Sword of Moonlight Forum
The Water Cooler => Game Chat => Topic started by: Black Hood on March 19, 2012, 08:19:32 pm
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Hey folks, I just finished playing through the translated Shadow Tower Abyss, which was great. Thanks again to the translators. I started a new game + but I think I'll take a break before continuing.
Anyway, in my searching around the Internet I came across a list of "games like King's Field" in a thread on an Agetec forum. One of the ones I hadn't heard of was Hungry Ghosts, which was only released in Japan, no English translation. Coincidentally, Hardcoregaming101 has a recent review of it: http://hg101.kontek.net/hungryghosts/hungryghosts.htm (http://hg101.kontek.net/hungryghosts/hungryghosts.htm)
I just ordered a used copy from Amazon, I was lucky enough to find one for under $20 - most of the used copies I saw were closer to $40, and others were in the $100+ range.
I don't know how keen folks are on attempting more translating here, but after seeing the excellent job on Shadow Tower Abyss, I just thought I'd throw this into the ring as it seems like it would be of interest. I'd be happy to create a disc image for translation use once I get my copy.
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I remember that game being mentioned too- it looks like it it has excellent art design, but gameplay looks closer to Resident Evil than KF. I liked RE too.
There's no way to say how easy/hard it would be to translate without looking at the files. I just ordered a copy, but it will take awhile to get here - assuming the Amazon seller doesn't cancel the order. I've had that happen more than once. I'll look it over when it arrives. It looks like Sony published that game and they are notorious for being copyright-nazis who will slap a "cease and desist" order on anyone who mentions tampering with one of their games- even if what the person is doing is perfectly legal. I'll post my findings here when the time comes (feel free to remind me if it's been too long). :smile:
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Thanks, HwitVlf. I'll let you know when my copy arrives also.
I keep being surprised by how many games there are for PS2, especially under-the-radar ones like this. Really glad I softmodded my PS2 and then coincidentally discovered Shadow Tower Abyss, it felt extra special all around.
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Oooh, I take a trip to Japan and people dig up some more interesting stuff. Maybe I should make more trips to Japan. :D
That definitely sounds intriguing - I may be up for trying to help out with some more translation down the road. Keep us posted!
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Ooh, nice find, looks great! This is one of the reasons I need to learn Japanese.. :bowl:
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Oooh, I take a trip to Japan and people dig up some more interesting stuff. Maybe I should make more trips to Japan. :D
Did you go to see Domo? :)
Where abouts in Japan? Ive been three times for vacation.
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Where abouts in Japan? Ive been three times for vacation.
Nice! I always love hearing about others' trips there - where have you been?
I used to live there for a while, but this last time we kind of did some random stuff. Went snowboarding and onsen-ing in Minakami (Gunma Pref.), then to Niigata to see some old friends, and finally went down to Yakushima for several days. After all these years of hearing about it, at long last I made it to the Ninja restaurant in Tokyo as well.
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Just looked at some vids on this, definitely similar genre to some of From's ps2 era games.
I would be interested in giving it a shot if there were a proper translation ;)
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Ninja resturaunt sounds cool. Im unfamiliar with Gunma is it in Hokkaido? When i hear of snow in Japan i think Hokkaido and macaques in onsens :)
Done a bit of onsening myself in Fukushima. I stayed in Fukushima twice for long vacations, though my first visit to Japan took me to Tokyo and Kamakura. Have to say ive a real soft spot for Fukushima, mostly Aizu and Sendai. Done alot of samurai and tradition learning when i was there along with walking in the mountains.
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Yeah, I was really heartbroken to hear that Sendai got hit - it's my favorite city in Japan. I've been hiking a few times in Fukushima as well (and one snow festival)...
Gunma actually borders Fukushima to the southwest. They have plenty of snow there, too - I lived not far from the region made famous by Kawabata's "Snow Country". 4-meter drifts in some areas up in the mountains. It's like driving in a pac-man maze! I found Hokkaido to be colder, but with somewhat less precipitation. The Japan sea coast gets pummeled with snow, but it only ever gets a couple degrees below freezing, so the snow melts pretty quickly between dumps.
Haha, the bathing macaques are definitely worth a trip to see if you're ever in northern Nagano. Jigoku-dani Koen is the most famous by far. Very touristy but at the same time completely worth it. There is even a nearby public outdoor onsen that is open to monkeys and people - which I did - but it's pretty filthy because monkeys are, well, filthy. Great experience for the story, anyway.
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Hunger appears to have an epic amount of text!
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My copy came in the mail the other day. I'm going to make an attempt to play it a bit with the English walkthrough I found.
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Now that Pilot Style is done, I'll look into this a little. I certainly don't plan on doing a full translation on my own right now because I'm very eager to get back to making my SoM game. But maybe some of the menus would make the game easier to play.
