Friday, August 12, 2011

Dialogue issue resolved

Aveyn Knight

People not on the translation team will not be aware of this, but we faced a pretty nasty obstacle right upon starting this translation project. Something we English players normally take for granted was missing from the game, specifically lowercase English symbols during dialogue.

Those who watched the Prologue I demo video will know that lowercase symbols do appear in the dialogue, so support for lowercase symbols is definitely possible. However, what we did for the Prologue I demo was merely a lazy hack and wouldn't work for the whole game. I feel terrible for "tricking" people, but it was either that or state we had little confidence in translating the whole game.

Fast forward to today, I can now safely proclaim that all (major) issues with the lowercase symbols missing from dialogue have been fully resolved, all thanks to the expert advice of Nagato, a skilled hacker who's currently working on the Nanashi no Game fan translation.


This image probably means little, but it's a huge breakthrough for us!

What happened is that, purposely or not, there was a "bug" in one of the game's algorithms, which prevents lowercase symbols from appearing. All it took to fix this was a simple (I say "simple", but knowing what to do and where requires a lot of advanced knowledge) correction to one or two lines of the game code.

So what does this mean for the translation project? Put simply (and especially now that Blazer has got a lot of the graphic hacking worked out), there are no more major technical issues stopping this project. So hopefully you'll see progress rapidly increase from today onwards. Of course, this also depends on what the team members are busying themselves with right now. I think I might go and take a break myself!

23 comments:

  1. (Although we are waiting on one more thing on the text dissector/compiler to make dialog easier... but otherwise, we're pretty much set on most parts of the translation, barring 1 or 2 graphical aspects...)

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  2. Could you upload evry progress please? I like to updatee ^^

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  3. ??? You mean new patches? If so, no, we don't plan on releasing another patch until the game is complete since we like to be professional. If Nintendo decides to translate this though we'll stop where we are and release a patch, but otherwise we don't have any planned new patches until everything's done. XP

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  4. HYYYPE!!!!!!!!!! I'm so proud of you guys. Great work thus far. I can't wait to see what you do with the dialogue/story. =]]]. WOOOT!

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  5. You guys wouldn't happen to need a editor/proofreader, would you?

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  6. That's nice! You'll make a great work, so surely this project will be finished without problems. Thanks for still working on this!.

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  7. Hey I patched the game with the latest English patch, and I tried loading it with my AceKard 2i but the game did not load (just white screens). I tested it with DeSmuMe and it loaded correctly. Is the patch only going to work with emulators or will it eventually work with DS Flash Carts like the AceKard or R4?

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  8. Illumio: The problem with your question is that it is nearly sure that you are using a rom. Because of this, I hardly see a member of the project answering to your question as it is about something illegal...

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  9. Barbatos Goetia: How else would you get a game to be patched WITHOUT a ROM, good sir? How else would you even start a ROM hack without a ROM or by getting the data from the card itself in someway?

    "The problem with your question is that it is nearly sure that you are using a rom."

    Also in rebuttal, have you not read the download section?

    "Furthermore, do NOT ask for any ROMs on this blog or any forum topic!"

    Well, the question I asked wasn't about asking for a ROM, just wondering if it would be emulator restricted or would go to Flash Carts also.

    Also under the Download section, they give links to emulators.

    Basically, the whole thing you've said was useless, since it is a hack to get a patch which uses a ROM.

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  10. @Illumio0000: I think the game doesn't work too well with flash cards, so I would say you are out of luck. :x

    I think I've heard it works with R4, but it can have problems with other flash cards.

    But this isn't because of the rom being patched, it was like this for the unpatched japanese rom aswell, I believe.

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  11. Illumio0000: You don't need to be so agressive...

    Anyway, you're right, but not on the point of flashcarts like you asked. Flashcarts are completely illegal, and besides, Blazer already said he doesn't know at all how the game works on flashcarts. I know it, because it was a suggestion of question I made for the faq because I was sure this question could come one day (and I wasn't mistaken about this prediction...).

    And besides, there are some ways for a game to be patched without rom, for Ds honestly I don't know, but I'm sure for Wii for example there are some ways to patch a game with the original Disk (like Riivolution for example). So you see, you're not forced absolutely to have a rom to have a patched game.

