Fixing the Untranslated Dimension Door | Rebuilding Heroes of Might & Magic [Episode 121]

A week after releasing my Heroes of Might and Magic 1 engine rebuild, the bug reports have been rolling in — and while fixing the view spells (View World / View All, View Resources, View Mines, View Artifacts, View Heroes) I discovered that the Dimension Door spell and its "Select Destination" prompt were still hard-coded in English, somehow slipping past the game's translation system. This episode is about wiring those strings into the localization files so they display in every supported language. I walk through how the translation system actually works: a JSON dictionary of about 1,260 key-value pairs that the engine looks up anywhere it needs text, plus a text-render (TR) function that handles the lookups and word-wrapping so nothing overflows the window. Because everything routes through that lookup, adding a whole new language is surprisingly easy — dump the English file into an AI, get back another language, and drop it in. I also cover the game's translation history (French and German originally, then Russian by Buka and Polish later, with Spanish and Italian being uncertain), community requests for Swedish and Vietnamese that are blocked mainly by font support, and a big shout-out to Andre, who volunteered to clean up the machine-translated Russian — prompting me to plan a proper credits screen for contributors. The back half is a live playthrough where I build up mage guilds to actually roll Dimension Door and test it in German, catching a couple of small bugs along the way (clicking a castle mid-move, a hero that keeps moving after a misclick — filming live always seems to surface them). By the end the Dimension Door translation is working correctly, though I note one thing still on my to-do list: testing Dimension Door while on a boat, which I leave as an exercise for the viewer.