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A Brief History

The original Xanadu II translation project started in the spring of 2011, when I had just beaten the game for the first time and decided it was probably the best action RPG I'd ever played. Work progressed swiftly at first. Within three months, I had translated all the text that Esperknight could extract and made a complete fan-dub for the cut-scenes. However, the project stalled in the late summer and autumn as problems related to extracting all of the script and extracting it cleanly (ie decompressing it properly) got in the way.

It wasn't until the spring of 2012 that Esperknight got the entire script out of the game in a clean fashion. In truth, we had only gotten about 40% of it the year before. Also, I had to cut-and-paste my old translations into the new script manually, so there was a lot more work to do. By then, I was spending all my time on translating Princess Crown, so the new-and-complete Xanadu II script wasn't 100% in English until November 2012.

And that's when things kind of stopped.

The problem was getting the script back into the game and getting it to display. Esperknight is a swell guy and a competent programmer, but I think some of the difficulties involved in accomplishing those tasks overwhelmed him a little. Also, he has a busy home life, a busier job and multiple other projects in the works at all times, so this one just wound up on the back burner, and that's how it stayed for a couple of years.

Finally, in 2015, I met elmer, who in my estimation is nothing less than a hacking superhero. In a matter of months, we cranked out a translation for Zeroigar on PC-FX, and its presentation quality is better than I had ever hoped for, mostly thanks to good hacking work. Naturally, I had to ask elmer if he would like to finish of Xanadu II with me. Delightfully, he agreed.


The Two Games

Elmer started hacking Xanadu II from square one. It has only been a few weeks since he began, but already he has not only cracked Xanadu II, but also made enormous headway into opening up Xanadu I for translation as well.

Xanadu II is first in line to get done. At this time, the script is extracting completely, including odd things like the menu text and weapon shop text. Once any remaining kinks are ironed out and the layout of the dump is finalized, we'll be able to transfer my old translation into the new dump (hopefully using automation) and begin reinsertion. No promises, but since the Japanese-to-English side is already so far along, this should come together relatively quickly.

Xanadu I is a beast of a game. It is literally 2.5 times the size of Xanadu II in almost every regard: it takes about that much longer to beat, there is about that much more text, and the cut-scenes are about that many more minutes. Though there are some things about the way it operates behind the scenes that are structurally simpler than Xanadu II, we're also more starved for free RAM with it. A good English translation is going to take up a lot more space than the original Japanese text, so some miracles are going to have to be performed to make everything fit. However, I am very optimistic about it coming together.

I really hope it does, too, because Xanadu I is a hell of a game.

However, at this time, none of the enormous in-game script is translated. It's going to take a while. Happily, while waiting for new script dumps, I have as of today completed my first draft of an English script for Xanadu I's cut-scenes. They literally total over one hour in running time, and the draft is over 5000 words. And this leads me to...


Dub Projects

I do intend to make a fan-dub of Xanadu I. If some of the better performers from my original 2011 project are up for working on Xanadu I, then great; if not, I'll probably re-cast their parts in both games. There were a couple of performances in the old project that didn't turn out all that well, often due to poor recording quality, so I'll possibly re-cast them as well.

If people here would like to participate, I'll be very glad to receive your auditions.

However, it is still very premature for that. There is no reason to get started on all of this until the scripts for both games are basically done. That's the only way I can guarantee the same actors in both games, and it's also the only way I can make sure that I'm not missing any sort of contextual information.

Just sit tight for now.


Final Thoughts

If elmer and I are going to do both games, then frankly, I think it makes the most sense if we aim to release both at the same time.

If we pull this off, I think it will be a great thing both for the PCE community and for English-speaking gamers at large. These two Xanadu games are wonderful. They're peak Falcom, for heaven's sake, and they're exclusive, too.

Though I hate to clutter up the forums with yet another Xanadu thread, I would hate even more to hijack elmer's excellent development thread, and the old Xanadu II thread is just that - old. It's also limited to the second game only. Therefore, I'm going to talk about the work currently happening on my end right here, where we can keep things focused. In addition to Japanese-to-English related issues, I'll update on other general things, like play-testing, when the time comes.

