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KSP Weekly: Volunteers Wanted!


SQUAD

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4 hours ago, The_Rocketeer said:

These dev reports are consistently sketchy about details, and ever has it been thus. Until the current dev team (keeping in mind the reshuffle of a few months ago) are approaching anything close to a releasable update they're going to give as little away as possible and rightly so. Why release details of sub-par unfinished products and face bad community reactions when you are already perfectly well aware that this is the case and you are still working on them?

I agree with that much of it.  The problem that I(and probably a lot of the other people complaining) have with this is that they they keep hyping it up and making it sound like that have something really great that's coming soon, but "we can't tell you WHAT it is yet."  If they don't want to reveal stuff too soon, that's understandable, but...save the hype for when you actually have something you CAN tell us about.

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15 minutes ago, Ten Key said:

That seems perfectly reasonable to me? Am I missing something here? 

Not that I can see. Besides, even with Chinese in-game descriptions, even if we're not native speakers we know what CoM CoL apoapsis, retrograde SSTO VTOL etc means. Surely our designation of those concepts won't be any different to those of the Chinese developer? 

Or am I missing something too?

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Yes, they will be different because you do not know what zhong xin (weight heart) or qingxie jiao (pour oblique angle) means. Similarly the concept of a heavy point (Schwerpunkt) will give you a headache. And if you do have some phantasy you might actually understand what a perpendicular starter (Senkrechtstarter) is. How do you talk to people if you do not use the same vocabulary? (Spoiler: You don't ).

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9 hours ago, DoctorDavinci said:

The salt is strong in this one :rolleyes:

And have you played any Japanese video games that haven't been translated to english? ... what was the first word you learned to read in Japanese?

So much salt ... Murphy's Oil Soap Law states that when there is nothing to complain about the forum will either create a complaint or bring up past percieved grievances in order to have something to complain about ... lesson is that no matter what you do, those who have a tendancy to complain will continue to do so regardless of what you do

Keep on keepin on Squad, there are many of us here that support and appreciate your efforts

Compairing it to Japanese isnt realy fair, since Japanese is a small language while english is the universal language.

Also im complaining because it eats up developer-time for something thats essentialy useless. E.g. the german translation, who will use it? Everyone younger than 30 learned english in school, even the majority of the older ones (afaik they were forced to learn Russian in the DDR before). So you aim the translation at people who are to young/old for realy basic english (again, you dont need the language for everything besides missions) but still able to understand orbital mechanics?

Then im thinking about the implictaions for modders. The obvios one are 6 times the textures (or maybe its done with a decal similar to flags), making stuff more complicated. But also we will see poorly translated messages like "pls help no work" all over mod threads since those people cant even read the big, red messages in the OP.

At last i think its bad from an educational standpoint. When i was younger i needed a few unconfortable kicks until i started playing games in english and learned a lot in the process. Since stuff like minecraft (especially with mods) was only available in english i was forced to learn and improve my understanding of the language to the point i got considerably better than others in my age.

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Modders will not be forced to make their mods in all translated languages.

32 minutes ago, Elthy said:

Snip

If English were actually universal, no company would ever bother translating anything.  Obviously this is not the case.   Thus, companies translate things.

Edited by klgraham1013
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47 minutes ago, Elthy said:

Compairing it to Japanese isnt realy fair, since Japanese is a small language while english is the universal language 

Really ... I think you are mistaken as Chinese is the most used language in the world with Spanish coming in second

47 minutes ago, Elthy said:

Also im complaining because it eats up developer-time for something thats essentialy useless. E.g. the german translation, who will use it?

Umm, Germans would use it ... and being a German Canadian myself I can say that there are those in my family who have seen my youtube videos and would love to take part in this KSP community but due to their rudimentary or non existant understanding of English they have not bothered since they want to play the game and not go through learning a new language that is similar in some respects yet different grammatically and in conceptualization 

47 minutes ago, Elthy said:

Everyone younger than 30 learned english in school, even the majority of the older ones (afaik they were forced to learn Russian in the DDR before)

So, out of the over 7 billion people on this planet, you assume that everyone who is under 30 years of age has learned to comprehend English?

