Hello everyone,
recently I was trying to help another modder who wanted to learn how to write his custom Localization.txt file for his mods. Although the original idea was to give him a quick answer, it turned out to be a little tutorial I thought someone else may find useful, so here it is for everyone:
Think of the content of Localization.txt as if it was the content of a table. As long as you stick to the vanilla format and follow its rules, you should be fine. Always try to match the vanilla format whenever possible.
Following these three simple rules will help you to write your own basic localizations from scratch:
1. First line of Localization.txt is always the table header with all kinds of labels or descriptions for entries below it. In other words, they should give you a hint as to which entry is expected where. This is the first line in vanilla:
2. As you can see in this first line, all the entries must be separated by commas thanks to which the game knows where the new entry is and everything after a comma is treated as a new entry. However, what if we needed to write a long text such as item description that may contain several commas that we actually want to show in game? That's what the rule number 2 is all about:
Writing long texts that have to include commas such as item descriptions would normally break the Localization.txt file format. To avoid that issue, the whole entry must be written inside double quotation marks like in the following example:
3. Each line in Localization.txt file is considered a new line of entries in the table, so what if we wanted to write a pretty item description with paragraphs instead of showing a wall of text with no paragraphs?
To write a new line inside our text, we need to write a special mark that will tell the game to put the text that follows on a new line. The mark looks like this:
Example:
In game this text will look like this:
If you wanted to leave one or more lines empty, you would have to put two or more of these marks together.
Example:
This will be shown on the first line.\n\nThis will be shown on the third line.
In game this text will look like this:
This will be shown on the first line.
This will be shown on the third line.
A good rule of thumb is to keep the length of your texts up to 80 characters per line, otherwise your text may show up a little bit broken, not neatly formatted the way you expected. It's because the game seems to put hard-coded line breaks after 80 characters, at least in some cases.
That's it for the basics. There are also some advanced things such as tags you can use inside Localization.txt that help you to show some special values that may be changing in game and it will always show the actual values, such as cvars, but honestly I'm not familiar with those yet, I never really had to use them and it's out of scope of this little tutorial point of which was to explain basics.
I hope this helps at least some of you to get started writing your first basic localizations for your new awesome mods. I hope you enjoyed it and I wish you good luck with your mods!
recently I was trying to help another modder who wanted to learn how to write his custom Localization.txt file for his mods. Although the original idea was to give him a quick answer, it turned out to be a little tutorial I thought someone else may find useful, so here it is for everyone:
Think of the content of Localization.txt as if it was the content of a table. As long as you stick to the vanilla format and follow its rules, you should be fine. Always try to match the vanilla format whenever possible.
Following these three simple rules will help you to write your own basic localizations from scratch:
1. First line of Localization.txt is always the table header with all kinds of labels or descriptions for entries below it. In other words, they should give you a hint as to which entry is expected where. This is the first line in vanilla:
Code:
Key,File,Type,UsedInMainMenu,NoTranslate,english,Context / Alternate Text,german,latam,french,italian,japanese,koreana,polish,brazilian,russian,turkish,schinese,tchinese,spanish2. As you can see in this first line, all the entries must be separated by commas thanks to which the game knows where the new entry is and everything after a comma is treated as a new entry. However, what if we needed to write a long text such as item description that may contain several commas that we actually want to show in game? That's what the rule number 2 is all about:
Writing long texts that have to include commas such as item descriptions would normally break the Localization.txt file format. To avoid that issue, the whole entry must be written inside double quotation marks like in the following example:
Code:
"This is one entry in Localization.txt, and this is still the same entry despite being written after the comma! All thanks to being written inside double quotation marks!"3. Each line in Localization.txt file is considered a new line of entries in the table, so what if we wanted to write a pretty item description with paragraphs instead of showing a wall of text with no paragraphs?
To write a new line inside our text, we need to write a special mark that will tell the game to put the text that follows on a new line. The mark looks like this:
Code:
\nExample:
Code:
This will be shown on the first line.\nThis will be shown on the second line.
Code:
This will be shown on the first line.
This will be shown on the second line.If you wanted to leave one or more lines empty, you would have to put two or more of these marks together.
Example:
This will be shown on the first line.\n\nThis will be shown on the third line.
In game this text will look like this:
This will be shown on the first line.
This will be shown on the third line.
A good rule of thumb is to keep the length of your texts up to 80 characters per line, otherwise your text may show up a little bit broken, not neatly formatted the way you expected. It's because the game seems to put hard-coded line breaks after 80 characters, at least in some cases.
That's it for the basics. There are also some advanced things such as tags you can use inside Localization.txt that help you to show some special values that may be changing in game and it will always show the actual values, such as cvars, but honestly I'm not familiar with those yet, I never really had to use them and it's out of scope of this little tutorial point of which was to explain basics.
I hope this helps at least some of you to get started writing your first basic localizations for your new awesome mods. I hope you enjoyed it and I wish you good luck with your mods!
