Use AI to translate in-game dialogue.

[captainstar]

I've tested chatGPT and Deepseek and they are very good at translating dialogues into more everyday languages. So I'd like to ask you guys to use them to make the dialogues and interface of our game into Brazilian Portuguese (and other languages if you prefer) ^^

Edited March 24 by captainstar

[Michiyo]

The issue with that is the way the game is designed, you can't have multiple languages active on a server at the same time.  You can translate the UI elements, but not NPC text, Mission Dialogs etc.  The server sends the client all text, and it has to send *everyone* the same text.  Changing that would require changes DEEP inside the server and client code.

[twozerofoxtrot]

6 hours ago, Michiyo said:

The issue with that is the way the game is designed, you can't have multiple languages active on a server at the same time. 

 

Is this why you can't type in characters from other languages (ex: Chinese) even if you have the keyboard settings for it?

 

But the game does allow for you to paste those characters into the chat box....

[Michiyo]

6 hours ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

 

Is this why you can't type in characters from other languages (ex: Chinese) even if you have the keyboard settings for it?

 

But the game does allow for you to paste those characters into the chat box....

No, that's not related at all.  Also, I can type *some* languages into the chatbox, but not all, it's a limitation of the input system.

[Fira]

This is so weird, why is it all in localization files if they're essentially not used in the end?

[captainstar]

On 3/24/2025 at 11:53 PM, Michiyo said:

The issue with that is the way the game is designed, you can't have multiple languages active on a server at the same time.  You can translate the UI elements, but not NPC text, Mission Dialogs etc.  The server sends the client all text, and it has to send *everyone* the same text.  Changing that would require changes DEEP inside the server and client code.

 

Can't do like that MODs?

[Krimson]

On 3/24/2025 at 4:34 PM, captainstar said:

I've tested chatGPT and Deepseek and they are very good at translating dialogues into more everyday languages. So I'd like to ask you guys to use them to make the dialogues and interface of our game into Brazilian Portuguese (and other languages if you prefer) ^^

I've looked into making AI apps to work with City of Heroes, and the amount of work to get it to anything is going to be interesting. City of Heroes doesn't have an API. Your first problem, ignoring which AI you plan to use, is HOW you are going to get information from CoH to the AI so the AI can process it, such as providing a translation. 

 

Client-side, I might be able to accomplish this using DLL Injection and API Hooking, maybe. I personally want to try and create a companion app that can tell you about the NPC you are talking to, tell you about your mission, the zone you are in, or any other information that could be scraped from the game. My purpose, however, is to create something that enhances immersion, but I suppose translation could fall into that.

 

Now I said client side because I am not even sure how the Homecoming Team would approach integrating AI into City of Heroes on the server end. Once again, the game has no API. And then what service do you use? OpenAI is making big strides, but also charging big money for its services. It might be better if they had a model that could be run locally on a server, and fine-tuned to City of Heroes. Of course, then you have to understand what fine-tuning and Loras are. 

 

At the moment, my AI City of Heroes experience is a simulation I made as a json file using KoboldCPP as a back end. I'm limited to story-telling, or text-based adventures ala old MUDs, but I could certainly do things like have a conversation with any NPC I want, so long as I provide information for that NPC. KoboldCPP has websearch, so I can make things easier by pointing it to web pages.

 

I don't see City of Heroes having such advanced features any time soon. The thing that will revolutionize the game is when we have a language model with a massively huge context, like 1 million tokens or more. Right now tokens for language models run between 16-128, big enough to absorb some books, but not yet big enough to ingest the entirety of Homecoming source code. When we have a model that can ingest City of Heroes and spit it out as something easier to work with, then perhaps we can make the game into something more.

[captainstar]

4 hours ago, Krimson said:

I've looked into making AI apps to work with City of Heroes, and the amount of work to get it to anything is going to be interesting. City of Heroes doesn't have an API. Your first problem, ignoring which AI you plan to use, is HOW you are going to get information from CoH to the AI so the AI can process it, such as providing a translation. 

 

Client-side, I might be able to accomplish this using DLL Injection and API Hooking, maybe. I personally want to try and create a companion app that can tell you about the NPC you are talking to, tell you about your mission, the zone you are in, or any other information that could be scraped from the game. My purpose, however, is to create something that enhances immersion, but I suppose translation could fall into that.

 

Now I said client side because I am not even sure how the Homecoming Team would approach integrating AI into City of Heroes on the server end. Once again, the game has no API. And then what service do you use? OpenAI is making big strides, but also charging big money for its services. It might be better if they had a model that could be run locally on a server, and fine-tuned to City of Heroes. Of course, then you have to understand what fine-tuning and Loras are. 

