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Determining console locale and language

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The locale name can be retrieved by using the GetUserDefaultLocaleName API. The User in this case is simply the signed-in session. This API actually retrieves the locale that the console is set in, shown as follows.

wchar_t localeName[LOCALE_NAME_MAX_LENGTH];
int retVal = GetUserDefaultLocaleName( localeName, ARRAYSIZE( localeName ) );
// The value is returned in localeName.

In general, games shouldn't really care about the locale or language specified on the device. What they really care about is what language resources they should be loading. At a high-level, the recommendation is to choose the language in the game's package that is "closest" to what the user has selected on the device. There are three contributors to this choice:

  1. The languages that are declared in the game's microsoftgame.config.
  2. The languages that are declared in the packages layout file.
  3. The languages that are selected on the device.

Choosing a "closest" language can be hard. To make this really easy, developers can use the XPackageGetUserLocale function. It will always return the "closest" language. Games should use this language to figure out what game resources to load. The following code demonstrates how to use the function.

char gameLocale[LOCALE_NAME_MAX_LENGTH];

// Get the best user locale that is installed
HRESULT hr = XPackageGetUserLocale(_countof(gameLocale), gameLocale);
if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
{
    printf("Game using locale: %s\n", gameLocale);
}

A few scenarios are possible, which are described in the following examples.

Example 1

On console, a user selects French for their Language setting and selects France (fr-FR) for their Country setting. The user's locale is fr-FR. The user has a game that contains the following in the Resources section of the microsoftgame.config.

<Resources>
    <Resource Language="en-US"/>
    <Resource Language="fr-FR"/>
    <Resource Language="de-DE"/>
    <Resource Language="en-GB"/>
</Resources>

This implies that the game has localized strings and images for English-United States (en-US), French-France (fr-FR), German-Germany (de-DE), and English-Great Britain (en-GB). Because the user's locale matches a supported locale in the manifest, XPackageGetUserLocale returns the value fr-FR. All the in-game text is in French (fr-FR). The return value of XPackageGetUserLocale is fr-FR. The return value of GetUserDefaultLocaleName is also fr-FR.

Example 2

On console, a user selects English for their Language setting and selects UK (en-GB) for their Country setting. The user's locale is en-GB. The user has a game that contains the following in the Resources section of the microsoftgame.config.

<Resources>
    <Resource Language="en-US"/>
    <Resource Language="fr-FR"/>
    <Resource Language="de-DE"/>
</Resources>

Because the user's locale isn't present in the manifest, the fallback locale with the same language (English) is chosen as the default language. In this case, it's en-US, and so XPackageGetUserLocale returns this value. All the in-game text is in English (en-US). The return value of XPackageGetUserLocale is en-US. The return value of GetUserDefaultLocaleName is en-GB. Remember that GetUserDefaultLocaleName will return what is set on the console independant of what the game has declared.

Example 3

In a scenario similar to the earlier examples, a user's settings on a console result in a user locale of fr-FR. The Resources section of MicrosoftGame.config contains the following.

<Resources>
    <Resource Language="en-US"/>
    <Resource Language="de-DE"/>
</Resources>

Because the user's locale isn't present in the .config file and no other locale with the same language is present, the first language in the Resources tag is selected as the default language (en-US). XPackageGetUserLocale returns this value. All the in-game text is in English (en-US). The return value of XPackageGetUserLocale is en-US. The return value of GetUserDefaultLocaleName is fr-FR.

Summary

The locale of the console is returned by GetUserDefaultLocaleName. This will return what is set by the user on the device independant of what may be declared by the game.

The language is returned by XPackageGetUserLocale and is based on the following:

  1. If the user's selected locale is present in the microsoftgame.config file, the locale is returned.
  2. If the locale isn't available in the microsoftgame.config file, it looks for some other locale with the same language. If there are multiple locales with the same language, the best fallback locale is returned. The fallback language is based on the user's locale.
  3. If the two previously mentioned situations fail, the first locale found in the Resources section is selected.
  4. If there are no locales in the user's selected language, the first locale entry in the Resources section is returned.
  5. If no languages are listed in microsoftgame.config at all, XPackageGetUserLocale returns the console language.

See also

GetUserDefaultLocaleName
XPackageGetUserLocale
Localization and globalization
MicrosoftGame.config localization