1 reply to this topic

[someguy]

Hello there, after years of non-playing I am looking at the original RCT1 again. However I want to modify the game a little bit, therefor I have a few questions. First I will present the main one, following by some other, which are less important, although I deeply appreciate some technical discussion.

Main question: How can I change the ingame fonts? Which tools are needed for this? Are they available on the net, or do you have to craft them yourself? To me both the fonts in csg1.dat and kanji.dat are interesting (I suppose they are stored in these files).

The reason I am asking, is that I am looking into creating a Russian translation of the game. Some kind of rare pirate translated version exists, but aside from stability issues (I believe its based on the original version before the 1.08 patch) it is in my opinion a rather poor job, for 2 reasons:

1) They solved the font problem quite poor, probably to save time: Essentially they made a Russian alphabet out of similar looking Latin capital letters, which they left in their original place, and then they replaced the remaining Latin capital letters with Russian ones. Because of this all Russian text is caps only and the remaining English texts are compromised. For example the games name is shown as Яollercoaster Tycoon, because they simply replaced the capital R with the Russian capital Я. Since they changed the csg1.dat this will also affect any other language (except from Japanese) version you try to run on the same system. Somehow, a lot of extended Latin letters, such as ä, ë, ü and so forth, seem to remain left unchanged. I cannot figure out, why they did not replace those.

2) They translated the English version of the game. Because in general English strings seem to be shorter than other European languages, this gives a lot of problems. Because of this the translators used all kind of techniques to compress the Russian text in the available space. This results in all kind of abbreviations and the use of slang. For example money only has 5 letters, whereas the Russian word has 6 letters, to solve this they just used slang. It seems better to make a translation on base of either some other European language or even the Japanese version.

Obviously the most important to me, is to change the ingame fonts. I am probably not able to reverse-engineer them myself. I am not very familiar with the community and a lot of links seem to be dead, probably during the age of the game, so I would be very grateful for some directions towards the necessary tools. Another question I have to solve is which version to pick as the base. Therefore it would be very helpful to get some input on the ingame character encoding and the length of strings in the different versions.

[rcthelp]

You may be better asking this question at OpenRCT2 which is an attempt to reverse engineer that version of the game. We never had many hacker/trainer authors here.

 

Our resource for people who want to understand the game internals is at http://tid.rctspace.com