From: raeky
Date: 2002-11-27 10:58:21
It has been suggested before that the way to best handle languages in-game will be to create several sets of fonts and replacement rules to mask the english version of the text with some cryptic hard to translate (hopefully almost impossible if we can) version that visually looks like another language.
I've been toying with a php script to do this for the Elvish language, i'm useing characters from the "Tengwar of Feanor" language to simulate an elvish looking language.
I also made an array of the 1000 most used english words, and am useing that to determine what words you would know at the various % knowledge for that language.
I round the precents like:
\t$rknow = floor($know / 10) * 10;
\tif ($know > 0 && $rknow == 0) $rknow = 1;
because its just easier to deal with % units in blocks of 10.
0% knowledge = all words in Elvin
10% knowledge = the first 25 words in the list are known.
20% knowledge, first 100
30% knowledge, first 300
40% knowledge, first 500
50% knowledge, first 600
60% knowledge, first 700
70% knowledge, first 800
80% knowledge, first 900
90% knowledge, all 1000
The adverage adult uses arround 2000 words in there every day speech/writtings. So this list might need expanded and adjusted.
Right now its a "proof of concept", and will need much work.
My thoughts on how these known words would appear in-game visually, would be if you know the word, it will make the elvish version a 10% transparency and supper impose the english word over it. So that you can clearly see that this text wasn't written in english, and you can tell that it was written in elvin by looking at the faded text in the background. I feel this method would quite visually nice.
The url for the test php junk i wrote is here:
http://www.d2jsp.org/raeky/word_stats.php