Thanks for your interest in the Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop project. When you make a contribution to the project (e.g. create an Issue or submit a Pull Request) (a "Contribution"), the Reactive Drop Team wants to be able to use your Contribution to improve the game.
As a condition of providing a Contribution, you agree that:
- You irrevocably grant anyone the right to use your work under the following license: Creative Commons CC0 Waiver (release all rights, like public domain: legal code)
- You warrant and represent that the Contribution is your original creation, that you have the authority to grant this license to anyone, and that this license does not require the permission of any third party. Otherwise, you provide your Contribution "as is" without warranties.
There are multiple ways to add or edit your translation of the game:
- via the GitHub web editor [jump]
- by downloading and editing an archive of the repository [jump]
- by forking the Git repository, editing your fork, and then submitting a pull request [jump]
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Ensure you are logged in to GitHub.
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Open the GitHub web editor by clicking on this link.
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When prompted, install the suggested extension.
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Use the File Explorer panel on the left to find a file to translate.
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Find some untranslated lines – compared to the translated ones, they are indented with two tabs!
You can find all of them at once through searching with the regex^\t\tlike this:
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Translate the lines, paying attention to not remove the quotes
"at the start and at the end of the string. Don't edit the lines starting with[english]: they're just there to provide some context for the translation!
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Outdent (remove the indentation from) the now-translated lines.
If you have many lines, you can select them all and then press Shift + Tab!
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Once you've translated enough lines, open the Source Control panel on the left.
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You will be prompted to enter a message describing your changes; add the name of the language you translated strings to between parenthesis, then describe very briefly what these strings are related to.
For example, a good message might be
(italian) Translate Steam Rich Presence strings.
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Create a new pull request by pressing Ctrl + Enter while the cursor is in the message box.
If it's your first time submitting translations, you might be prompted to fork the repository: please do so!
You'll then be prompted to enter the title of the pull request, which will be pre-filled with the message you entered earlier; press Enter to continue.
You will also be prompted to enter a branch name; leave whatever the editor suggested unchanged, and press Enter again.
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Done! Your translation should now appear in the list of pull requests of the repository, and can be approved, edited, or rejected!
Download the repository, edit it on your computer and then submit it through the Issues tab by providing an archive.
Fork the repository, edit & commit it and then push your changes back to the origin.
Use an editor to make your changes and integrate them through github. Read more about it on our wiki.
- Any unicode plain text editor. E.g. Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code.
- An GIT installation
Please make sure that your text editor preserves file's encoding.
The new files you create need to have same encoding as their english counterpart (e.g. labsmail1_czech.txt needs to be UTF-8 encoded just like labsmail1_english.txt). If you use Notepad++ you can see the file's encoding in the menu Encoding.
These files are automatically created based on the resource/reactivedrop_*.txt files. You can manually trigger an update of the files through executing utils/translation-sync-tool.exe.
- sync-tool: Very useful verification tool!
- It can help solving issues with ci-checks. After you have manually modified the content about achievements, it is highly recommended to run the tool to check for problems. Avoid Pull Request Failure.
- It can automatically synchronize achievement fields from
reactivedrop_*.txtto563560_loc_*.vdf! This is very useful to avoid the painful task of comparing and duplicating work.
Create a copy of each mail and news file, and rename it to your language sufix(e.g. labsmail1_russian.txt). Translate the contents of each file. See labsmail1_russian.txt as an example.
In these files(e.g. basemodui_czech.txt) the untranslated strings are indented by two tabs to be easily visible. Translate each indented line and remove the two tabs in front of it.
Create a copy of the English file and rename it to your language suffix (e.g. workshop_tags_schinese.json). Translate the contents of the file. In JSON files, only translate text on the right side of the :.
Copy the lines with _english for your language. Try to keep each block of translations in alphabetical order by language name. If there are words between %percent_signs%, leave them as-is (they are replaced with numbers by the game client). Don't change any lines that aren't labelled with a language.
If you change an English string in a way that does not require editing other languages (such as fixing a typo that doesn't change the meaning), you need to also change the [english] copy of the string in each of the other language files that have it translated. Adding new English strings or changing strings in a way that does require re-translation is handled by the sync script/executable in the utils folder.
First of all, Go into Steam - Library - Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop, right click and choose 'Properties'.
- Select 'Language' tab: Select the language you are translating into.
- Select 'Betas' (Recommended): Join the beta version, this way you can see the real effect of the translated text in the game. Otherwise, the game text may not match the translated text.
- Select 'Local files': Click 'Browse...' to open your game folder.
- Enter the subfolders '.\reactivedrop\resource', like:
Steam\steamapps\common\Alien Swarm Reactive Drop\reactivedrop\resource - Copy your translate files into the respective folders (.\resource).
- Start game, and test your translation :D
- ATTENTION: Every file in the resource folder is UTF-16LE encoded, whereas all files in this repo are UTF-8 encoded. You may need to change the encoding of the files before you copy them over.