Supported Languages
XWVM comes out of the box with support for English and German, since those are the languages the original games officially supported in UI, missions, cutscenes, etc.
In order to support additional languages, XWVM allows translations to extra locales by providing text files in certain folders under the game installation directory.
You can find these folder under <XWVM-install-dir>/XWVM_Data/StreamingAssets/Localization/.
Inside that folder, you can find an CSV folder and an XLIFF folder, which contain the translation files to the different locales.
Each of those folders have a different purpose, that we will explain in depth.
What is a locale?
A locale represents the culture of a certain place. For what matters to XWVM, it represents the language of a place.
The difference with a language in general, is that the same language is spoken or written in different ways in different places.
For example the en locale represents English language as a whole. But in order to represent American English, the locale is en-US.
XWVM supports English, in general, and German, in general out from the box.
We also added support for Spanish and Italian as general languages. But we could add support for particular dialects of all these languages if we wished to or anyone would want to put the effort to do so.
This can be of more relevance for certain languages where they drastically change the what they are used, such as Chinese.
But it is good to know that if you wish, you can provide a translation to a particular regional locale, and provide only the strings that are different for that locale. All strings you don't provide will fall back to use those from the general language.
So, for example, you can define the es-AR locale that changes how certain texts are presented for Argentinian Spanish, but for all others, they will just use texts from the general Spanish translation.
Finding the right locale code
A locale code has two parts:
- A language code of two lowercase letters, such as
esfor Spanish orptfor Portuguese. These come from the ISO 639-1 standard. - Optionally, a hyphen and a region code of two capital letters, such as
-ARfor Argentina or-BRfor Brazil. These come from the ISO 3166-1 standard.
Together they form codes like pt, pt-BR, or zh-CN. XWVM recognizes codes written in exactly this form.
Reliable places to look them up:
- List of ISO 639-1 codes for the language code.
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 for the region code.
- The IANA Language Subtag Registry, the official reference for these codes.
When in doubt, use the language code alone, and add a region only when your translation differs for that region.