Documentation - rules only available in English

[osowiecki]

Hi, do you plan to add translations to the rulesets in the future? The Interface of the application is displayed correctly in polish but rules are all static html files. I believe there should be the option to choose a different set of htmls for different languages (even though the html files themselves don't exist yet).

[joeraz]

I believe someone made a French translation of the documentation at one point, but it's probably a bit outdated now.

That being said, I'd be open to getting a translation of the documentation, but it's not really practical at the moment for a few reasons:

• First, the documentation is technically incomplete. There are over 300 games that are still missing rules. I'm working on adding these missing rules, but this is more of a longer-term project that will take many releases to finish. Plus, there are a lot of other features that should be mentioned in more detail in the docs. And that's not counting all of the new games that are being added. Short version is that the documentation is currently being heavily expanded, which would make any translation efforts more difficult.
• Second, there isn't anyone currently on the team to handle the translations - I don't believe any of the people who did the interface translations are still around. I don't really know any other languages well enough to do a proper translation myself unless I was to use Google Translate (which I know is a bad idea).
• Lastly, while the documents are raw HTML, some parts of the files are generated by a script.

While I can update/review the script to account for alternate translations, in order to actually get the translations, I'd need a volunteer who knows the language well enough to translate the pages and is willing to stick to get any new pages that are added translated as well.

[osowiecki]

I understand. In that case I will wait for a more complete English documentation to show up and than I can offer a polish translation the next time someone asks me for a Solitaire application. I'm setting up a reminder in my calendar to check back again in 6 months. Thanks for all your work.

[cardset]

I think writing the rules from scratch will be to much work and a boring job.

Possible solution: Find a good coder, who is able to read out the variables from the game. Then let the computer create with these variables and the use of some words and phrases the ruleset.

[joeraz]

@cardset I had considered this approach - this is what XM Solitaire does for its game rules. Unfortunately, I don't see this working for PySol. I could pull the game variables easily, but they won't be able to tell the whole story because most of the individual games contain some amount of custom code to handle the games' more unique rules. An automated rule generator would not be able to parse this custom code, and in many cases, the logic in there is key to the game.

[shlomif]

On Wed, 29 Dec 2021 17:15:50 -0800 "Joe R." @.***> wrote:

@cardset I had considered this approach - this is what XM Solitaire does for its game rules. Unfortunately, I don't see this working for PySol. I could pull the game variables easily, but they won't be able to tell the whole story because most of the individual games contain some amount of custom code to handle the games' more unique rules. An automated rule generator would not be able to parse this custom code, and in many cases, the logic in there is key to the game.

there is https://politaire.com/ , but I'm not sure if its source is public and/or GPLv3-compatible.

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[joeraz]

I'm familiar with Politaire. I believe it's written in JavaScript, so the source should be obtainable if someone was to download the site pages, but I don't think it's officially available anywhere and the main developer died in 2015. I couldn't find any license info, so I can't assume it's GPL compatible. But I'm pretty sure that the documentation there was not auto-generated.

Probably mostly useful as a reference to confirm game rules.

[cardset]

From politaire.com

Politaire has detailed game rules pages for every single game. Admittedly, they are all programmatically generated from the option settings, so they can be a bit robotic in style,

[joeraz]

Okay, completely missed that. I think I was thrown off a bit by how there are some sections of their rules that were written by a human (describing history and sources for the games).

Looking closer, with Politaire, all of the games are generated by a set series of variables, which can be set by an Option menu similar to the Solitaire Wizard. This is similar to XM Solitaire, where the game rules are determined by XML variables. I could see this being useful if we wanted to make rules for Solitaire Wizard games, but it wouldn't work for games that contain unique rules or custom code (and most of them do).

[joeraz]

As of today, the documentation now contains a set of rules for every game in PySolFC. Though they could use copyediting and review for clarity. So it should be easier to go ahead with translating if anyone wants to.

That being said, I plan to start adding new games again after the 2.18 release, and may add other pages to the documentation too, so there will always be more pages added later.