Locale system news

Another one of the sub-goals of v0.1 development was finished yesterday: a final locale system which supports all game text and some other features.

One of the hardest things to do was to get all Blood Omen text in a single file. We would like to thank The Lost Worlds for the published NPC Dialogue Script, andLegacy of Kain: Dark Chronicle for unused dialogue scripts, which help us to get all the text together.

The second big advantage is timing marks. Timing marks are required to display only a part of speech text in subtitles. Blood Omen has a number of rather long monologues, up to over 50 seconds. Which, if shown entirely, fills half of the screen with subtitle text. In order to handle this, it needs timing marks to be placed in the subtitle text, to show only a portion of Kain's monologue at a time.

There is a number of differences between speech in PC and PlayStation version of the game. Some phrases are shorter in PlayStation version, so they need to be supported in a special section of subtitles description file:

• All pillar names (only pillar name are leaved);
• "Shed your blood for me, and these artifacts will be yours.";
• and some more.

Another thing was that PlayStation version has some phrases that are not present in PC version. These phrases will be included in the locale pack. So both PC and PS-based installation of Blood Omnicide will match.

In order to support old style 2d maps and to get rid of the problem of duplicate subtitles all text is now stored in global console-variable space, and loaded when the game starts. It also provides a minor speed increase, as a previous localization system was loaded on each map change. Also, missing strings are handled correctly now - they got default locale (so partial localization is possible).

So, by introducing a new localization system, it is now possible to produce locale packs for Blood Omnicide which will cover all of the game, without need to re-develop localizations each time new location is added.