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Using the language system

What is the language system?

'Language system' might sound intimidating if you've never used one before, but it's very straightforward. A language system is just a way to make things translateable.

For example, let's suppose I want to create a wonderful new item designed to thrill server admins the world over: the 'Nuclear Bomb'. I write the item code, and then, in my code, I set the item's name to be 'Nuclear Bomb'. 

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...
// (some code to create the item)
...
item.setName("Nuclear Bomb")
...
(not real code - just for demonstration purposes)

Now, suppose we want Spanish speakers to be able to play our addon. Well, in Spanish, that's called 'Bomba Nuclear' according to google translate. But I've hardcoded in 'Nuclear Bomb'... so how can we make sure that Spanish people see 'Bomba Nuclear' instead?

The solution to this is to just use a generic 'translation key'. 

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// (some code to create the item)
...
item.setName("item.nuclear-bomb.name")
...
(not real code - just for demonstration purposes)

Now, we can create a different file for each language, containing all the translation keys for that language!

en.yml
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item.nuclear-bomb.name: "Nuclear Bomb"
(not real code - just for demonstration purposes)

es.yml
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item.nuclear-bomb.name: "Bomba Nuclear"
(not real code - just for demonstration purposes)

Obviously, we'll need some system to substitute in the right translation for the right people, but Pylon will handle that for you automatically. Now, let's see how to do the same thing with Pylon.

Adding name and lore to our baguette

Remember how we did item.setName("item.nuclear-bomb.name") above? In Pylon, you don't need to do that because Pylon automatically generates the translation key based on your item's key. All we need to do is create translation files and make sure they contain the correct keys.

Open the 'en.yml' file ('en' is a code for 'English') in the src/main/resources/lang folder.

Adding translations for other languages

If we wanted to create a Spanish language file, we would call it 'es.yml' - or 'cs.yml' for Czech, and so on. See this Wikipedia page for a full list of these 2-letter codes.

Next, add this inside the file:

en.yml
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addon: "<your addon name here>"

item:
  baguette:
    name: "Baguette"
    lore: |-
      <arrow> <dark_red>The <blue>best </red>food

Note that we have an addon key. This is just the name of your addon.

We've also added name and lore for our baguette. Notice that we're using baguette here because that's the key that we created earlier, in this line: 

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NamespacedKey baguetteKey = new NamespacedKey(this, "baguette");

What's all this <arrow> and <red> and </red> business?

We go into this in the Advanced Lore chapter.

Start up the server again. Your baguette should now have name and lore! Baguette with translations