I am at the point where I have sufficient knowledge in japanese and coding to translate games, but I don't know where to start. Thinking to start with Memories Off which was added to Steam recently. Anyone have some experience with PC game translations? Or making translation patches in general
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I don't know where to start, but I know where not to start. Anything in the OP and below OP of
Ideally you should pick a series that uses the same engine across many entries, possibly with a defunct dev/publisher if you care about C&D.
You pick something you liked and want to share or are interested in (though it's preferable to actually have played it before translating as it ruins the experience for yourself and adds context to the text you are translating). You then just do it and drop it somewhere where it's relevant when finished. What you don't do is translating things for clout or attention, because it will make you miserable and insufferable.
Obviously its preferable to start with something that doesn't require much of a toolset or has a toolset available to get a proper flow for translating text and images, then you might want to move on to something that will require some more technical work. Translating itself is a slog, which is why I really want to stress that sharing that piece of media should be the key motivator.
so far the stuff i like already has patches. I have no interest in doing it for clout or shit like that as much as I wanna share with others (to put my months of autistically learning japanese to use), as others have before me. Right now it's more about getting into some entry level projects so I can get learn and get better for future bigger ones
I don't know exactly what I'd point you too and where you draw the line. One developer that has gotten quite a lot of attention is Alicesoft. I'd only really mention them because they have a large amount of older games/ADV hybrids that are somewhat lighter on text that have very mature toolsets and engine replacements to work with. Might be of interest to look into the technical side there.
Anything that is purely a VN in general should be easy enough as
points out, then you have 80s BASIC+assembly, which in and of itself doesn't have to be hard, it's just that it can be rather obscure in its coding to say it in a more positive way. An issue with older stuff on Japanese computer is that they like to use roman alphabet letters as commands in their engines which makes for a lot more work if the devs never had a need for an escape command.
Why don't you play through old PC-60/80/88/98 games and see what catches your eye? If you're only interested in translating what you enjoy nobody else but you is going to be much help. You're better off asking someone somewhere else who has actually translated a game their advice, since nobody around here has done so.
Hey, I translated Lightning Warrior Raidy. Well I used the script of the remake translated by G-Collections as my Japanese is pretty basic.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BC-V97MRZD2OYeL9rRWl4RnBd9UhaxMp/view?usp=sharing
so how did you do it? Did you reverse engineer it? Or what were the steps?
Oh, neat. I always assumed anons on nu/vr/ were all talk. Probably would have been cooler to make a new translation in case something changed on the Japanese end, but still, kudos.
It was my first project and I fixed a few obvious errors from the English translation like ("...はブレスを吐いた!" was "...recovered!" but it's shown when fire-breathing monsters.
There are some improvements to make though: Raidy 2's exe adds an extra text command that handles Ascii for its menus so I used this instead of the original exe. Fun-fact: DO and ZyX engine text display normally uses a look-up table to replace bytes in the 0x20-0x7F range with frequently used full-width hiragana, numbers and punctuation. This acts as a light compression as script files are not compressed.
And I did some editing by hand because text boxes aren't the same size (cutscene dialog VS battle dialog VS dungeon message) while the right way to go would be to write a script decompiler and account for text boxes changes. This would also allow to translate Crystal Rinal and Legend of Rouge.
Branmarker 2 shares the image format but its scripts are completely different.
>months
It's not sufficient knowledge.
i can read novels already, I understand around 70% (everything but the more complex kanji, but I learn through repetition). Only goes up from here
>i can read novels already, I understand around 70%
>70%
>seventy percent
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH WOW
NO YOU FRICK OFF AND STAY FAR, FAR AWAY FROM TRANSLATING ANYTHING YOU moronic DEKINAI
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
THE WORLD ILL NEEDS YOUR DEKINAI ASS FRICKING UP THE SIMPLEST OF PHRASES DUE TO YOUR ABSOLUTE ZERO KNOWLEDGE
cope homosexual. At least I know that much compared to your official "localizers"
See this, you single-brian-celled shitter? This will be you. This is the kind of shit you will pull off with your insufficient experience with the language. You will commit these kinds of embarrassing errors and worse. You will be responsible for painting a work, a character, a situation, in the wrong light for people all because you're a narcissistic homosexual sitting high atop the peak of Mt. Stupid.
Frick you and go study more. Read more. Listen more. Do not dare to ruin any piece of media with your inferior hands.
And I fricking mean it. Do NOT soil any story, bad, good, or great, with your microscopic brain.
Stick to the motherfricking pond.
is the correct translation something like 'are you for real? is this really the "immovable mountain", Hai?' (rough translation)
Here's my quick sloppy attempt, not saying I would put this in game as is:
>"Are you for real? You, who is as unmoving as a mountain?" (Wants to get b***hes now?)
Basically the left side is saying getting a Christmas date is impossible when he's actually commenting on the MC's unwillingness to mess around with girls.
looking at the context of the conversation in the patch, they continued on the same plot that getting a girl is "impossible", wtf
>bruh you can't be serious
>It's already impossibru to get you do do ANYTHING, and now you think you're gonna do THAT?
