I've read the documentation, played through the game, used the "Search" function, had prior experience (with Dragon Knight), known the basics of PHP, and I still had problems understanding Translation. I still installed lots and lots of modules before beginning to translate the basic game. I still, in my enthusiasm, acted like a Bad Newbie and got in over my head.
But then, rather than ask questions, I used the "Search" function again, played with the Translation Wizard until I felt I kind of understood it, reinstalled the game with NO modules at all and went back to the drawing board and the documentation. I like to think I've mended my ways.
I like documentation. I like reading it, and I like writing it; writing documentation helps me to understand. I also feel that newbies should always have a hand in the creation of documentation, because the more experienced you get, the harder it can be to remember what it was like when you actually needed an FAQ, and thus, the harder it becomes to write effectively for your target audience.
So, I've made a quick Newbie Guide to customising the game. Please, take a look at it - if for nothing else than to check if I'm correct in my assumptions about how Translation works. If you like it, then feel free to use it, change it, expand upon it, whatever you like. If you don't, please tell me where I'm incorrect in my assumptions.
Consider this my first of what I hope to be many contributions.
Thanks!
~Caveman Joe
(newbie guide follows)
A NEWBIE GUIDE TO CUSTOMISING YOUR GAME
This is a quick run-down written by a noob for other noobs, hoping to explain how to customise your game to create a unique theme, such as samurai, pirates, Three Kingdoms, sci-fi, or whatever your imagination can produce.
Initially I was confused when trying to customise my game, because although I've played about with lots of PHP applications in the past, I could always change the text in said applications by editing language files. LOGD has no such independant language files - the text to output in, say, a Dragon encounter is actually stored within the dragon.php file.
So, rather than editing, say, public_html/language/en.php to give your game a sci-fi theme, you would edit "translations" of each bit of text, stored in the database. These translations are stored alongside the original bit of text, so that the game knows when to display what.
When we talk about "Translating" a game, we could mean translating it into a different language, or translating it into a different world. Whether you're talking about making all the text German, or making all the text military-themed, or pirate-themed, or sci-fi based, what we're doing is always "Translating" the game.
LOGD's Translation system works by creating a table in your database full of translations to particular phrases or lines of text, and giving you an interface to mess about with that table. Thus, you can change lines of text directly in your browser. While this approach is confusing for newbies, it ends up making a lot of sense - this way, you can give your creation team access to translate the game without needing to give them the FTP information for your server. How cool is that?
There are two commonly-used methods by which people translate the game into their chosen language or theme:
1. Using the inbuilt Translator Tool.
2. Using the Translation Wizard module.
The Translator Tool is already installed on your server, but you most likely haven't activated it yet. You need to grant yourself access to it, before you can see its effects. To do so, edit yourself under the User Editor, go to Superuser Flags, scroll down a bit and you'll see it.
Check the box, hit Save, and you'll see little red T's all over the place. By clicking those T's, you can edit the adjacent text.
Now, some T's will appear to be in the wrong places. For example, you might see a horizontal line of T's running across the bottom of each page that actually correspond to the status texts on the screen's right-hand side; don't worry, they're only there because they can't be directly next to the text that they correspond to.
To edit some text, we just click on a T and enter text in the lower box of the window that opens up (leave the text in the top box intact). If you make a mistake and want to start again, just close the window. Once you've entered your desired text in the lower box to replace text in the upper box (which, I'll say again, should be left unchanged), press "Save and close." Refresh the page and your text should be changed. The colour of the little box surrounding the "T" will change to blue, so you can quickly see which bits have been translated and which haven't.
And it's as simple as that. You can go through your entire game this way, and theme it however you desire. However, this will take an awfully long time. The Translation Wizard, while initially more confusing, is a sight more powerful.
LOGD's Translation Wizard was originally created to translate the game into different languages. Thus, the name becomes a little misleading if you're planning to use it for other purposes, but as long as you understand that "Translation" really means the act of changing text in any capacity, you should be fine.
For now, we'll assume that you're going to translate the game into a sci-fi/pirate/military/whatever theme, so the first thing you should do after installing the Translation Wizard is to set your language to English.
