Greetings Everyone. This is the ABSOLUTE STATE of doing God's work on this lovely game:
>3030/3030 Dialogues Translated. That's 100% of the text boxes you can read in-game completed. >I repeat, the dialogue is 100% translated >Proofreading and Editing is currently underway, to fix mistakes, broken control code, and re-write stuff that sounds weird >Also going in and hand-editing each text box to work well with the Variable-Width Font that a truly based user provided in the previous thread. Many thanks to you. >Enemy, menu, and other auxiliary text is next, but some of it will be VERY restrictive without the aid of people with romhacking knowledge and skill (I am NOT good at any of that)
I haven't had a lot of time to shoot decent video, but webms are incoming to prove that indeed, progress in the forward direction is being made in this. Feel free to ask any questions, comment, etc.
One other thing, please don't mind spelling errors or weird line breaks/etc. One of the reasons I have so much video of this in the first place is to identify problem spots so I can tweak the text to fit better in the boxes, identify points with broken control code, and catch errors that would be easier to miss glancing over a huge ass text file.
>>Enemy, menu, and other auxiliary text is next Are the names part of this?
Ethan Williams
Slowly but surely, decisions are being made as far as finalizing the names of certain key items, characters, locations. It's a lot easier now that the main body of text is translated.
Names will require additional hacking to get proper English font/etc in there. I'm using my several hundreds of save states which are, sadly, from a file I made that has the names set to the default Japanese. As very very little is gained from being able to name the characters, I'm honestly considering just hard-setting each character's name to their default one in all the dialogue boxes, because it'd look a lot cleaner that way.
I can't really give an estimate. One thing is for certain: With the main text 100% translated and about 25% edited and revised, being able to go to other places to try and garner interest in helping me to tackle the tech issues will be a LOT easier than most of the projects on, say, the romhacking website, where people are ALWAYS putting up "dream" projects that they can't actually contribute to in a meaningful way.
BIGASS DISCLAIMER FOR WEBM RELATED Given the controversy of Trials of Mana's CHARLOTTE talking like a literal child, I am debating whether to eliminate What's babyspeak as well. NOTE: He literally DOES talk like a baby in the original JP script, and I can provide proof if any user cares that much.
Parker Watson
Crap, forgot to attach the webm. Oh well. Incoming. Again, Super Kid What really does talk like this in the original text. A big fat baby indeed.
I have no idea what this is but it looks good so yeah, I'd definitely play it if the fan translation gets released. Unfortunately I know jack shit about hacking but I will be wishing you good luck all the same.
Another thing: some bits of text, though translated, don't actually get pushed through, like the previous webm where the little tomato guy shows up on screen. Oh well. Issues to be resolved.
Thank you kindly for your support user. I've already lucked into help just from posting here, and I cannot thank them enough. Their efforts are what has made this text very good looking instead of the stock fixed width font that was causing major readability problems.
so in the last thread you mentioned being worried about tomato picking apart any translation you did. I've known him a bit for years so I reached out to him since I know he'd done some translation work on it and he gave me a youtube playlist of his entire live translation he did on twitch years ago. I don't think you should just copy everything he has verbatim, you may end up with a mix of translation "voices" and I think it would be best to keep things in your individual "voice", but I think it could be a valuable resource as a second opinion of sorts. he also reiterated that "it WILL need new/updated tools to go beyond the proof of concept stage of the current tools" so are you definitely going to need more help from hacker anons to get this finished. but like you said, having a completed script makes finding someone willing to pitch in much easier than fishing around saying "oh yeah I'll totally translate this, I promise" youtube.com/watch?list=PL8fufren85t_pcV-ME9PNuAmffo9DDGRY&v=MTXHERfsLtg&feature=emb_title
It is indeed a very simplified JRPG that is sort of like an alpha version of Mario &Luigi Superstar Saga. Indeed, this was Alphadream's work which impressed Nintendo just enough to give them the Mario IP to play with for later titles. Instead of the Mario timed hits, every weapon you use, Gimmicks, have a little minigame you play to determine the effectiveness of the attack. Some are really good, some are a huge pain... You find the ones you like the most and stick with them.