Like most games these days, Hunger has its files lumped into one big clump. I think I've figured out the format enough to "decompact" it, but I'll have to make a tool to do so.
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@John: Ifyou were to make the tool and gave me some basic instructions, I'd be glad to try and get the whole game translated. :)
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The tool is attached, but it just extracts the separate files out of the big one- it doesn't dump the text or anything.
This game has a massive amount of text so translation help would be excellent.
The tool will extract some 2500 files to wherever Pack.dat is so don't use it on your desktop etc or you'll cover it with files. Not all the files have text in them. The extracted file names are just tags to enable reinsertion after translated and basically mean "[Archive#],[File#], [offset]" so "1.4.0x00008000" would be file4 in archive1 which is at location 8000.
You can open the files with Microsoft Word (using other encoding - Japanese Shift-JIS) to read the Japanese. I know system text is in file 0.2. It would be a good place to start. Recording what text is in which files would be useful.
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After looking at the text more, I think it may have a lot of duplication. Which means there may not be as much to translate as I thought. The game may store a separate full copy of menu text for each "map" area or something. It's not uncommon for games to do it that way.
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@John: If there's a lot of duplication, that would make things easier, indeed. :)
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A pic of some test text (typos included :smash2:) I don't think the font is great, but that's secondary in my thinking.
There is a lot of repeated text. The phrase "Looks like a keyhole" appears around 17 times.
(http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b324/weissvulf/Hunger1.jpg)
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Ah, I've only got OpenOffice, and it doesn't read the files right, even with the correct encoding. Getting MS Office. ;)
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You might try notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.1.3.html). It's free and works better than Word in some ways. For Japanese you can select encoding > character set > Japanese >Shift JIS and turning wordwrap on would probably help.
If having cleaned up text would help, I can do that fairly easily and send some to you.
I've translated most of the "radial menu" choices and I'm working on the items now.
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Notepad++ didn't help much either. Still only get a Japanese character here and there, in between a hundred other symbols that certainly has got nothing to do with Japanese. :/
Please try sending me such a file. :)
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Here are a few files. The "junk" data you're seeing is the text pointer table (at top) and other data between lines to tell the game where/how to draw the text. Let me know if these files are "cleaned" enough for your needs.
The game handles each line of text as a separate "sentence" rather than using a standard line-break code between lines. That makes it hard to tell if a text line is part of the sentence above or the beginning of a new sentence.
If I stared at the game's files long enough, I might be able to figure how to make a proper text dumper, but I wasn't planning on taking that much time.
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Ah, yeah, I figured that was probably what it was. :)
Oh yes, this is perfect! :D
Now, how would I go about putting this back into the game after changing it?
Also, if this was easy for you to do(made an app for it, or something?), could you do it with all the files and send me?
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Now, how would I go about putting this back into the game after changing it?
Also, if this was easy for you to do(made an app for it, or something?), could you do it with all the files and send me?
To insert changed text, I have been editing the extracted files in a hex editor (ultra edit) then reinserting them into Pack.dat with a second tool I made, then reinserting Pack.dat back into the ISO. But that method means you have to "translate around" all the data junk (pointers etc). If you translate the text-dump files (attached earlier), we'll either have to manually type the new text over the Japanese in a hex editor or take the time to figure out the pointer table format enough to automate the process.
I "cleaned" the text by using a few "search and replace" operations in XVI32 (attached) , which is a a hex editor that supports wild cards. The wildcard feature is a bit confusing, but attached is a picture; mark the "joker char hex" box and type a value into the field to the right, whatever you type will count as the wildcard in the fields above.
"0d0a" is the standard line-break hex value so:
replace "00" with "0d0a" (replaces blank letter slots with line-breaks)
replace "0d0a 0d0a" with "0d0a" several times (removes multiple line breaks next to each other)
replace "0d0a * 0d0a" with "0d0a" (removes some generic data between text lines)
replace "0d0a * * 0d0a" with "0d0a" (removed rest of the generic data between text lines)
The only junk left should be the pointer tables, but they are easy to see/delete in Notepad++.
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I was working on a menu translation for Hungry Ghosts when I turned this project over to Guyra and it looks like it is dead now. Hunger seems like a really good game from what I saw and was worth translating. It's very artistic and original. If anyone wants to pick up the project and has the know-how, let me know and maybe I can send what was done so far. I was actually converting the games narrative into first person "Will you pick it up?" > "Should I pick it up?" because I thought it deepened immersion and suited the game well. So my work may not be any use for people who want to do a direct translation.
The game already supports English text so you might be able to do a translation without any "hacking" at all - just type the English over the original Japanese text.
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Heyo, long time no chat. If you don't mind things taking a while, I'd be interested in helping out with the Hungry Ghosts translation. I was looking for another 'productive distraction' while finishing the thesis.
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Mord! Hiya :)
It would be great if you picked up this project. I am so busy right now that I wouldn't be any help. I can tell you that a lot/all of the text is in pak.dat and is in Shift-JIS encoding. There is a lot of text, but I think large passages may be duplications so there is less than it may appear.
