New Thracia 776 translation

[js394]

Great news! This will surely speed up the translation! (And also nice to hear that the pointer offsets I gave you worked!)

So let me get this straight- Resire will dump a script, which you can then edit, and then insert it back into the game? I've just been a little confused about what it actually does.

Also guys, I think that this topic is quickly escalating in to a big argument. If you don't think gringe is a good translator, or that you just don't like fan translations, that's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. But if you don't like how we're doing this, then please refrain from posting about it. All this does is derail the thread and take up space.

[Quirino]

One question, will your program be able to handle scripts that are longer than the original? Thus require more space than the original space reserved for Japanese script. How will that work within your program?

[shadowofchaos]

To do that in many cases requires deviations from the source

to be honest I had zero consideration for the source material

not the names, in which source material fidelity was like... number one on my list

You know, I'm trying not to be condescending. I'm really trying.

But what is the point of calling it a "translation" patch and "refining" it when you're taking zero consideration for the original source material?

While I am one of the people that usually go "literal" route more than is healthy... I understand the demands of translation... of localization. The fact is, sometimes it involves changing something completely. Even to the point where *I* won't be happy... but who cares if the quality of the work is improved in most people's eyes?

But damn you're taking it to a stupid extreme.

In this regard, gringe's approach being more free to interpretations of text to a slightly lesser degree than you are, is more qualified to make deviations from the script because of one simple advantage:

He can read the original source material, understand it, digest it... and then decide whether or not to "breathe life" into the script with changes as well how best to do it.

What takes the cake is that you obsess so much over the names of all things.

Just call it "FanFiction Emblem: Thracia 776".

Honestly the community's chances of recognizing your work from before towards a "recommended" translation patch (excuse me for crapping all over it) is as much as the community recognizing the work of a "no-effort" text reskin ROM hack where someone just did a text replace for Lyn and Eliwood's names, and recolored their portraits and battle palettes for their own self-insert characters, and called that a super quality FE7 ROM hack.

Edited April 9, 2014 by shadowofchaos

[Siuloir]

to be honest I had zero consideration for the source material whatsoever (this is for the translations themselves, not the names, in which source material fidelity was like... number one on my list)

I was always concerned about making a good story

FESD of course always being my idol

You take a trashy hollow lifeless thing and imbue it, golemlike, with a spark

To do that in many cases requires deviations from the source

A kind of phantasmic power has been given to these games in the minds of the fans, but if people saw them as they really were they would be nothing but disappointed

Your last statement is a bit confusing - What games are you referring to specifically, and how are non-Japanese-speakers talking about 'seeing things as they really were'?

The Thracia script is definitely not a trashy, hollow, lifeless thing. I'm not going to purport that SNES games of the time were novel-grade material, but what it is, there's a measure of quality to it. It has the best opening arc in any Fire Emblem, arguably, in terms of building atmosphere. Calling it trashy is far off base.

[General Banzai]

A significant part of Thracia's atmosphere is not delivered by its script

In fact Thracia as it stands is probably more enjoyable scriptless than with a script, with a few exceptions here and there where something of actual interest is related, usually by August of all people

[shadowofchaos]

Are you implying that the original FE5 Japanese script is so void of any value that it requires something akin to the Ghost Stories "localization"?

[Celice]

Great news! This will surely speed up the translation! (And also nice to hear that the pointer offsets I gave you worked!)

So let me get this straight- Resire will dump a script, which you can then edit, and then insert it back into the game? I've just been a little confused about what it actually does.

Also guys, I think that this topic is quickly escalating in to a big argument. If you don't think gringe is a good translator, or that you just don't like fan translations, that's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. But if you don't like how we're doing this, then please refrain from posting about it. All this does is derail the thread and take up space.

On another note, Are you the same joesteve1914 working with the second Tingle game on the DS?? How many active projects do you have :o

Edited April 9, 2014 by Celice

[Book of Ereshkigal]

A significant part of Thracia's atmosphere is not delivered by its script

In fact Thracia as it stands is probably more enjoyable scriptless than with a script, with a few exceptions here and there where something of actual interest is related, usually by August of all people

Then just go write a fanfic (or a fan remake, if you really wanted to, but I advise you actually use the jp script...) or something. Most people probably don't want a fanfic instead of an actual translation.

Either way, why delude a community on the "low quality" of a game by rewriting it? They should be able to experience what it actually is. (why do you even care what the community thinks? I admit, I'm kinda missing the meaning of that statement?)

Edited April 9, 2014 by L95

[Siuloir]

A significant part of Thracia's atmosphere is not delivered by its script

In fact Thracia as it stands is probably more enjoyable scriptless than with a script, with a few exceptions here and there where something of actual interest is related, usually by August of all people

No, no it does not. What an asinine, baseless statement, and one you've made based off an English translation of the script which omits entire lines of dialogue at random instances.

The 'interesting bits August fills in' are largely bits of world building, which was never a significant component of game releases of the time. You're not going to find a Mass Effect-level constructed universe in games of that time, the industry was not at that point.

