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Posted by Nick Cash   USA  (626 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Tue 22 Mar 2011 07:21 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
LOL. I suppose that's what I get for browsing forums on three hours of sleep. Thank you for pointing that out :P
~Nick Cash
http://www.nick-cash.com
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,770 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Tue 22 Mar 2011 06:33 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Indeed. I started it in 2003, 8 years ago, and got about two responses at the time.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Twisol   USA  (2,229 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Tue 22 Mar 2011 05:58 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
It should be noted that this thread was started in '03.
'Soludra' on Achaea

Blog: http://jonathan.com/
GitHub: http://github.com/Twisol
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Posted by Nick Cash   USA  (626 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Tue 22 Mar 2011 02:16 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]

Amended on Tue 22 Mar 2011 02:19 AM (UTC) by Nick Cash

Message
Nick Gammon said:

David Haley said:

I have to say that my eyes perked when I saw you're designing a new server. Is there a way I could have a hand in that?

I have emailed you a response. It sounds like we have similar ideas. :)


I too would love the chance to help hack together a new mud server with some good coders. I've worked with C/C++ for 9 years on a wide range of projects (personal, academic, and professional). I also have a fair amount of scripting experience (including Lua), although I tend to prefer C++ hacking :)

If you'd like any help please let me know!
~Nick Cash
http://www.nick-cash.com
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Posted by Twisol   USA  (2,229 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Tue 22 Mar 2011 01:12 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
We have that in English too. :)

"Woman without her man is nothing."
vs.
"Woman: without her, man is nothing."
'Soludra' on Achaea

Blog: http://jonathan.com/
GitHub: http://github.com/Twisol
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,770 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Tue 22 Mar 2011 01:07 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Hmm, interesting. I think I read a while back that if you slightly mispronounce Chinese, something like "hi, how are you?" becomes "your fish are very old", so I suppose getting it almost right isn't good enough.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Mymyc   (25 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Mon 21 Mar 2011 08:16 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
Quote:

Anyway, that's interesting about not many Hungarian MUDs. Sounds like MUD games might be a bit of an English phenomenon. Perhaps because the original ones were written in English.


It is not about the parser, parsers using core words only is ok, it is less typing more reading, so "put gold pack" and the equivalent in other languages is very ok.

It is about english language, you inject worlds between variables in the right place and tada, it is done. English language is simple yet powerful. Simple in terms of, you know... You smile at %playername% and %functionHESHE% smiles back at you, while you give a big thumbsup to %otherplayer%. :-D

So the problem - regarding to mudding - with hungarian/similar languages is that translating the single stock emote often found in muds --> smile at %playername%) is *totally* impossible without those grammatical custom functions, or else your output will be... lolworthy garbage. Not worth to send it to the player after your awe instpiring room description. You have to stick those morphing letters after %playername% and sometimes alter the last few letters of the %playername% variable itself to produce proper output. You have to alter mob and object names if a player interact with them, and you have to deal with third person messages too. The mission itself is too big for a single person, or a group of coders. And we speak about muds as a hobby not a profession.

So while you english speakers pick your mud codebase, and boost it with some nice race/class abilities and add cool quests and cool third person messages, we other language speakers need to jump head-first into c/c++ coding, then create functions, tables and lists to produce a simple "X smiles at you" line... but nah, we instead learn english and play english muds or write our own mud in english o_O

Other problem is the accented characters, you have to solve the problem of switching server side between UTF8, CP1202, or MS-DOS 852 when sending accented characters to clients. Players may use <whatever client> on win, linux or osx. You have to make a website howto about how to set up every single mud client to accept codepages, what monospaced fonts to use that have full UTF8 support etc.

An interesting addition a Hungarian software company made a similar software that solves this porblem, you throw whatever world at it and it produces a nice list of every case possible. The softwares was made by language scientists and teachers. It is a commercial software costing *heavy* dollars.

The name of the company is Morphologic the name speaks for itself.
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Posted by Erendir   Germany  (47 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Mon 21 Mar 2011 02:30 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
I speak Russian and German (and English of cause, but not very well...), and was playing different muds in russian.
So I try to answer some of Nick's questions:
Quote:
How do players from your country play MUDs?


