Schlachtfeld

More than two months ago I asked the German community to submit questions for developer-interviews. And with those question in my pocket I did my first interview with a developer of Warzone 2100 GPL.

This first developer-interview has been conducted with Giel van Schijndel. He is 19 years old, lives in the Netherlands and describes himself as "programming-addicted". He just finished his degree in food-technology and is now starting with computer engineering.

Kreuvf: What’s probably the interesting thing is: How did you find Warzone 2100 and since when are you part of the team of the Warzone Resurrection Project?
Giel: Well, I found Warzone itself in a toy store; as for how I found this „resurrection project“ I don’t remember anymore. But I started programming on it around November/December 2006.
Kreuvf: What is your main intention when working on Warzone 2100? In other words: What’s your motivation to work on Warzone 2100?
Giel: Well some goals are: making the code very clean (up to beautiful, if possible), also making the game very mod-friendly is a favourite of mine.
I’m currently working on re-implementing the sound-library (the current implementation is rather flawed), adding UTF-8 support, adding font rendering support.
And EditWorld, we shouldn’t forget that; I’m busy on making it work on other platforms than just Windows currently.
Kreuvf: Version 2.1 is scheduled for Christmas 2007 and we can expect lots of new things. But what is your No. 1-feature of 2.1?
Giel: Although I don’t really have a personal No. 1, I would say UTF-8 and general multi-language support.
Kreuvf: Which brings us straight to the next topic: Internationalisation. People from the German community want to know, if currently somebody of the WRP is working on complete translations of all texts in-game and if there will be translated voice-files as well in the future.
Giel: Well, I (and some others) are currently working on making internationalisation (aka i18n) support better. That way it will be possible to translate most of the in-game texts. As for German: I think very large portions of Warzone’s texts already have been translated into German.
Kreuvf: How would one contribute a translation? Are there any special programs one would need in order to do the translation?
Giel: Currently we use „GNU gettext“ to add translation support. Most of those gettext-files (they’re called translation catalogs) can be edited by poEdit, which is a GUI for translators. Then, when you have created/edited/updated a translation file, you can send it to the mailing-list and we’ll add it to the translations.
Kreuvf: Sounds quite easy to me :D
Giel: It is, and should be easy.
Kreuvf: Okay, that was my last question, Giel. So: Thank you for this interview.
Giel: Happy to be of assistance.

German translation of this interview

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