[Scummvm-devel] Translations of the About text in ScummVM

[Thierry Crozat]

On 13 May 2011 09:58, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:
>
> >
> > Looking at that code made me thing that there is a big static table in there (about 10kb I would guess)
>
> You for the sake of reference, I think you are referring to the table of strings in gui/credits.h (and just to clarify, this table has been there before, and my code does not modify its content, just how it is represented in credits.h, making some of its entries translatable).

Yes that's what I was talking about and I know this table has been in
the code for a very long time.

>
> > and it is only going to get bigger. Maybe this should be changed to be loaded at run time when we display the about dialog and be dropped as soon as we can to free some much needed memory for the small devices (or is it small enough to be negligeable). I mention this because if you modify the way credits.pl generate the credits.h file you might have well think about this (and also this might impact the generation of the translations template file).
>
> No, I might not -- the changes I made to credits.pl and the resulting header are minimal invasive. What you propose amounts to a major rewrite of the credits code, which is way beyond what I had in mind :). I believe in the KISS principle, and would really like to separate one issue (making the gui dialogs localizable) from another (reducing the size of the scummvm binary).

Fair enough. Actually what I meant is that if we wanted to work on
that it would probably be better to do it before making the credits
translatable rather than after. I never intended to suggest working on
both at  the same time since as you said they are separate issues.

>
> The latter is of course a noble and worthy task. Indeed, for reference, a stripped debug build with all engines enabled over here has 2 MB in the DATA segment; the output of "strings scummvm" produces 42.073 lines with 990.137 characters.
> A well-known prime candidate for space saving would be the GUI theme format: If we replaced the XML encoded built-in theme (which take about 42kb) with a clever binary format, we could probably reduce it to 10kb or less, saving three times the size of the credits.
>
> But I digress :)
>
> As mentioned in my other email, I am somewhat skeptical how useful it really would be to move the credits into an external file. Given that the about dialog can be requested by the user at during game play, too. Putting it into an external file also means that this file can be "lost" if people copy scummvm around... I am really more a friend of the "single integrated binary" approach ;). Yet, it sure could be investigated, but please independently from this localization effort :)
>

I forgot about the possibility to open the about dialog from games and
that makes the idea less appealing. Also from what I gather here, if I
have time to spend on such a task it would better be spend on the GUI
theme format.

Thierry