Re: Localizing RPG Tsukuru 4
I was trying to explain to Dray how I do my translations.... but it's kind of complicated and technical, hard to explain.... so I don't think I succeeded. >_<
But, basically, I open up the disc image in a hex editor, look for Japanese text spread throughout the 257 million character/byte file, and then I go from there (yes, I go through it character by character, line by line, it's the only way to make sure I don't miss something.... I'm on character 8,200,272 right now - here's a pic http://thutmosesworkshop.com/assets/trans_example.png).
For easy stuff, I just copy/paste the text into Google Translate, one word/phrase at a time, try to figure out what is really being said, and then I go back to the code.
For each Japanese character in the word/phrase, I can type two English characters. So it might seem easy - but, when you have a word like "城", which means, in English, "Castle", I have only two to three spaces to type in my translation. Because of Kanji, I encounter this problem frequently. My only choice is to shorten the word to something like "Csl". Yeah. >_>
Now, there is another issue. Sometimes there is a huge string of Japanese characters which mean something simple like "モンスターユニット", which means "Monster Units". That gives me plenty of room in the code to type out "Monster Units". But, when I go to play the software, what happens? The menu was only designed for 9 characters to fit, and I just modified the code to tell the game to place 13 characters there. That's too much, and the text just goes off the screen (believe me, that's far from the worst graphical glitch that can be cause by putting in too many characters).
So I'm limited in space by both how much room there is in the code, and the available screen space in the game - whichever is smallest.
It may be possible for me to overcome the first problem by modifying something called "pointers" (these basically tell the software where in the RAM each word/phrase is stored), and then moving the locations to a place where there is plenty of free space in the code. But, that's something that I'll look into after I have the translation completed as it would be fairly time consuming.
There is, however, no solution to the second problem unless I somehow figure out how to either make certain menus larger, or decrease the space between characters. Again, that's something for me to figure out after the translation is done.
UPDATE: I think I have just about the entire battle system translated. So, now, screens like "Tactics" makes sense (it used to say "Meeting" but I think that "Tactics" makes more sense), and so do the messages you get after battle - in case you're curious, when you win, it says "We won the battle!" (which I shortened to "We won!" 'cause I ran out of room
).
I have also translated the title screen editor, along with all of the names of the backgrounds.
And lots of other odds & ends are done too.
My microphone gets here Tuesday/Wednesday, once I have that, I'll start putting together my video feature on RPGT4. ^_^
I was trying to explain to Dray how I do my translations.... but it's kind of complicated and technical, hard to explain.... so I don't think I succeeded. >_<
But, basically, I open up the disc image in a hex editor, look for Japanese text spread throughout the 257 million character/byte file, and then I go from there (yes, I go through it character by character, line by line, it's the only way to make sure I don't miss something.... I'm on character 8,200,272 right now - here's a pic http://thutmosesworkshop.com/assets/trans_example.png).
For easy stuff, I just copy/paste the text into Google Translate, one word/phrase at a time, try to figure out what is really being said, and then I go back to the code.
For each Japanese character in the word/phrase, I can type two English characters. So it might seem easy - but, when you have a word like "城", which means, in English, "Castle", I have only two to three spaces to type in my translation. Because of Kanji, I encounter this problem frequently. My only choice is to shorten the word to something like "Csl". Yeah. >_>
Now, there is another issue. Sometimes there is a huge string of Japanese characters which mean something simple like "モンスターユニット", which means "Monster Units". That gives me plenty of room in the code to type out "Monster Units". But, when I go to play the software, what happens? The menu was only designed for 9 characters to fit, and I just modified the code to tell the game to place 13 characters there. That's too much, and the text just goes off the screen (believe me, that's far from the worst graphical glitch that can be cause by putting in too many characters).
So I'm limited in space by both how much room there is in the code, and the available screen space in the game - whichever is smallest.
It may be possible for me to overcome the first problem by modifying something called "pointers" (these basically tell the software where in the RAM each word/phrase is stored), and then moving the locations to a place where there is plenty of free space in the code. But, that's something that I'll look into after I have the translation completed as it would be fairly time consuming.
There is, however, no solution to the second problem unless I somehow figure out how to either make certain menus larger, or decrease the space between characters. Again, that's something for me to figure out after the translation is done.
UPDATE: I think I have just about the entire battle system translated. So, now, screens like "Tactics" makes sense (it used to say "Meeting" but I think that "Tactics" makes more sense), and so do the messages you get after battle - in case you're curious, when you win, it says "We won the battle!" (which I shortened to "We won!" 'cause I ran out of room
).I have also translated the title screen editor, along with all of the names of the backgrounds.
And lots of other odds & ends are done too.
My microphone gets here Tuesday/Wednesday, once I have that, I'll start putting together my video feature on RPGT4. ^_^
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