First time posting here, so please excuse me if I got the wrong section. Been trying to contact the devs for the past two-three weeks (email, facebook, direct email contacts) but has been so far unsuccessful and that’s why I decided to try these forums.
I’ve attached the email I’ve been trying to send them but tl;dr is: Me and my colleagues translated the Black Mesa back in the 2012 and we would like to finally get our translation (recently corrected and fixed) into the game. That’s it.
Original email (without the mentioned files of course)
Hello,
My name is Jindřich Pospíšil. I work as a freelance translator and have been overseeing the Czech part of a Steam Translation Server (responsible for translations of TF2, CS:GO, DOTA2, Steam client and other Valve-related things also including a full-scale overhaul of HL2 translations) for the last six years. Today I’m writing to you because of a project me and my friends were working on since 2012 when Black Mesa released as a mod.
Now you might not know but back then the community of dedicated HL fans decided to translate your magnum opus into many languages, Czech included. That was long before the game became stand-alone and much bigger than anticipated. Still, we did translate it back then and our translation was never used for the mod. But we understood the growth of the game and patiently waited for the right time to finish our journey and help you get Black Mesa to as many fans as possible. We believe that the time is now, few moments (compared to aeons that passed since the initial announcement) before the planned final release of Xen and Black Mesa as a whole.
So, without a further ado, let me present you the Czech translation of Black Mesa (the part that actually takes place in Black Mesa Research Facility), its current state and the future we hope it has:
- Present
I’ve attached to this message a final version of our translation. As said, this project began back in 2012 and has gone through many versions. This one being the latest and most complete one with every possible thing tested in the game*. Files included:
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Black Mesa specific TXTs (bms, gameui, closecaption, gameui_loading_screen, bootup, bmsmp, blackmesa_publish, credits and also every MP map description)
-
Updated re-used HL2 TXTs (gameui, valve and vgui)
It would be an immense honor for us if this passion project of ours was added officially to Black Mesa and accompanied other languages (just to show the attractiveness of the Czech language – as of today, 0.47% of Steam customers use it while already official languages like Finnish and Norwegian are below 0.20%).
- Future
We believe (and you are surely very well aware) that the final release of Black Mesa will attract many different people to buy and play the game (not Xen only), so including as many languages as possible would be a great idea to even further boost your sales and popularity.
The only problem we can see is that after releasing the Xen, our translation won’t be 100% complete. But let’s be honest, Xen isn’t really a text-heavy part which means it can go without a translation for a while which isn’t an option for the Black Mesa part with many dialogues.
Just to sum it up. It would be amazing if you could add our Czech translation to the game right now or with the final release and then we would ASAP provide you with the Xen part. This way people would be able to enjoy the biggest part of Black Mesa in Czech right after the release, and Xen would be added shortly after.
*PROBLEMS
Sadly we ran into some problems which are tied to Source Engine. While closecaptions within the game work great even without any changes, main menu is broken. Here’s why and how it could be solved not only for our language but many other.
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Update the Black Mesa font “din1451alt” with a newer version that has a wider range of special characters.
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Delete the line “custom” “1” in “\steamapps\common\Black Mesa\bms\resource\ClientScheme.res” within the section “CenterPrintText”.
2.1 This is an easy fix that lets engine look for a default font in the system but the underlying problem is much more complicated and has been present in Source Engine for years. Unfortunately we only know there is a problem, but have no idea how to fix it except for the actions shown above.
So again, this is a change you would need to provide for our translation to work flawlessly but if our calculations are correct, it’s something everyone would benefit from.
For the purpose of testing we used a workaround with a custom folder “replacing” the English TXTs but that’s not a solution that could be used widely. I’ve still attached it.
THE END
Thank you for reading this message and thank you for working on Black Mesa. It’s without a doubt the best remake ever made. Now it only needs more languages so fans all over the world can enjoy the updated version of Gordon Freeman’s epic story. So please consider adding our Czech translation made by seasoned HL veterans and really slightly tweaking your game to make it even better.
Have a nice day,
Jindřich “SC” Pospíšil
CREDITS
Lead translators
Jindřich “SC” Pospíšil
Martin Svozil
Translators and helping hands
Rudolf “Rudy” Prokop
Petr “benetti32” Kudlička
Jan “ELjano” Doležal
Michal Habel