Hi everybody!
Sorry if I talk too much, but I have a lot to say.
I suggest, not only for languages topic, to use the real life as the first example to solve problems about this game. As a roleplaying game it must be see like a real life simulator, so let\'s see what real life is like.
In real life every people around you talk the same language you do, except for outcoming people. If there are more than one official languages you will find that people at shops or service buildings in general used to talk the language you use to start the talk. And when you go to a foreign country you use to speak in english because it is the most speaked language, the common language we could say.
So what is Planeshift like?
I see this world as a total mix of cultures like every place in Earth was some centuries ago. I mean there were foreigners everywhere and a lot of languages in each city. So, why not take advantage of all the cultures the players will come from. I have proposals of two kinds, for npcs and for (what is the acronym for...?)players.
1. For npcs:
Well, I suppose that there will be some amount of npc at every place each with some predifined dialogs. I propose to open those dialogs to the public and ask people to translate all the dialogs they want in the language they want, and to send them back to the developers (this is a general advice for developers: try to make people to colaborate asking them for things like this, or textures, music, voices, architecture, etc, etc; you can save a lot of time of working).
Of course, the developerse will choose from all those translated dialogs what to use, in real life you won\'t find salesmans who know 20 languages. The english would be the common language, and there could be cities or countries with other official languages like spanish, german, french, and so; languages with a lot of people who knows them. And why not, there could be countries or cities where no english were spoken, this must not be a problem. When you head to a country whose language you don\'t know you try to use english first, or you make some friend who can help you with it. Well, why not in the game?
I request some participation of minoritary languages. There could be some npcs who knows some of those; it would be very cool to find some npc speaking your motherlanguage even if it is very minority (those could be ancient languages or something like that).
2. For players:
I don\'t see any problem with this. I will speak in english, but if I find someone who knows spanish I will speak in spanish with him/her. And if I find a place with a lot of german speakers, I try in german with the bit i know.
I don\'t see necessity for the game or the server to translate nothing via software. And I think that the only language option (in addition to the interface language option) that would be of interest is some option to set your default language for all the npcs (if they speak that language), but with the posibility of choosing it for some concrete npc, for example: I would choose spanish or german as default, but if there is some npc speaking bask (euskara) I want to know and speak in bask with him/her. And of course, I see ridiculous to use diferent servers for diferent languages.
Thank you very much for your time!! (if you have read the whole document)