The major issue you will find with the script is poor characterization of the non central characters, a problem which Fire Emblem has struggled with in every incarnation of the game (particularly pre Support chains) because it has such a large cast.

Are you implying that the original FE5 Japanese script is so void of any value that it requires something akin to the Ghost Stories "localization"?

A script General Banzai has not even read because he doesn't speak Japanese, no less!

Edited April 9, 2014 by Siuloir

[MP2E]

Awesome, MP2E. I hope this text editor works out well and serves the purpose we need it to serve.

Thanks!

Hey MP2E, how is your program figuring out what duplicate text isn't used by the game? I know there's some unused text in the game in the prologue, dealing with Noishe and Alec and Ethlin, and I'm not sure if this text is included in some pointer array or not. But my big interest is leftover text that isn't included in a pointer array, like we see in games like Chrono Trigger. You have any ideas on an automated way to detect text not in a conventional table?

Duplicate text is handled by creating a merge tag and inserting it at the beginning of the original bit of dialogue, so that when I write an encoder it will write the script in multiple places. As for unused dialogue, it should handle it as long as the game doesn't reference it in the PPT tables.

I'm kicking around a few different ideas as to how to find the tables. I could:

A) Identify sections of valid Shift-JIS or EUC-JP text, then finding the 'boundaries' around said text. Then search for the address of the beginning of the text and note where it's pointed from.

B) Identify the pointer tables themselves, then verify they are pointing to text by jumping to the address and matching it to a 'fuzzy template'

Probably B will end up in the final product.

Great news! This will surely speed up the translation! (And also nice to hear that the pointer offsets I gave you worked!)

So let me get this straight- Resire will dump a script, which you can then edit, and then insert it back into the game? I've just been a little confused about what it actually does.

Also guys, I think that this topic is quickly escalating in to a big argument. If you don't think gringe is a good translator, or that you just don't like fan translations, that's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. But if you don't like how we're doing this, then please refrain from posting about it. All this does is derail the thread and take up space.

Resire just dumps the script, I'm planning on writing another program that reads the scripts that are output from Resire and reinjects it into the ROMs

One question, will your program be able to handle scripts that are longer than the original? Thus require more space than the original space reserved for Japanese script. How will that work within your program?

This is actually outside of the scope of Resire itself because it only dumps scripts, but the reinjector will support injecting larger scripts, yes. How it can do this is:

A) Identifying unused space and using a control code to jump to an unused address to resume the dialogue (Risky)

B) Using an extended ROM and using that space as the area to drop longer dialogue bits (Safer)

Most likely I will write the injector to only do B, and later extend it to support A, if needed.

I'm writing each component as a separate tool, for now, but I'm already tossing around the idea of combining them into a text editor with a GUI after each component is complete.

Edited April 9, 2014 by MP2E

[Celice]

I'm writing each component as a separate tool, for now, but I'm already tossing around the idea of combining them into a text editor with a GUI after each component is complete.

There's be a lot of thankful people in the community, both currently and in the future, if you do end up doing this. If it ever gets to that stage, would you also be interested in adding in a small font editor, based on some basic graphic editors already out (like YY-CHR), as well as a way to edit the font's variable-width information? A few other game editors, such as Lazy Shell (Super Mario RPG) have similar features to help users create fonts which allow more and different kinds of text to appear on screen.

For example, Korean fan translations are quite popular for videogames, and being able to use your tool not only to extract and insert modified text, but also to create the necessary lettering and other glyphs for such a translation, would be a great boon.

[Quirino]

And what I forgot to say earlier.. Thanks a lot to Joesteve for picking this up, because this game can use a retranslation very well!

Edited April 10, 2014 by WindMage25

[js394]

On another note, Are you the same joesteve1914 working with the second Tingle game on the DS?? How many active projects do you have :o

Yes, but the hacking part is solved, so I really don't do anything with it anymore because the only thing left to do is translate. That's why I took up this project.

Resire just dumps the script, I'm planning on writing another program that reads the scripts that are output from Resire and reinjects it into the ROMs

Ah, okay. That makes a lot more sense.

That is unfortunate though that Firelizard's translation omits some dialogue. Although we're probably out of luck there because I don't think anyone is going to want to retranslate a script of FE5's size just to look for lines that were left out

Edited April 13, 2014 by joesteve1914

[MP2E]

Small-ish progress update. Still working steadily, I've hit a few roadblocks with the auto detection of dialogue so I've broken out a hex editor to try and figure out if there's an obvious difference between pointer tables and ... everything else. The issue is that SNES opcode length is defined by a register, so in other words, unless you're emulating the SNES AND you've already executed the instruction, you have no idea if it's an instruction or not.

It doesn't *seem* like there's an easy way, but I feel like I'm missing something. I've been reading documentation like crazy to make sure.

Dumping with PPT memory files will still be the default. I'm realizing how much time I've wasted trying to auto-detect text when more important things could be done, so I'm going to focus on getting the actual dumper and injectors finished so we can start putting the actual dialogue in.

