Sociopath Community

So you want it to translate from latin letters to chinese writing?  Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning the language? 

No. 

The nice thing about a lot of more modern eastern MMORPGs is that they usually have a sort of bot that will auto run your character to where you are going. So basicly, you spend a lot of time simply watching your character run, which is great becasue it allows me to study and do other things.

The idea is to only show the translation if you hover your curser over the chinese text. What this means is that in general when I'm playing, it's all Chinese, but if I see something I would like to know how to say or understand, I only need move my mouse over it. 

This is great becasue you look at the character, realize you don't understand, concentrate as it as you move your curser over it, see the pinyin, and english, and then remember. Next time you might recognize the meaning but forget the pinyin, so you look again.

You know I could play this game for much longer than I could ever study. Who says studying needs to be boring? This is a great way to have fun while picking up plenty of Chinese along the way. Let's not forget that this game is a social game. You have to work with others. You have to communicate. The translater will only get you so far.

The thing is, though, that without a tool such as this, Chinese is insanely hard to learn. Look at those characters. Do you know how you look that up in the dictionary? You count how many "strokes" of the pen is requires to make it, and then you look by that number. You don't know how to spell it and you can't look it up alphabetically. It is HARD, and as a result, my Chinese characters are really bad. This is my solution.

How would you propose one extract the Chinese from the background? To me that seems the greatest problem that needs solving.

As I see it, you'd either need some sort of advanced image recognition and run that over the final rendering image, or you could try to intercept the game's drawing calls to the graphics card and see if you can single out the calls that print the characters.

What platform and graphics API is the game using?

No idea. To be honest, the game confuses me becasue the source files are all in English, and even some commands in teh game such as /hug are in english, yet the game is Chinese, and was made by a Chinese company. 

It looks, feels, and plays exactly like Perfect World.

I think the best solution would be image recognition looking at the text itself, recognizing it, running it through google translate, and showing the results.

Image recognition might be hard. The text seems to be floating in the 3D-world, which means not only will you have to take scale into account but also that it seems other things may overlap the text itself. Also, add to that what seems like a slew of different color options and just extracting the parts that need to be translated seems difficult. If one could get this sort of image recognition to work, one might even be able to code a bot that plays the game from the 'outside', just like a regular player would be. That'd sell very good. :)

If one could islolate the drawing calls and somehow find out which font and characters that are going to get rendered, I think you'd have a much easier time translating the text.

Is this a multi-platform game? Windows, Linux etc.?

I'm guessing it's just Windows.

here is the website: http://tx3.163.com/

Luna, how long did you play FFXI for?

Okay, thanks. Yes, it seems to be for Windows only.

There's a tool called PIX from Microsoft (I think) that is a great asset when trying to see what the graphics card (and game) is really up to.

a couple years