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Translation of the text is in the files:
1) *_MM.eng - Help, description of Missions;
2) *_TEXT.eng - all Menus, Interface, names of Buildings, phrases of inhabitants;
3) eventmsg.txt - events, alerts; (Caesar3 have eventmsg.txt ? maybe not)
Files *_MM.eng" and *_TEXT.eng are databases.
Trying to edit through regular notepad inevitably messes them up.
When translating through a HEX editor, it was critical to preserve the length of the lines.
Short lines were followed by spaces.
Long lines were cut off, which is why the words in the translation are often abbreviated, or not the most successful synonym is used (because it fits in length).
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@PCDania
I had to give up on a few tiny bits as it would become too long in Danish thereby effect the gameplay in a negative way (read 'make it buggy').
One of the tricks was to translate a file from a language that has statistically longer words. For example, from German.
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Cleopatra (Pharaoh v2.0) has *.txt files with the same names as *_TEXT.eng and *_MM.eng.
From their content it becomes obvious that these are source files for converting text into the ".eng" database format.
They mention "csr2text"
"..Once the text has been changed type 'csr2text' at the dos prompt to.."
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@Trium
csr2text was a private custom utility (private to Impressions, that is) and is not publicly available. It was used to generate the .eng file from the .txt file.
@sajuuk
Might Impressions have made their csr2text file public now that they don't exist ?
@Trium
I am not aware that copies of csr2text have survived or made it across to the public domain. I imagine they would have surfaced by now if any did exist.
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@atzen1991
i also contacted the activision support and they also had no clue because they had no datas of the former sierra/impression games support team...
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@PCDania
What the original program Impressions Games (IG) used goes, then as far as I understand from a comment from a former IG programmer, that program was lost some time in the early 2000s (maybe when IG closed in 2004?) so Activision has never had that program.
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Therefore, for a long time editing the Translation of the text was inconvenient until Pecunia wrote (2020) EngConverter.
github.com/bvschaik/citybuilding-tools/releases/tag/engconverter-v0.4
- unpack the database files _Text.eng and _MM.eng with translation;
- edit the translation;
(And WITHOUT the old troubles for the HEX editor - "you need to respect the length of the line, padding with spaces or cut off words")
- pack back and play;
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About the different sizes of the original and new files
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@PCDania
Pharaoh_Text.eng seems to convert to .xml and back to .eng just fine.
Unfortunately, Pharaoh_MM.eng differs from the original when converted to .xml and back to .eng.
I seem to remember that Impressions Games made several changes to the game engine when they made Pharaoh.
@Pecunia
yes, there are differences, but they are in unused fields only.
For example, the ENG file can have an X and Y coordinate for the title, subtitle and video strings, even when the string itself is not defined.
I ignore those X/Y coordinates in the XML output and the result is that they are not in the resulting ENG file either.
Furthermore, there are "empty" message entries which have no text at all but are still counted as non-empty in the original ENG file.
And as last one: there's a spurious "@18" string in the Pharaoh ENG which does not correspond to any known text field...
I've analyzed all game .exe files and they do not use the fields that change in the ENG -> XML -> ENG conversion.
Therefore, I chose to ignore any "rubbish" that the files accumulated over the years, to make editing the texts as simple as possible