 

At the moment, my AI City of Heroes experience is a simulation I made as a json file using KoboldCPP as a back end. I'm limited to story-telling, or text-based adventures ala old MUDs, but I could certainly do things like have a conversation with any NPC I want, so long as I provide information for that NPC. KoboldCPP has websearch, so I can make things easier by pointing it to web pages.

 

I don't see City of Heroes having such advanced features any time soon. The thing that will revolutionize the game is when we have a language model with a massively huge context, like 1 million tokens or more. Right now tokens for language models run between 16-128, big enough to absorb some books, but not yet big enough to ingest the entirety of Homecoming source code. When we have a model that can ingest City of Heroes and spit it out as something easier to work with, then perhaps we can make the game into something more.

 

 

I was thinking about putting the texts in simple formats for the AI to translate the dialogues, and better words to use in the interface. There would be no need to actually connect them.

Edited March 27 by captainstar

[captainstar]

And in specific things like hair types. I think I could "simplify" it to: "hair 1", "hair 2"... something like that.

[Andreah]

Even if you get past the technical hurdles, an issue is in the fidelity of the translations, which won't be reviewed and verified, to the text they purport to translate. It may be excellent almost all the time, but the few times they're not, they'll cause problems.

[VictoriaGray]

Awesome suggestion! Translations will make the game shine for everyone!

Edited May 21 by VictoriaGray

[Doomguide2005]

On 3/26/2025 at 4:00 PM, captainstar said:

 

Can't do like that MODs?

My skill set is not in IT, AI or anything related but sometimes we need to be reminded this game was created to be able to run and when much of the internet ran on dial up. 

[GM Crumpet]

I'm not a tech person but there is a lot of good information here. Because the game runs so well and we've been able to update a lot of stuff and add new content people forget the game is actually really old. It doesn't use anything that more modern games use like game engines and the like, and everything about it is bespoke. It's a miracle it works even a fraction as well as it does. Things like the Mapserver event show the limitations that hit a wall no matter what we try. Get 100 players in a zone with all the powers, pets, enemies and stuff going on and it slows to a crawl. 2 full leagues will really stretch the resources, and three leagues you might as well not bother. I've spoken to the people that matter about reducing the player cap in the affected zones during the event so it spawns more zone instances, but that won't happen this year. 

 

We've been accused a few times recently of using AI and our reply is always "huh?". There is nothing to hang AI on. We'd love to be able to do things like language translation and the like, but the way the game is built it's fundamentally not possible without a lot of work and I don't know if even then it would be possible without a rewrite of the entire game code. From my limited knowledge the game is just too old and too incompatible to take advantage of the more positive aspects of AI. While nothing is impossible, a lot of stuff we would like to do is so difficult it enters the realm of highly improbable. 

[Krimson]

On 4/11/2025 at 2:21 AM, GM Crumpet said:

We've been accused a few times recently of using AI and our reply is always "huh?". There is nothing to hang AI on. 

I can verify that this is true. It might be possible to get something to work using DLL injection and API Hooking, but that's beyond my knowledge at the moment. But yeah, no API. No easy way to get the game and AI to talk to each other.

[jkwak]

On 3/25/2025 at 3:53 AM, Michiyo said:

The issue with that is the way the game is designed, you can't have multiple languages active on a server at the same time.  You can translate the UI elements, but not NPC text, Mission Dialogs etc.  The server sends the client all text, and it has to send *everyone* the same text.  Changing that would require changes DEEP inside the server and client code.

how so if that worked on the Live servers for a long time? i cant imagine, that wehen the mutlilanguage support was removed, the life Devs cleanead out everything of that system when on the client side there seems to be so much remaining of the mutliple languages that used to be supported

edit: on that note i would take just the content that was already translated on life befor they removed the multilanguage support, if games that are still supported bye there studios and publishers do similiar things by claiming to be "multilanguage" yet all the new content in the last 10 years is only in english *looking at DCUO* so Homecoming can to

Edited April 18 by jkwak

[Marine X]

On 4/17/2025 at 7:56 PM, jkwak said:

just the content that was already translated on life befor they removed the multilanguage support

They technically never removed anything. The individual Shards can be run in say French or German, but only one at a time. You are remembering the old German and French servers from live, but those are all or nothing, not Multi-Lingual. The settings for Language are global and are in the initial setup of the Server/Shard should someone wish to Set up one for any of the supported choices. I don't think they ever went beyond French, German, maybe Spanish and Korean ( for their Cancelled Server ).