To do this:
Superuser Grotto -> Translation Wizard -> Change Current Scheme.
At this point, the rest of the options will probably be a mystery to you. They were to me, too, and the documentation for them wasn't terribly idiotproof, so I'll do my best to explain what to do.
The Translation Wizard lets you edit the game's text without having to go to the particular page where the text is displayed (which could be a real bitch if you have to trigger a random event a dozen times so you get the right output). It also lets you do procedures like Search and Replace.
I'm not going to give you a rundown on what each and every option does - that's already been done. What I'm going to try to do is get you basic operating knowledge of how the Translation Wizard works, and that should be a good base from which you can find out for yourself what all the bells and whistles do.
This is a conclusion I've drawn based on my noobish observations of how the Translation Wizard does its thing, and so it might be wrong - but hell, if it is, then it's a decent enough analogy.
From what I gather, the Translation Wizard works by looking for bits of text that haven't been translated yet. It knows when something hasn't been translated yet because the Translations part of the database contains more than just the translations of text in the game - it sucks up the original text too, so that it knows where each bit of translated text should go (so that, for example, when a file says to output "You've slain the dragon," it looks up "You've slain the dragon" in the table and replaces it with its translation ("You've slain the Blair Hippo"), if there is one). Thus, you have a "Translations" tabel and an "Untranslated" table.
So, the Translations table first has to have something to cross-reference with the Untranslated table, or the Translation Wizard won't know which bits we want to translate. We've got to fill up our Untranslated table with the stuff that we want to change, before we can tell the Translation Wizard what we want to change that stuff to. The Wizard will then put the translated text in the Translations table, and the game will know to check the Translations table for translations of text in the Untranslated table before it outputs that text.
People use the Translation Wizard in a number of different ways, and if you search around DragonPrime you'll get an idea of other methods you can use. For me, the following has proven the easiest method to understand:
STEP ONE: GETTING TEXT TO TRANSLATE
Superuser Grotto -> Translation Wizard -> Advanced View -> Scan Modules
Now, you'll be able to scan individual files in the game for text to change. If you've been paying attention to your Address bar while playing the game, you'll have a good idea of what these files mean. If not, it should be pretty self-explanatory: dragon.php for fights with the dragon, forest.php for stuff that happens in the forest, home.php for the starting page, it's all fairly obvious.
As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn't scan files contained in the lib folder, or files like dbconnect.php that are essential to the game's mechanics and don't contain any tasty language anyway.
Now, for an illustration of principle, click in the topmost drop-down selection box and select "dragon.php." You're taken to a new page showing all of the translatable text in dragon.php! Now, to suck up the bits that you want to change and store them away ready for editing, just click the checkbox next to each one and click "Insert Selected into your Untranslated table."
All done!
Now, remember this: the whole reason that we selectively tell the Wizard which text we want to translate is so that we're not faced with thousands upon thousands of lines of text, most of which doesn't need changing anyway. So FOR GOD'S SAKE ONLY DO ONE FILE AT A TIME! If you go through the whole game sucking up the untranslated text before you start to translate any of it, you'll quickly find yourself totally overwhelmed and seriously confused! Take it slow, take it easy, and do the files one at a time. Trust me on this one - I may be a noob, but I'm a noob who's made some silly mistakes, and in a perfect world I would be the last one to make those mistakes.
STEP TWO: TRANSLATING THE TEXT
Now you've got some text that you want to translate, go and have a look at the "Translate by Namespace" option on the left hand side of the screen.
By changing the namespace to match the name of the file you just scanned, you can find all the text in that file. Now, simply click on "Edit" for each text line, and you can change "The Green Dragon" to "The Blair Hippo"!
As you go through your untranslated stuff and begin to translate it, you'll see the translated entries disappear from the list. Now, we want to keep this list neat and easy to deal with, so if there are any bits of text that don't need translating, we can delete them from the "untranslated" table.
That's it for my little guide - hopefully now you have the beginnings of a decent understanding of how to theme your game.
Have fun!