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Sure, sounds good. I don't foresee being able to sink entire days into this, but I would enjoy doing like 15 minutes a day or so. Slow, but better than never having a finished version!
I looked over this thread again, but I didn't see a link to pack.dat... I guess PM me?
I think it probably makes sense to go about this in a similar way to how I did it before - make a 'true' or strict translation first, then touch things up, make the sentences more natural/coherent and unify the style (e.g., first person like you mentioned earlier) later. And keep everything organized and indexed in a spreadsheet or some other system. Inserting text back into files can happen later; even if it's slightly more work in the long run, it's good to have discrete goals on a big project.
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One the organization point: I think I might be able to whip something together to insert the translated text in python without too much headache (ha! watch me eat those words later). Just shooting from the hip here, but I think it would be straightforward enough as I go through the files (automate after getting the hang of it from the first few) to make a note of where the translation-needing text starts and ends, then just save the original text blocks in a python dictionary. Translated versions then can be stored in new dictionaries (making it scalable for translating to other languages, if anyone's interested). Finally, inserting the new text should be relatively easy, since we would have the exact strings to replace (start/stop positions) in the original dictionaries.
Then for keeping track, I could just make a color-coded spreadsheet for progress. (Red=nothing done yet, yellow=needs some work, green=good to go, etc..)
Never worked with hex in python before, but I know it has tools, and it's definitely my language of choice.
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You might look into the compiler ARMIPS. It uses ASM files that pretty much do what you describe.
A basic entry to write a line of text to a specific location in a file would look like this:
.org 0xB68A8
.string "Text"This would write the word "Text" to 0xb68a8 in the previously opened file.
I think the game is laid out in sections so translating even a signal section would be cool. The menu and items would do a lot too.
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:eek: WOW, you weren't kidding about the epic amount of text! Nor about the massive repetition... I'm not finished scanning the file, but some blocks are repeated in excess of 10 times. :movingeyes: The hardest part of this project I think will just be sorting out all the data properly (keeping strict tabs on start/stop positions, size of each translation block, etc.) I spent a few hours playing with some methods for automation of finding the real text blocks, but I think it will be much more reliable (and faster, at this rate) to just scan the file in the hex editor and jot down the positions. I noticed some patterns, but nothing that repeats perfectly. I've had good luck simply searching for instances of common characters, such as い and the ellipsis block …
The (duplicate) text is strewn over the whole of PACK.DAT, so for now, I'll just translate a few sections, insert back into the .dat file, and see if that's good enough to start. Eventually, when I've translated all the unique text blocks, it shouldn't take long to swap those out.
Thanks for the tip on ARMIPS! That looks like just the ticket.
I'll try to provide occasional updates, though feel free to poke me if it's been a while. This is just a very crude estimate, but I'll try to have the organizational stuff sorted out by the beginning of summer, and all the translation of the unique blocks done by around the end of summer. The text I've seen seems easier to translate than that in STA - it appears to be more conversational/colloquial, which is much easier for me than translating obscure item names and the like, since I didn't learn by studying 'textbook' Japanese.
At any rate, I'm committed now, so it'll happen (slowly)!
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I don't think it would be too hard to make a text dumper for ShiftJIS that produced an ASM file.
ARMIPS supports "areas", meaning you can define a maximum space for the text. The dumper would only have to detect SJIS
record the SJIS start as the area's beginning and the string's beginning
record the SJIS end as the area's end
and write the generic tags
Say the following text started at 0x100
ともに真の平和を築きましょう
It would be 28 bytes long and say it has 7 'blank' 00s after it for a total of 35 bytes (0x23) maximum text size.
.org 0x100 (sets the write location for the translation that follow)
.area 0x123 - 0x100 (sets the max area for the translated text ie end minus start)
.string "Translated text" (armips will write the text between " " at 0x100)
;ともに真の平和を築きましょう (Putting the japanese in an ignored 'comment' line helps)
.endarea
If you made a dumper that produced such a file for ARMIPS, all you would have to do is run ARMIPS and it would auto-insert the translations and make sure nothing was oversized.
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I found a very good tactical hack n' slash called 'Severence: Blade of Darkness' that plays a lot like Dark Souls, you can buy it on gog.com for $5.99.
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I have an old big-box copy of Severance for the PC. It was one of the first games I encountered that had a big modding community. If anyone tries it out, they might search for fan made mods too.
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I've been following this with great interest. I've tried playing the game several times but always stopped a few hours in since having a guide at all times ruins the atmosphere and sense of exploration. I'm really hoping you guys stick to it so we can finally play a translated version of Hungry Ghosts.
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It's going slowly, but it is going. :coffee: I'm happy with my code for extracting and inserting text from the iso.