[jkwak]

11 minutes ago, Marine X said:

They technically never removed anything. The individual Shards can be run in say French or German, but only one at a time. You are remembering the old German and French servers from live, but those are all or nothing, not Multi-Lingual. The settings for Language are global and are in the initial setup of the Server/Shard should someone wish to Set up one for any of the supported choices. I don't think they ever went beyond French, German, maybe Spanish and Korean ( for their Cancelled Server ).

weird, i was sure there was some language option client side, but its many many years ago and i might misremember it

[Michiyo]

On 4/17/2025 at 4:56 PM, jkwak said:

how so if that worked on the Live servers for a long time? i cant imagine, that wehen the mutlilanguage support was removed, the life Devs cleanead out everything of that system when on the client side there seems to be so much remaining of the mutliple languages that used to be supported

edit: on that note i would take just the content that was already translated on life befor they removed the multilanguage support, if games that are still supported bye there studios and publishers do similiar things by claiming to be "multilanguage" yet all the new content in the last 10 years is only in english *looking at DCUO* so Homecoming can to

Super late I know... but they *DID* remove the translated content when they dropped to English only, and that content was ONLY ever server side, so it's not possible to go grab NPC / Mission text etc from older clients, since it never existed outside of the server's data.

[jkwak]

thats kinda sad,
the stuff client side is mostly image files for UI elements, UI elements which arent used anymore anyway, a couple text snippits and old loading screens
i m aware that most of the actually important suff like mission texts, as the most obvious example, was and is handled server side, i just assumed that because they didnt clean out the multilanguage support so thuroughly on the client side they would not have cleaned out that support so thuroughly on the server side as well,

But there is probably a huge difference between leaving a handfull of images and text snippets worth a couple of Megabyte and leaving everything on the server and wasting god knows how much gigabytes unused while also impacting performance for no reason at all

Edited May 1 by jkwak

[Heliopause]

I've been somewhat successful using Python/AI integration to speak Contact dialog by pressing a hotkey.  It basically takes a screenshot, does an OCR of the contact dialog box, then feeds it to text to speech engine.  There are quate a few stumbling blocks I'm trying to resolve.  I'm not a coder so it's challenging for me.

[Aironfaar]

On 3/26/2025 at 9:00 PM, captainstar said:

 

Can't do like that MODs?

A friend of mine from France looked for a French version of Homecoming. He found a website where they offer a mod that indeed translates Homecoming into French - he tested it, and it technically worked! Unfortunately, it's "technically" because already in character creation, a bunch of strings were messed up; the mod hadn't been updated for a few years now.

However, if nothing else, I suppose that should be proof of concept. And maybe a basis to work off of.

Edited May 28 by Aironfaar

[WhiteNightingale]

I have a better idea: LET'S NOT USE PLAGIARIZING SOFTWARE, FOR ANYTHING.

[Michiyo]

I'm just going to leave these here:



This will *never* be able to translate ANYTHING from the server.  No missions, no dialog from NPCs... This will ONLY be able to translate UI elements.  BUT I do have partial translations for French, Spanish, and German so far, with one person currently looking at cleaning up Spanish, and one person interested in helping with French.  If anyone wants to pitch in for the 3 currently selected languages, or wants to do another one... let me know.

[VVonder]

I messed around with this a while ago:

The idea is to watch the logs, grab the stuff that works as spoken audio, translate it, then speak it.  It also displays the translated chat stream in a text window.

That is step one.  Step two is whenever _you_ type something, it sees that, translates it to english and injects it into the chat stream.  So when you talk to your team-members they see both what you actually typed and the english translation.

Step three is to input the non-english text in the text window and inject only the english translated text.  Don't even need to type it, sprinkle some whisper speech-to-text and you can just talk in your native language and read/hear in your native language.

The problem, and it may be well within the capability of the Homecoming team to resolve, is that injecting text with it being glitchy is really awkward.  I'm stuffing the keyboard buffer, and it _mostly_ works but the timing is hell.  If you are typing a message or in combat or just traveling.. throwing a bunch of characters as if the player typed them junks it up.

You can minimize the impact with macros, but it gets complicated.  If the homecoming team added a reliable way to send chat text, maybe a localhost port?  That would be make a client side integration reasonably viable.

Note to French speakers:  yes, the translations in this clip are really horrible.  It is a proof of concept, dropping in a better translation engine/service is the easy part.

Edited May 31 by VVonder
clarification