Re: Languages, HELP!

From: Daniel A. Koepke (dkoepke@circlemud.org)
Date: 02/02/02


On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, Ramsey Stone wrote:

> Now, when people who speak english see Al Bhed, and vice versa, I want
> it to be scramble. But I want it to make sense. Like, The letter A in
> english is Y in Al Bhed.

Note that this is not even a rough approximation of how actual languages
are formed or overheard.  That's fine, since we're dealing with, at most,
simulation, and faking it is a tried and true design.  But there are some
issues with these one-to-one cryptograms.  The largest, of course, is that
they're trivial for your players to learn.  A player need only listen to
his Al Bhed speaking friend (or he could multiplay) say the alphabet.  He
then has the translation table.  If there are any clues what tongue
another person is speaking, one can probably get one's client to
autotranslate.

> Alphabet [English]:  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
> Alphabet [Al Bhed]:  YPLTAVKREZGMSHUBXNCDIJFQOW

It's very simple.  Setup a translation table indexed by the language and a
number 0..25 (for a letter in the alphabet).  If the player knows the
letter or the input is not a letter, pass it through unchanged to the
output buffer.  If the player does not know the letter, then look up its
translation in the table and write that to the output buffer, like:

  *(output++) = translationTable[language][LOWER(input[i]) - 'a'];

Example code here would be trivial.  You should know how to do things like
this before you consider yourself a "coder."

More complex, but interesting, would be a syllabic translation
(many-to-one and many-to-many translation).  An intermediate-level
programmer should be able to accomplish this without much fuss.  At the
upper echelons, are language parsing and translation: things that few here
could do in a timely fashion, and that none here would be willing to do
for a Mud project.  (It's really not worth it.)

-dak

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