Bay 12 Games Forum

Confirming Todestool's report, as well as the workaround.

I've searched the forums and noticed that there doesn't seem to have been any discussion at all about translating DF into other languages. I don't have any particular reason to, but I think it might be neat to implement them and widen the audience of the game. I'm wondering if there are any present technical limitations (i.e. stuff being in static strings in the code) which would make this particularly difficult.

I haven't actually played Adventure mode yet (which is where I assume the various languages of the DF world come into play), but I assume that the way they work is just by replacing word x with word y from the proper language_*.txt dictionary. This might make things really difficult, because grammar would need to be re-implemented and I figure with inflected languages it would be a complete pain in the ass, if even possible without a humongous amount of effort.

I'm willing to offer a decent, but non-native German translation for the game in my spare time.

So please, give me feedback in some sort of way whether you know the technical details or want to tell me that it's a horrible idea or whatever.

I don't see any problems at all with using ads to help support the game. I'm familiar with all sorts of free/open source projects that inject a tasteful amount of advertising on their site and I'm happy that this helps support them financially whether or not I or any other players decide to donate to the developers. A few Adsense ads combined with a single banner on the forums sounds pretty "tasteful" to me.

You could also go the "21st century shareware" route like UnReal World and Mount&Blade, which offer a very reasonable price for their games (about $20) and free upgrades for life, but still offer a time-limited/level-limited (respectively) version that give a very good idea of what the full game is like.