Frogatto now has a Chinese translation

Frogatto is a platforming game with beautiful classic pixel art, stylish music, humorous dialog, and gameplay that ranges from relaxing to challenging. I easily became a fan of the game, and recently learned that it is possible to create translations for the game's dialog and menu text. For most platforming games, which have little text other than a settings screen, translation is probably a small issue. However Frogatto has a lot of dialog which illustrate its interesting characters and world, as well as things like hints and achievement texts. I worked with some Frogatto developers and users for a few weeks, and now the game can be played in Chinese!

The translation is written by another Frogatto player, CloudiDust, who I met on Frogatto's forum. I did write a translation by myself before noticing that another user was also interested in creating a Chinese translation. However, my Chinese is getting rusty, and I felt my translation didn't do justice for Frogatto's humor. So we decided to use CloudiDust's translations, and I focused on the programming side of getting the translation to show in game.

In most cases, creating a translation for a program doesn't really require much if any additional programming. Most programs use fonts installed in the system to display text, and as long as you have a Chinese font, these programs can display Chinese text. On the other hand, Frogatto uses a font that's manually drawn by the team's artists. This certainly makes it easy to achieve a consistent look between the 2D graphics and text, but it also posed a challenge for the Chinese translation, because the artists did not draw Chinese characters:

And even if someone started working on drawing a Chinese font for Frogatto now, it would take a long time to finish. Chinese has a huge set of characters, and just Frogatto's translation uses over 1000 characters. And when sentences in the translation are revised, it might require new characters. So, for a language like Chinese, I thought the best solution is to automatically create a font compatible with Frogatto, containing the characters used in the translation, from an existing Chinese font. This process needs to be done also for Japanese, Korean, and maybe more languages. So I built a system to do this, with help from Frogatto developers.

Since it is a very new feature, the Chinese translation doesn't work out of the box yet. If you use Windows, you can download a recent development build of Frogatto, 1/31/2011 or newer. You also have to extract this zip file into Frogatto's installation. Then, you need to set an environment variable LANG=zh_CN before running Frogatto. In a future release this should be much simplified.

If you use Linux, get Frogatto from SVN, compile it, run make update-mo, and run the game also with the appropriate LANG environment variable setting. Arch Linux users can just use the frogatto-svn package from AUR.

If you want to help translate Frogatto to other languages, the Transifex service makes it quite easy. A Frogatto developer and I started working on a Japanese translation, but neither of us is a Japanese native speaker, so we'd really like some help.

Problems with tabs in user interfaces

I apologize to any old readers, and new readers who have looked at my older posts, that this post is quite disconnected from the older ones. Considering I haven't posted in more than 3 years, that's not a surprise though :p.

Reading Celeste Lyn Paul's ideas about using tabs in the taskbar has reminded me about some of my thoughts on tabs in user interfaces.

Every major browser is using tabs now, and we can also find them in text editors, virtual terminals, and as Celeste mentioned it is being integrated to KDE's window manager. One of the motivations for tabs is to limit the number of windows and task bar entries, by grouping multiple "documents" in the same window. This helps reduce clutter on the desktop and task bar, but often the clutter is simply moved to the tab bar of the application. My Chrome window tends to gather 10 or more tabs after an hour, and by that time, many of the open tabs aren't really related to what I am working on at the moment.

I think there are three cases of why people use multiple tabs (or if they were never invented, multiple windows or "documents"):

1. They need to work with multiple things at the same time. For example, I might have Google Translator open while translating a Google Document. I might be running some commands in one Konsole tab, while reading a manual page in another tab.
2. They want to move on to something else, but the old document cannot be closed for some reason. For example, while aptitude is upgrading packages in one Konsole tab, I want to run another command, and so I open another tab.
3. Sometimes the user didn't intend to be "done" with the first thing, but forgets to get back to it after opening a new tab. This is kind of in between cases 1 and 2. For example, sometimes while I'm waiting for an online video to load, or writing a post like this, I'd get distracted and open another site and forget about what I was doing until a few hours later.

I think case 1 is where tabs are doing the best in their role. Grouping closely related tasks on the same view can help the user increase productivity. Many applications that support tabs also allow you to move tabs manually, and create multiple windows with tabs, to organize tabs the way you need. However, I personally rarely use these features, and I think using them extensively could take enough time to cancel the productivity benefits.

Another problem is that closely related tasks are not always done in the same application. Nowadays you can do a lot of things with the web browser, including watching videos, playing games, word processing, calculating, and translating. But there are still a lot of desktop applications that can work together to help with the user's tasks. Normally you cannot put these separate applications in tabs to help with your workflow. KDE allows you to group windows from different applications together as tabs now, but it's currently not very convenient to do, and it can be confusing to have tabs both on the window manager level and the application level. I think ideally, applications shouldn't be concerned with having tabs, and should just leave it to the window manager and the user to organize tasks in different ways, be it to put windows side by side, dock them, or tab them.

Cases 2 and 3 are not benefits from tabs, but rather clearer demonstrations of their problems. Although, maybe the problems are inherent to multi-tasking and the amount of distractions in our lives today. I think it would help if there was a system that could automatically close, or hide long-untouched tasks. This would require work to be not lost when a window or tab is closed: for example, forum and blog editing pages should autosave the content, and the browser should be able to re-open a page with the same state as it was before being closed. On Linux we use the program Screen to keep a command line program running without keeping it on the display, and this could be extended to the whole desktop. However, there are challenges associated with keeping more and more programs running in the background, reloading them fast enough, and presenting their list to the user in a non-distracting way, yet preventing the user from forgetting about them completely.

A New Frontier

Get a Better Browser Today!

