Zusi-3 for English reading users.

[blockhead51]

Hallo.
This is my first post here.
When Zusi-3 finally becomes available for purchase for the first time in the next few months? years? Millennia?
Will an English translation of the instructions be available for it from the word Go?
Or will English speakers/readers have to wait for a translation?
Or not expect to get one?

I've got fed up of trying to make a route in Rail Simulator, (Kuju) just don't find it enjoyable at all.
Its a badly thought out Sim.
Bit of a Dogs Dinner really.
Also lost Rose Grove marshalling Yard due to a bug in that, so just don't want to bother with it.
Takes too long to make anything in Rail Simulator.
So thought I'd wait for Zusi-3 to become available.
From what I have seen of it, and the fact that Roland Ziegler is involved with it, I'm sure a lot of thought will have been given to making it very useable and efficient for the operator of it.

Wayne, Lancashire UK

[Roland Ziegler]

Wayne,

welcome to the Zusi forum.

I can only give you my personal opinion and impression, anything official has to be said by Carsten.

You will have read about the appearance of Zusi3 at the Innotrans in Berlin, you will have seen the new Zusi website and you will have watched the video on YouTube. Carsten publishes progress reports and feature descriptions only if he is confident that a certain milestone has been accomplished and a certain feature has been implemented successfully. As no release date has been announced so far, I would draw the conclusion that there is still some work to be done.

To my understanding, internationalisation has always been an important aspect during Zusi3 development. However, as you will be aware, the Zusi project has very limited resources, essentially it is a one-man-project, fortunately with a few similar-minded "co-workers" and contributors in the background.

Part of the internationalisation work is translation of documents and user interfaces, another important part is "culture" specific railway aspects. I would guess that Carsten kept/keeps this in mind when writing his code. There is a work-in-progress Zusi2 British route with essential and professional contribution from the UK. This allows some insight into British railway infrastructure and operations. Such knowledge will most certainly have had or have some influence on the Zusi3 design. Pure guesswork again, I would think that the foundations for internationalisation will be there from early on.

I don't know how Carsten plans the release but I can imagine that there could be a gradual process. I have no idea how much visible and usable internationalisation to expect in the beginning, but even if a first package were all German it could be wrong to draw any conclusion it will remain all and only German for the ensuing versions.

[Carsten Hölscher]

The programme-interfaces will be translatable in every language. All texts and messages are listed in a simple textfile, that simply has to be translated. I'm sure that this job is done soon after publishing the first Zusi 3-version or maybe even at the same time, if someone helps me with that during beta-testing.

The translation of the documentation is more expensive. I would like to concentrate on programming until the most important features are implemented so it's a question of helpers again. But anyway there must be a stable version of the German version first, unless we want to translate everything twice.

Carsten

[blockhead51]

Thanks both of you for the comprehensive answers.

Wayne

[Rbnqss]

Kind of offtopic, but how interactive the Zusi 3 locomotives will be, i mean that are thre gonna be working info displays( i dont know the correc terms) where you see your timetables etc