The menus are mostly complete, and I finally have a chance tonight to plug away at the intro video/boat man sequances and some of the initial gameplay text. Had to make some interesting alterations to fit in the sometimes severely limited space available, but it makes sense. And I've done a couple tests to make sure that what I translate and put back in actually works and shows up correctly in-game, etc.
It'll get there! :bowl:
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Very cool! Screen shots?
Also, can you tell the basic outline of how your tool works?
My brain often works backwards so I'm always happy to get tip on how other people tackle a problem. :beerchug:
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Haha, sure. I'm on a work trip, so I don't have access to any screen shots of the game at the moment. But I can at least describe how I'm doing stuff...
Basically, I'm just using a couple of short python scripts I wrote. This is almost definitely a more tedious method than it could be, but I like it because I know it's doing exactly what I tell it. (and I like python...)
- First, I scanned through the PACK.DAT binary in MadEdit (Just searching for some common Japanese characters), and wrote down the start and end positions of some blocks. I doubt I'll do this for ALL of the gajilions of text blocks, but I wanted to get started on some real translation, and it was easy to find blocks I wanted containing specific words (like the menu stuff).
- Next, I just read the PACK.DAT file into python, copy the byte streams based on the start/stop positions, and save the text, positions, etc. as a csv file. This way, I can easily work on any given text block independently, without having to worry about the others.
- I do all the translation from the csv in a spreadsheet, so that I can make comments, see the length available real-time, search, copy and paste easily, etc...
- Finally, when I have a block all finished, I reinsert the text blocks to PACK.DAT in python. It's easy-peasy to just read in PACK.DAT and the translated block(s), swap out the block bytes (since I have the locations in a nice list), and close the file. Then I load the iso file as binary in python, and directly swap all the bytes of PACK.DAT. It's memory intensive and it's not efficient by any means, but it only takes a minute or so, and this way I know there will not be any issues with checksums, etc.
Perhaps over-complicated, and I may streamline this for later, but works like a charm!
One added benefit to doing it this way is that it would be much easier to translate to yet another language: I can share my csv files, and the translator can simply open them up, translate (with the built-in "how many characters do I have left" cells), and swap out the iso data with the scripts.
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I don't think efficiency is really an issue with something like this since it's mostly a 'one time' run. I can picture the auto-formula features in Excel being quite handy. Interesting!
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Status update:
Things are still moving along at their own pace - There are a lot of weird entries in the item menu that are difficult to translate. At any rate, progress is slowly being made. Plus, there is one other item of news to report:
A new member has volunteered to help on this project! I'll let him introduce himself here, if he so chooses, but the important thing is that he has offered to help share some of the burden. This means, of course, that you should be able to play this game in English a bit sooner! :beerchug:
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Really cool! I would think help could go a long way in the Hunger project because there's so much duplication to dig through. I know how much work is involved in something like this, but I hope you both stick with it!
:beerchug:
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Yes, I'm hoping there won't be too many casualties in the Hunger Games.
...
:sweatdrop:
The worse the joke, the better.
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Just to give an idea of the kind of things that are making this project take a while...
Came across this little gem in the menu items block today:
保持すると移動に関する呪いを
自動で跳ね返し、呪われ中に使
用する事で呪いを解除する。
:face85:
(They managed to use the word "curse" three times in the same sentence! Curses!)
It literally translates (with a little rearranging) as something like: "When it is held, movement-related curses are automatically rebounded, curses are released when used mid-curse."
Making this more natural (by taking some liberties), it reads something like "Holding this automatically reflects movement-related curses. Using this will also release curses currently in effect."
But, the translation is limited to 82 characters (28-28-26), so I adopt something like:
"
Movement-related curses
repelled when held, current
curses released when used.
"
which barely fits in the space available...
:smash2:
Onward and upward! :coffee:
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Lol :biggrin: I feel for you! One that still makes me laugh from KFJ was the truth mirror message for the mummy which read something like:
Mummy
A mummy man who has been mummified by being wrapped in bandages.
Err...thanks for clearing that up? I couldn't bear to do a literal translation on that one.
Your final product is clear and sounds fine. :cool:
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About 2/3 done with the huge block of menu items... :bluelink:
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OK, finally finished with the menu items (though some entries will likely get updated later...). So, yeah! With this, here is how things stand:
Finished
- Opening video
- Opening sequence/dialogue with the boatman
- System settings
- Menu items
- Status messages/common replies (what I've found doesn't seem to be all of them, though)
Unfinished
* Basically, ALL of the dialogue between the player and NPCs
Things that can't currently be done:
* The screen that shows the controller settings seems to be hard-coded as an image (i.e., not searchable text). So unless someone can track down the exact image, I'll just have to include a screenshot with translations overlaid in the distro.
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That's very cool. Just having the menu in English along with the story setup does tons to make the game more accessible to English speakers.
Can you post a screen shot of the graphic-text you need to edit? If I get some free time, I'll have a look.
