, it's still lacking in many ways, most importantly the non-existant AI.
So I thought: The best Magic software ever would be Forge with the foreign language support of Virtual Playtable. I know that Detonator started to sell VPT recently, so I don't know if he would be willing to share his code or if it is that hard to figure out for yourself. He's using a database to automatically create the cards so that it isn't necessary to have the full card scans. Would this be possible to implement in forge?
I know there are a lot of more important things for you to work on, as most magic players use english language cards, so this is only a suggestion. But I'm sure there are more magic players in this world that like to play the game in their language.

Sorry for this wall of text and thanks for reading. Keep up the great work guys!

krishkrush

edit: I have to correct myself. The best magic software ever would also include multiplayer

With regards to using cropped images with generated text that could be localized, we made a decision quite a while ago to use the full scans instead because this allowed for full differentiation between the same card in different sets (and most of the developers that didn't speak English as their first language still preferred to use the English cards).

You could ask in the Pictures forum (in the main board index) where to get the German scans. The HQ team has scanned practically every card ever printed so if it's available, they should be able to point you in the right direction.

And as for multiplayer... we're working on it and have made the first steps.

[Doublestrike]

To add some info from the UI perspective - Forge used to be (somewhat) multilingual. It had support for German and English.

Unfortunately development was halted since there wasn't anyone with time to take it on. That evolved into pretty much complete abandonment of multilingual support, which is where it sits now.

I think most of the old data is still there but it's just not being used, and there's no one maintaining it. It's in slight danger of being removed altogether, since legacy stuff complicates present development a bit.

So that's the story - the feature needs a dev who's excited about implementing it, and then continued maintenance for all languages involved.

[krishkrush]

Thank you for the answers. VPT does actually support full images with the overlay, but I get what you're saying. Well, i guess it's no use then. But at least I tried convincing you
I'm pretty sure I've already searched thoroughly for german scans (which mostly also are in an awfully low quality), but I will try asking in the forum. In the end, it's the only hope left.
That's good news regarding the multiplayer! Really looking forward to it.
As for the german data: That's a pity. I really would like to help here, but I've got literally no programming experience. All I could do is translating text from english to german.

Thanks again for your time and keep up the great work.

[krishkrush]

Update: I asked for german scans in the pictures forum, but it seems there aren't any complete scan collections out there. So, this isn't really an alternative. Guess my girlfriend has to live without Forge, then.