La Progetto Wunderland

One of the indicators of the worldwide reach of a project is when you receive complaints about it only being in English. We found ourselves in this position earlier this year when we were contacted on the forums from Switzerland by Ronny Standke. However, Ronny didn't contact us to complain--he contacted us to offer to internationalise Project Wonderland! Since then, working with the core team, Ronny has internationalised the majority of the core source code and also provided German (de) and Swiss German (de_CH) localisations. Not to be outdone, our colleague Michel Denis has provided a French (fr) locale, and I've produced a British English (en_GB) variant of the default US English. 

We invited Ronny to write a blog entry on his experience: 

'Here at imedias, the information center for digital media in school and teaching of the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, we were given a task from the canton Solothurn to set up an "active and living environment" for headteachers.
After a long evaluation phase we decided to use Project Wonderland. The reasons for choosing Project Wonderland were:

However, Project Wonderland obviously has some negative aspects, such as:

We are confident that Project Wonderland will mature over time and that speed issues will be resolved. The one area where we can help to improve the situation is translating the client to our languages. We downloaded the source code via anonymous svn and performed the localisation (L10n) for German, i.e. we just translated the few resource bundle files we found. Unfortunately, most of Wonderland was still missing internationalisation (i18n). Because we have some experience with i18n/L10n of Java programs we tried adding the missing pieces. After some days of careful source patching, translating, updating from svn and resolving conflicts we had a pretty good i18n coverage.
We did not want to keep this work behind our closed doors so I contacted the Project Wonderland team and asked if they were interested in our work. After sending the initial patch I was welcomed with open arms and a huge amount of appreciation and received developer access almost instantly. Then I tried committing the changes we made piece by piece, checked every change and by doing so noticed several little (mostly cosmetic) things that were crying out for a fix. I became a little too ambitious with it, started breaking things until it raised some eyebrows and was brought back into line. Now I am working in minimal invasive mode, conducting a code review with the owner of the source code before committing my changes and also learned to write bug reports before sending in a patch for review. So, let this be a small lesson for you all future Wonderland contributors. ;-)
Right now we (the whole Project Wonderland team) are still finding pieces of Project Wonderland where i18n is missing or can be improved and fixing those parts. We really look forward to a version where our target group must not jump over a language barrier in addition to the technical challenge they will face when using a virtual world client for the first time in their lives. When working with the development version of Project Wonderland it is great and encouraging to see the improvements that happen to it every day. And it is also great to see that other Project Wonderland team members start taking care of little cosmetic things in the source. ;-)
And (just in case you wondered), we are still calling it "Project Wonderland" here.'

To get some idea of how the user interface changes when using different locales, the screenshots below are of the avatar configuration user interface for the US English, German, French and British English locales, respectively (you may need to widen your browser). Volunteers are needed for other languages, so if you're able to spend a while translating from English, German, French, or British English to some other language, please get in touch.

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Re: Any updates on a WL 0.4-like video capability for 0.5?

JME Version?

Re: Any updates on a WL 0.4-like video capability for 0.5?