Chats translator for lobby, rooms and in game

[Pudim]

PudimTranslate — chat translation for 0 A.D.

Click a chat message to translate it. Click again to get the original back. Works in a match, in the multiplayer lobby and in the match setup screen.

Any language, in both directions, with nothing to configure. You never pick a language pair:

• What was written is detected automatically. English, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese — it does not matter, and it does not have to be the same language twice in a row. A room where three people type in three different languages just works.
• What you get back is whatever language your 0 A.D. is installed in. Playing in Spanish gives you Spanish; playing in Polish gives you Polish. The mod reads the game's own locale, so there is no setting to find and nothing to keep in sync.

Built for players who want to play multiplayer without being locked out of the conversation.

Nothing to install, on Windows, Linux or macOS — the companion program ships in two versions, PowerShell and Python, and the launcher uses whichever your system already has. No dependency on PudimMod either: the two are independent, and running both together causes no conflict, because PudimTranslate keeps its helpers in its own namespace (pudimtr_*).

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⚠️ Read this first: the translator must be running before the game

Translation needs a small companion program. Start it before you open 0 A.D., every time.

That is not a style preference — it is how the game works. 0 A.D. indexes its data folders once, at startup, and never notices files that appear afterwards. If the translator is not already running when the game starts, the game cannot see the bridge at all and nothing will translate for that whole session. Closing and reopening 0 A.D. fixes it.

So do not launch 0 A.D. the usual way. Launch it with tools/Play0AD.bat (or tools/Play0AD.sh on Linux and macOS), which starts the translator, waits for the bridge to be ready, opens the game, and shuts the translator down when you quit. One click, right order, nothing to remember.

The first time you run it, Play0AD.bat creates a 0 A.D. Translator shortcut on your desktop, carrying the 0 A.D. icon so it sits recognisably next to the game's own shortcut. Use it from then on, in place of your normal 0 A.D. shortcut, and you are done — one click starts everything in the right order.

The .bat file itself will always show the plain Windows script icon. That is not something a mod can change: Windows takes a .bat icon from the file type, not from the file, so only a shortcut can carry a custom one. That is precisely why the shortcut is created for you.

Both the shortcut and the launcher work out where 0 A.D. is installed on their own — they look in the usual install locations, in the Steam libraries, and finally read the target of the Start Menu shortcut the installer left behind. The path found is remembered in tools/caminho_do_jogo.txt, next to the scripts, so the search happens only once. That file is machine-specific and is deliberately kept out of the repository, so nobody inherits somebody else's install path. If the game is somewhere unusual and the search fails, run it once with the path and it is remembered from then on:

powershell -File tools\Play0AD.ps1 -Jogo "C:\your\path\to\pyrogenesis.exe"

 

If you prefer to keep the two apart, run tools/PudimTradutor.bat, leave its window open, and only then open 0 A.D. yourself.

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Installation

Download the repository (Code → Download ZIP, or git clone) and put the PudimTranslate folder inside your 0 A.D. mods directory:

System	Path
Windows	%APPDATA%\0ad\mods\ — or Documents\My Games\0ad\mods\
Linux	~/.local/share/0ad/mods/
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/0ad/mods/

If you are unsure, the game's own reference is at https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths.

The folder must sit directly inside mods/, so that mods/PudimTranslate/mod.json exists — a common mistake is ending up with mods/PudimTranslate/PudimTranslate/.

Then open 0 A.D., go to Settings → Mod Selection, pick PudimTranslate, click Enable, then Save Configuration and Start Mods.

Nothing to install, on any system. The companion program exists twice — once in PowerShell, once in Python — and the launcher picks whichever your machine already has. That is not accidental duplication: the native coverage is complementary.

System	Launcher	Uses	Already installed?
Windows	tools\Play0AD.bat	Windows PowerShell	Yes, ships with Windows 10 and 11
Linux	tools/Play0AD.sh	Python 3	Yes, in practically every distribution
macOS	tools/Play0AD.sh	Python 3	Yes, with the command line tools

Each launcher falls back to the other runtime if the preferred one is missing. On Windows the .bat calls PowerShell with -ExecutionPolicy Bypass, which applies to that one call and changes no system setting. On Linux and macOS, give the .sh permission to run once with chmod +x tools/Play0AD.sh.

The desktop shortcut is a Windows convenience and is simply skipped elsewhere.

To update, replace the folder with the newer version and restart the game.

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How to translate a message

Click the message. That is the whole thing. There is no button to find and no menu to open — the line of text is the button.

The screenshots below happen to show English being turned into Portuguese, because that is the author's setup — but nothing in them is specific to that pair.

In the multiplayer lobby, someone says hello in a language you do not read:

Click that line and it comes back in your language, in green so you can tell at a glance what was translated and what is still as it was written:

Click it again to get the original back. Nothing is lost.