Frick off wigger you aren't fitting in
I assure you, you will frick up the most basic of basic shit because you don't have enough experience piled up. Like a sentence trailing off that has an incredibly obvious ending but you'll go "it could have been anything, how was I supposed to know!" There's already enough N5 masters going around trying to "correct" others. Literally just read for another year and two and you'll realize how overconfident you're being.
Buddy, I know where you are. I was there about 7 and a half years ago.
It's hard to read things and takes a long time, so "translating" something means you have something to read later, right? I put out a couple of garbage doujins with that kind of mentality. You're not doing anyone a favor by writing shit.
If you really want to waste your time, stick to small projects, you'll at least release shit given even a moron can pump out 20 pages in a day. And then in a few years you can look back on them and laugh.
Stop. You're just embarrassing yourself.
Learning another language is bad now?
In your case, absolutely. Your epic fail at reading comprehension, that lead you to think that's what anyone said, shows that you need to devote much more time and effort to learning enough basic English to even function in society. Hold off on other languages until you can read at a 5th grade level.
The technical side of a VN is usually pretty simple: figure how the game script files work and code your exporter and importer. Images extraction/insertion and menus hiding in the executable may be the trickier part.
The real tough part is that the script will likely be huge as it's a 20+ hours VN.
better to look for a shorter one then. I assume that PC games would be easier to reverse engineer/inject into than console games?
https://f95zone.to/forums/request.119/
RPG Maker takes the lowest amount of effort; on the other hand RPGM starting from VX Ace at least is easily MTL'able so it's a big risk of losing your potential audience to some third world moron who barely speaks English but can shit out MTL garbage by metric tons for pennies.
Disregard everything this dumbass says.
Nscripter/onscripter covers 90% of this shit unless the game has an actual gameplay element like the farland games or utawarerumono.
For a lot of windows games you can use a text hooker and just supply it your translated script instead of sending it to Google translate.
Do neosphere of the deep blue ocean/sky.
Yeah, PC is easier. The data is usually in folders or archives whose role is easy to determine (scripts, images, sounds...).
Then when you modify a file, the game won't complain about it being bigger.
>An issue with older stuff on Japanese computer is that they like to use roman alphabet letters as commands in their engines
Pic related, Filsnown, does. What I did was change the commands to unused values < 32.
>better to look for a shorter one then. I assume that PC games would be easier to reverse engineer/inject into than console games?
Console games usually have compressed graphics of some kind unless they're Famicom games with raw CHR ROM data.
>I am at the point where I have sufficient knowledge in japanese and coding to translate games
But of course you are
>but I don't know where to start
Well you certainly wouldn't want to start by actually trying to do it. That would ruin the entire fantasy.
Hijacking the thread to ask a related question since there is no /hbg/ at the moment. Does anyone have resources for character encoding/mapping implementations on retro systems? Trying to think ahead how to design a text system that works programmatically and is somewhat generalized (i.e., not simply making the text out of premade sprites). In particular, I'm curious how text drawing systems that support kanji (or presumably any font glyph within a limited static n-sized map) work.
Compression, usually a modified lz77 algorithm.
>I'm curious how text drawing systems that support kanji (or presumably any font glyph within a limited static n-sized map) work.
Find an official SDK on web.archive.org and/or get a homebrew SDK for a system of your choice and look there.
I know that PSP uses TTF fonts (albeit converted), so it's likely too high-level for you, but PS2 and PS1 SDKs should be useful.
>Does anyone have resources for character encoding/mapping implementations on retro systems?
They made the text out of premade sprites. Either the system had a ROM chip with a kanji fontset in it that was accessible to devs, or the game used some proportion of its ROM for a subset of useful characters.
there is a youtuber Hilltop who goes on about reverse engineering old games. He does mention the font/kanji issue in one of the videos
Translate baldrhead games, Black person.
Just do the most niche of weebshit that no one will ever remember. Simple as.
you should expect to dump an ungodly amount of your free time for no thanks / pointless drama
It can be fun at times but know what you're dedicating yourself to.
The biggest problem with a lot of old shit, especially around 2000-ish, is that most games used fixed font widths meant for kanji. So the text L O O K S L I K E T H I S when you try to swap in English text. For some games it's an easy fix, just decreasing the font spacing and increasing the characters per line, but other times trying to do that will break six other things.
>Memories Off
Just want to say that Kaoru is a prostitute and her route is actual literal cuckshit. I did really like Yue's route though
Find games you like, find your niche, and stick to them.
I've got mine. People who translate coomer/porn games have theirs. SNES hackers have theirs.
Do it because you like to do it, not for attention or clout.
And always be reading. Read and listen to shit like your life depends on it. The thing I hate the most is talking to other translators and asking what light novels they're into, and almost none of them have ever even read a single one in Japanese proper. That, to me, is a red flag for a multitude of reasons.
I reversed engineer the PC-98 and the English Windows version with IDA.
Both games' texts and game logic are mostly stored in script files, and while the commands sets are different, each text display command in the remake had an equivalent in the original.
For Filsnown I only did a UI translation, where this time, strings were in the executable. And a machine translation of the first map to check if I had nailed the simple script format.
I really like IDA to disassemble (5.0 for PC-98 DOS and the latest for Windows).
memorizing kana tables doesn't mean you can translate a video game