Spent much of yesterday creating videos and sample sounds for the SFXEngine Bolt-on DLC, and the admin of the launch of Gunstorm II in the evening. It was a tedious and unhappy day of endless menial admin jobs; so what is increasingly a typical day.
Today has also been working on SFXEngine, with an aim of adding multiple languages to the program, but this is difficult. Five things need translating: icon text, error text, main menu text, the manual, and the text in the plug-ins/engines. Each presents its own problems, and I've spent today working on the main menus, integrating those with a single text file.
The text in the plug-ins may be the most difficult. The text strings are part of the plug-in files, and I've never needed to translate these before. I did program in some simple multi-language support to prepare for it, but that too is hard-coded, meaning that if and when I add another language, I need to put it into the plug-in and recompile it. This not ideal. Ideally, I think, each plug-in would simply link its text (name, names of the parameters) to text in an external file, making translation a matter of changing that file.
Either way, I'm faced with a lot of work. Translation to just one other language would require a lot of re-coding, and re-compiling each of the 100 plug-ins, at bare minimum. This is possible. Is it worth it? Who can say. Perhaps auto-translation by Windows will soon eclipse this sort of manual translation, and perhaps do a better job than I. Of course, I can't speak (or can barely speak) other languages anyway, so any translation of the bulk text would largely be automated.
For such complex and unqiue software though, it may find a niche in a non-English area.
I will muse on the best way to proceed.
Deb is still ill with a cold-like virus. It's been over 10 days since she fell ill with it, and the doctor seems to think it will take 28 days for her to recover. Eight years ago today we first met when I interviewed her on ArtsLab on RedShift radio, an encounter which is happily preserved forever in the radio archive (which is on Mixcloud at time of writing).
I saw her today for a rare time (we've only met up once in the last 10 days) and we had an nice walk in the sun and shop visit. I returned home to find the house empty, my mother at the hospital with her sister. Bogi has apparently hit her head while parking her bicycle, fell backwards and became unconscious. She apparently feels fine, but head injuries are tricky things at the best of times.
