Has anyone (else) tried to translate AB2 to languages other than English? Much of the text shown to players is in files easily enough edited with a plain text
editor, but by no means all of it.

BTW, I take the open registration key and especially the 3rdparty file as clear
indication that the author would have no objection to this kind of thing. (About y2k or so I gave up trying to contact him directly).

There is a bit of annoyance that sometimes altering a file can trigger an anti-tamper reaction, and I would not object to a cleam way of turning that off, but it is possible to work around that, and leaving the game intact for players, with only the language displayed on screen chanted, everything else working precisely the way it did before.

Of course I would NEVER change the actual game play of somebody else's game, just make it available to a wider audience. In fact I wouldn't even correct the "off by one" error in some of the math that the game does, even if I knew where and what arrays were DIMmed incorrectly, or whatever.
(My main wild guess is that Mark Sinclair recycled some code from an earlier version of AB, and trusted a compiler from oh, perhaps Microsoft or somebody, to use the same default origin (Option Base in old MS talk) of an array as it did in earlier versions of the same compiler. Big mistake, some suppliers just never quit tinkering with what used to more or less work, and don't adequately warm programmers that things no longer work the way they did.

Anyway...
My primary interest at this time is Esperanto, and I already have working versions of the user doc (probably the longest esperanto translation of anything I've done yet) -- that and the HINTS file (what NPCs say in the taverns) goes a long way to esperantizing the game, along with a few other things like the advice for level 1 players in town with <W>izard, but the greetings, like "Welocme, <player name>)
-- many things like the word "Welcome" seem to be hard wired in the
exectuables, can't find where they are, can't fix 'em -- yet.

It's possible I will still find where to translate the rest -- for example I did manage to translate the names of terrain the player passes over, shown just
below the map, and I could change the banes of the monsters (but prohably won't). But that remeaing hidden stuff, dialog during purchases, etc., is vexing. I'd hate to have to try
decompiling the whole thing, goes against my grain on somebody esle's code like
this, and not even in possession of whatever compiler(s) he wrote it all in.

One thing I'd especially like to fix: context sensitive user Help. There are some places in the game where pressing a <?> should give help, but no help is available, even though the user doc has a section on it that should obviously be shown here. How does the <?> know what part of it to show when it does work? That's one thing that I WOULD fix, because it doesn't actually change game play, only make it MUCH easier for the player to look up info exactly when
it's needed.

--- BBBS/LiI v4.01 Flag
* Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)