Statement of our EQII producer Sandra P. regarding our lag- and localization issues. [Archive]

srand_SOE

09-30-2006, 03:29 AM

Greetings! I wanted to take this opportunity to chat with you a little about some of the work we’ve been doing recently on the translation system in EverQuest II. Our goal is better translation quality across the board, but I’m afraid that some of that work has caused some issues. So I wanted to let you know what was going on as well as express my sincere apologies for any inconvenience this work may have caused. As I am sure you know, EverQuest II has had problems for some time with translated text reverting back to English. A phrase that was translated in one update would show up untranslated in the next update. This problem was caused by the way that the code internally stored and looked up the translations. It used the English text itself as the key, so when the English text changed in any way the code thought that the text was all together new. The code was unable to find old translations for the new text, even if the only change was to, say, fix a spelling mistake in the English that didn’t affect the translation at all. As you can see, this is not a perfect system. In order to fix this problem, we’ve been working on a much better storage system for translated text. We now give each piece of text an unique identifier called an asset tag, and then we use this tag to keep track of the text over time. This lets us keep old translations when something minor like the English spelling changes. Changing to this new system has been a lot of work – and it’s not over yet – but we are confident that the new system will lead to a much higher quality of translation in EverQuest II. Unfortunately, getting the new system online has not been so easy to coordinate. Initially we had a mismatch between the live translation database and the code – which is why you saw problems like combat messages showing up when you were harvesting, for example. We fixed this issue as quickly as we could and got the new database synchronized with the code – and then found that we had a very subtle and difficult to find issue deep in the translation code that caused the new system to bog down badly. This made for nasty lag on the worlds, so as soon as we had identified the problem we temporarily reverted back to the old system so that you could at least play. We are getting close to having a good solid solution for the lag-causing problem, but in the meantime we have made several small tweaks to the old translation database to try to fix the worst of the lingering mismatch problems. We are close, though. Some of our best programmers on both the international team and the game team have been working together to resolve these issues. I’m terribly sorry if our efforts have caused difficulty and inconvenience for you, but I am also very excited about the prospect of higher quality translations. It’s sometimes harder for us to communicate with our international customers, but please never doubt that you are just as much our customers, and your experience is just as important to us. I realize I’ve gotten a little technical in this post, but I wanted to give you as much information as I could about what is happening and why.