    I know they give links to emulators and Blazer said he would help any issue with Emulators, but for Flashcarts, if he was truly ready to help issues about flashcarts (ready or able to) I think he would already have said it...

    Anyway, Blazer himself will be much more qualified to answer your questions but don't make too illusions. It's an advice, you do what you want after that of course.

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  12. "You guys wouldn't happen to need a editor/proofreader, would you? "

    - no thanks, the last one we tried didn't work out, this job is... it's complicated, let's leave it at that, but thanks for the offer (it looked like an offer, anyway)

    @Other posts--you guys can talk about flash carts, I just don't want people asking for ROMs, where to find them, how to get specific versions of it, etc... you're going to need a ROM to play the patch but that's all I can say on the matter. In general it's kind of taboo to talk about ROMs directly. :\

    Regarding the actual flash cart problem, I believe there was an AP patch for this game, but our patch does NOT include this patch. We may in the future release a version with the AP patch applied (whether it's in the main patch or included separately) but it's technically not part of our translation. The game works fine on my SCDS2, another DS flashcart, and I know it works on some other flashcarts. I'd either try finding an anti-piracy patch yourself or upgrading your flashcart's firmware in order to solve the problem.

    Unfortunately I do not know the details of the AP patch or specific flashcart firmware. As a result it's up to you to figure this out for the time being. As I said though, in the future we may look into this so that we can make it easier for people to play the translation. Right now, it's just not our priority with everything else that is going on, both with the translation and with our personal lives (as summer is closing down my already low free time is becoming shortened...).

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  13. Ok Blazer. Now that you gave us the autorization to talk about flashcarts (it is forbidden in some places I visited some time ago so I prefered being careful) I will answer partially to your question Illumio.

    For Acekard, I'm truly sorry, I can't say anything.

    But for a true R4 Revolution for Ds (one of the first R4) the game works, but you have some conditions:

    -You need to have a clean fire emblem 12 rom.

    -You have to patch this rom.

    -You absolutely need Wood R4 installed on your linker and play the patched game with it, if you don't have it, the game doesn't work. (at least it didn't worked for me.)

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  14. I just wanted to thank all of you for your efforts on this translation project! I've been considering purchasing the Japanese copy of the game and using a transcript(so I can play online as well). Will you be releasing a transcript when the project is finished?

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  15. I never thought of releasing it, but given the way we edit text, it shouldn't be too hard to release a transcript. However, it wouldn't be the prettiest transcript ever, and it likely wouldn't be released until a few weeks after the game is done, because we would have to take the hacking-version of the script and convert it to a somewhat more reader-friendly version.

    Also I hope I'm understanding transcript as essentially a written version of the game's script on the computer, and not something else, as the word 'transcript' can have different meanings (and I'm tired right now and have a tendency to say stupid things when I'm tired...).

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  16. @Blazer, @Barbatos Goetia

    Thank you for the information, I will wait for later updates if you guys ever decide to implement the AP Patch.

    If not, then the thing is that whenever I try to patch another patch onto a ROM that has a patch all ready on it, it doesn't ever go over too well. It's usually like:

    *spazattack* YOU NEED CLEAN ROM TO PATCH!

    So yeah, quite the hassle.

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  17. Yeah, one way is to manually apply the patch, although this is difficult sometimes, especially depending on the patch format. For UPS patches it's easy but it's not so easy otherwise. With our arm9 file being hacked though (the programming file) we'd have to manually apply the AP patch or else it won't work, unfortunately, because it'd change the wrong data or something. >_>

    Quite the hassle indeed, I will try and help you as much as I can when I can, I know the AP patch is kind of important, we're just a little overwhelmed right now...

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  18. That is exactly what I meant by transcript. :)I understand that it would be extra work but I know that I would appreciate it very much! Another group did a similar project for FE 6 (Fuuin no Tsurugi).
    Here is their game script so you can get a good idea of how easy or difficult this would be for you:
    http://www.neoseeker.com/resourcelink.html?rlid=73699&rid=68123

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  19. Also, everyone might want to sign this petiton. It could potentially give all of you a lot more freetime. ;) http://www.petitiononline.com/FE12USA/petition.html

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  20. Keep up the amazing work you guys!

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  21. Love it, just wanted to stop by and show some support.

    Keep up the great work!

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  22. That image means you got more control...feel like adding content

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