I've been playing the Alpha 5.1 English version which I've been helping with some of the translations for and I've noticed that I've made a couple of typos in various texts. Could I maybe ask that any errors that are spotted in the buildings/ships descriptions are posted here so I can correct them for a future update?

I'm currently working on the minor races which I'm hoping to get done at some point in the next few weeks/possibly months - currently done all the As and Bs which has been slow progress.

I've gone through the buildings and fixed the typos I found. Since I made some other data changes to the buildings.data file with the editor I post the whole file here for further use.

Thanks, I've got that file and made the changes that I've noticed - I'll keep hold of the file and see if anyone else spots a typo and then I'll send it back to you when I send the minor races.

To explain in short what I changed beside the typos, well I added a fourth type of shipyard for the Omegan race and modified the Type III shipyards for all major races. We decided to make the "super-yard" buildable in other systems than the homeworlds of the major races.

Fixed some typos and missing words in shiplist.data. Also changed all tech 0 colony and transport ships to shield type 0 in order to make them cheaper at the beginning.

Thanks again, I keep looking through the things that I've written, but I guess sometimes when looking at a couple of hundred entries, its possible to miss fairly obvious typos! Its often only when I'm playing the game with the data that I notice where I've made mistakes.

happens to me all the time too, don't worry .

I have a couple questions that I've been meaning to ask, regarding this topic/the changes, and I apologize if I am asking something that's more or less answered someplace. Firstly, having been a few months, had the game itself been updated to reflect the changes in these files? I only downloaded the game from here, and installed it (the Alpha 5.1 that is) a few days ago (A couple weeks at this point). Secondly, I don't know if this is fixed or not, or if it's something that can't be fixed (or make for some reason, I have a mess up somewhere), but the name "Earth" isn't in English, nor is barracks screen where you build your troops. The name of the units and their description isn't in English (again, at least for me...), and finally (and this would somewhat go with my first question), if the game, the currently posted download that is, has not been updated with these changes, should I add it? Like, the minor changes and corrections, it doesn't change things to much does it? It's just corrections and intended updates, right? I only ask in the last part because of the online games I play (When my internet connection is behaving...)

Overall though, I love this updated version (The Alpha 5.1), great work to all the people involved in the making of the game.

denzil's corrections have been included in Alpha 5.1 but you're right, there are still german text lines especially in troop section in the game, still hard-coded. So there is no way yet to replace these words with their english translation counterparts. But you can of course make a list and translate them all into a .txt file and zip and attach it here to the boards so once SirP gets to fix them, he has the right translation at hand.

I open this thread to discuss and work out translation improvements. First thing that comes to my mind is the "Benefit" button in build menu for the display of structure bonusses and ship values. I'm content with "Description" there on the right hand side but is "Benefit" really the best choice here? Bonusses would make sense if there were just structures shown there, but when you build a ship in ship yard, their offensive and defensive (i.e. shield and hull) values are shown which do not really qualify as Bonusses in my eyes. Values would be possible then.

Any ideas?

Benefit sounds iffy. Something like Info or Statistics or meh i duno because you have it acording to your wording, for two seperate infos in one screen.

Hmm maybe structural or structures or something along those lines might do.

alright. statistics or stats like in botf: http://www.trekmania.net/conference/akira4.jpg , hm, would count more for ship stats then structure upgrade bonusses.
I assume "values" then also sounds not-so-good?

Well then I'll go with Info, thx mate. Was Information before anyways, I just searched for a shorter word cause the letters went over the small button on-screen .

I was wondering who was still working on translation of the minor races? And where are you upto? I've been working through them for quite a while and there were others who were planning to do some work on them too.

I found in the german forum http://bote-forum.square7.ch/phpBB3/vie ... t=englisch that you did minor races A and B (many thanks) - I didn't check: is A+B now in the latest version - it's Alpha6.1 (version 0.81)

I'll post there if anybody did further improvment of minor races desciptions.

Since I last posted, I have also completed C and some of the D races, I'll take these files, compare what I have already done with the new files and update where necessary.

I'm just registering with the German forum so I can see what is happening there too.

Is this really a problem? Cause everything (even with bad translation) makes sense to me . . .

but I'll lend my hand if needed

(what are we doing exacting?) finding errors? cleaning up grammar?

finding errors? cleaning up grammar? - yes, both, because I think BotE is completely translated in English, or not??