It works the same in the match setup screen, where most of the talking happens before a game. Here a whole conversation is in a foreign language:

Click any lines you want. Each one is independent, so you can translate only what you care about:

In a match it is the same gesture: click the chat line on screen. There the line also carries a tooltip, so hovering a translated message shows the original wording without switching it back.

A few things worth knowing:

• While a phrase is being fetched the line shows translating…. It usually lasts a blink.
• If it says the translator is off, you opened the game without the translator running. Close 0 A.D., start it with the desktop shortcut, and try again.
• System notices ("== Someone joined.") do nothing when clicked, on purpose: 0 A.D. already shows those in your own language, so there is nothing to translate.
• A phrase already translated once is free forever — it is cached on disk, so repeats like gg or well played never hit the network again.

Do not want to click at all? Set pudimtranslate.auto to true in the user config and every incoming message is translated as it arrives. This applies inside a match only — in the lobby and the match setup screen you still click the messages you want.

Neither language is ever configured. The one you read is taken from your 0 A.D. install, and the one that was written is detected from the message itself — see the top of this page.

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Is it working?

The translator opens in a window of its own and prints what it does. A healthy start looks like this, and a translated phrase shows up as a > line (what was said) followed by a < line (what came back):

PudimTranslate - tradutor de chat
  pasta do jogo : D:\Documents\My Games\0ad
  ponte         : D:\Documents\My Games\0ad\saves\campaigns
  idioma destino: pt (o jogo pode pedir outro)
  cache         : 12 frase(s) ja conhecidas

  traduzindo para: pt
  > attack blue from the north, i need help
  < ataque o azul do norte, preciso de ajuda

 

Leave that window open while you play. Closing it stops translation; the game keeps running.

When something goes wrong

The message says the translator is off. The game was opened before the translator was running. This is the one failure that cannot fix itself mid-session: 0 A.D. indexes its data folders once at startup, so if the bridge was not there at that moment, it stays invisible for the whole session. Close 0 A.D. and open it again with the desktop shortcut.

The translator window flashes and disappears. Something in it failed. Run tools/PudimTradutor.bat on its own — the window stays open and shows the error instead of vanishing.

Nothing happens when you click a message. If the line is a system notice (== Someone joined), that is deliberate — the game already shows those in your language. For anything else, check whether the translator window is still open.

You updated the mod and nothing changed. 0 A.D. loads mod scripts only when it starts. Close the game completely and open it again.

The desktop shortcut points somewhere stale after moving the mod folder. Run the launcher once from its new location and the shortcut fixes its own target.

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Why a companion program at all

There is no way around it: the 0 A.D. GUI script engine has no HTTP — no fetch, no XHR. The only networking exposed to scripts is the XMPP lobby and mod.io, both in C++. A mod simply cannot call a translation service.

What a mod can do is read and write files. So the mod writes the phrase to a file, the companion program translates it, and writes the answer back:

mod  --writes-->  saves/campaigns/pudim_tr_req.json  --reads-->  PudimTradutor.ps1  --HTTP--> Google
mod  <---reads--  saves/campaigns/pudim_tr_res.json  <--writes-------'

 

No API key and no sign-up: it calls the same free endpoint the translate.google.com page uses. Translations are cached on disk, so a phrase already seen costs no network round trip.

That folder is not a matter of taste. The GUI's ReadJSONFile/WriteJSONFile only accepts a closed list of paths — gui/, simulation/, maps/, campaigns/, saves/campaigns/, config/matchsettings.json and config/matchsettings.mp.json. Anything else answers Restricted access to …. Of those, saves/campaigns/ is the only writable user folder. It does not disturb campaigns: the game only lists *.0adcampaign there, and these files are .json.

The response file is always exactly 64 KB, padded with spaces. The game's VFS remembers a file's size from when it indexed the folder, so a file that grows gets read truncated — a JSON cut in half. A fixed size keeps that remembered value correct forever.

How it works, per screen

In a match no button had to be invented. The game's own ChatOverlay already treats each chat line as a button — gui/session/chat/ChatOverlay.js sets ghost = !chatMessage.callback — and sizes the line to the exact width of its text. So attaching a callback makes the message clickable without covering the map or stealing clicks meant for units.

In the lobby and the match setup screen the chat is a type="list", one item per message. There is no per-line button there, but there is selection, so the gesture ends up the same: click the message to translate it.

Privacy

The chat messages you choose to translate are sent to Google Translate. Nothing else leaves your machine, and nothing is sent until you click a message — unless you turn on pudimtranslate.auto, in which case every chat message that arrives during a match is sent as it arrives.

System notices are never sent at all, and a phrase already in the on-disk cache is answered locally, without touching the network.

Language

The mod's own text (tooltips, notices) is Portuguese or English, following the game's language.

License

PudimTranslate is released under the GNU General Public License v3 or later — see LICENSE.

All code is original — see NOTICE.

PudimTranslate-main (2).zip

Edited 46 minutes ago by Pudim