Evolution of a Go program

About the development of Moyo Go Studio, software to (help) play the Oriental game of Go. Go is a two-player zero-sum game of perfect information. It is considered much harder than Chess. Currently, in spite of enormous effort expended, no computer program plays it above the level of a beginner.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

I18N & L10N

I noticed that SmartGo now has on-the-fly switching of CJK languages.

I hacked up such a system a decade ago. I published some of that code and this is why, when you download GNU gettext from SourceForge, my name appears in the credits. I used RTTI to recursively modify the GUI widget properties that needed translation and an XML file provided context, comments and the translations in UTF-8.

GNU gettext is better so I use that, although my version was able to display CJK correctly on Wintendo (95, 98 & ME). MoyoGo is not supported on platforms that are only partially 32-bit so it's not an issue.

MoyoGo is ready to be translated: I have an external file, I made the program Unicode-compatible (well, some bugs always remain but they will become apparent when a Japanese translation file will be used) so everyone who offered to make a translation for Chinese, Japanese or Korean: Brace yourself :)

Anyone willing & able to translate into a language that is not yet on this list:
http://www.moyogo.com/Translations.htm will get a free copy of Moyo Go Studio.

The reason I waited such a long time was the fact that I kept adding strings - now it's mainly bugfixing and the creation of a "SmartGo/GoTools/MadLab killer": A TsumeGo module that will solve life/death tactics and problems. This will take a long time to develop and while I do that and the program is being translated, I'll fix all those little issues that have been requested and don't require new translations strings, except hints on buttons etc.

posted by Franciscus @ 2:52 PM