Stay tuned!

This is great news! If you guys need any help with pc hardware donations or $$$ please just let me know! I wish I could be more of help in other areas (beta testing), but this job of mine takes up quite a bit of my time nowadays.

'Tis awesome that you two are working on these Falcom beauts.  :mrgreen:

Quote from: SamIAm on 10/22/2015, 06:02 AMThough I hate to clutter up the forums with yet another Xanadu thread....

It's not clutter at all.  Stuff like this is 10x better than the repeated 'which system should I buy?' threads or the misplaced 'for sale' threads.

I will 10000000000000000000000000% be down for doing a voice if the need arises...

Awesome work, and I look forward to seeing one or both finished in the not so far future.

I think that there aren't enough Xanadu threads! Thanks for the update SamIAm. If there's anything I can do to help, I'll be there

I'm super glad that these two games will finally be playable in English.  The first Xanadu was the first game I ever imported and I've always wanted to know what everyone's saying everywhere. 

I am a bit curious as to why you feel both games should be released at the same time rather than when they are done...?

Quote from: seieienbu on 10/23/2015, 12:41 PMI am a bit curious as to why you feel both games should be released at the same time rather than when they are done...?

This is just my personal feeling, but everyone has waited 20 years already ... waiting another few months for them both to be ready at the same time isn't a huge burden.

I'm guessing that when they're translated, then it'd be best to play the games in their proper order so that you can enjoy the story at-it-was-intended ... but Xanadu 2 is likely to get done first, just because SamIAm's translation for that one is already "complete".

But it's more-than-possible that he may want to go back and change a few lines if they're referring to events that happened in the first game.

At the end-of-the-day, this translation is all about making Falcom's story/writing available to those of us who don't understand Japanese.

I was really impressed by SamIAm's ability to make the Zeroigar story sound both natural in English, and enjoyable, all without dumbing-down the language to a grade-school level.

He tells me that the stories in these Xanadu games are some of the best that he's ever seen in a game ... and I, for one, am looking forward to being able to understand/enjoy them in the confidence that he's exactly the right guy to support with my time-and-effort in his desire to get this/these games translated.

That's good enough reason for me.  Even if you put out LoX 2 first, I'd wait to replay it until after LoX 1 anyway.

Quote from: guest on 10/23/2015, 01:08 PM

Quote from: seieienbu on 10/23/2015, 12:41 PMI am a bit curious as to why you feel both games should be released at the same time rather than when they are done...?

so tobias can release a box set collectors combo... duh!

Haha ... "yes", there is our multi-million dollar licensing deal with the Devil to consider (well that's what he promised, and sounded honest!).

There will be a "public" version of the translation ... but that one will have every-other-word cut out.

Anyone that complains about this will be hunted down and confined in a VGA-graded box in the dungeon of my secret lair!

Wahahahaha!  :evil:

*********************

But practically ... "yes", once these translations are done, it's easy to imagine that Tobias will plan on taking them and making another PCEWorks collectard set.

We're trying to think of ways to discourage this ... but he's a smart b*stard, and there are limits to what I can think of doing.

Quote from: elmer on 10/23/2015, 01:18 PMHe tells me that stories in these Xanadu games are some of the best that he's ever seen in a game ... and I, for one, am looking forward to being able to understand/enjoy them in the confidence that he's exactly the right guy to support with my time-and-effort in his desire to get this/these games translated.

That's wonderful to hear!!!! Yaaay! :)

Quote from: SamIAm on 10/22/2015, 06:02 AMElmer started hacking Xanadu II from square one. It has only been a few weeks since he began, but already he has not only cracked Xanadu II, but also made enormous headway into opening up Xanadu I for translation as well.

http://youtu.be/MJDkcI5wxHE
SamIAm and elmer, you rock! :D
More bumper cart action on the PCE is worth it's weight in gold!

Quote from: seieienbu on 10/23/2015, 12:41 PMI am a bit curious as to why you feel both games should be released at the same time rather than when they are done...?

In short, releasing both at the same time helps me ensure consistency and accuracy. I can use the same actors in both dubs, and I can make sure that the Xanadu II script is not missing any context from Xanadu I.

