How I added English to my solo-dev Unity MMO without touching 130 UI files

#gamedev #unity3d #csharp #localization

My game, Battle of Pirates, is a free online pirate MMO for Windows: real-time naval PvP, fleets, fortress sieges, boss events. I build it alone in Turkey, so for two years every string in the game was hardcoded Turkish. Players here search for it as an online korsan oyunu, and that was fine until the game started showing up on itch.io and IndieDB and international players arrived.

The problem: about 1,700 unique UI strings across 130 C# files, all built in code (text.text = "AYARLAR"), plus hundreds of server messages sent from Node.js. Wrapping every literal in a T("...") call would touch every file and risk breaking a live game.

The trick: translate at the last moment, not at the source

Instead of changing the code that sets text, I translate the text after it is set and before it is drawn. A single MonoBehaviour runs late in LateUpdate ([DefaultExecutionOrder(32000)]), so it runs after all game code but before Unity renders the canvases:

foreach (Text t in texts) {
    string s = t.text;
    if (ReferenceEquals(seen[t.GetInstanceID()], s)) continue; // unchanged, skip
    string r = BopLoc.Translate(s);
    if (r != s) t.text = r;
}

Only Texts whose string reference changed are processed, so the per-frame cost is a reference comparison. When the language is Turkish, the component doesn't exist at all: zero risk for existing players.

One dictionary file, two kinds of entries

Translations live in a plain tab-separated file in Resources/:

exact entries: AYARLAR → SETTINGS
fragment entries for strings built by concatenation: "Seviye " → "Level ", " inci" → " pearls"

Fragments are applied longest-first and only on word boundaries, so " sa" (hours) never breaks a word like saldırı. Rich-text tags such as <color=...> are skipped, and each segment between tags is translated on its own.

Server messages for free

Because translation happens on the client at display time, the server needed no changes. A message like "Kaptan23 artık arkadaşın!" hits the fragment " artık arkadaşın!" → " is now your friend!" and shows as Kaptan23 is now your friend!

Things I had to handle

Input fields: skip the textComponent of every InputField, or you'd translate what the player is typing.
Switching back to Turkish live: store the original string for every Text you changed, and restore it when the player switches back.
Trailing spaces: they kept getting stripped from the dictionary file, so the loader copies the key's leading and trailing spaces onto the value.

Result

About 1,670 dictionary entries, one new C# file, and a language toggle on the login screen. The English update shipped as a normal patch through the game's own launcher.

It's not a replacement for a real localization pipeline, but for a solo dev with a live game, it got a second language out in a day without a risky refactor.

If you want to see it running, Battle of Pirates is free on battleofpirates.com and the Microsoft Store. Questions about the approach are welcome in the comments!

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