Making multilingual games without Unicode

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  • Now, we all know that Construct doesn't support Unicode. Thus, it's easy to think that it'd make translating your program to Japanese or Russian or to any other exotic language impossible. However, this is false: It is entirely possible. Since Construct is a non-unicode program, it, along with any exe created with it, will run in the user's system locale. Due to this, you can in fact translate your program to any language you want, like this little example application here:

    <img src="http://planar-studios.com/bin/multilanguage.png">

    Now how do we achieve this? First of all, your game obviously needs to be fitted for translation: All your text data should be loaded from external files.

    Then, if you don't feel like changing your system locale and rebooting for every exotic language, or can't get anyone else with the desired system locale to edit your files, you're going to need Microsoft's AppLocale. If you're on Windows Vista/7, you'll most likely need to install and run it in compatibility mode to XP and run it as an administrator.

    Anyway, the important thing about your external files is that they are saved in ANSI, not in Unicode. Therefore, you should open Notepad (or your favorite text editor) in the desired locale using AppLocale, and editing your files appropriately in ANSI.

    Now that you have your external files in ANSI, you just proceed to make Construct load them like business as usual. If you preview your game with the exotic languages, you'll probably notice that they show up as garbage. However, if you run Construct or the built application with the appropriate system locale (either using AppLocale or having the proper locale on your system), you'll notice that it works exactly as it should! Since chances are that your Japanese players have their system locale set to Japanese, they don't need to do anything on their end to make the game work like it should in Japanese.

    Obviously, as you noticed earlier, you can't run all languages in any system locale like you could if the application was Unicode, but that's just something you have to deal with.

    To download the above example program and its source code, click here.

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