Recently I found one sentence in MoralEvents.data #35 Sign Friendship/Cooperation Treaty - Heyoun - I replace the german sentence with:

The new treaty with $param$ is good for our trading

little questions to the right side of the image:

is "on the web" ok? or is "on www" better?

and also: is forum ok or is it board (or is both used?)

Is help with the BotE English translation still needed? If so, where is the best thread to "start" for those (like me) who'd like to contribute to this part of the project?

I speak Canadian/British English fluently, but very little (and very awful) German. The English text (in BotE Alpha6.1) is generally legible, but there are still a few places where the wording is somewhat forced, convoluted, or just strange to English speakers. There's a rare few instances where it actually doesn't make any sense at all; fortunately these puzzling texts are not critical, they're just background fluff to add immersion and ambience. Actually, it sometimes seems to add an interesting "alien" flavour to the language.

of course Ayrik . well, you could start by improving the text files containing the diplomatic and sabotage/espionage messages. Then you could move on to the minor race descriptions starting alphabetically in reverse order (from Z on). afterwards you could clean up the stringtable file and the rest of what seems "alien" to native english speakers.

Just edit the files with notepad? Are they all simple plaintext?

I'm also curious ... how many people actually play the English version of the game?

notepad is sufficient for most *.data files in the bote subfolders. Be sure not to add additional line breaks and see that notepad does not "wordwrap" the file, so you might need to check if it works for you by just opening and saving a data file once and see if it gets corrupt. You should always see the line breaks as "blocks" or "squares" when editing the buildings.data file for example (you can edit it both with the respective editor program or with notepad).
Minorraces.data, buildings.data and ships.data have their own binary format so you need the editors provided in our modding section.

well according to the download figures from the main portal site here, over 22000 people have at least downloaded the game over the years. I have no idea how many actually play it, I assume most do not show up here to post in the forums but just play it with their friends. There is no tracking software in-game (and never will, of course) so I really can't say. But you can have a look at the bote game reports section here on the forums, some are at least playing it quite intensely.

let's see how many people will vote at viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4442 for English or German Playing

of course I don't look forward to many votes (only forum-member can vote, and only when they're online - some aren't for months or years..) - but also less votes will give us a little sense of it

PS: Notepad++ is quite well for editing BotE data-files :-)

So, to be clear, Malvosin ...

Are you referring to all the *.data files within the \Data\Races\ directory, and the \Data\Strings\StringTable.txt file?

I'm a little curious why many of the code-internal labels are English. Have you just converted them from the original German, or is this sort of the way programmers (at least BotE's programmers) do their work? I honestly can't imagine German C coding (Das C?).

I'm referring to all the data files there except for the minorraces.data which is not a regular txt file like the buildings.data file. Iin a nutshell each data file that has a special editor is not really a regular one.

SirP programmed nearly all of the code and he just decided to name the labels in english. Only the documentation is in german, I guess because the documentation contains complete sentences which is easier for a German to write in german. Denominators, tags and labels are just simple words.

Don't know if this is already posted, but playing as the Heyoun Trade Union when there is a +1 morale notification after a trade agreement with a minor race one of the alternate descriptions in the Empire page for this +1 morale text is still in German for the English version of the game. I'd have to replay to find the particular text itself, but it happened to me a couple of times and both were the +1 morale boost

hm, so when using the Search function in Windows for file content and searching through the data folder you should be able to locate the file where the wrong german text is located and be able to replace it.

If I could remember what the thing said. I guess I'm just going to have to play as Heyoun again and try to get that message, copy paste and then do search and replace.

Or.. how many +1 morale things are there for that? OK, I'm going to start delving. See if I can find it.

got it, #35 for Heyoun I added in:

Speculative trading has shot up after details of the treaty with $param$ were released

already fixed in dev version. I guess we use your phrase instead of the one reg invented over here: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4244

What did yours say? (I'm heading to bed now, don't have time to DL your full version, install and examine it right now) I was just trying to match the meaning of the others in that heading. It's for two types of diplomacy treaty, right? That's why I just stuck with 'treaty' as the description to work with both (Friend and cooperation if I remember right)