The technical demo is a very early version of Pathologic 1,
demonstrating basic capabilities of the in-house 3D engine
(Plague City); an early version of some of the game's
mechanics, such as the Actor system; and, presumably, a
draft of the plot, the characters, and the dynamics between
them.
Aryal Cyr font file is included with the download. This
font is referenced by name in the .exe file, but was not
actually included with the demo, probably implying it
was already installed on all computers that the demo was
supposed to run on...
Installing it will let you see the text how it was
supposedly intended to be seen. Running the demo without
it will have it use a default font of your system's, but
it might make some text look less pretty.
If you wish to patch your own copy of the techdemo
instead of relying on this patch, you will only require
the /patch folder from the link above.
As a good amount of the strings is stored directly in
the binary (.EXE file), it requires to be modified in
order to change some of the text. The /patch
subdirectory includes a .bdf file which contains all
necessarily modifications to the strings. It can be
applied via
bspatch
(or maybe via
one of these, although I haven't used any of them personally) to
the original PlagueCity.exe file.
All dialogues with NPCs are stored as text files. You
can swap the Dialogues folder from /patch with the
original folder in /Data/Text/.
As mentioned before, many strings of text are hard-coded
into the .exe file. Editing them is, theoretically,
rather straightforward: you can open the .exe in a hex
editor (I use ImHex), search for the strings, and
replace them with your desired ones.
There are, however, a couple things to keep in mind when
placing strings:
All strings are limited in length, are packed in the
.exe rather tightly, and must start exactly with the
address that the program looks for them at.
Strings of different UI elements are usually bundled
together, and are separated with empty bytes (00).
Not separating the strings like so might lead to
unexpected results.
There are a couple notable roadblocks when working with
Cyrillic strings in the demo.
The first one is related to searching for their location
in hex code: location - they all are encoded in
Windows-1251, or CP1251 encoding. If your hex editor of
choice doesn't allow specifying string encoding, likely
it will be looking for strings only in UTF-8, the
standart encoding. This poses a problem, since different
encoding will have the same Cyrillic text looking
entirely different when converted to raw bytes.
The solutions for that are: 1. find a hex editor that
will allow you to specify encoding; 2. if your most
favourite already chosen hex editor doesn't support
that, but can just search for patterns of bytes, you
could use
this Python script
that I wrote for translating any string to CP-1251
hexcode, so that you could then just search for those
bytes.
To make the text more-or-less universal for all users,
it's recommended to stick to encoding all strings in the
.exe to UTF-8.
But that doesn't solve the other roadblock, which is
related to the externally stored text, aka the files in
Data/Texts/Dialogues: the game will always read them in
CP1251. A future patch could *probably* fix this, but
it's going to take much more effort to find out where
does the demo store the encoding it's told to use
(naively assuming it's built as straightforward as
that).
(Although - lucky to this project, all of these problems
don't affect the English language, because UTF-8 and
CP1251 have the Latin symbols mapped the same way.)
To open and reference the unmodified demo how it's
originally meant to be viewed, you will have to deal
with the Windows-1251 encoding again. If you don't use a
Russian language Windows, some tools exist that could
allow you to make a specific program to run with a
different encoding than that on your system.
If you use Linux or MacOS with Wine, no extra tools are
required as you can just export the encoding before
running the demo, like so:
LC_ALL=ru_RU.CP1251 ./PlagueCity.exe
I used
bspatch4
to create a .bdf patch; this format seems to be somehow
common in the ROM hacking scene and seems to be
appropriate here, and it was also pretty easy to make.
To create a .bdf file like this, you need to preserve
the original .exe file and place it next to your
modified .exe file, then run bsdiff to create a .bdf
file that contains the differences between the two
versions of the techdemo. This file can then be applied
to an .exe.
However, the .bdf patches are more common over in the
ROM hacking scene because distributing any editions of
ROMs is usually forbidden by the copyright law,
requiring modders and translators to only share the
patches, leaving the end-user to "legally" secure the
ROM-to-be-patched themselves. As such, since the
techdemo's distribution isn't exactly... controlled?, in
this case it might be easier to just directly share the
modified .exe file.
Patches *could* still come in useful - for example, if
someone creates a patch to change in-game controls, and
a user would like to play both with the updated controls
and the English localization: they could then just apply
two non-conflicting patches to one .exe. But as that
situation seems to be kind of theoretical right now (I'm
not aware of any other techdemo mods existing at the
time that would also modify the .exe), I left the .bdf
file and these notes as more of a "what if" or as a
starting point for someone else's tinkering, than
something that everyone would have to sit through in
order to play the demo in English. :^)
