Love of Magic Localization

Love of Magic's a big game; the full trilogy has ~650k words (about the same as Lord of the Rings + Silmarillion). There's been several attempts at localizing it, but each fan-translation has crashed against the sheer amount of text. It remains common requested feature, though; the English isn't always the easiest, and some people struggle with it. Machine translation has come a long way, with LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok jumping generations ahead of old machine translation systems. I decided to have a go at it.

Several weeks later, and regretting my life choices, it's finally done. One of the things that made it more complex than expected was that I decided to localize all the UI and ingame (non-dialog) text. Stuff like events, card descriptions, kingdom events, etc. There's a LOT of text scattered around in little corners of the game, and hunting down (most of) it was a pain.

Now, the first thing I have to say is I don't know how good the translations are. I don't speak Chinese, Russian or Turkish. I'm making the raw txt files available to anyone who wants to fix it up, and will be posting updates as people help me smoothen things out.

The other thing I should probably say is that if you're happy reading English, I don't recommend switching to the machine translation. I wrote it in English and I don't know how well my jokes and language tone translates to Russian or Chinese. A classic example was an early attempt to translate "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" to Russian and back to English, where it showed up as "The Vodka's excellent, but the steak is bad."

Apart from that, the game has been recompressed to lossless compression, which should hopefully remove rendering artifacts some people were mentioning. I also revisited the Elsewhere path cards, fixed some achievement issues people have reported, and did a typo pass.

With that I return to Wings of Empire, where the third Act has begun. It's a Space Opera set in a world where the Roman Empire never fell, and now faces interstellar was against the Commonwealth. Inspired by books like David Weber's Honorverse, Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet, CJ Cherryh's Merchanteer Universe, and movies and anime from Battlestar Galactica to Legends of the Galactic hero, it aims to blend grand space opera with the stories of your character and the girls surrounding him.

Give it a wishlist if it looks interesting, those are super important for helping it have a good launch! [dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/3203710/Wings_of_Empire/"] Hope you've enjoyed Love of Magic, and that you'll join me as we head out into the Dark, finding glory, love and victory!