You can translate the game Transport Tycoon Deluxe with this program. I've started writing it because I wanted to translate TTD to Hungarian, and I've found the way how to do that. Some other people was also interested in translating TTD, so I've put it on the Web and continued developing it. I've implemented many features since then, the latest version is 2.5 now. You can download it at the Downloads page.

You can find all TTD translations available on the Translations page. I'd like to know about all of them, so please send me an e-mail if you start translating TTD to your language. I can also host your translated executable if you don't have a place to upload it.

The sources of the program are also available at the Source code page.

What's new in TTD Translator 2.5?

The latest improvements of TTD allow a translation to be contained entirely in a GRF file, loaded by the TTDPatch NewGRF mechanism. Since version 2.5, TTD Translator can export the translation into a GRF file to allow using this solution. GRF files have several advantages over executable files:

• The filesize is much smaller, since it contains the changed texts only. The Hungarian translation is around 500KB as an EXE file, while only 56KB as a GRF file.
• GRF files contain no executable code, so they can't be infected by viruses
• A GRF file can be disabled easily by removing it from NEWGRF(W).CFG, no file renaming is needed
• Since only ten strings differ between the DOS and Windows TTD versions, it's easy to have a GRF file that translates both correctly, simplifying the installation
• Other GRF files can easily provide vehicle names and other texts for your language.
• The file can contain in-game TTDPatch texts, so there's no need for a separate ttdpttxt.txt to be added.

• GRF files need TTDPatch 2.5 or later, they can't be used with unpatched TTD.
• Currently, there is no way to export the keyboard layout of the DOS executable into a GRF, so players will have to use the layout provided by their original executable.

The other important change in TTDPatch is the support for Unicode encoding. You can use any character from the Basic Multilingual Plane in your translation without resorting to character redraw hacks needed in earlier versions (the needed character graphics are still needed, though). To support this feature, TTD Translator 2.5 has full support for Unicode input. If a string contains characters outside the TTD codepage, it will be automatically UTF-8 encoded in the format needed by TTDPatch. Because of this change, the program is no longer guaranteed to work under Windows 95, 98 and ME, since these OSes don't support Unicode and may replace characters absent from the local code page. (I couldn't test it in those OSes, so it might actually work...) Windows 9x users can keep using the older versions, they won't be removed from this site.

Csaba Varga