So, I built a word game that was fairly successful on Steam in Unity. I’ve since switched to Unreal and have other ideas for word games, but the core problem I didn’t want to solve myself was the dictionary. They are expensive and hard to maintain, as well as being a real problem when it comes to multilingual support. (which a significant number of users requested)
I’m wondering if Epic has internal dictionaries they use, or if someone has good advice / a process for building one. It’s not a ‘indie’ specific question, I guess, but this specific market is one that even Wordle didn’t make much money in, so I can’t imagine larger players having any interest.
a C# dictionary, the equivalent in C++/Blueprints would be a Map
they function on Tuple, but you can think of it as <key,value> pair (technically you can have multiple values per key in a map, but that should be manageable by checking if the map contains before do an add)
unless you are talking about the more open definition of dictionary (a large bank of works that can be searched through) that would probably do best as a data-Table of strings
for multilingual support you can take a look here,
you could also put additional strings into your data-table for the other languages you support, though that would be seperate to the native localization functionality.
This isn’t a programming question; I know what a map is.
I’m hoping for some sort of library including an English dictionary, divided into Proper Names and non-proper names, with an associated API for searching for a specific word efficiently, searching for words containing sets of letters efficiently, and so on.
Maintaining just this in American English is a large task on its own. Trying to do it in a multilingual fashion would require tons of man hours.
the localization system provided by Epic is in the 3rd link I provided, unless you want to use something different.
in terms of the actual translations/interpretations “for individual words” that is supposed to be a bullet point positive of “Generative AI”; even though even if 2 or more languages shares a direct root conceptual interpretation might still be needed, which personally I would want validated.
as soon as you get to sentences the chance interpretation is required vs direct translation gets extremely lopsided, and this is still very shaky ground for Generative AI (It is close 95% accurate with direct word to word translations, depending on the languages, but only at 55-70% on interpretations especially if there may be conflicting interpretations)
This isn’t a question about localization or generation. It’s a question about, essentially, word lists and traditional dictionaries. It’s a question about a specific kind of resource that I am pretty sure is not included in the engine as-is. I am wondering if there is something Epic uses internally for it, (if they use it at all) and if there is something Epic can do to help me get access to this specific kind of resource so that I can build games around it more easily. Honestly, it is probably better classified as a feature request than as a question.