Fallout: New California Devs Offer Translation Alternative

Earlier this month we talked about how the team behind the incredibly passionate fan-project Fallout: New California announced their plans to offer more localization and language options for their huge mod. The outpouring of applicants was immediate, but now the team is offering up a new solution - one that might not be so time consuming or demanding of such a small team.

"If we upload all the dialogue and notes in the game to an open Google Spreadsheet, would people in alternate languages translate lines whenever they feel like it," asked the latest post on their Facebook page.

"Instead of relying on committed individuals (commitment is a rare and fleeting resource in volunteer based projects,) that might help the translation efforts get done in an open and non-linear way within this decade. 16,000 lines is a LOT of dialogue, and we're not paying, so it's very much a no strings attached, we get what we pay for process."

They added, "We can take the documents and export them back into a plugin, and that way we can translate our mod in all the languages people have been offering to help with. People offer to help, but they offer no genuine commitment or responsibility to lead and self-organize."

As a closer and an opening for any additional contributions, they asked "So if I remove the responsibility and commitment, maybe we can Torrent our translation effort by delegating it to the cloud?"

If you're interested in helping out, you can let them know right here! To support the mod, make sure to mosey on over to their site here to check those out!

As for the state of this project itself, the mod art is locked, the bugs are near non-existent, and everything - for the most part - is ready to go. So then why are they waiting until October 23rd to release the full project? The dev team explained, "Because something is missing -- and all the testing guys noticed -- is side quests. Again, not the end of the world, but you hit this story with huge replete branches 16,000 lines of dialogue long you expect some little moments with characters off to the side of the big arcs, and there just aren't any. Again, because there was no one to code it! I'd also like to take time to revise some plot holes and gaps in the open possibilities that appeared in testing."

But, 60fps goodness is on the way, they promise! "So we will code that ourselves the hard way, and provide a lot more support in optimizing the engine side of things. Our art is just running up against the limits of what this old engine can do. We need source code. Or, we need to do tedious work to work around limitations on both low end systems and high end ones that can handle all the pretty stuff at 60fps."

As the Titanic meme goes, "it's been 84 years ..." but it's finally happening! It's finally happening! Sorry, I've been following this project for a long time now and have covered every monumental step of the way.