.tff fonts —— possible support for Unicode?

  • I recently bought FS 2 on steam and found it works pretty well in VR. I played FSX/P3D and DCS series for years, but still get impressed by Aerofly FS2.

    I would like to introduce this fast & neat flight simulator to more people in my country (China), but the localization can be a problem.

    So my initial idea was to make a Chinese "patch" on my own, by editing those .tmc and .txt files. But then, i noticed that the .tff file might be an encoded texture atlas.

    In order to make it work, i have to add the necessary Chinese characters into the .tff file.

    This procedure is definately a bit hard for me alone to complete. That's why i want a confirmation from the official developers that if this can be done.

    If the answer is YES, below are what i can provide:

    1. Relatively accurate tranlations —— I'm not a professional translator, but my in-depth knowledge in aviation / gaming / coding is adaquate for such tasks

    2. Full localization —— Steam store "About", UI Texts, aircraft introduction, tutorial audios (voice acting costs about $80, i can easily cover that :D )

    What i need:

    1. A full list of all texts displayed in Aerofly FS 2

    2. The voice acting script for all tutorials

  • Thank you for your offer to help us translate Aerofly into Chinese,

    Language files are plain text files which are stored in the aerofly installation folder in the directory "language".

    The contained languages English, German and French (I think) are the only files used as far as I know but maybe you can get aerofly to recognize other language keys.

    You can make a backup of the French or German translation and then edit these files and replace the translated text with Chinese. Make sure to keep the file format as it is so that your special characters are preserved.

    Make sure to backup your progress because Steam could overwrite your files with the originals.

    If you dig through the directory Aerofly FS 2 Flight Simulator\game\missions\tutorial_basic as well as Aerofly FS 2 Flight Simulator\game\missions\general

    you can find a folder "sounds" in there the language sound recordings are stored. To create your own sounds you need to install the Aerofly SDK and convert your custom wav sound recordings. You can do so by moving your raw sound files into the dr400 example aircraft intermediate folder and then convert the dr400 aircraft. In the output dr400 folder your sound files will be available as .tsb sounds.

    For the other languages we used a synthetic voice generator so that we can easily add new sounds that sound exactly like existing ones. If you manually record sounds there might be sounds that are missing if we decide to expand the flight school or missions.

  • Like i mentioned in my first post, I cant simply replace existing texts like English, German, Franch, Spanish, Japanese.

    In a game, inputing different languages is not as simple as writing in a Word or Notepad, especially when you are dealing with Chinese.

    In a operating system like Windows 10, it will automaticly choose the decoding method and displaying font for different languages from the library.

    BUT, you cant directly access the font library from game. Instead, we have to pack the fonts, or just some specific characters frpm the font into something like a "texture atlas", so that we can use them later in the UI. Otherwise, not included characters will never be shown in the UI.

    And about the synthetic voice generator, I actually didn't notice that, and it does sound like a good idea. But still, i guess you people still need translated scripts to generate them. If you can ask the developer team to provide the original scripts, i ll be much appreciated, cos i really dont want to replay flight school a few more times only to write them down.

  • Like i mentioned in my first post, I cant simply replace existing texts like English, German, Franch, Spanish, Japanese.

    In a game, inputing different languages is not as simple as writing in a Word or Notepad, especially when you are dealing with Chinese.

    In a operating system like Windows 10, it will automaticly choose the decoding method and displaying font for different languages from the library.

    BUT, you cant directly access the font library from game. Instead, we have to pack the fonts, or just some specific characters frpm the font into something like a "texture atlas", so that we can use them later in the UI. Otherwise, not included characters will never be shown in the UI.

    And about the synthetic voice generator, I actually didn't notice that, and it does sound like a good idea. But still, i guess you people still need translated scripts to generate them. If you can ask the developer team to provide the original scripts, i ll be much appreciated, cos i really dont want to replay flight school a few more times only to write them down.

    This is something that likely won't be addressed, so all that can be done is the suggestions made by Jan (Jet-Pack). By the way, both Jan and myself are on the actual IPACS development team.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • This is something that likely won't be addressed, so all that can be done is the suggestions made by Jan (Jet-Pack). By the way, both Jan and myself are on the actual IPACS development team.

    Thanks for your reply. if this cannot be done, then there is no point for me to make any translations, because Chinese characters can't be displayed in the aerofly fs2 at all.

    I'll check this post from time to time to see any further changes, thanks again for all the help from you and Jan!

  • RoCk3T_L: Thank you for bringing this up. Jeff and Jan are right here, the current version does not yet support chinese and japanese characters. The amount of work required to translate into chinese or japanese has shown to be quite high in the past. However, we did have a japanese translation of our other products in the past, so we could in theory modify Aerofly FS to do the same. The main difficulty was to map those many chinese and japanese characters. Can you give us a rough overview of the number of chinese characters you need for the translation and in what unicode range they are?

    If you can really help and support us with the translation into chinese we could send you a small fix for testing purposes, e.g. you will get the possibility to see chinese characters in Aerofly. Please contact us at mail(at)ipacs.de to further discuss this.