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Yeah, thanks! It'll be a few days (traveling again), but I'll get it. :movingeyes:
Extending on that, there are a couple other things that seem to be stored as images. The options on the menu screen such as "Enter the Gate" (i.e., Start Game) seem to be so. At least, a search for those strings didn't turn up anything. And the enter-your-name screen is also only in katakana - the background image for sure, but also characters that show up when you select one. I tried to find where they are stored, because I could just swap them out with 2-byte English characters, but no dice so far.
Not sure what can be done yet about either of these (or if it's even worth spending time trying to track them down in the data), but I'm planting them firmly in the "think about later" category. :rolleyes: The controller configuration screen is much more important.
That's very cool. Just having the menu in English along with the story setup does tons to make the game more accessible to English speakers.
Yeah, I was actually thinking the other day that it might be really fun to intentionally release a version like that:
Basically, you get the run-down at the beginning from the ferryman, and all your menu items/descriptions, self-monologues, etc. are understandable (English), but all the NPCs are speaking to you in this unintelligible-to-your-character language (Japanese), and you have to try to figure out how to appease them from the various clues. It kind of stands to reason that in a hell-type place, there would be tons of entities that don't speak your language. Seems like a neat take on the story, anyway. :rolleyesani:
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OK, here's a screenshot of the controller settings screen. The text entries may be in there somewhere, but I didn't have any luck finding them...
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Bah humbug! No luck- at least without spending more time than I have to spare right now.
I don't think this screen is using the default font - you can see how the イ character at top (default font?) differs from the font used in the main screen like to the right of "SELECT". Meaning, this screen probably is a graphic image. I found the regular font file (its at the beginning of pack.dat). There's also a specialized text image with things like "R2 LR" nearby, but no luck with stuff in the screen shot.
The main problem is that the PS2 images seem to be stored in a mixed up (swizzled) format which is optimized for the PS2 hardware. That makes it quite hard to find an image in a raw graphic scanner.
Sorry I couldn't be more help. :tinfoil: You might try posting in the "Personal Projects" section at Romhacking.net. Someone there may have a better understanding of the PS2's quirks :badteeth:
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Holy shit. I had to make an account here just so I could say how awesome you guys are for working on this game.
... When I first saw this thread some months ago, I though the project was dead; only now did I notice that the replies were all really recent, meaning that there's still a chance for me to one day play this incredible game in english.
:movingeyes:
Three or four months have passed now since I played King's Field and Shadow Tower, and I just fell in love with the series and it's enigmatic lore. It's so different and mysterious, I can't describe the feeling of playing them.
King's Field IV and Shadow Tower Abyss were just masterpieces, and I'm really sad that there are no more games like those left for me to play. They were really fun, and when I discovered Hungry Ghosts, I knew I one day just had to play it, even if I couldn't understand a single thing (good to know I just have to be a little more patient, thanks to you guys).
Really, thanks a LOT! You guys are doing a great work! :biggrin:
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I agree! I'm really grateful that Mord of Swoonlight is doing this project. There aren't too many games that make me say "wow", but Hunger did. It seems to have excellent artistic taste, great ambiance, and uniquely interesting game play. I hope the story lives up to the rest of the package.
Like Kuronekoekoeko says, thank you for this Mord!!! :cool:
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Well, shucks. It's always wonderful to hear that my efforts are appreciated! :badteeth:
And of course, I'm not doing ALL the work... The various forms of support I get from all you guys help the project move forward. (And in case he is still planning on hiding in the shadows, I'll introduce Nembo here - he's helping with a lot of the tedious work, such as verifying the block positions, etc.). It's happening slowly but surely!
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Here is the screenshot of the controls, with translations. I'll include this with the release, of course, but I figure it's probably good to have it available in multiple locations.
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Cool!
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Mini update. Many items' detailed menu descriptions and events are now finished. But more importantly, I guess, I just finished the journal entries / dialogue records last night.
As always, progress is slow but steady. :dazed:
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Took a break from the actual translating to tidy up the accounting (of the text locations, etc.). And I started a catalogue of the text duplicates. As mentioned long ago, there are quite a few exact duplicates - that's good news for getting the game out sooner! I've also noticed a couple patterns in the entries that might help speed things up slightly. :badteeth:
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Great job Mord! My jaw dropped open when I first saw how much text there was in this game, but I'm really hoping it's mostly just duplication. I've seen other games that use a duplicate of the entire text for each area of the game.
Is that the entire journal entry section? People who haven't played this game may not get how much that is. Isn't that about 75% of the text needed to make the game playable to English speakers?
Anyways great work! :coffee:
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Yeah, the journal entries were a fair amount - about 600 lines or so - but this game has truly ridiculous amounts of text. :sweatdrop: I started compiling a list of all the unique text blocks, to help put things in perspective. I don't have everything in there yet, but when I did a quick sum on the total lengths of the blocks I have translated and not, I have something like 30-40% of the unique text in the game translated.
