Hello all.
As everyone here, I am really thrilled about Planet Zoo release, so first things first: awesome job, Frontier!
I wanted to raise a little flag about localisations. Of course I can only talk about Italian, which is my native language. I admit I have an OCD for localisations, but since the beta I spotted some weird translated strings, and it looks like it's more on the UI side than the Zoopedia side. From a user perspective, it looks like they came from two different teams, or at least from two different processes. Anyway, while it's not a deal breaker, it surely hampers the immersion in the game.
One of my hobbies is to contribute to software localisations, so I just wanted to ask you Frontier guys how are you going to deal with fixes in localisations. I could see different paths here:
As everyone here, I am really thrilled about Planet Zoo release, so first things first: awesome job, Frontier!
I wanted to raise a little flag about localisations. Of course I can only talk about Italian, which is my native language. I admit I have an OCD for localisations, but since the beta I spotted some weird translated strings, and it looks like it's more on the UI side than the Zoopedia side. From a user perspective, it looks like they came from two different teams, or at least from two different processes. Anyway, while it's not a deal breaker, it surely hampers the immersion in the game.
One of my hobbies is to contribute to software localisations, so I just wanted to ask you Frontier guys how are you going to deal with fixes in localisations. I could see different paths here:
- Not care about them at all, or fix them "when you have time". Hey, not ideal for us, but being a software developer myself I know you guys have priorities. No hard feelings, not going to blame you for this: the game is great anyway and I'm not going to stop playing it just because of some weird translations.
- Collect suggestions via forum/email/other media, and implement them on a regular basis. Yes, could work, and if you say so I'm going to compile a list of the issues I find.
- Allow custom localisations from XML files, and possibly upload them as a mod in Steam. I know Planet Coaster allowed custom localisations starting from a sample XML, and I guess this can come back sooner or later also in Planet Zoo. But there's one specific thing that worries me in this path: you would need to support this, providing updated XML for any new game update, for every language, as a base to let the user customize them. Not ideal, if you ask me
- Setup a well known centralized localisation system where users can register and contribute to the localisation: I have worked with some of them (Weblate, Transifex) and I have to say they work pretty well. Of course these are completely managed platforms, so that a user can only propose strings and not overwrite existing ones without authorization, so it's completely safe. Unfortunately I can't help with setting up such a system and integrate it in the build workflow, but from a community user perspective, this would be an awesome solution.
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