Some players learn English and just play a mud in English. I've heard about some server with lots (like 50%) of russian-speaking people on it.
There're also some more or less translated MUDs, and few of them translating only descriptions (I.e. almost anything player see is in Russian, but all commands are in English).
Some few MUDs are written from scratch.

Quote:
How important do you think it is for MUDs to support multiple languages?

I personally would take the "Support multiple languages in a single game." option, with "main server language". But the 2nd option is probably "good enough".

Quote:
Are there other issues that a multi-language MUD would need to address? Examples that spring to mind are the way numbers are formatted (eg. is "one thousand" represented as "1,000" or "1.000"?), dates (if applicable, eg. date you last logged on), word-order for automatically generated lists.


I don't think these problems are hard to solve

Quote:
One example that springs to mind is the automaticalled-generated output from MUDs frequently is customised to the gender (alleged gender, anyway) of the player. For example, if you give Gandalf a coin the MUD might say "You give him a coin" or "You give her a coin". Things like singular/plural (sword/swords, fish/fishes), masculine/feminine (him/her, he/she), and sentence construction ("you give John a sword" or "a sword to John you give"). If the output from the MUD was going to look smooth it would need to be able to adapt to those changes.


These plus grammatical cases, as already mentioned, are the hard problems. You can not more simply write/store something like "You give %name% %object%.", but "You give %name|Dative% %object|Accusative%.", where "name|Dative" refers to the Dative case of target's name. (In English only |Genitive will alter something, and server should just add "'s", and this is why it's so easy to write MUDs in English ;))

Quote:
Any general comments?

Great idea :)
And here[1] is google-translated version of russian version of mudconnector.

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=www.mudconnector.su&act=url

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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,770 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Sun 20 Mar 2011 08:59 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]

Amended on Sun 20 Mar 2011 10:08 PM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message
Ah yes, interesting. Of course English isn't particularly easy, especially with plurals:


dog / dogs
door / doors
fish / fish
deer / deer
man / men
child / children
alias / aliases
mouse / mice
die / dice
automaton / automata
billiard ball / billiards


But even English MUDs don't try to parse grammar particularly well. For example you may type:


cast fireball nick


Rather than:


cast the spell fireball on nick


And you have this stuff pretty commonly:


put 3.sword in 4.pack


One thing you could do in other languages is use stuff like MXP (where you use hyperlinks instead of having to type anything):


Exits: North South East West


Another thing you could do is what is pretty common in MMO games and not type anything at all, but click on stuff. Like click on your target to select it, and hit "1" to attack it. This could be done with MUSHclient even, there have been "button bar" plugins done before.

Anyway, that's interesting about not many Hungarian MUDs. Sounds like MUD games might be a bit of an English phenomenon. Perhaps because the original ones were written in English.

However, MMO games are another kettle of fish. (Azonban MMO játékok egy kanna hal.) Lol, thanks Google!

They are very big in non-English speaking countries, for example, China.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Mymyc   (25 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Sun 20 Mar 2011 07:08 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]

Amended on Sun 20 Mar 2011 07:11 PM (UTC) by Mymyc

Message
I play english muds. I am hungarian though, possibly the only one playing english muds in my country. We have 3 or 4 hungarian muds here, all extremely poorly written by 16 - 20 year old hackers. Basically they are stock diku or lp muds very poorly translated into hungarian, stripped the original areas and replaced with highgly unoriginal, chaotic, immature and incoherent stuff. Every time I think about login into a hungarian mud it makes me convulse.

We have one mud that is in english: after the plaque that has the most amazing game mechanics ever seen.

Our language is not like english, we have no his/her/it, everything is "it".

Also we stick letters to the end of the worlds to modify its meaning.

Some example in english then in hungarian:

backpack = hatizsak
backpacks = hatizsakok
from backpack = hatizsakbol
from backpacks = hatizsakokbol
to backpack = hatizsakhoz
to backpacks = hatizsakokhoz
into backpack= hatizsakba
with backpack = hatizsakkal
onto backpack = hatizsakra

cigarette = cigaretta
cigarettes = cigerettak
with a cigarette = cigarettaval
from a cigarette = cigarettabol

Now imagine what kind of command parser needed here.