For example, in the old Xanadu II dub, I made the grave mistake of assuming that a character mentioned in passing from Xanadu I was a man. This was not the case. One of the lines in the old dub script said "he/his" when it should have been "she/her", and now I have to either hope that the same guy from four years ago can record for me again, or I've got to recast the whole part. I'm just glad I found this before we released anything, or else I would be even more embarrassed.

Releasing both at the same time simply makes for better quality translations, and I really want these to be as good as possible.

================================

Since elmer mentioned story, let me describe how I feel the story impacts these games with an abstract example.

Playing Xanadu II without understanding the story is like looking at a photograph that's had its bottom right quarter cut off. Maybe you can sense that that quarter wasn't where all the critical information was...heck, maybe it actually seems inconsequential. Maybe the rest of the picture still looks perfectly good on its own. However, without that quarter, it's really difficult to relax and enjoy what you have. You focus way too much on what you know you're missing.

Playing Xanadu I without understanding the story is like looking at a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle that someone managed to put together even though a random third of the pieces are missing. Somehow, you can still get a pretty good idea of what the image is supposed to be. You're objectively missing more than Xanadu II, though, and the way it feels to look at it makes you wish you had the missing pieces a lot harder.

What I want to emphasize with these examples is that in both cases, the missing stories ultimately just compliment a whole that's mostly there already. There are other games...for example, let's pick an easy one: Snatcher...where playing without understanding the story is like looking at a photo with the subject perfectly cut out with an exacto knife and thrown away. The surroundings may look pretty, but what you're really supposed to see just isn't there, so what's the point?

However, that's not what's going on with the Xanadus, and I don't want anyone to over-anticipate what the stories are going to do for the games. In truth, both stories are fairly simple. There's not a lot of clever intertwining of plot threads and drama between characters or anything. I see them more as supporting and guiding you, the player, through the experience of adventuring in this fun fantasy world. They merely add a layer of charm and make you excited about the next dungeon.

I do hope that you'll be able to feel that charm and excitement, but what I really want is for you to be able to focus on and appreciate the harmony of the whole by giving you the complete picture. The music and graphics, the settings and themes, and the characters and story all fuse together really beautifully in these games. They have an old-school heart but were the product of some very big dreaming, and stylistically, they are Falcom all the way.

You can definitely look forward to that.

===========================

In other news, I've been measuring the timings of each spoken line in Xanadu I and recording the results so that I can edit the script and get performances that fit nicely into the original spaces. I'm about 40% finished. For Xanadu II, this process is already done.

Back to work!

I have to commend you Sam.  I know how heavy these games are on text, so I'm sure it was a lot of work getting everything done.  I know you were working with Nightwolve and Dave Shadoff to get Emerald Dragon finished too, so hats off for putting in so much of your personal time so that people can play these in English. 

I like Xanadu I a lot, but the constant running back and forth for dialogue and exposition before getting to the part of the game I really liked (the dungeons, of course) made it hard for me to complete.  I think part of that was that it took me longer to read everything the first time I played through back in 2010 or so, as that was back when my reading ability was a bit weaker.  I'd be willing to bet this will be a lot more pleasant the second time around in English.

Update:

Script dumping and formatting for Xanadu I has been more-or-less finalized, and translation of the text has started.

I have completed measuring all speech timings for the dub script, but I have not finished editing it accordingly. Editing properly requires test-recording each line to make sure it's not too long or too short, and that's a little harder to set aside time for. I hope to do this within another week or so.

Xanadu II text is inserting without breaking anything, according to elmer. However, getting a single-byte, 8x12 font working is a large task that remains.

We may have some neat things to share someday soon. :D

I am beginning to get a feel for how long it's going to take to translate Xanadu I. The prologue strikes me as having a little more text than the average chapter, of which there are 12 in total. Assuming that's true, I expect it to take around 80-100 hours to work up a full first draft.

This is a really fun game to work on, though. The locations are all so unique and developed. In the prologue chapter, for example, there are two villages on an island that each make their own wines, and they're rivals. A drama unfolds involving the two mayors and two lead winemakers of both towns as well as the aristocrats who have come to vacation in a private, out of the way mansion. There's a cave with an ancient monster in the mix, too.

