Research

How the game works inside and what had to change to make it speak Ukrainian. Each page is a separate story with evidence and conclusions.

• Fonts: the FNT format, Ukrainian letters and Franklin Gothic Medium — The game does not support any language that uses the letters І і Ї ї Є є Ґ ґ. To display Ukrainian text, these eight letters had to be added to both of the game’s fonts, with…
• Loading the translation at runtime: from an unpacked game to ASI — This page describes how the translation gets into the game, which engine functions were found for this, and how the delivery method evolved from 0.1.0 to 1.1.10. For the overall…
• Textures with lettering — Part of the game’s English text is not strings but images: the logo, the splash screen, signs, instrument panels. To translate them, we had to find every such texture among…
• PC menu: strings baked into the EXE — After ENGLISH.TXT was translated, part of the menu stayed in English: “Quit to Windows”, “Video Settings”, “Screen Resolution”, “Shadows”… One screen showed both «Назад» and…
• The custom character editor: names, saves and UTF-8 — The game lets you build two custom characters and give them names. This is where Ukrainian text first left the string tables: the names are stored in the save file, and the editor…
• Cultural adaptations — why «Валєра» (Valera), «Пластун» (Plastun) and «круглики» (kruhlyky).