Yup, there's tons of exact duplication. As you mentioned about other games, this one also seems to have a separate copy of a certain set of items (90 or so text blocks) for each level. That part will be easy to deal with; getting the first one of each into English will be the time consuming bit. The journal entries aren't actually exact copies of the dialogues, though. An example: say an NPC says "Give me the ring!" The corresponding journal entry will then say something like "He told me to give him the ring." So the actual dialogues will still take some time, especially since I haven't quite found all the dialogue blocks yet.
Now I just need to maintain a pace that won't interfere with school... :evils:
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Wowie, sounds like a lot of work is going into this
Do it to it, man
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Great to hear you're still working on this. Really looking forward to playing the game!
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Thanks for the hat tip, Gworzor! Hearing from people who are eager to play helps keep me going! :bowl:
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I cant wait either. I'm watching this one. :smile:
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I JUST found out that that PS2 Shadow Tower game was translated! Wow! And now Mord and his "shy" friend are working on this Hungry Ghosts game that I never even heard of! Many thanks! Looking forward to it! .... and all I was doing was looking for help with Diadem of Maunstraut (that damn Fire Key IN the lava! what the hell?? :madani:). Such a good game! But I really hate that "darkness" skeleton! :madani: hehehe
Mord and Nembo, please keep up the good work! We're counting on you! :smile:
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Welcome, higado2!
OK, so I thought I was missing a bunch of the NPC discussions, and started searching through the binary again. (But went about it slightly differently.) I spoke too soon before - I just uncovered a whole pile of new (unique) blocks to translate. :cheesy:
I do think I have almost everything identified now. I count up a total of 700~ish kB of raw text in the game. That may not sound like much if you're used to seeing MB sized pdfs and whatnot, but remember this is raw text size. To put this in perspective, averaging 2 bytes per Shift-JIS character, that's roughly 350,000 Japanese characters. Typical words average about 2 characters, so... you get the idea. :OOooh:
With the new stuff added into the mix, I'm at about 20% finished.
But, I don't see that as a discouragement, just a shift in expectations. The fight will go on. :groundal:
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Oh, and I also tried searching for the static images with text again (like the title screen, controls screen...), but no luck. PS2 images are usually stored in TIM2 format, and there are various tools out there (such as TextER) to search disc files for any TIM2 headers. But these turned up nothing. Hopefully something will turn up later, but everyone may be forced to just reference the photoshopped screenshot I uploaded earlier for those things...
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Wow! :eek:
I had hoped the total text would be far less than that after duplication-adjustment. Most people who have been in school can identify with having to write a 10,000 word essay - 15 to 20 pages, single spaced. Well this would be at least around a 250 page essay! And translating is probably as hard as, if not harder than composing an original essay.
Believe it or not, Brigandine has about 1MB of raw text with katakana/hiragana encoded in 1byte per letter. I don't think most people (myself included) appreciate how much effort developers put into composing text for an average game.
I really appreciate all the effort your putting in Mord! :beerchug:
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I suppose I can at least throw everyone a minor bone. :wink:
When I first started translating this, I kind of thought that most of the NPC interactions would have semi-cheesy stories about their deaths. "Mr. Fartypants wanted my money, so he poisoned me!" or something along those lines. But NOOooo no, some of the content is really, properly, dark. Not in a explicitly gruesome way, but more hinting at the horrors these souls trapped in Hell's buffer zone have endured. I was going over this one passage today - a menu description about a lever. (I will note that you won't use the item for the purpose described; it will be a trigger for a conversation with someone afflicted by it in the past...) Paraphrasing:
A lever. It seems like it fits into something to release some kind of blockage.
[further down]
This area is darker than elsewhere; I can't make out details very well.
This appears to be a lever used for opening stuck torture tools.
It has a certain presence about it.
It faintly... exudes the malice of those who were tortured and executed here...
Unfortunately, the space is extremely limited (as always), and I had to shorten it quite a bit. But it gets the job done.
The tone of the game is not really depressing, by any means, though. You're not necessarily trying to redeem yourself, per se, but rather involve yourself in this place and with its inhabitants in order to change your otherwise certain fate which you will receive upon your final judgment. The whole thing borrows heavily from various Buddhist ideas about fate, karma, and the like. So this is not Hell according to the rough Western concept. But the inhabitants of this place did not end up here because they were good.
It's a fascinating game, and I'm excited about finally being able to play it through in English.
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Holy cow, Wolf. Brigandine has, well, roughly a metric s**t ton of text. We both did it to ourselves this time, huh? Good luck to us both, I guess! :dazed:
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LoL that's the truth! :drool:
That is a neat detail from the translation. Your description about the game's narration style is exactly what I was hoping for. I've played a good number of "horror" type games, but Hunger seemed to have a lot more depth and ambiance than average. Great stuff!!