The next chapter is totally different. It happens in a port town run by a corrupt businessman who over-taxes a nearby community of old farmers. A thief, who eventually joins your party, plays a Robin-Hood role between them. After many events, you get a ship to sail around a mountain range to a town that's been destroyed by monsters, where important discoveries are made.

Each of the 12 chapters is unique like this. Every one has a set-up entirely its own, full of characters with developed and important identities. I think people will enjoy experiencing this in English.

I put in a couple hours today. I'll try to post every time I make progress!

Quote from: SamIAm on 11/07/2015, 03:58 AMI am beginning to get a feel for how long it's going to take to translate Xanadu I. The prologue strikes me as having a little more text than the average chapter, of which there are 12 in total. Assuming that's true, I expect it to take around 80-100 hours to work up a full first draft.

This is a really fun game to work on, though. The locations are all so unique and developed. In the prologue chapter, for example, there are two villages on an island that each make their own wines, and they're rivals. A drama unfolds involving the two mayors and two lead winemakers of both towns as well as the aristocrats who have come to vacation in a private, out of the way mansion. There's a cave with an ancient monster in the mix, too.

The next chapter is totally different. It happens in a port town run by a corrupt businessman who over-taxes a nearby community of old farmers. A thief, who eventually joins your party, plays a Robin-Hood role between them. After many events, you get a ship to sail around a mountain range to a town that's been destroyed by monsters, where important discoveries are made.

Each of the 12 chapters is unique like this. Every one has a set-up entirely its own, full of characters with developed and important identities. I think people will enjoy experiencing this in English.

I put in a couple hours today. I'll try to post every time I make progress!

This made my heart rate increase dramatically - thanks for the update!

Quote from: SamIAm on 11/07/2015, 03:58 AMI am beginning to get a feel for how long it's going to take to translate Xanadu I. The prologue strikes me as having a little more text than the average chapter, of which there are 12 in total. Assuming that's true, I expect it to take around 80-100 hours to work up a full first draft.

Excellent news! I'm really looking forward to actually seeing the story.  :D

The technical side of getting the scripts to insert is finally done now ... and most-importantly, the insertion doesn't break anything!  :D

Here's the first dialog for Xanadu 2 (still using the ugly 12x12 ROM font, for now) ...

(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5757/22853956915_3f46caa279_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/APwvaV) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5833/22435590847_bc12c2221c_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AbygvR)
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5695/22853956695_5740616ebf_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/APwv78) (https://farm1.staticflickr.com/675/22461784079_62288eb9fd_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AdSvRi)
(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/699/22865105811_96103dd99c_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AQvDmg) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5759/22435606288_a402321745_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/Abym75)

And here's the first dialog for Xanadu 1 ...

(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5813/22853956205_d54400f76f_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/APwuXF) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5645/22665949290_b6d881f6a8_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AwUV49)
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5690/22232800613_b11d8ee921_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/zSCV3v) (https://farm1.staticflickr.com/566/22827949046_f2768429c4_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AMecWo)
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5690/22435607078_235a5fe7ff_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AbymkG) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5750/22461784349_dfc91dcbd3_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AdSvVX)

Noice!  Looks really good so far!

That font, ATM, isn't looking ugly to me, but I think that may be do to the excitement of seeing it in English!  I can read, I can read!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's the default S-JIS 16x16 font from the System Card. This is the problem with most PC Engine games and why not they're fan-translated, beyond the space issues for English text, because that's usually the only font you can use by default without a sophisticated font hack which very few people interested in the system are capable of doing... He's basically just testing insertion presently and will hack an 8x12 font or whatever down the road.

This is glorious!

I don't give a shit what the font looks like, if it's in English it looks good to me!  8)

Note that Xanadau 2 is using the system font, undoctored.
Xanadu 1 is doing some sort of shift technique to make it seem more bold.

I think it's ironic that we all think of replacing the font in the game because the system font is bad in so many ways (not least of which is that it isn't consistent as to where the baseline of the font is)...