OH! Very cool, I will give this a look just to see what Tomato's takes on certain things were. He definitely has his own distinct voice and style, so it would be hard to blend that with what I've done... But it could offer new insights into ways I didn't think of to word certain things. Then again, if this is a "live translation" then it might be rough and not in his "optimal" voice... Thank you for posting it.
Again, many apologies if you despise the baby talk from Super Kid What. All things are subject to change at any time for any reason. I personally don't have an issue with it (or else I would not have done it) as this game really is made and broken on its characters.
Yeah I figured it would be most helpful for things like jokes and wordplay shit. Sometimes having a second person to say “oh wait I get this joke” can make a huge difference if you’d just been reading it straight
Joseph Baker
Gonna just keep dumping webms, I only have like... 6 or 7 left after this. I'm really not dedicating that much time to playing the game or shooting video, as there is just so much work to be done yet on the text. There'll be plenty of time to test and play as things come together further and further.
Indeed, having a 2nd set of eyes and ears on this is very valuable. I do envy people who have teams and the like to bounce ideas off of. Everyone's experience is incredibly valuable when it comes to this. Seems very worth it even if unifying the overall voice of a script could be more challenging that way.
And finally, my favorite thing in the entire game, and legitimately the reason I decided to attempt this project in the first place. If you saw the original JP text for this... You'd be pretty impressed at how this preserves the overall feel of this freakin' sign.
Charlotte's problem isn't really her baby speak, it was that ALL her text had so many Ws. The script writer literally did a find and replace for all Ls and Rs and turned them into Ws,
Connor Young
nani, kore?
Josiah Baker
I think it's also because charlotte is voiced. having to read the stupid baby talk is bad enough, but then having to hear a grown woman trying to pretend she's a widdle baybee is just obnoxious
Charles Lopez
Tomato Adventure. AKA the pre-alpha of Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga.
Brandon Evans
>but then having to hear a grown woman trying to pretend she's a widdle baybee is just obnoxious the sex sounds good
Ian Hall
>he Really glad that font was of some use.
Two of your webms did auto line wrapping after a set number of horizontal pixels used by characters, that's one thing to be mindful of (add manual line breaks sooner) >character names Realistically, you're better off just writing them as plain text rather than rely on the control code that calls the data you used the first time in the naming screen. The naming screen names will still be used in battle sequences. Lots of localized games do that (like Tales of Symphonia)
The reason why I recommend this is that the naming screen is limited to 4 characters per name. I have no immediate plans to extend it, but I could at least force it to English characters. If you write them in full characters, you're no longer bound by existing limitations.
>pic related That aside, I wouldn't want to impose on the romhack author or the audience here, or get too heavy handed recommending "how things should go", so take this as a vague suggestion. But ... if there's any talented graphical guys or even idea guys, now is your time to shine.
All (?) the game's graphical data is encoded as GBA 4BPP (except the title screen, and select tiles), and mostly behind a layer of compression, which I used LZ77restructor to overcome.
I'll be dropping a few graphics from the game, alongside their loose translations. If you can do pixel art, load this graphic in the graphical editor of your choice, restrict it to "Indexed Colors > Local" or equivalent, so that you don't exceed the original color count and palette (extremely vital, otherwise your work is useless to me), and try to work on a translated concept.
This one says "Tomato Adventure". The gear must remain in the same place because it's part of an animation.
>Japanese line with tomato that didn't go through The way these tools work is the following: The Japanese text data is all stored contiguously as a data blob, at specific offsets. How can the game tell where those offsets begin? Those specific offsets are stored (as "pointers", following a conversion that's fortunately easy to figure out for GBA, basically add 08000000 and write the 4 bytes in reverse order. you can find that pointer with a simple hex search) The game uses those pointers to go directly to those lines.
What tomato's tool does: Gives up any hope of modifying that tangled data blob mess. It extracts it properly (which is why that faulty line is even shown to you in your jp text dump). Then it puts your english text as a COPY of the game text, near the end of the rom, and changes the POINTER to ignore the Japanese data blob, and instead pull from the new English data blob. For that line that still shows in Japanese, its pointer was probably not updated OR the game uses ANOTHER pointer to fetch that same line. Fortunately, this is quite easy to figure out eventually.
