Languages, tooltips and dialog text

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love internationalization.

Language configuration / Text locales

Escoria supports separate languages for text and voice. Text includes speech and tooltips.

These are configured in your project settings as defaults, but whoever plays your game can alter them, save them and load them, if you provide more than one language option.

Development language and translations

Set the language code used during development in escoria/platform/development_lang. This means the language you use for tooltips and writing dialog.

This is required so Escoria can skip the translation code if the game is in the same language as during development.

If you're translating for a language that conjugates use/combine tooltips, you can add new identifiers for tooltips that end in .object1 and .object2 with the proper words.

In Finnish, for example, you would have key.tooltip say "Avain", key.tooltip.object1 say "avainta" and key.tooltip.object2 say "avaimeen".

Protip: this same functionality can be used to lowercase yor tooltips in use/combine situations where your language requires it. German is exempt, as German nouns are always capitalized.

Translating the texts are documented further in The Escoria book

Changing locales

Add buttons (inheriting from BaseButton) to your menu, which is any menu using main_menu.gd. Name the buttons after the locale, eg. fr or de. Now you are able to change languages by clicking the buttons.

Text timeout

In case you don't have audio to determine how long your dialog text is visible, you can change the escoria/application/text_timeout_seconds to your liking. This is how quickly the dialog text disappears on its own.

Speech locales

You must create a file like

#warning-ignore:unused_class_variable
var speech_locales = ["en", "de", "fr"]

in your game directory and configure escoria/application/speech_locales_path to point to it.

This is the list of accepted and supported locales in your game.

The game will crash if you define a locale that's not accepted, so don't add unsupported locales to your game code or define an unsupported default ;)

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