...But nobody ever talks of creating a patch to make the system font nicer, to ameliorate the appearance.   :wink:

-Dave

Since the choices offered by the system card are 8x8 or 16x16, and patching it would only be good for an emulator, that would be why. I guess nowadays with a writable Turbo Everdrive V2, you could start talking about taking the System Card 3 ROM and altering the English tiles at its S-JIS area for use on real NEC hardware, but even so, 16x16 is still gonna be an ugly spaced out font for English.

I guess you could patch a dual tile system though and it'd work out if you have large enough text blocks and can compress your new text. But nonetheless, none of that is desirable: tying a fan translation patch to a patched system ROM and then a flash cart for use on real NEC hardware.

Quote from: NightWolve on 11/07/2015, 05:30 PMHe's basically just testing insertion presently and will hack an 8x12 font or whatever down the road.

Yep, you're spot on!  :wink:

The font hack is now my top priority, because it's just not possible to get a decent idea of the space used by the translated text, either in memory or on-screen, until I get that done.

Quote from: dshadoff on 11/07/2015, 08:00 PMI think it's ironic that we all think of replacing the font in the game because the system font is bad in so many ways (not least of which is that it isn't consistent as to where the baseline of the font is)...

...But nobody ever talks of creating a patch to make the system font nicer, to ameliorate the appearance.   :wink:

I'm going to agree with NightWolve here ... even if we could replace the System Card font (which isn't really practical), then a better-looking 12x12 or 16x16 English font is still lousy for translations. An 8x12 or 6x12 font is what's needed.

Even better, is just to have more RAM so that you can do whatever you like, and have plenty of room to easily hack in a new font-printing routine.

IMHO, TheOldMan absolutely hit-the-nail-on-the-head with his System Card Dreams thread.

If someone could manufacture and sell a card with 512KB of RAM, that would really help.

I know for sure that it would make my life easier with the Xanadus ... and it may yet still turn out to be "required" in order to get everything working.

We've got that capability with the TED v2, and also with TailChao's CD Stupid Card.

I'd like to think that there's room for a cheaper solution than the TED v2, and for one that is going to be more generally-available than the CD Stupid Card.

TheOldMan and I seem to have different ideas of what an affordable-and-practical card might be ... but at-the-end-of-the-day, ALL of the current and proposed cards provide a nice-and-simple 512KB of RAM for translators.

QuoteTheOldMan and I seem to have different ideas of what an affordable-and-practical card might be ... but at-the-end-of-the-day, ALL of the current and proposed cards provide a nice-and-simple 512KB of RAM for translators.

.....At the end of the day, I want to be able to pick up an empty pcb, add rom/ram as requested, flash the rom, pack it in a carrier and send it out.
That way, I only need 1 card blank for production, and I don't have to worry about over-buying boards.

Quote from: NightWolve on 11/07/2015, 05:30 PMHe's basically just testing insertion presently and will hack an 8x12 font or whatever down the road.

It looks like the road wasn't that long!  :wink:

It's nice to be able to get a lot more text on each "page" of the dialog.

I personally prefer the clean font on the blue background rather than the outlined font on the transparent background, but it's selectable from the game's pause menu.

Which version do you all like better?

(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/709/22263608184_1b99ff90ea_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/zVmP4w) (https://farm1.staticflickr.com/584/22467992267_9a44bba1c6_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/Aeqkk2)
(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/734/22698333800_15ca068f0d_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AzLTQL) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5769/22265208403_e7b91406bc_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/zVv1Kv)


(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/726/22860380966_25494a6cb0_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AQ6qPq) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5736/22872888952_835639c4ce_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/ARcx1m)(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/757/22467992487_70d73155ce_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AeqkoP) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5655/22468021218_baf1f75319_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AeqtWb)

8x12 is plenty for things on my end. That allows for 84 characters per box, some of which of course we lose when we put too-long words one line down, but which generally is sufficient to write the equivalent of one full Japanese text box.

There's still more work to do behind the scenes, but things are really coming along now.

PS: I worked on the text some more today. :)

Clean on Blue looks great for font. This is so rad

Quote from: elmer on 11/09/2015, 10:11 AMIt looks like the road wasn't that long!  :wink:

Wow, that's awesome !!

