Any Brigandine (PSX) fans?

[HwitVlf]

Poor Dogal 
"Born with an ugly visage, he was trained as a knight
but the city-dwellers persecuted him. He came to hate
and distrust humans, retreating into the remote mountains
where he communed with beasts and adopted them like children."

In translating the Rand sibling's (Miguel, Castor and Liguel) descriptions, I got a fact I had missed in the LoF translation. They chose to fight for different countries when the war broke out so as to raise the odds that one of them would be on the winning side and live to carry on the family name. But they all vowed to never take arms against each other even if their King commanded.

EDIT: Incidentally, the knight/creature description section is one of the biggest chunks of text in the game weighing in at around 15,000 words or 200 paragraphs, so it's taking awhile. I'm about half done.

[Ekoy77]

Can't wait to see the latest patch release...
How is the progress...

[HwitVlf]

I could release a updates partial patch when I'm done with the description section if you would prefer. It wouldn't be polished, but it should be significantly better than the v0.5 patch.

[HwitVlf]

I have about 60 descriptions left to translate and most of those are "updates" with just have a few changed phrases so hopefully they'll go quicker.

It's interesting to compare Atlus' translation to the original Japanese. I cut Atlus some slack because Brigandine was released when they were a relatively obscure company, but I must say, they botched a fair percentage of these translations. I don't mean to sound like an authority on Japanese (I'm not even close), but there are places in Legend of Forsena that don't really make sense and now I can see that it was just poor translation. 

For instance, Atlus' translation of the Cleric Aphelia's description was:
"She seems like a classy woman with no faults, but her friend Adilicia states, "Aphelia is actually a wolf in sheep's clothing."

I never understood why her "friend" would be accusing such a nice knight of being deceptive and sinister.
 What the Japanese is actually saying is:
"She seems like a prim and proper lady, but her friend Adilicia claims Aphelia is actually quite a firecracker."

"Firecracker" is not a literal translation; literally it says "concealed cat " which is just a saying meaning "not what it seems".  "Wolf in sheep's clothing" was a really bad choice in this case, and "classy" wasn't especially a good choice either. About 10% of the descriptions have significantly misleading translations.

[Hellborn]

pretty good! Even trying to describe the lexically correct translation of the original ... It is admirable! I almost had already agreed to play in the English version! Japanese is not my thing, I can translate the meaning of English phrases ... as for voice-video, can be used to make subtitles, then go to one of the groups of amateur anime translation, the benefit of many. But even so the voice is not the most important thing. I think everyone played the game flowing description of quests (99.9%  ) and most of the fighting. Here's the place that probably all like to read - quests! but there are too many Japanese ...

[HwitVlf]

HB, if you do decide to make a full Russian translation, I will be happy to help you understand the English if you run into a confusing sentence.


I encountered a description that I'm having trouble matching up with a knight. I remember seeing that there was one Knight portrait which didn't seem to appear in-game. This description is in a section with the new "quest knights" that were added in GE (between Rod and Neville) so I'm wondering if the portrait and this description belong to a previously undiscovered Grand Edition quest knight. 

"A hedonist who spent his life mocking knights who took duty seriously.
He became a knight himself just to have fun practicing his casting,
but serving seems to have changed him a little...maybe."

[ReV3nGe]

I just registered to say THANK YOU. I've been waiting for a decade for an english translate. I really hope you don't quit this project.
anyway stay awesome bro 

[HwitVlf]

Thank you very much for the encouragement ReV3nGe! I must admit, I got sidetracked this week by playing the Light and Darkness mod of Mount and Blade, but I'm getting back on track today.

[Prevch]

Hi HwitVlf,

Several things:

First and foremost, thank you.

I remember being 13 years old at a video game xchange store and randomly seeing Suikoden and Brigandine on the shelf. Those were the days when box art still played a significant role in the game purchasing decision. Needless to say, as an rpg fan, I picked both of the games up. That was a good day.

