How do I add Simply Chinese 2 my Australian Version

[madbill]

Hi, I recently bought an Australian version of SimCity, but there is no Chinese language support in the game. Needed because my wife is Chinese.

Is there any way to add Simply Chinese to my game?

[whatevermind]

I'm no expert on this, but I'd hate to leave this unanswered, so here goes.

Short answer: Not really.

Long answer: My understanding of how the game handles different languages is that most, if not all, of the text and graphics you see in game are contained in several external support files and that you could theoretically maintain several sets of these files, and swap them out as a way of changing your game settings.  However, you would need the full set of these files from a Chinese version of the game to ensure you got everything, and this would be hard to come by without a Chinese copy of the game, or someone with such a copy willing to copy their files for you.

Additionally, some of the text might be hardcoded into the EXE file, in which case there is nothing you could do to resolve that other than buy a Chinese copy of the game and just have two installs on your computer, one in English, and one in Chinese.  In either case, you would be facing some amount of careful setup (either getting two full sets of files, or having two installs of the game on the same computer), and then possibly some constant maintenance, such as swapping out files to get the correct settings every time a different person wants to play the game.

I would say either of those methods is technically possible, and depending on your computer skills, might even be something you could setup to run fairly seamlessly.  However, neither is particularly easy.  There is no game setting to just switch between languages, unfortunately.  Getting multiple language full versions would require multiple installs, and any copy of the game might have only certain languages available for installation.  You would also have to face the issue of fonts as well, the game wouldn't likely know it has to switch fonts, although it is possible to mod the game to use different fonts, and there is discussion somewhere on here of the basics to do that.


Perhaps someone here who works on modding text/language settings or maybe even has faced bilingual setups before would have more insight, and certainly if you do figure this out, I'm sure people would be interested in knowing what you did if you could post your solution here for others to try out.