Localizing Black ICE, the Biggest HOI3 Mod, into Chinese

I started playing Hearts of Iron III in high school and never really stopped — university and graduate school included, more than a thousand hours in total. Black ICE was always my favourite mod: supply is unforgiving, industry is a real planning problem, and the order of battle of a single armoured corps can eat an afternoon. But my English could not keep up with the reading — three hours of play meant two hours in a dictionary.

So the wish sat there for years: if only Black ICE were in Chinese.

In 2026 I finally built it. The repository is BlackICE-Chinese: Black ICE merged with the community’s Chinese localization of the game, so that it opens in Chinese and can be played from start to finish.

The hard part was not translation

The engine was. The stock hoi3_tfh.exe only understands 8-bit glyphs, so the Chinese text simply would not display — drop it in and the interface shows blanks or garbage.

Half of the project therefore went into patching the executable:

• reading glyphs at 16 bits instead of 8: 42 patch sites plus an 8 KB new code section;
• fixing a guaranteed 0xC0000005 crash. The root cause was small: inside a code cave, mov cl,[edx+eax] clobbered the caller’s ecx, which held the string capacity 15; the following cmp ecx,0x10 then took the heap-pointer branch and dereferenced inline characters as a pointer. The fix is two bytes;
• enabling the 4 GB address space (LAA), without which the late-game map runs out of memory.

The patches are made offline; nothing is injected into a running process.

Where it stands

• 80,195 of 83,751 localization strings translated, 95.8%;
• general names (21,623 unique names), unit designations (8,472) and cabinet ministers (5,993 unique names) all at 100%;
• weapon models and specifications deliberately left in English: 381mm MkII, Mark 20 Bidder. Chinese players read those in English anyway, and a forced translation makes them harder to recognise.

What is still missing: a handful of theatre HQ names and one full play-through.

Why write it down

None of this is useful. It will not become a paper or the first line of a CV. But it is the most complete idea-to-delivery project I have done in years: direction, trade-offs and acceptance were human; AI read assembly, read crash dumps and wrote verification scripts, and also made mistakes that a human had to catch. The tools, the hours and the token usage are all recorded in the repository’s ABOUT.md, so anyone can check.

I have come to feel that a person should not be judged by papers alone. Projects, questions and long-held interests probably say more about who someone is — which is also why I am putting this material on my homepage.