All accented chars were replaced in this post, we have a shitton of accented characters as well.

The greatest pain about writing a mud in hungarian language is that you have to write a grammatical-engine that takes the core word (like cigaretta) and generates all kind of possible variations - handling the exceptions as well - into a list. And this issue applies to player names and every kind of objects.

Writing a mud in hungarian in terms of proper linguistic/grammatical output is comparable to writing a mud in finnish or sumerian and japanese.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,770 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Sun 24 Aug 2003 07:05 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
At present I am thinking about the C++ design aspects, but as the time gets closer for game design, I'll canvas more opinions. :) Thanks for the offer.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by Poromenos   Greece  (1,037 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Mon 18 Aug 2003 08:52 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
By the way, if there is a forum about this server or if I can help develop it, it'd be great. My C++ knowledge is limited, but I'm willing to help if you need me.
Vidi, Vici, Veni.
http://porocrom.poromenos.org/ Read it!
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Posted by Poromenos   Greece  (1,037 posts)  [Biography] bio
Date Mon 18 Aug 2003 08:50 AM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
I agree, declinations are a problem, albeit a small one. Foreign names don't need to be changed, so Gandalf would remain Gandalf, but Poromenos would have to change. People would definitely get it, it's not a big issue, it would just look odd, like "You give a sword Nick" or something to that effect. The declinations in normal messages wouldn't be a problem, since they would be already coded in most of the time, and when you would need to use variables you could avoid them or find another solution most of the time. I think that an acceptable solution would be to keep a list of 4 (or 5, depending on how many declinations the language has), and use each one where necessary... The rules there are pretty strict, so that wouldn't be a problem. When you refer to someone, you use nominative (or whatever it would be called, I'm not a linguist :). When you give/do/etc something to someone, you use the 3rd declination, when you say that something belongs to someone, you use the 2nd (much like "Poromenos' item"). I can't imagine it being too hard if you design it correctly from the beginning.
Vidi, Vici, Veni.
http://porocrom.poromenos.org/ Read it!
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Posted by Nick Gammon   Australia  (18,770 posts)  [Biography] bio   Forum Administrator
Date Sat 16 Aug 2003 10:52 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
I might comment here that the problem is no worse for my proposed multi-lingual MUD than for - say - a straight French, or German, MUD. If such a MUD existed - and it is hard to believe one does not - then they must have addressed that problem, in one form or another.

Already SMAUG has things like replacement strings for socials, etc. which change according to gender.

eg. You smile at him / You smile at her.
He smiles at you / She smiles at you. / It smiles at you.
You get his sword / You get her sword.

Basically other languages would need similar replacement tables.
- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com
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Posted by David Haley   USA  (3,881 posts)  [Biography] bio   Moderator
Date Sat 16 Aug 2003 10:16 PM (UTC)  [ quote  ]
Message
This is a problem for any language that uses declentions. Examples of such languages are Latin, Greek and German.

For example, in German: (forgive spelling/accents/etc.)
Der hund des lehrers. The dog of the teacher.
Der lehrer ist gross. The teacher is big.

The word "lehrer" means teacher, but when it is the subject it doesn't have an s... when it is in the "genitive" position (sorry, I don't know the word in English), it has an s.


Basically, the ends of words can change depending on their function in the sentence.


I think that's making things a bit too complicated though... proper nouns don't need to be declined, it's an exercise in futility :) People will get it. For common nouns, you have a bit more of a problem... you'd probably need to keep a table of each noun according to its function. Ugh.


In Latin, it's fairly easy to make up the different versions of a proper noun. For example, "Ksilyan" could become, in Latin 2nd group declentions:

Ksilyanus (nominative)
Ksilyane (vocative/apostrophe)
Ksilyanum (direct object)
Ksilyani (genitive)
Ksilyano (indirect object)
Ksilyano (ablatif)

I still don't really think it's an issue though. As I said, people will get it.



Probably the easiest solution for languages that have declentions (of which there really aren't that many) would be to simply say "Sorry" with a big smile and let them be happy to have it in almost-correct form. :)
David Haley aka Ksilyan
Head Programmer,
Legends of the Darkstone

http://david.the-haleys.org
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