47 minutes ago, Elthy said:

Then im thinking about the implictaions for modders. The obvios one are 6 times the textures (or maybe its done with a decal similar to flags), making stuff more complicated. But also we will see poorly translated messages like "pls help no work" all over mod threads since those people cant even read the big, red messages in the OP.

I myself am part of a modder group, BDArmory Continued, and it is never an issue to help anyone who is having an issue using BDAc regardless of language barriers ... what you are implying here is that if a person doesn't speak or understand english that they should be SOL since from your perspective they don't deserve to be able to play KSP due to them not being able or wanting to learn a new language

47 minutes ago, Elthy said:

At last i think its bad from an educational standpoint. When i was younger i needed a few unconfortable kicks until i started playing games in english and learned a lot in the process. Since stuff like minecraft (especially with mods) was only available in english i was forced to learn and improve my understanding of the language to the point i got considerably better than others in my age.

So what you are saying, and correct me if I am wrong in my assumption, that those who would like to play KSP should be required to learn English so as to make it easier on yourself, modders, Squad and the rest of the community since it would be too difficult for those of us who speak English to help those who are trying to just play the most amazing game ever .... I personally think that perhaps taking the time to learn about languages and other cultures might be of great use to you as the position you are taking here appears to be based on a superiority complex in regards to English being the top language in the world

"Do what I tell you to do or you get nothing" is what I am seeing in your train of thought

That is not how the world works ... personally I belive that you may want to rethink your position in regards to being inclusive instead of exclusive

Edited by DoctorDavinci
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Great, we finally get to see what KSP devs have been working on besides ads, renders for more ads, and layouts for ads! Apparently they're going to be retopologizing existing non-in game assets for CG videos for ads! Cool. What this game is missing is a quirky CG video showing people how much fun Kerbals can be. Plus, you guys can sell more KSP, which is great. But I do hope, after about two years of art (the new assets in 1.2 are RoverDude's models, without a doubt) which has been devoted entirely to selling KSP, someone fully employed by Squad still remembers how to make Unity assets. Because KSP players are going to be disappointed to find advertisements to buy KSP in their part list in lieu of updated / newly (not amateurishly) modeled existing or new rocket parts. Or clouds. Or new, in-game 3D assets on planets - whatever. Just something besides advertisements. It's confusing why they think their fans are going to be really excited for another ad for a game they've already purchased. We get it, after two years of nothing more than an engine update and a remote tech light system, you can't think of anything else to do to this game. But stop pretending KSP fans are going to by happy to have yet another CG trailer for a game they already own. Epic Plans! More marketing!!! I guess the Squad game company and the Squad marketing firm have re-merged and they're done pretending that actual game dev goes on there anymore.

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I think localised KSP will be a good thing too.

Yes, currently, an understanding of English is needed for a large portion of the KSP content.  And yes, I can see the argument that it could help and/or encourage the learning of English.  But it could also work the other way... As a native English speaker I could use other language versions to help my understanding of those.

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7 minutes ago, pandaman said:

I think localised KSP will be a good thing too.

Yes, currently, an understanding of English is needed for a large portion of the KSP content.  And yes, I can see the argument that it could help and/or encourage the learning of English.  But it could also work the other way... As a native English speaker I could use other language versions to help my understanding of those.

I'm just hanging in there for a mod to reverse the word order of any Spanish localisation efforts. Looking forward to learning how to speak Kerblish as it should be spoken.

But joking aside, you make an excellent point @pandaman. If folks have learned English from playing computer games, why couldn't that apply to other languages too?

Edited by KSK
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4 minutes ago, JohnF said:

We get it, after two years of nothing more than an engine update and a remote tech light system, you can't think of anything else to do to this game

Nothing more than an engine update?

Given the complexity of upgrading to a new game engine I would think that you would understand that it is a complex process to do this ... the amount of work involved in doing this is a monumental endeavour 

Perhaps learning about engine upgrades would be in order ... think of upgrading a Toyota Supra engine from scratch to having 4 times the amount of horse power off a stock block 

I think many people here have no understanding of the effort involved in upgrading an engine regardless is it is a video game engine or a car engine ... assuming you know doesn't mean you know

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40 minutes ago, DoctorDavinci said:

So what you are saying, and correct me if I am wrong in my assumption, that those who would like to play KSP should be required to learn English so as to make it easier on yourself, modders, Squad and the rest of the community since it would be too difficult for those of us who speak English to help those who are trying to just play the most amazing game ever .... I personally think that perhaps taking the time to learn about languages and other cultures might be of great use to you as the position you are taking here appears to be based on a superiority complex in regards to English being the top language in the world

You dont need english to play the game, since most stuff is numbers. You need english for the community, which wont get magicaly accesible by localizing the game.

