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09-23-19, 02:10 PM   #1
Hamurator
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Join Date: Sep 2019
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Question How much is possible regarding manipulating text strings?

Hello there!

I'm new to the addon developing front and before I start reading Lua documentations and such I'd like to ask the veterans if my idea is even possible to do.

As the most of you know (I guess) WoW Classic is built on Vanilla patch 1.12 which is fine (more or less). Unfortunately regarding the German localization it's a construction site. I guess in the mid of Vanilla Blizzard has changed its localization rules which meant a lot of regions, cities and characters names got changed. I can't speak for other languages but for the German localization it were done step by step meaning every later patch in Vanilla included changes until the pre-patch for Burning Crusade.

That means in Classic the German localization is totally mixed up. Some names are translated and some are not (but are in Retail, in the books, etc). I find this quite annoying but Blizzard has announced they won't do changes in that regard for creating an authentic experience. 1.12 has nothing to do with authentic Vanilla localization but okay, it's their decision.

So I came up with the idea to write an addon to fix the localization which means it needs to read any printed out text and, if necessary, manipulate it. From a programming perspective it's not a hard task but does the API allow to change names? Especially on the minimap, in quests and even items? If so do you have methods in mind I could play with?

Thank you in advance!
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09-23-19, 02:21 PM   #2
jeffy162
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Ummm, no. I believe Classic WoW is built on 8.1 (a highly modified version of 8.1 to be sure). It has nothing to do with Vanilla WoW or a patch from it.
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Last edited by jeffy162 : 09-23-19 at 02:23 PM. Reason: more blah blah blah.
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09-23-19, 02:27 PM   #3
Kanegasi
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First of all, Classic is not based off of 1.12, it's based off of a BfA fork (the BlizzCon demo last year was forked from Legion) with imported 1.12 content.

Secondly, the global strings I've seen are directly from retail, because all retail-only strings are still in Classic, just not used. However, that's for the UI. The translations you're talking about are probably for NPC speech and quest text, which is not available to users in any capacity. You won't be able to alter any NPC speech, but replacing the contents of the quest text window is easy to actually do, but the amount of time and effort to ensure thousands of quests are correctly translated would be insane for one person doing it free.

Lastly, something like this is super easy for global strings, which are for the UI, like error text and button text and so on. Global strings are nothing but all-caps global variables holding the string.
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09-24-19, 01:48 PM   #4
Hamurator
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Join Date: Sep 2019
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Sure, you all are right. Classic is built on a 8.x version of the engine afaik but the data is from 1.12 (and that's the important part). That's what I meant initially. Sorry for the misunderstandings.

You won't be able to alter any NPC speech, but replacing the contents of the quest text window is easy to actually do, but the amount of time and effort to ensure thousands of quests are correctly translated would be insane for one person doing it free.
Hm, so you mean you have to customize quest texts before and it's not possible to manipulate strings when the text is requested for displaying? My idea was to hook on requested quest texts and search via regex for names and replace them with the German equivalent.
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09-24-19, 07:52 PM   #5
jaliborc
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Originally Posted by Hamurator View Post
Hello there!

I'm new to the addon developing front and before I start reading Lua documentations and such I'd like to ask the veterans if my idea is even possible to do.

As the most of you know (I guess) WoW Classic is built on Vanilla patch 1.12 which is fine (more or less). Unfortunately regarding the German localization it's a construction site. I guess in the mid of Vanilla Blizzard has changed its localization rules which meant a lot of regions, cities and characters names got changed. I can't speak for other languages but for the German localization it were done step by step meaning every later patch in Vanilla included changes until the pre-patch for Burning Crusade.

That means in Classic the German localization is totally mixed up. Some names are translated and some are not (but are in Retail, in the books, etc). I find this quite annoying but Blizzard has announced they won't do changes in that regard for creating an authentic experience. 1.12 has nothing to do with authentic Vanilla localization but okay, it's their decision.

So I came up with the idea to write an addon to fix the localization which means it needs to read any printed out text and, if necessary, manipulate it. From a programming perspective it's not a hard task but does the API allow to change names? Especially on the minimap, in quests and even items? If so do you have methods in mind I could play with?

Thank you in advance!
while most would be possible, sounds like a massive undertaking that could taint the code and create forbidden errors in the end. In essence, you would have to hack every single text element in the game
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