What's the best way to create multi-language support for your games?

Question

Hey everyone! I'm with some tricky question here. I was thought about what's the best way to put an option to language selection for subtitles and texts. Obviously, this is not hard at all, but I was thinking about the best way to change between every language supported.

For each text, I thought in an array of string with n elements, where n is the number of languages supported, but I don't know how expensive is this for the memory to manage(seems pretty expensive), so I wish someone could guide through this, giving me some hints and a way which can give good results without killing the performance in mobile devices, for example.

I also bring some code. The idea I passed above:

 public class languageManager : UnityEngine.MonoBehaviour {
 
     public enum Language {
         
         English,
         Portuguese,
         Spanish
         
     }
     
     private static Language _curLanguage;
 
     public string[] MENU_Play;
     public string[] MENU_Options;
     public string[] MENU_Quit;
     public string[] MENU_Credits;
 
     [...LOTS OF MORE ARRAYS ABOVE...]
     
     public string getText(string[] texts, Language language) {
         
         return texts[(int)language];
         
     }
     
     public string getTextInCurrentLanguage(string[] texts) {
         
         return texts[(int)_curLanguage];
         
     }
     
     public static Language currentLanguage {
         
         get { return _curLanguage; }
         set { _curLanguage = value; }
         
     }
     
 }

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Best Answer

Answer by Tim-Michels · Jun 21, 2012 at 02:26 PM

A common way that is used is to have an XML-file for each language. The XML-file should contain every phrase you use in your game with a unique ID.

In your code, you can then get the correct phrase out of the current language's XML, using the correct ID.

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GutoThomas · Jun 21, 2012 at 02:35 PM 0

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This would be possible for mobile, as well?

programmrzinc · Jun 21, 2012 at 02:41 PM 1

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the above answer should work for both desktop and mobile formats.

GutoThomas · Jun 21, 2012 at 03:21 PM 0

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Great! I don't know nothing about .xml sintax but I start searching about it, just to get used to. I came up with this:

 <menu>
     <mainMenu> Play </mainMenu>
     <mainMenu> Options </mainMenu>
     <mainMenu> Credits </mainMenu>
     <mainMenu> Quit </mainMenu>
 </menu>

Something like this is right?

What's the best way to create multi-language support for your games?

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