Items (still) not yet shipped ...

Over the week-end I have been working on translating (well ... I mean babelfishing, as I don't know a single word of russian) a very interesting document authored by Yurii Tiapchenko one of the designer of the Soyuz's console "Sirius". This kind of document is pretty critical for our project as this is pretty much the only source of information we have on it (and as I'm still waiting for that Soyuz book!) ... There is also an article from the same author available on the web (and in English!), but it doesn't have the same level of details and mostly deal with the more recent Soyuz variant. While I was swimming in russian, I also started looking at how we were going to display Russian within the panels (as well as how to support multi-language). This is in fact a rather simple issue thanks to Unicode. By using only Unicode string in the add-on (and of course in the SDK), we can pretty much support any language. Now, the problem is that a word or a sentence in English may take more space than in Russian, and space on a controls (or around the controls) is limited. Here's the russified version of one of our test panel (related to my previous post):

Friday night I found the meaning of the two knobs located bellow the screen (see previous post) ... Brightness and Contrast (well duh!). Now, we have to decide how we're going to deal with the language issue. For realism sake, using Russian is the way to go, but it'll make things way more complex for non Russian users ...