Translating City Car Driving to your own language

Overview

Learn how to modify the game to add your own language translation. Normally the language files are encrypted, so this guide shows how to create a seperate non-encrypted modification for your own use.

General method for Language used

CityCarDriving 1.5.2 (as of 11th Nov 2016) has two release modes;

• Steam
• Non-Steam

Steam version starts Starter.exe which queries Steam API to find out what language is set and writes this to language.txt. Then Starter.exe continues just like Non-Steam version.

Non-Steam version starts Starter.exe which reads language.txt to find out what language it uses.
From this it looks in two folders for messages.mo (Game menu, button, message text) and messages.xls (mission related messages – those that appear on the right hand side during game play)

Normally both these files are protected so cannot be edited to either add your own messages, or to translate to another language. If you do you will see the “Some files are corrupted” message.

To allow for your own messages you must add a new language and create your own messages.mo and messages.xls, and write the language ID to the language.txt file to change it. Since Steam overwirtes language.txt each game start up we must also block this behavior.

Steam Version Changes

If you are running the steam version you must first block the writing to language.txt

You can do this via modification of Starter.exe ( Location of checking ClassLib.dll security ), and ClassLib.dll ( Location of writing to language.txt )

General Changes to Allow Translation

• Create folder in : “%ProgramFiles(x86)%Forward DevelopmentCity Car Driving Home Editiondatai18naf_ZA”
• Change file in the file: “%ProgramFiles(x86)%Forward DevelopmentCity Car Driving Home Editiondatai18nlanguage.txt ( af_ZA )
• Copy an existing messages.mo from datai18n??_??LC_LANGAGES to your af_ZA folder
• install the program “POEDIT”, [link]
• Press WINDOWS KEY + R, enter CMD and press OK
• Type the following;
  • CD “%ProgramFiles(x86)%Forward DevelopmentCity Car Driving Home Editiondatai18naf_ZA”
  • “%ProgramFiles(x86)%PoeditGettextToolsbinmsgunfmt” messages.mo >messages.po
  • “%ProgramFiles(x86)%Poeditpoedit” messages.po
• Edit the translations in the GUI, editing the right hand side only
• From the file menu choose “Compile MO” and save toe message.mo

• Creat folder in: “%ProgramFiles(x86)%Forward DevelopmentCity Car Driving Home Editiondatatables” to match above af_ZA
• Copy any of the other folders contents into af_ZA
• Edit the af_ZAmessages.xls for message content for each game

NOTE: You can use any of the following language strings, it doesnt matter.
af_ZA,ar_SA,ar,ar_IQ,ar_EG,ar_LY, … en,en_GB,en_AU,en_CA,en_NZ,en_IE,en_ZA,en_JM,en_GD, …ne_NP,ne_IN,ne,fy_NL,ps,tl_PH,dv_MV, … and so on.

Some languages will require special fonts, you can find ####_la_NG.font files dotted around the game folders;

• …dataguihomefonts
• …dataguiCommonfonts

These are XML files specifying the various font dimentions for this font pack, and the font TTF file. Just simply copy the example files for zh_CN or others and rename to af_ZA.

Then inside those files change the name of the TTF to one that supports your language.
And copy the TTF into the folder with the .font files. ( TTF, or True Type Fonts are available both in windows itself or online to copy )

Here is an example of dataguihomefontsPDD.font
<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>
<Font Name=”pdd_font” Filename=”Framd.TTF” Type=”FreeType” Size=”12″ NativeHorzRes=”1600″ NativeVertRes=”1200″ AutoScaled=”false”/>