Thank you for your interest in the Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop project. When you make a contribution to the project (eg. 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, 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. Eg. Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code.
- An GIT installation
Make sure your text editor preserves file encodings.
New files need to have the same encoding as their english counterparts (eg. 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. Visual Studio Code shows the files encoding in its status bar. Most files use UTF-8 with BOM.
Quotation marks inside your translations need to be escaped like this \"Space Station\".
If there are words between %percent_signs%, leave them as-is (these are dynamically replaced with numbers in the game later).
Find and edit achievement related strings in resource/reactivedrop_*.txt.
This repo includes a folder named achievements. Do not edit files in this folder.
The files in this folder are automatically updated based on the forementioned text files.
Create a copy of each mail and news file, and replace the language suffix, eg. labsmail1_russian.txt. Translate the contents of each file. See labsmail1_russian.txt as an example.
In these files(eg. 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 (eg. workshop_tags_schinese.json). Translate the contents of the file. In JSON files, only translate text on the right side of the colon :.
In the folder utils you'll find the translation-sync-tool.
Most of its work is done automatically (after you've made a commit), but you may find it useful to work with manually, in some edge cases.
It has several functions:
- finds syntax errors
- compares text files of different languages for consistency
- generates vdf files and progress-reports
It's useful for:
- manual continuous integration checks
- batch edits (like changing english reference strings)
Executing utils/translation-sync-tool.exe will synchronize achievement fields from reactivedrop_*.txt to 563560_loc_*.vdf as also throw an error if there is something wrong with the files.
If you decide to launch it with translation-sync-tool.exe --help you'll get a list of possible command line parameters.
- -input-manifest compile the steam input manifest
- -markdown generate a markdown translation progress report
- -only-update only update source strings; do not reset differing translations
- -render render derived files (except the steam input manifest)
First of all, Go to Steam > Library > Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop, right click and choose 'Properties'.
- At 'General': Select the language you are translating into.
- At 'Betas': Opt into the beta. This is recommended especially if you're working on recently added content.
- At 'Installed 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 translated files into their respective folders (.\resource).
- Now you can start the 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.