English is the top language in the world because its the language of science, engineering and informatics. This is due to historical reasons, not neccesarly because English is the perfect language (although its quite simple to learn while still having lots of cool, very specific words to describe stuff with great accuracy). At this point other languages are just cultural ballast from a logical standpoint.

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The way I like to think about localisation is pretty simple - what if it was the other way around? What if the game was only in French, a language I (technically) learnt for 5 years in school? Would I still have decided to play it? Would I have kept playing it for the 3 4 years I have? No, I probably wouldn't have. The investment of dealing with another language - especially with a game so focused on community, where asking questions on forums like these is so very useful, and with some pretty heavy technical language once you get into it - is pretty large. Large enough that it could quite easily take the fun out of the game entirely, at least for me.

Now, I'm fully aware that someone else might react differently. Someone driven enough, who really wants to play the game from Day 0, might be happy putting up with it. But logically, those aren't the people who Squad are targeting here. Those people are already sold - they've already made up their minds whether they want the game or not. There's still a whole bunch of people out there who probably have some casual interest in the game, for who buying the game is still a risk - there's every chance they won't like it. And it being in a different language just makes it all the riskier - perhaps too risky. A literal language barrier. I don't know how many people fit in that category, but seeing as Squad feels it's important enough to dedicate work to, I'm guessing it's quite a lot. :)

15 minutes ago, Elthy said:

You dont need english to play the game, since most stuff is numbers.

Sure you don't in theory - but that doesn't change that there are people out there who won't buy the game because it's not in their native language. And ultimately, that's the main concern here.

Edited by GluttonyReaper
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27 minutes ago, GluttonyReaper said:

Sure you don't in theory - but that doesn't change that there are people out there who won't buy the game because it's not in their native language. And ultimately, that's the main concern here.

There are also people out there who dont buy it because the graphics still look like 2003 without mods. And everyone would profit from an improvement there...

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29 minutes ago, GluttonyReaper said:

What if the game was only in French, a language I (technically) learnt for 5 years in school? Would I still have decided to play it? Would I have kept playing it for the 3 4 years I have? No, I probably wouldn't have.

What if the game was only in Dutch. A language I've learned from birth. Would I still have decided to play it? Would I have kept playing all those years? No, I definitely would not have.

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12 minutes ago, Tex_NL said:

What if the game was only in Dutch. A language I've learned from birth. Would I still have decided to play it? Would I have kept playing all those years? No, I definitely would not have.

So let me get this straight, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying is that it is all about you and what you want for KSP?

Edited by DoctorDavinci
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1 hour ago, Elthy said:

You dont need english to play the game, since most stuff is numbers. You need english for the community, which wont get magicaly accesible by localizing the game.

Good point.

@SQUAD, I hope you'll devote resources to maintaining a section of the forum for each official KSP language.

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3 hours ago, DoctorDavinci said:

Really ... I think you are mistaken as Chinese is the most used language in the world with Spanish coming in second

Only as native languages. English is much more widely understood as either of those. If I recall the figures correctly, there are an estimated 2.1 billion people on this planet capable of having a simple conversation in English. Contrast 1.2 billion for Mandarin (nearly all of which are in China) and 700 million for Spanish. And no other language even comes close to English as a second language. More people have English as a second language than Spanish, French, Arabic, Hindi, Russian and Portuguese combined. Chinese and Spanish are more used than English as primary languages, but apart from those speaking it as a primary language, pretty much nobody use them at all. This is even more extreme with Japanese, with an estimated 130 million native users, and 10-12,000 secondary users.

Also, funnily enough, Malay (204 million L2 users) is a more common second language than Chinese (190 million). Or, if you want, approximately as common as Spanish and German combined.

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