Ever since, Brigandine has been one of my favorite games. I usually sit down for a run through annually. I know the whole Bulnoil boss fight in LOF has been a big point of contention between Brig players for years, but I still swear that I fought him one time when I was a kid......or maybe that was just a 13 year old boy's dream one night. I'm still determined to beat that pesky wizard in LOF someday.

Your work of translating GE to English is truly a labor of love and something many of us strategy rpg lovers have been waiting years for and such dedication does not go unnoticed.

I personally am a fan of LOF's 3D cutscenes. I leave them on through all of my play throughs. I like the anticipation of seeing whether an attack hits or not and I love the sens of scale between the units.

I also agree with you on the voice overs. Subtitles are great, but I'd love to see GE with English voice actors, that would be just awesome.

I read your post about wanting to be a teacher and I agree with you on the politicized educational field. I used to teach grade school, but I left, got an advanced degree, worked in the private sector and now teach college. It is a much, much better environment for learning in my opinion. If you ever have an opportunity to teach auto mechanics at a tech college, go for it!

Lastly, I'm interested in making a mod for LOF. One thing I love about GE is that it shows the player what their odds of hitting an opponent with a certain attack is. What I'd like to do is create a mod for LOF that displays the chances of an attack/spell connecting, prior to committing to the action. My problem is that I guess I just don't know where to start. Any advice or resources you could offer on this project would be greatly appreciated, even if the advice is "You're nuts don't even try it" that would also be helpful!

Thank you again so much for your hard work and communication. I have truly enjoyed reading this thread and watching the process unfold. 

[HwitVlf]

Hi there Prevch  I have a very similar memory of when I bought Brigandine.  I didn't have money to get a new game very often so I spent a lot of time trying to pick out a good one. The stores kept all the games locked up so you basically had to decide based on the cover art. I had narrowed it down to Brigandine or Vagrant Story. I was a big Final Fantasy 7 fan so Vagrant Story made by Square Soft was in the lead, but there was just something about Vaynard's portrait on the LoF cover that made me feel like I'd be in for an adventure went with Brigandine. An boy did I make the right decision!

Hmm, I had not considered teaching at a college level, but I can picture it being a better environment since the students mostly want to be there. I guess I thought of college teachers as being brainiacs who all have doctorates in their field (which I don't). I know the city college in a nearby town has an automotive degree program, I might just make some inquiries. My main interest in cars is from a mechanical engineering point of view- which you don't get to employ very often as a mechanic, but I can picture the engeneering aspects being used more often when teaching.

Anyways, about your hit-odds mod: it is certainly possible, but it would take some understanding of Playstation assembly language and how to use a debugger.  A "debugger" in this case means a program that reads the Playstations "machine code" (binary 1s and 0s) and translates that into tags that humans can understand. If you don't have any experience with using a Playstation debugger, then I would recommend you try some simpler hacks first to "sharpen your teeth". 

You would probably be dealing with two parts. First,adding a routine to calculate the odds, and second, adding a routine that displays the results on screen.

As far as calculating the odds: Brigandine obviously has a "calculate odds" routine already, which is probably run when the attack is finalized. If you are lucky, you might be able to simply tap into the existing routine and run it before the attack is finalized. If that won't work, you would have to write the routine from scratch. It would look up the pertinent variables (attacker/defender AGI etc) and process them into a final percentage.

As far as getting the calculated percentage to "print" on screen, I have not looked at LoF's text system, but usually, there is a built in process to draw text on screen. It is fed the text's start location in memory (which would be the hit percentage number in this case), and the screen coordinates where the text will be drawn and everything else is already built in. The hard part is figuring out where/when that process is run and how to tap into it properly.

One of the best debuggers for Playstation that I have found is built into the Psx v1.13 emulator, but I think LoF may have issues running on it. It loops at the new game screen unless you push buttons quickly and you can only play as Iscalio. But that is probably enough to set your hack up.