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Finished another huge block of menu stuff yesterday. The item entries were similar to, but not the same as, the block I did a ways back. So I think this one is maybe the descriptions that show up on screen when you obtain items. Or something.
There are still a couple more massive 'system' chunks that need to be done, like the in-game notes that describe how to play or give various tips. Then there are the remaining NPC dialogues, etc. I'm at 23% finished by the last count.
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Haven't worked on this in the last couple weeks, since things have been insane with my day job. To make up for it, and to celebrate this being my 100th post on the forum, I'll celebrate by giving everyone a little treat!
Here are some videos of the game with the current (first pass) translations. Enjoy! :badteeth:
The intro announcement (this plays before the title screen.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpc-3rW6YPM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpc-3rW6YPM)
Here is where your character crosses the River of the Dead at the very beginning of the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvulIDmn2w (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvulIDmn2w)
And finally, here is a little gameplay teaser. :biggrin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_t5eEyAHrc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_t5eEyAHrc)
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Those look so good!
I swear, this game has a level of artistry that very few PS2 titles matched. It reminds me of same sort of poignant feel in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Just great!
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I am so impressed with how far this has come! Thanks so much for the effort. I'm so glad! I didn't get very far with my attempted playthrough two years ago. Amazing work!
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Mord of Swoonlight wanted say thx for translation this game) i waited soo much ^^ good luck in that project)
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Hey, welcome AirMage! And you're welcome! I'll try to keep posting updates here, so do check back occasionally.
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This is looking awesome so far! Great work! I really, really look forward to being able to play this in English! :D
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Mord tends to pop in here every now and then so it may be awhile before he sees your message. I hope he's still going, but sadly most translation projects fizzle out. There was a project for Moon RPG (PS1) a while back that I was really looking forward to. It sounded like the project was almost done, but apparently it died.
If you read this Mord, and have been struggling to finish the project I hope you release what you've completed so far. Even a partial translation should make it far easier to play for English speakers. :beerchug:
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Don't worry - the project is NOT dead!
As HwitVlf said, I'm not logged in every day, so don't despair if my updates are sparse. I am indeed still working on the translation, but the pace has slowed drastically recently. I'm trying to finish my PhD by May, and that has to take priority with most of my time. On the positive side, though, I have finished a few minor text blocks. I should have a bit more time in the next couple weeks, so I'll try to give a better update soon.
Thanks for all of your continued interest, everyone!
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You get two thumbs up from the uber-cool department :beerchug:
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I'm trying to finish my PhD by May, and that has to take priority with most of my time.
Worst excuse ever!! Prioritizing important real life stuff over a video game translation project! What is the world coming to?
:beerchug:
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any news? almost 5 months passed already/
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Hi,
No real 'news' yet - but it's not at all a dead project. I've hit an unavoidable, but temporary, bottleneck in my time in real life that I knew was coming. Some progress has been made, but of course it's an enormous translation project. The good news (for this project, anyway) is that I will be completely free to work on things like this all summer. I may have a version that's far enough along (but missing some of the obscure parts) to send to a play tester to check for missing/wrong bits in June or so. It's currently mostly playable (in English anyway) for the first couple areas, except for the 'gameplay instruction notes' at the beginning.
So, until then, :coffee:
Thanks for checking in
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Hi,
No real 'news' yet - but it's not at all a dead project. I've hit an unavoidable, but temporary, bottleneck in my time in real life that I knew was coming. Some progress has been made, but of course it's an enormous translation project. The good news (for this project, anyway) is that I will be completely free to work on things like this all summer. I may have a version that's far enough along (but missing some of the obscure parts) to send to a play tester to check for missing/wrong bits in June or so. It's currently mostly playable (in English anyway) for the first couple areas, except for the 'gameplay instruction notes' at the beginning.
So, until then, :coffee:
Thanks for checking in
I just wanted to say what infinite silence in topic it is not good)) reminds me tales of vesperia ps3 project(which complete now))
good luck o/
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Hi,
No real 'news' yet - but it's not at all a dead project. I've hit an unavoidable, but temporary, bottleneck in my time in real life that I knew was coming. Some progress has been made, but of course it's an enormous translation project. The good news (for this project, anyway) is that I will be completely free to work on things like this all summer. I may have a version that's far enough along (but missing some of the obscure parts) to send to a play tester to check for missing/wrong bits in June or so. It's currently mostly playable (in English anyway) for the first couple areas, except for the 'gameplay instruction notes' at the beginning.
So, until then, :coffee:
Thanks for checking in
Thanks for the update.
Definitely looking forward to hearing about progress this summer Dr. Mord.
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I am extremely excited about the translation of Hungry Ghosts. It looks like an awesome game and I really enjoy first person rpg's/dungeon-crawlers.
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Any update on the status of this?
