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Copying a bunch of strings from one STBL to another without overwriting the whole thing?
Triplis
Posts: 3,048 Member
Maybe someone knows something about working with strings that will make this more efficient...
I'm down to basically the last thing before I release the next version of my Sorcerer mod, but due to how I've been doing things, I have a bunch of different ID STBL files with some of the strings for the mod and I want to compile them together into one set of STBL files (one set meaning one file for each language). Just so it's not sheer chaos for translators trying to go through a stupid number of STBL files to put together translations for one language.
Typically, I've been using Sims Studio when I want to combine stuff. In the past (before I had any actual translations) I could just compile the files once (in say, the English STBL file), then delete all of the other language STBL files and duplicate the English one, renaming the ID each time. Much more efficient, in other words, than adding a boatload of strings to 18 different files, one at a time.
But now that I have translations mixed in, that method only really works for files that are 100% English. For ones that are partly, or fully, translated, I can't just use a duplicate of an English file for it, or I'd lose the parts of it that are translated.
(Hopefully this makes sense. I'm really out of it right now and it seems a little confusing to me writing it lol.)
I think ideally, what I'm hoping for is some kind of tool where I can take an existing STBL file and copy/paste add a bunch of strings to it en masse.
Doing it manually for each is horribly inefficient, not to mention soul-crushing. Granted, only 6 of the files have actual translations, so most of them I could do with the duplication method. But the problem is only going to be worse the more translations that are made for the mod, if I ever add strings to it again beyond this update.
Edit: Oh and to give a sense of proportion of how horribly inefficient it is doing it for each one... I have something like 150 strings to add to the "main" files.
I'm down to basically the last thing before I release the next version of my Sorcerer mod, but due to how I've been doing things, I have a bunch of different ID STBL files with some of the strings for the mod and I want to compile them together into one set of STBL files (one set meaning one file for each language). Just so it's not sheer chaos for translators trying to go through a stupid number of STBL files to put together translations for one language.
Typically, I've been using Sims Studio when I want to combine stuff. In the past (before I had any actual translations) I could just compile the files once (in say, the English STBL file), then delete all of the other language STBL files and duplicate the English one, renaming the ID each time. Much more efficient, in other words, than adding a boatload of strings to 18 different files, one at a time.
But now that I have translations mixed in, that method only really works for files that are 100% English. For ones that are partly, or fully, translated, I can't just use a duplicate of an English file for it, or I'd lose the parts of it that are translated.
(Hopefully this makes sense. I'm really out of it right now and it seems a little confusing to me writing it lol.)
I think ideally, what I'm hoping for is some kind of tool where I can take an existing STBL file and copy/paste add a bunch of strings to it en masse.
Doing it manually for each is horribly inefficient, not to mention soul-crushing. Granted, only 6 of the files have actual translations, so most of them I could do with the duplication method. But the problem is only going to be worse the more translations that are made for the mod, if I ever add strings to it again beyond this update.
Edit: Oh and to give a sense of proportion of how horribly inefficient it is doing it for each one... I have something like 150 strings to add to the "main" files.
Mods moved from MTS, now hosted at: https://triplis.github.io
Post edited by Triplis on
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I could still use a tool, yes, if it's possible. And just to be sure we're on the same page, when you say mush into one STBL, do you mean one STBL for each language, or one STBL with all languages in it? The first one is what I'm wanting.
Like English1, English2, English3, combined into English1, with all the English strings in it. And then the same for other languages too. Ideally with the kind of setup Sims Studio has, where you can add by string ID and name if you want to (but with being able to do it en masse, not only one at a time). If it was just a program that looked at STBL files and mushed their contents together automatically, that'd definitely be helpful too. Just not as flexible as I'd prefer.
But I'll take what I can get if it speeds up some of the horrible inefficiency I'm facing.
Hope that makes sense. Let me know if not and I'll try to clarify further.
Go to the Musher tab, click on the STBL you want to copy from and the STBL file you want to copy to. (It'll look like they're selected when you first open it but they're not.) You'll see a list of strings in the Copy-From file with checkboxes to select the ones you want. Then click Copy.
Please keep a backup of your original package(s) just in case, I haven't had time for much testing. The modified STBLs work in s4pe but I haven't tested at all in-game, so you might want to do a quick test with one language just in case.
That's all I have time or energy for today! Please let me know how it works and of problems so I can fix them!
Oh, and in future you can use this tool to add strings to all the languages at the same time - maybe keep you from getting into this situation again. You might also try the export to xml / import from xml functions for translations.
I uploaded it over on MTS: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=596197
Edit: There's a very weird bug going on; when you copy strings in languages other than your main language, they don't show up in the Languages List tab Edit buttons. They seem to be added okay, though. I'll have to fix that tomorrow.
The gist is, the windows don't seem to be adjusting to screen size and I can't seem to drag them into view to see everything at once (and I think they're overlapping, so scrolling isn't showing me everything I need to see either).
Here's a screenshot of what I mean, in fullscreen, on the Musher tab:
If I adjust one window to see most of another, that one is now mostly hidden. And I'm not finding the Copy button in the Musher tab, so I suspect it's hidden at the bottom somewhere beyond where I can see it.
In case it means anything, I'm on Windows 10, with a 1366x768 monitor.
I'm going to see if I can work around the problem for now.
Only other "issue" I noticed so far is that in the Language List, if you hit Edit, it seems to cut off the list such that you can only see the strings in that list of the lowest number file. So say I have one file with 110 and one with 100, both files only show 100 in the Edit window. I don't think that particular thing should cause any problems with Mushing though, as in the Musher tab, it's showing up with the correct number of strings.
As for editing the strings in the Language list, that's based on your primary language - by default English but you can change it in Settings - the list consists of the strings in the primary language with the corresponding strings in the translated language. Any translated language strings that are missing show as blank, and any that are not in the primary language won't show. The program really isn't intended to work with inconsistent sets of strings.
Only thing I should probably mention, in case it means something to you... really kind of a big question mark on my end... is I had a package that I Mushed strings to. Everything worked fine on the functionality end as far as I can tell. Then I "saved as..." the package, extracted its STBLs (which is usual procedure for me when editing them, to edit outside of the main package file for the mod), imported them into the main package file, saved it as a new copy, etc.
The weird part is, this gave me problems when Sims 4 tried to run. Just immediate crash without even loading at all. I still have the crash file and can PM it to you or something if you're curious and/or have any idea how to read those things.
But anyway, I thought ok, maybe it's some kind of funkiness with how the files were saved. So on blind theory, I tried loading up a copy of the Mushed STBL package into Sims Studio, hit Save (with no changes made), then went through the process again of extracting (this time from the "saved in Sims Studio" version) and importing to my main package file, tried my main package file again, and this time no crash.
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but it worked.
Either way though, the strings are now "mushed" and seem to be working in-game so far. So thanks again!
Oh, and did you edit using s4pe? I think I saw a bug in the code for saving after modification but I didn't test.
http://simfileshare.net/filedetails/261450/
http://simfileshare.net/filedetails/261449/
I use s4pe for the main importing/exporting/packaging everything together, etc., if that answers your question. I pretty much have only used Sims Studio in the past for editing strings.
Edit: And it's fixed; edited STBLs no longer crash the game and hopefully work okay. Sorry about all the bugginess, doing something fast like this without enough testing is never good.