Association News 24_CW08 - DDFs are talking Englisch

Basically, the introductory text says it all about. But nevertheless, the development of how this came about is quite exciting, which is why we can still report a few more words on this point.

Over the last few weeks, we have noticed that our English-speaking DMXControl community has somehow grown - both here in the forum and on our Discord server. As a result, there are now significantly more posts in the "international" section. Quite a few of them - as so often among the German-language topics - concerned the subject of DDFs. However, we had a shortcoming here until recently: there has long been detailed documentation on DDFs in the Wiki for our German community. This was also the result of the fact that we did not have the personnel capacity in the development team to update all innovations in the logic of DDFs in DDFCreator. But in our English-language Wiki, this very important part was completely missing.

You have probably used one of the many tools to translate websites live into English - but nothing is better than having them directly available in English without any other tools. We have been using fitting tools to translate the texts for the English version of a news item for a long time now, and we also carry out the odd text optimization afterwards. However, translating a Wiki article is a different level, especially in the context of our DDF documentation. This includes numerous tables and no fewer XML code blocks, where the latter in particular must not be touched.

In one of our livestreams, we once showed that we had already consulted ChatGPT for a new function in DMXControl 3. After this first test, the tool fell asleep again in our minds. For some inexplicable reason, however, ChatGPT has returned to the forefront of our minds in recent weeks, and we have been discussing our experiences with this AI internally. Triggered by another inquiry about DDFs, it was only then that we thought to ask ChatGPT for help with the translation. And lo and behold: the result was again very promising.

Thanks to the support of ChatGPT, you can now find the comparatively good English-language version of our documentation for the DDFs in our English-language Wiki. We will have to check the articles afterwards and remove well-intentioned optimizations in some places. Some templates also did not work or (possibly) still do not work properly, but an important milestone has already been reached. As part of this check, the cross-references from the German to the English Wiki and vice versa will also be introduced.

We hope that this will make it much easier for you to create DDFs for DMXControl 3 from now on. However, if you still have any questions, you are of course welcome to continue asking questions here in the forum or on our Discord server.

Yours DMXControl team

A word on our own behalf: Usually the English and German versions of our news are the same. In this case, however, we have deviated from our usual procedure and have adapted the text of this news in some passages specifically for you as an English-speaking community.