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Hey Demifiend, thanks for checking in. I'm still slowly chugging along on the translation, making progress when I can. (I recently moved across the country, which slowed things up a bit.) At least slow progress is better than no progress! ;)
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Hey Demifiend, thanks for checking in. I'm still slowly chugging along on the translation, making progress when I can. (I recently moved across the country, which slowed things up a bit.) At least slow progress is better than no progress! ;)
Thanks for the update!
Is there a rough estimate of when this will be completed?
And if you need someone to test what you have translated so far, let me know, I'd be more than glad.
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I know better than to announce a specific date or anything, ha. But I think I'm on track to finish the version for testing sometime in late summer. Thanks for volunteering to help test things out! I don't anticipate sending anything out until the first-pass translations are all done. :dazed: (I did a basic check myself, to make sure my changes work, which is when I made those teaser videos.) But I will definitely be relying on testers at that point to iron out the wrinkles. I'll send a message around when it gets to that stage. :devo:
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Any update on this?
Is the project still being worked on, or is abandoned?
thanks
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Any update on this?
Is the project still being worked on, or is abandoned?
thanks
late summer. according to prev post if you cant read)
so maybe soon)
Yes i sure still being worked)
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Any update on this?
Is the project still being worked on, or is abandoned?
thanks
late summer. according to prev post if you cant read)
so maybe soon)
Yes i sure still being worked)
I can read and I had read the previous post.
And in case you can't read the date of my previous post, summers over, that's why I was asking for an update.
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Hi guys! The project is definitely not abandoned, but several major-ish life events did get in the way of progress more than I'd hoped recently. Among other things, I just moved to another continent for work, so things are understandably moving a bit slowly. I feel kind of bad saying that it's still not ready, but... it's still not ready. I have been making slow progress when I can, though. :sweatdrop:
:coffee:
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Hi guys! The project is definitely not abandoned, but several major-ish life events did get in the way of progress more than I'd hoped recently. Among other things, I just moved to another continent for work, so things are understandably moving a bit slowly. I feel kind of bad saying that it's still not ready, but... it's still not ready. I have been making slow progress when I can, though. :sweatdrop:
:coffee:
Thanks for the update! Glad to hear it's still being worked on. Very excited for the release of it. If you need someone to test it when it's half way done or something send me a message, I'd be more than glad. Really need a good first person game to play
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Made an account just to express interest in this project. I'm pretty on-the-fence about purchasing the game, but would gladly go ahead once something public is released.
Is this the topic I should be following for updates and info, or is there a more official one?
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Like Luvitus I made this account to know is any progress with translation of Hungry Ghosts? I do not want to play this game with japanese text because I dont know it. Hope translator will not abandon it untill 80% of the game will be not translated and showed in public :batman:
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I check this page every morning in hope it will one day be done :)
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Same. Too much hype for this game) Its even better than most resident evils and silent hills +fatal frames)
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Made an account to tell you that I'm very excited about this project :) I really look forward to play it thanks to you.
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Is this project still on-going? If so, any estimate on time for completion?
thanks!
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I assume project now dead? almost 7 months no activity even autor didnt was here for that time)
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Oh man, I've kept this project in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, always thinking "I should go back to that "King's Field Maker" forum and see if that project for translating that King's Field like game is complete or not".... I guess not yet!
Come on Mord! We are counting on you! Throw us a bone! Hehehe :smile:
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Please finish! :)
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Mord of Swoonlight dont die pls(
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Is there a partial translation for this available?
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Hey guys, sorry for the complete lack of communication over the last several months. Thanks to the people who checked in to make sure I didn't die. :wink: I'm still ticking and kicking! Life in general required me to take an absolute, complete hiatus from the project for far too long, but I'm back in the proverbial saddle again. I want to emphasize that the project was never under threat of dying, but I am a regular person who is doing this for free on the side, after all, and sometimes things come up that disrupt the progress temporarily. But enough of that...
I just noticed today that the gameplay demo I uploaded on youtube a year ago has over 1000 views, so interest is looking good. Some good news is that I think I can convince one of my native speaker friends to help a bit, which should speed things up.
I'll post again soon when I have some more real milestones to announce.
All the best,
Mord
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I do hope things are working out nicely. I still have time to beat a few games at a comfortable pace before this translation comes out, but still, I want to express my gratitude for taking on such a task.
Cheers. :smile:
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Happy anniversary! 1 year since the last update... I hope one day we can all play this mysterious game. See you next year!
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I started playing Hungry Ghosts following Evil7's guide but it really breaks the immersion from the game... It's so sad because the game looks really good.
Is this project dead? It certainly looks dead...
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I might just look into translating this game myself, I've been wanting to play it forever.
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Do it! The community will thank you ahah! :beerchug:
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I think it would be easier to learn japanese than hope for a translation for this game lol :drool:
If I knew how far the progress for this game is, maybe I could help in some way :smile:
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I did just that, and now I'm far enough to play the game with the help of a dictionary.