Localise This

This week has been a bit of a strange one. It started slowly due to the task of translating NSS3 into Polish for games magazine KomputerSwiat (look out for it in Poland.) It proved to be a lot more time consuming than I'd hoped, as is often the case with seemingly "simple" jobs, but once I'd got my head back into NSS4 my work rate gathered pace and is currently running at full tilt.

If you didn't know already, in NSS4 I intend to offer the option of playing as a player or a manager (or even a player-manager). This means that as your career as a player comes to an end you can move into management and continue your game. My first assignment for the week then was to bring in some of the management features that are needed such as tactics and team selection. For computer controlled teams I implemented some manager AI (artificial intelligence) to pick the best team available, taking into account various things such as skills, form, energy, confidence and so on. Players that are picked will receive a match rating based on their performance, which determines their form, but they will use up a certain amount of energy during the match (depending on their stamina) which they will need to recover during the week. With some players recovering faster than others, and match form fluctuating it means the computer managers aren't picking the same team each week. There's still a lot of AI work to be done (at the moment the computer managers don't changes their tactics at all) but it's a good start. For the human managers (that's you) I have set up a simple tactics editor and team selection screen.

Using the same system you can also select your first eleven and the substitutes. First you click on the player icon, then click on the player name in the list. By clicking on two players already selected you can switch their positions.

With that in place I realised that I was only a step away from have a reasonably playable game. Admittedly a very shaky one (competitions aren't yet finished, player abilities don't change over time, there's no transfer market etc) but if I can implement a match engine then we have a management game where you can pick the team, choose your tactics and win the league. This will of course make testing the competitions far more interesting. One thing I've been keen to do since the outset was bring back the text match engine from NSS2. It's clear to me that some people simply prefer to play matches with the click of a mouse button, rather than wrestle with a joypad, as NSS2 continues to sell a few units every week. Ideally then you will have a choice of text or 3D action matches in NSS4. I will be completely re-writing the text match engine simply because it will need to deal with real players (if you remember, there wasn't a player database in NSS2) and besides, I'm a much better programmer now than when I wrote NSS2. The trouble with text matches though is that they require an awful lot of words. "He heads the ball on." "That's a great tackle!" You know the kind of stuff. So if I want to localise NSS4 (translate it into various languages) then I aught to get the localisation system in place early on. As I'm programming the game in BlitzMax I set about searching the BlitzMax forum for some ideas on the best way to go about it. I had already thought of using XML files when 'hey presto!' it turns out that a chap called Brucey had already written a free module that did exactly that. A few hours later and NSS4 in is completely translatable. I simply offer the English text file to some clever multi-lingual people like Fabrizio (go and say hello to him on the NSS forums) they return it back in another language and 'alacazam!' the game is localised.

So now that important feature is in place I can set about creating a text match engine. I better get on with it. See ya!