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============================================================================ |
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Internationalization in PennMUSH |
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============================================================================ |
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PennMUSH 1.7.3 and later have extensive support for running in non-English |
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environments. There are two parts to this. First, what the mush considers |
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to be valid characters, what's upper-case, what's lower-case, how they |
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are sorted, and so on. The second is translating the messages produced |
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by the game into another language. (Helpfiles aren't currently translated.) |
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Several languages are currently supported to one degree or another. |
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If your favorite language isn't (or if you want to increase the |
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level of support), and you're fluent in it, you can help out! |
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See http://www.pennmush.org/translation.html. |
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Localization (the process of making a MUSH conform to a given "locale") |
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is controlled by the LANG or LC_ALL environment variables, which have |
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the form "la_DI", where la is a language code and DI is a dialect. For |
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example, "en_US" stands for English, United States dialect. The |
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language codes are usually the same as a country's top level domain in |
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URLs. Spanish is 'es', Russian is 'ru', and so on. |
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There are two places where you have to use LANG: when you're |
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compiling the MUSH (in order to compile the message translation files) |
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and when you start up the MUSH (in order to set the locale for |
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the running server). |
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1. Compiling the MUSH - tips |
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Files with translated messages are located at |
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http://download.pennmush.org/Source/translations/. Get the one for your |
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patchlevel and language, put it in your pennmush/po/ directory. |
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These files have to be compiled to an efficient internal form before |
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starting up the mush. This means you should set your LANG environment |
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variable before you compile your server. |
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To do this using the common bash shell, 'export LANG=en_US', or whatever |
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your setting is. If that gives an error, try the tcsh shell form 'setenv |
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LANG en_US'. If that still doesn't work, consult the documentation for |
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the shell you're using. |
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The message files are compiled during the "make install" step. |
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Be sure that you compile with a COMPRESSION_TYPE (in options.h) that |
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is 8-bit clean so it will work properly with non-ASCII characters. |
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2. Starting up the MUSH - tips |
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The LANG environment variable that controls what language the mush |
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uses is normally set in the pennmush/game/restart script. There's an |
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example for using French in the script already that can be used as a |
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starting point. |
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Your server account might be set up with a non-english language as the |
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default. If so, and you don't set LANG in the restart script, that |
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default language will be used. |
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