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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rogueboy" data-source="post: 4739574" data-attributes="member: 61742">It may be naive of me to believe, but I am under the impression that the US is the largest share of the market (as you suggest in your final paragraph), and from what I've seen, I can think of only one demographic group within America that is familiar with the Metric system: scientists. I wish that wasn't true, because the metric system is infinitely more logical than the Imperial system (1kilometer = 1000meters [factors of 10] vs. 1mile = 5280feet [factors of WTF?]).However, I think another reason for this dominance of the Imperial system is that many of the developers and designers are familiar with the Imperial system and can visualize Imperial measurements, but are unable to do the same with Metric measurements (even as a scientist, I admit that I have some difficulty with visualizing metric measurements, especially distances [I'm a chemist, I don't deal with distance - volume and mass, sure, but not distance]). Because of this predominance among the developers and the market favoring the Imperial system, and the societal recoil from anything metric, I can understand why many games are written with Imperial measurements.But of course, that doesn't deal with the issue of why the measurements aren't adjusted to metric when translated to another language, since the market for the translated edition is likely able to visualize metric measurements, but not Imperial? I can think of two answers to this. The first is far simpler: the translators are lazy. It's a lot easier to just leave the measurements in Imperial units than it is to go through and convert all of them to equivalent (or at least similar) metric units.This brings me to my second answer: if a measurement is "30 feet," what is the proper choice of conversion? Do we approximate 1 yard (3 feet) to equal 1 meter (roughly 10% off - 36 inches vs. ~39 inches)? This would leave the "30 feet" measurement equal to 10 meters... a simple number. However, what happens to squares? As written in 3.x, 1 square is 5 feet on a side... that would become 5/3 meters... not a simple measurement... and if we approximate that to 2 meters, we then end up with the 10 meter measurement we got earlier as 5 squares, rather than 6 as written.To put it simply, my second answer to the question (2 paragraphs above) is that it would require some form of approximation, and a general consensus of how to do the conversion: if you're being accurate to within ~10%, then we have to be willing to have somewhat awkward measurements for certain things (like how long the side of a square is), or be willing to have the distance (in squares) be different in the Imperial and Metric systems... neither of which is a particularly pleasant choice, and likely leads back into the first answer: developers and translators have decided that laziness (not dealing with the second answer I proposed) is preferable to trying to figure out a workable conversion that doesn't make things unnecessarily complicated.</blockquote>

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