Opera is giving out free registration codes. I recommend and command any Internet Explorer users to get it so that they can view my blog better :).

Ironically, I purchased Opera about 30 minutes before learning this news :p. But it was out of my appreciation of this great browser, so I don’t feel uncomfortable about it.

I also use Firefox, and it’s very difficult to judge which one of the two browsers is superior in terms of functionality, customizability and pleasantness. But Firefox does use a lot of memory, especially left open for long time, with lots of pages open. I personally can tolerate this flaw, but I’m sure Windows users who have been unhappy about Firefox for this will enjoy Opera.

Today is the second day of school. I have much to say about the experience so far, and some plans for my blog (forshadowing, for good news). I have school work to do, school fun to have for now, but I’ll be sure to update in the weekend.

Tags:

• Opera
• registration

Vantage Master Online

Most non-Asian gamers probably only know Falcom as the maker of the Ys series. I played one of the early Ys games, but I didn’t enjoy it very much as the action rpg genre didn't suit my taste. However, a few other games made by this Japanese company make up the majority of my favorite PC games. Most of them are not popular except in Japan and China due to the lack of English translations, but a fortunate exception, Vantage Master Online, a turn-based strategy game, is available in English, and even free to download (for Windows).

Simple, Traditional, Yet Complete and Innotative Battle System

The four elements of natials in VMO—each is another’s natural enemy. from Vantage Master Online Manual.

The basic ideas in the battle system are a little clichéd, and you might want to just try the game and discover them yourself. In a battle in VMO, two summoners fight on a grid map. The goal is to reduce the opponent’s HP to zero, but the process involves more. The summoners can attack and use magic, but their main weapons are, of course, summoned spirits, called Natials by Falcom. There are 24 natials, categorized into four elements. The relationships between the four elements make it important to choose what to summon based on what the enemy summons. Within each element, natials also differ by properties such as attack and defense powers, speed, moving range, etc. Summoning natials costs mana, and each natial also costs some mana per turn, so you need to capture and defend magic stones, strategically placed on the map, to keep up with the expenditure.

An important feature is complex interactions between natials’s properties and the environment. For example, different terrain types might affect the movement for a natial, if it's land, water, or air borne. Natials with projectile attack have different launch angles, thus their range will be affected differently by height. In some maps there are transitions from day to night, while in others there is a fixed lighting level; accordingly there are daytime and nocturnal natials that will perform better or worse depending on the lighting. Summoners can use spells that alter the environment, e.g. switch day and night, or raise and lower water level, to make provide advantage to themselves.

Three Modes of Gameplay

There are Scenario, Expert, Free Battle and Network Battle modes. In Scenario mode, you start with only the basic natials, and after completing each scenario, you get one of the natials or a spell, and some stat increase. There are a few alternative maps at a time for you to attempt, and after beating all of them, new ones open up. As you progress, the enemies will have higher stats, and are able to summon more natials or cast more spells, and may have advantagious positions in the maps. In the Expert mode, you and enemies will both have all the natials and spells, but the maps require a lot more strategy.

The free battle mode allows you to pick any map, any character for the two opponents, and either or both can be played by human or computer AI. You can also configure which natials and spells each has.

Network Battle mode obviously allows you to play with someone else on another computer. It doesn't require a public server, and it’s pretty easy to set up as long as you have a modern version of DirectX. I’ve only used this once with a friend; although he wasn’t very interested in the game, it was still a fun experience. I’ll be very happy to match wits with anyone interested :)!

Playable and Useful Features

Besides boasting a network mode, VMO has many features that improve the playing experience. You can select any unit—your summoner and enemy, and any natials— and use a context menu to see its move range, attack range, and attack-after-move range, and all kinds of stats. Hovering on any tile will show its height and any influence on defense, etc. The main interface is similar to your famililar Windows applications—with scrollbars, menus and buttons, reducing the need to adjust to unique control methods.

Aesthetics

Screenshot of a VMO battle. Click to view full size.

For a 25MB download, VMO’s graphics is very impressive. The bitmap tiles and looping animations are very well used, making the battle maps look 3-D. Most of the maps have unique styles, making it easy for you to have a mental picture of the fantasy setting. The background music of each scenario also compliments the graphics and the pace/difficulty of the battle, and I’ve always liked music in Falcom games—as you can see I listen to them very often. Each natial requires an artifact–like item to summon; the descriptions of these items are also very artistic. There is some story in the game, in the form of simple animation clips with subtitles after the completion of some scenarios. Unfortunately the English version didn’t translate the subtitles, and you might only see garbage code on a non-Japanese computer; however they're not necessary at all to enjoy the game. In the beginning of scenario modes, you need to take a quiz to determine your attributes and your class. That is pretty fun too, and I heard that many of the characters come from previous games by Falcom.

Vantage Master Evolved: VM Japan

VM Japan, released more recently, is a much more decorated version of VMO. It has a more involved story, and the graphics and music are no longer mini-gamelevel. There are more natials, and all of them originate, or seem to, from Japanese folklore. More variety is introduced; for example there’s a spell only mastered by one character, and a natial is very powerful, but can only move on one special type of terrain. These changes might be too few and disappointing for some VMO fans, but it’s still nice to see Vantage Master evolve into a full-sized game. I think there are two volumes of the VM Japan series already, and it’s also available for PS2. Unfortunately, I don't think there are English versions yet.

Summary

I think VMO deserves much more attention, especially among strategy gamers. It makes excellent use of its small size, and beats many bulky games in terms of playability. I hope you will try it out, and hopefully be interested to VMO-duo with me :)

Tags:

• Vantage Master Online
• PC game
• strategy game
• Falcom
• VM Japan