Oh yeah, Resire is going to include the re-injector now. Looking at all of the generic code that can be shared between the dumper and reinjector, it seems silly NOT to put it in the same utility.

No plans for a GUI yet, that's far in the future.. I definitely forsee Resire needing to dump font data, character portraits and various other image formats and reinject them, but I don't know if I'm up to programming a full image editor + text editor suite. I'll revisit that idea when I'm a lot farther along.

One huge thing I forgot to mention : This tool is going to be released on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It's command line only at first, but I'll include some simple double-clickable scripts for each platform in the interest of making it incredibly easy to use. Performance is pretty ridiculously fast(like it matters, since it's dumping text) and memory usage is low :)

Oh and, here's a bit of a 'teaser' to prove I'm actually coding and not just a fuckwit: Bit of Resire's code

That code just handles command-line options, I'd like to keep the juicy bits secret for now, but all will be released when it's ready and as close to bug-free as I can possibly guarantee :P

In the interest of not posting a bunch with no progress, I'll probably wait on posting another status update until real progress is made. I'll still be checking this thread a bunch, though.

EDIT: Aha! Found how Team J2e detected pointer tables and it's pretty simple. Whew. Maybe it will be in the first public release then.

EDIT2: The syntax of script files as they will be dumped is now fully documented, check it out here

Edited April 16, 2014 by MP2E

[js394]

Nice to know that development is moving steadily. Like what Celice said before, many people will be grateful for this. This will most likely result in a lot more fan hacks made for FE4 and 5. Probably the reason the GBA games are so popular for fan hacks is because there are tools like FEditor that make hacking easy.

[Hector Barbossa]

You know, I've been aiming to get into the Jugdral series (currently starting Shadow Dragon), but I'd always been wary of Thracia because I heard the translation never really worked out. Really looking forward to finally seeing a complete translation. Keep on!

[Celice]

You know, I've been aiming to get into the Jugdral series (currently starting Shadow Dragon), but I'd always been wary of Thracia because I heard the translation never really worked out. Really looking forward to finally seeing a complete translation. Keep on!

Well, here's the essential script available in the current public translation patch--take a look and see if it meets your expectations.

[js394]

Updated first post.

[Siuloir]

'Stoutness is cute as well' always makes me wince. It's such bizarre translation of that actual line.

[MP2E]

EDIT: Found another EUC table file from a different source that already does what I want it to do

Edited April 22, 2014 by MP2E

[js394]

Alright, so I was thinking something like this for weapon names-

Also this is not the final version. The letters could still use work.

(And I know AxeFghtr looks terrible; that's just a placeholder until I get the full name inserted)

The reason I'm doing this is because when fan translations only say what the weapon is made out of you can really tell you're playing something fanmade. The official NoA translations would never do that.

If have any suggestions, please post them!

[Celice]

The reason I'm doing this is because when fan translations only say what the weapon is made out of you can really tell you're playing something fanmade. The official NoA translations would never do that.

If have any suggestions, please post them!

It isn't actually all that uncommon for paid translation teams, either. As games became more lax in their file size limits, the need to work with the limitation naturally diminished. Still, I've come across games over the past few years that still use the icon+quality method of naming when it works fine.

[Book of Ereshkigal]

Alright, so I was thinking something like this for weapon names-

snippy snippy

Also this is not the final version. The letters could still use work.

(And I know AxeFghtr looks terrible; that's just a placeholder until I get the full name inserted)

I like the idea of having the full name in there, nothing against that. But the final version will be the same size, right? Because right now it feels like it's saying Iron AXE which annoys my mind.

But yes, having full names is a good thing if it works. So, since that is probably gonna be fixed, I am excite.

Edited April 25, 2014 by L95

[bookofholsety]

you've gone with a two-letters-to-a-glyph approach here, right? i remember i tossed around the idea of doing that for FE4 a few months ago, before MP2E came on board, but i figured the sheer volume of combinations required would render it impractical, ditched the idea and settled on eventually begging MP2E to look into implementing a variable-width font instead :P

[js394]

you've gone with a two-letters-to-a-glyph approach here, right? i remember i tossed around the idea of doing that for FE4 a few months ago, before MP2E came on board, but i figured the sheer volume of combinations required would render it impractical, ditched the idea and settled on eventually begging MP2E to look into implementing a variable-width font instead :P

Yeah, that's what it is. Sadly I don't know any ASM tricks, so for now a vwf is out of question. It will take long to do this, but I think it'll be worth it. Also, work on this won't start until I get the rest of the rest of the menus translated (I'll be using Resire to edit the actual script; thinking about editing the script by hand in a hex editor is scary :D)

I like the idea of having the full name in there, nothing against that. But the final version will be the same size, right? Because right now it feels like it's saying Iron AXE which annoys my mind.

Yes, I'll probably see if I can get someone who's good in this area to make the letters, all I did was make the regular font thinner.

Edited April 26, 2014 by joesteve1914