So, I'm trying to create a localizatoin mod and I'm trying to understand .STR

[6637486d1a356thomas-k-cameron]

Dear Community,

I initially posted this on discord but I was advised to bring it over here.

I'm interested in creating community localization for Japanese language in System Shock 2.
I was wondering if you can share your technical insight with me.

I have few questions,

1. Encoding
Do anyone know what's the right encoding? I've ran into some mojibake with UTF8.
I think I can just replace any mojibake with single quote, but I'm concerned that I might be missing something or corrupted the file along the way.

2. rcs sub directory.
Unzipped file had sub directory named rcs.
Can I ignore this directory? It seems like it has a lots of text that looks like a metadata for a version control system. I also noticed that there is an entry where Korenchkin says that they went to Canopus 4, instead of Tau Ceti 5.

Here is a tree structure.

Code: javascript:void(0);

./en
├── CHARGEN.STR
├── HACKTEXT.STR
├── HRM.STR
├── HUDUSE.STR
├── INFOCOMP.STR
├── invcursor.str
├── JARGON.STR
├── LEVEL01.STR
├── LEVEL02.STR
├── LEVEL03.STR
├── LEVEL04.STR
├── LEVEL05.STR
├── LEVEL06.STR
├── LEVEL07.STR
├── LEVEL08.STR
├── LEVEL09.STR
├── LOCKMSG.STR
├── MAPTEXT.STR
├── MINIGAME.STR
├── MISC.STR
├── MODIFY1.STR
├── MODIFY2.STR
├── NETWORK.STR
├── NOTES.STR
├── OBJLOOKS.STR
├── OBJNAME.STR
├── OBJSHORT.STR
├── PSIHELP.STR
├── rcs
│   ├── HRM.STR
│   ├── HUDUSE.STR
│   ├── INFOCOMP.STR
│   ├── JARGON.STR
│   ├── LEVEL01.STR
│   ├── LEVEL02.STR
│   ├── LEVEL03.STR
│   ├── LEVEL04.STR
│   ├── LEVEL05.STR
│   ├── LEVEL06.STR
│   ├── LEVEL07.STR
│   ├── LEVEL08.STR
│   ├── MAPTEXT.STR
│   ├── MINIGAME.STR
│   ├── MISC.STR
│   ├── NETWORK.STR
│   ├── OBJLOOKS.STR
│   ├── OBJNAME.STR
│   ├── PSIHELP.STR
│   ├── RESEARCH.STR
│   ├── SAVENAME.STR
│   ├── SKILHELP.STR
│   ├── STATHELP.STR
│   ├── TRAITS.STR
│   └── WEAPON.STR
├── RESEARCH.STR
├── RSRCHTXT.STR
├── SAVENAME.STR
├── SETT1.STR
├── SETT2.STR
├── SHEAD1.STR
├── SHEAD2.STR
├── SKILHELP.STR
├── STATHELP.STR
├── TRAITS.STR
├── USEMSG.STR
└── WEAPON.STR


Thank you very much for reading this post!

Thomas

[6637486d1a631ZylonBane]

You can only use 8-bit character encodings, so you're probably limited to katakana or hiragana. Although, the Japanese version of SS1 apparently used kanji somehow, and the Dark Engine inherits a lot of font handling code from SS1, so maybe there's a way to use 16-bit character encoding lurking in the engine.

The default character encoding is CP850, but for this you'd probably use something like  JIS X 0201.

Here are the tools and documentation for creating custom fonts: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=11286.0

Everything in the RCS subfolder is unused.

Note that SCP makes numerous changes and additions to the vanilla strings.