Soltys/Translations
The game was originally released in Polish. Thanks to the work of a few dedicated people the game is now also available in English on the ScummVM download page. If you would like to contribute to the project, you could invest some of your free time in translating Soltys in other languages. You will find the instructions below, but before starting it would be a good idea to check that there is not already a translation in progress for your language.
To contact us, send an email to <translation AT scummvm DOT org>.
Get the game
Grab the game in English (or Polish if you prefer to translate from Polish) from the ScummVM download page.
Extract the game files
Extract the game file using the extract_cge tool. You will need a Daily Build of the tool. A version for Windows is available from our download page. For other platforms you will need to compile it yourself or you can ask (politely) a member of the team, for example on IRC, to compile one for you.
If you are using the GUI Tools, choose Extract, then select either the vol.dat or the vol.cat file and follow the instructions.
If you are using the tools in command line, do the following:
./scummvm-tools-cli --tool extract_cge -o /path/to/soltys-extracted /path/to/soltys-en-v1-0/vol.dat
Translate the game
The text for the dialogues is in the file CGE.SAY. The text for the hotspot names is in the *.spr files (the files with the spr extensions). The name of the file usually starts with the scene number, so for example 21drzwi.spr will contain a hotspot for the scene 21. In those files you will need to translate the name (i.e. the text on the line starting with 'name='). Not all *.spr files have a name and you can ignore the files that have not one.
You will also need to edit the .version.txt file.
If you are using accentuated letters you need to save the file using ISO-8859-1 encoding (aka 'Latin1'). You also need to use CRLF line endings (i.e. Windows/DOS line endings).
Font support
The font file included in the Polish and English game file should work with most western european languages. If you see missing characters for your language you can contact the team using the <translation AT scummvm DOT org> address.
The font provided is a mix between the mazovia encoding for the Polish characters and ISO-8859-1 encoding for the lower case western european accentuated characters.This means the font has the following characters:
- ASCII below 128
- Polish 128 - 168
- Latin1 223 - 255 (some of the characters are missing, if you need them contact us)
Between the characters 168 and 223 it contains also the mazovia character set and they are used to draw lines for the title screen. So if you open the cge.say file using the ISO-8859-1 encoding those lines will not appear correctly. This is normal and you should not modify them.
Note that the space for each letter is limited and it might be difficult to add accentuated upper case letters, so if you can it would be better not to use accents on upper case letters.
Repackage the game
To regenerate the game data with your translation, you need to use the pack_cge tool.
If you are using the GUI Tools, choose Extract, then select one of the file in the directory with all the game files and follow the instructions.
If you are using the tools in command line, do the following:
./scummvm-tools-cli --tool pack_cge -o /path/to/soltys-mylanguage /path/to/soltys-extracted/
Test the game
Add the game in ScummVM and play to check your translation.
There is a walkthrough available on the wiki if you get stuck.
You can also get instant access to all the scenes (i.e. cheat :) ) with alt+shift+4 (for qwerty keyboards this needs to be the 4 from the numpad on some systems).
Traduction Notes
The name of the game, Sołtys, is also the name of the main character in the Polish version. In the english version this has been translated as Chief. Roughly the word can be translated as Mayor or leader of a village.