How the translation was built

1. 1

   Research

   Found out where the game keeps its text, fonts and textures, and which TT Games formats would have to change.

2. 2

   Unpacking

   Unpacked the DAT archives and located ENGLISH.TXT, TRC.CSV, the credits, the font atlases and the textures with text.

3. 3

   Fonts

   Added І, Ї, Є, Ґ and their lowercase pairs to the game’s font atlases, tuned the metrics and checked every font in the game.

4. 4

   Translation & glossary

   598 game strings, TRC.CSV and the credits: first a glossary and context for every line, then translation, proofreading and cultural adaptations.

5. 5

   Engine (UAP/ASI)

   An ASI plugin loaded through dinput8.dll serves resources from the UKRAINIAN.uap package at runtime — original files stay untouched.

6. 6

   Textures

   Repainted 9 textures with text, including the title-screen logo.

7. 7

   Live QA

   Played through the game with the translation: hunted for clipped text, bad line breaks and lines without context, fixed and re-checked.

8. ✕8

   Release

   Built a ZIP with SHA256SUMS checksums and published it on GitHub — the first public release, 1.1.10.

This page explains how the Ukrainian localization was made: where the words come from, who did what, how every string was checked and why some decisions are the way they are. Technical details are in architecture.md and in the research section.

In short

• The translation is not a machine-translation pass. Every string was translated in the context of where it appears in the game, checked against the glossary and proofread by the author.
• The technical side (formats, memory addresses, the plugin) was researched from scratch: there are no official tools for translating the game.
• The AI assistant was a tool for research and drafts. Decisions, proofreading and in-game testing are the author’s.
• Nothing is claimed without verification: if something has not been checked, that is stated explicitly.

Who did what

The project was made by one person with AI assistants (Claude Code, Codex). We say so openly: it is honest, and it is how we managed to get, in a few weeks, from “the game doesn’t know the letter ї” to a complete translation.

Author	AI assistant
The project idea and every decision: what to translate, how to install, what to release	Research into the .FNT, UAP, DDS and save formats
Glossary and dictionary, cultural adaptations («Валєра» (Valera), «Пластун» (Plastun), «круглики» (kruhlyky — the studs currency))	Finding addresses and functions in the game’s memory, analyzing crash dumps
Proofreading every string, style and terminology edits	Unpacking resources, texture inventory, OCR
Testing in the live game: playthroughs, screenshots, bug hunting	Translation drafts based on the glossary and context
Graphics: the logo, texture lettering, manual glyph tuning	Tools: builders, DXT encoders, tests, the plugin
Identifying the Franklin Gothic Medium font and its render parameters	Documenting the research and checks

An important consequence: almost all of the font bugs described in fonts.md were found by the author in the live game. Automated byte-level checks did not see them.

The path of a single string

 String ID         where it is in game      glossary             translation
 ┌────────┐       ┌──────────────┐       ┌────────────┐       ┌──────────┐
 │ 151    │──────>│ character    │──────>│ team-      │──────>│ «Валєра» │
 │ Jungle │       │ shop, short  │       │ approved?  │       │          │
 │ Guide  │       │ name         │       │ yes/no     │       │          │
 └────────┘       └──────────────┘       └────────────┘       └────┬─────┘
                                                                   │
                         ┌─────────────────────┐       ┌───────────v──────┐
                         │ live check in the   │<──────│ author proofread:│
                         │ game: fits, font,   │       │ style, gender,   │
                         │ context             │       │ tokens [..], %d  │
                         └─────────────────────┘       └──────────────────┘

1. ID. Every ENGLISH.TXT line has a numeric ID, TRC.CSV rows have text labels, and the PC menu has its own IDs. The translation is stored by ID in translations/*.json; the repository contains no complete English game files, and the structure of the strings (IDs, service tokens) is described by the index in index/.
2. Context. Where the string appears: a menu, a hint, a name in the shop, a level title. That determines length, grammatical gender, case and tone. For example, “Posted” in the game is a parcel status, so it becomes «Відправлено» (“sent”), not «Опубліковано» (“published”).
3. Glossary. translations/glossary.json holds names, artifacts, places, game terms and a confidence level for each: high, medium, low-proposal, team-approved.
4. Translation. The AI assistant prepared a draft from the glossary and context; the author accepted, edited or rewrote it.
5. Proofreading. The author checked style and terminology. The automated check (python -m ua validate) makes sure no IDs, service tokens [...] or %d are lost and that every character exists in the font.
6. Live check. The string has to be seen in the game: does it fit, is it cut off, does every letter render correctly.

