The plan is to release it in a Y test patch which may become an official patch after the new languages are refined. It's not really a problem to have an official patch with a number, for example Y4. It's probably best to save the Z letter for a patch with more content. The language patch is intended to be 100% compatible with Y.

About input, I don't know yet as I have not researched input methods. I'm not sure that can be done without making LFS not work on Windows 98 / ME. Windows 2000 / XP / Vista have better input support. Does C-LFS allow the input of Chinese characters?

Anyway my plan is to finish the translation display system for a test patch then find out if it's possible to support text entry as well while the translations are being refined.

in clfs, you cant have fullscreen while using input because the input programs are a little different.
after you type in the word with alphebets, you have to be able to see the characters in a box to pick which character you want.
heres a screenshot of chinese input system:
http://googlified.com/files/go ... n-input-method-editor.gif
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi ... ng/300px-GooglePinyin.png

Wow if the new langauge comes out it will be another big hit in the Chinese LFS community. Or Singapore players? Most of us players in Singapore are Chinese hope you know that. But we are more comfortablle with English unless sometimes we're sick of English all the time. We can switch languages, a transition.

@Scawen

I made movie of simple japanese input method and Input it to C-LFS.HERE (12MB) (RapidShare)
YouTube(small size) Mirror

I think Chinese and the Korean to be a similar method.

Thanks! That's a great video, fully illustrated and even music added!

It helps my knowledge of these quite complicated systems...

I suppose the worst problems are :

1) The Windows text entry input box is not displayed in full screen mode. I don't know how to fix this, maybe LFS will one day need to draw this itself. That sounds very complicated, there must be a dictionary database converting Latin <-> Katakana / Hiragana <-> Kanji... maybe this is provided in Windows and LFS could access this conversion system somehow? If so I am thinking that might be one of those things for when LFS becomes XP-only (not yet). But I will read up on these systems... this is lower priority than the translation system of course, which will be helpful even without full text entry support.

2) You can lose control of LFS if you exit from LFS's text entry box while your keyboard is still in Kanji mode. Is there any way to recover from this state - return to single byte mode, so LFS responds to key presses again? If not, and LFS can get "stuck" in Kanji mode and can never respond to keys again, I must do something about that (high priority).

Quote from yamakawa :

@Scawen

I made movie of simple japanese input method and Input it to C-LFS.HERE (12MB) (RapidShare)
YouTube(small size) Mirror

I think Chinese and the Korean to be a similar method.

That's a fantastic video! Very well made.

Thx,When a text input box of LFS is not displayed, KANJI mode key doesn't response. When text inputting is finished, and I forget to return to single byte mode and push Enter (text input box is non-displayed). . . stack it.
All character key becomes no reaction. In this case I restarted LFS.But I was taught a good method by a friend recently. ESC, Function, Tab lives.

- Push ESC and choose Namber plate (and the like) in Options and display text input BOX. And push KANJI key and return to Single mode.

I think that the method how it chooses single byte and double only text inputting is good,It's usually a single byte mode automatically.

hey scawen
jw, how many percent hav you done?

Well... not too far from a test version though I can't give an estimate as I don't know how long it will take to finish up the remaining things.

After a long night last night, I've reached the point where the character caching works and Japanese, Chinese and Korean translations are now visible.

I must still :

- deal with spacing / size / positioning issues
- try to make the font selectable in cfg.txt
- repair some single byte katakana characters
- make the system work for 3d player names (above cars)
- make the system work on number plates
- try to fix the input method selection bug
- look at the text input system

Some, but not all of these must be done before a test version is available.

Quote from Scawen :

*snip* when LFS becomes XP-only (not yet) *snip*

Care to elaborate on this a bit?

Uhh... not worth talking about, it's just an obvious possibility for some time in the future.

One day it may be time, when only very few people still use Windows 98 / Me, to make LFS only work on XP or later, to take advantage of new features offered by the later versions of Windows.

Quote from Scawen :

Uhh... not worth talking about, it's just an obvious possibility for some time in the future.

One day it may be time, when only very few people still use Windows 98 / Me, to make LFS only work on XP or later, to take advantage of new features offered by the later versions of Windows.

Oh, XP or later.

Worried me for a second.

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

Oh, XP or later.

Worried me for a second.

Don't worry DWB, I don't think there is any risk of Scawen forcing us to use Windows Visturd.

Quite the opposite, actually... I thought for a second he was going to force us to use XP. Should have known better. ;]

Anyway, sorry for momentarily derailing the thread.

its great that the chinese language its developing well... im exited since i was on chinese classes... but i gave up its so difficult... but i will like to learn the things in LFS how they look in chinese

great news, ppl on SRFC cant wait to get a test chinese version of lfs
the clfs has been experiencing major fps drop since patch y version was released

hey sacwen. havnt heard about the y4 or 5 in a while, i saw some screenshot of it.
is it possible that i can become a beta tester for the patch, i can find and fix errors on the translations.
my email is [email protected]