Localisation and Git Support

[stuntboots]

Hi there!

I have a couple of questions about articy:draft!

1. Does the upcoming Unity plugin support localisation? As in, am I able to manage multiple translations through articy:draft? Writing the game out in English, then providing translators a full outline of the game's text, and having that be a part of the Unity export?
2. How does articy:draft save its files? Are files saved in some kind of binary format? Or can it utilise the benefits of source control? As in, comparing differences between commits, seeing added files etc. I work on a couple of different computers, and would love to be able to monitor various changes etc as I make them, as well as being able to roll back to different versions, or make branches to handle different parts of the story.

Thanks!

[[Articy] Nico Probst]

Hi!,

1. Does the upcoming Unity plugin support localisation?

Yes! The unity export inside articy:draft can be set to export using localization, it will generate a xlsx file for every package you have defined. The unity plugin will import the data and the excel files and will make sure to use the texts from the currently set language.

As in, am I able to manage multiple translations through articy:draft? Writing the game out in English, then providing translators a full outline of the game's text, and having that be a part of the Unity export?

Ok not exactly like that but close: The unity export will generate exactly one excel file, you can copy that excel file for every language you want to support, change its name and place it next to the generated excel file from the export and the plugin will automatically parse every localization file.

Here is a little preview of how that looks in unity.

localization.png (144.31 KiB) Viewed 17648 times

Best regards

Nico

[[Articy] Peter Sabath]

Hi,

I will try to answer your second question.

Per default articy:draft uses a binary save format, but starting with articy:draft 3 you can add a command-line switch to change that to a JSON text format. This comes with the price of a longer loading time due to the text parsing required.

The multi-user version of articy:draft has support for the source control systems SVN and perforce. Git is not supported due to its two level publishing design with a local and a remote repository.
But you sure are free to use a single-user version and handle adding of files commit and update steps yourself.

Doing so you can branch your project, but merging or cherry picking is still very tricky, because of the complexity of such a project, all files may reference objects in other files, picking objects into another project may lead to a clash of object ids. So it is possible but needs some care. An articy:draft project is much more complex than a single file of source code.

-Peter

[stuntboots]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the responses!

Ok, so it seems like it's probably best to sync with Dropbox rather than Git. Once a project gets pretty big, I'd imagine dealing with a JSON project would be noticeably slower?

That exporting looks great. How is the data accessed then in Unity? Are the spreadsheets loaded at run time? Or is everything kept in a class in the game? Also can articy easily handle things like menu text conveniently as well? I'd love to store all my game's text in a single location.

Also do you have a rough idea of when version three will release? I'd like to sign up for the subscription on Steam, but don't want to learn the ways of version 2 only to have to relearn things in a few weeks for version 3?

[[Articy] Nico Probst]

That exporting looks great. How is the data accessed then in Unity?

Most of the data is accessed transparently. So for example:

Code: Select all

var entity = ArticyDatabase.GetObject<Character>("Ent_Manfred");
label.text = entity.DisplayName;

In this case DisplayName would return the correct localized text automatically depending on the current language.
But you also have the option to get the loca key via

Code: Select all

entity.LocaKey_DisplayName;

You can use that to manually translate a property utilizing the localization manager.

Code: Select all

label.text = ArticyDatabase.Localization.Localize(entity.LocaKey_DisplayName);

the LocalizationManager is also used to change the language at runtime.

Code: Select all

ArticyDatabase.Localization.Language = "de";

Are the spreadsheets loaded at run time? Or is everything kept in a class in the game? Also can articy easily handle things like menu text conveniently as well? I'd love to store all my game's text in a single location.

They are stored in assets, alongside the Database with your project data itself, so the excel file is only used as an intermediate format. And yes i built in the option to add a fully optional general purpose localization file, which you can populate with custom loca keys and text any way you wish.

Also do you have a rough idea of when version three will release? I'd like to sign up for the subscription on Steam, but don't want to learn the ways of version 2 only to have to relearn things in a few weeks for version 3?

Don't worry, version 3.0 is not fundamentally different from 2.0. And you can easily convert your 2.0 project to version 3.0. Using flex will automatically upgrade you to the new version without any additional cost.

About the release date: We haven't officially announced it yet, but you are in luck, i tell you anway ... If everything is going according to plan, we will release the 3.0 on February 16, alongside the unity plugin ofc.

Hope that answers your questions and let me know if you need anything else.

Regards

Nico

[stuntboots]

Nope, that's great! Thanks very much for all the info!