Glossary and sources

• The official Ukrainian dub of the trilogy (ICTV, TV+ studio): «У пошуках втраченого ковчега» (Raiders of the Lost Ark), «Храм Долі» (Temple of Doom), «Останній хрестовий похід» (The Last Crusade).
• Ukrainian Wikipedia: names of characters, artifacts and places (Меріон Ревенвуд — Marion Ravenwood, Малюк — Short Round, Салла — Sallah, Беллок — Belloq, Ковчег Заповіту — the Ark of the Covenant, палац Панкот — Pankot Palace).
• There are no Ukrainian translations of Indiana Jones books, so this is not a skipped step but an empty niche.
• No established Ukrainian terminology for LEGO games (Studs, Free Play, Minikit) could be found publicly. Such terms are reasoned proposals and are marked as such in the glossary.
• Third-party Cyrillic localizations were not used as a translation source. Technically, the only thing used was the atlas of a third-party Cyrillic font patch, as the base for Font 1.

Cultural adaptations are described separately: research/cultural-adaptations.md.

How it was tested

The live game. Browser automation is no help for a native Win32 game. The test loop looked like this: close the game → update the files → launch through Steam → reach the right screen → screenshot → compare. For fonts, the author temporarily replaced «Нова гра» (“New Game”) with a test string containing all eight new letters side by side, to see them in one word.

Process memory. A separate tool reads the memory of the running game (without changing anything) and confirms that our strings are really there: 598/598 main strings, 194/194 CSV values, 38/38 PC strings.

Tests. Formats, the string index, font structure, the baseline, the runtime targeting characters, the x86 editor adapters, DDS replacement on the original containers, behavior without a UAP and with a corrupted UAP.

Game integrity. After installation and rollback, the SHA-256 of the EXE and DAT files must match the original.

Honest status. Every version stated separately what had been verified and what had not. For example, a full start-to-finish playthrough is not yet complete, which is why the feedback channels are on the first screen of the README.

From 0.1.0 to 1.1.10

Version	What was discovered or done
0.1.0	All the text and 8 letters in the main font; the game had to be unpacked
0.1.1–0.1.2	The logo and 9 textures with lettering
0.1.3	Fixed Font 2 and the baseline of the gamepad icons
0.1.4	The PC menu from the EXE via pointer replacement in memory
0.1.5	Editorial pass: «круглики» (kruhlyky — studs), «Бонуси» (Extras), hints
0.1.6–0.1.7	UAP: the original DAT files stay, the package shrank from 182 MB to 2 MB
0.1.8	The official Ultimate ASI Loader and an ASI plugin
0.1.9	Cultural adaptations of names
0.1.10	Targeting reticle, UTF-8 in the editor, «Форелька» (Forelka) and «Льоля» (Lolia) as custom character names
1.1.10	First public release, new reproducible repository

Details of every version are in CHANGELOG.md.

Principles worth keeping

• Do not modify game files on disk. Everything is substituted in memory, and deleting three files restores the original.
• Do not ship game resources. Git holds only our text, our graphics layers and our glyphs; complete resources are built from your own copy of the game.
• Verify before changing. The plugin checks the EXE, the function bytes and the package; at the slightest mismatch it does nothing.
• A hypothesis is not a fact. Several early assumptions (loose files on top of DAT, a “magic” value in the FNT header, the plugin being to blame for the pause before cutscenes) were disproved by experiments. A conclusion is written down only after it has been verified.