QuoteI personally prefer the clean font on the blue background rather than the outlined font on the transparent background, but it's selectable from the game's pause menu.

Which version do you all like better?

Stylistically, I'm torn - they both look good.
But I would worry that some important feature could be hidden behind the panel in some obscure situation, if the blue panel is used instead of the transparent one.

...So I would opt for whichever one was used in the original game (in both cases).

-Dave

Clear on blue looks really good and fantastic work so far.  Looking forward to more progress and thanks for sharing the screenshots.

Quote from: dshadoff on 11/09/2015, 12:21 PMWow, that's awesome !!

The Xanadu games both print text in 4-pixel-wide strips ... just like PC-FX Team Innocent.

I'm using the same trick here that I did for that. It's the same font, too ...but with some pixels moved to make it "rounder".

It makes for a nice-looking "almost-vwf".  :)

QuoteBut I would worry that some important feature could be hidden behind the panel in some obscure situation, if the blue panel is used instead of the transparent one.

...So I would opt for whichever one was used in the original game (in both cases).

The original Xanadu game does both techniques ... you can switch between them in the game's options menu.

So we should be perfectly safe with the solid panel ... Falcom already had to make sure that nothing important was hidden.

I'm guessing that the outlined font was their "default" because dynamically making the ROM font "bold" and giving it an outline is a pretty-damned-clever programming effect (IMHO).

Does anyone know of another PCE CD game that does that with the ROM font?

[EDIT]

Hmmm ... I guess that the programming discussion of the font technique really doesn't belong here ... I'll continue it to the "blog" thread, and leave this thread for updates on the game translation itself.  :wink:

QuoteDoes anyone know of another PCE CD game that does that with the ROM font?

I seem to recall a couple of other late gen games that might have done that.

Quote from: elmer on 11/09/2015, 10:11 AM

Quote from: NightWolve on 11/07/2015, 05:30 PMHe's basically just testing insertion presently and will hack an 8x12 font or whatever down the road.

It looks like the road wasn't that long!  :wink:

It's nice to be able to get a lot more text on each "page" of the dialog.

I personally prefer the clean font on the blue background rather than the outlined font on the transparent background, but it's selectable from the game's pause menu.

Which version do you all like better?

(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/709/22263608184_1b99ff90ea_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/zVmP4w) (https://farm1.staticflickr.com/584/22467992267_9a44bba1c6_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/Aeqkk2)
(https://farm1.staticflickr.com/734/22698333800_15ca068f0d_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AzLTQL) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5769/22265208403_e7b91406bc_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/zVv1Kv)

DUDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111

You are a master of your craft like no other, no doubt about that!

Never thought I'd see that happen! Legend of Xanadu was actually the first or 2nd game I tried to hack in late 2001 when I first got started, but because all I could do was replace 16x16 Japanese S-JIS characters with English alpha characters, there was no point. The text was at least uncompressed, but that didn't matter much. So I kept searching for other RPGs I could handle, which is how I found Xak III (as a RIGG archive from a PCE pirating group) which had built-in 8x16 English font support and easy 16-bit text pointers for me to learn to adjust to pack a text block.

Anyway, congratulations man!!! We saw EsperKnight as the "great hope" once upon a time to carry the PCE fan translation torch, but that hope came and went - it's about time we got somebody else with SNES level talent to pull off low-level PCE ASM hacks for this system! This calls for a mass Like. :)
SFIIHonda-Mass-Likes.jpg

Thank you for the kind words.   :oops:

At this point ... the translation is definitely going to happen. The technical issues all seem to be solved.

It's just all going to take months of hard work.

IMHO, the worst that will happen is that we'll need the extra RAM on a TED v2 (or in Mednafen) ... but I'm still hoping that we can avoid that.

This is awesome news!

Quote from: elmer on 11/10/2015, 02:19 PMIMHO, the worst that will happen is that we'll need the extra RAM on a TED v2 (or in Mednafen) ... but I'm still hoping that we can avoid that.

Worst case, maybe you go with the translation being an Arcade Card release?  I would far rather have that happen than those other options.

Quote from: Bardoly on 11/16/2015, 12:37 AM

Quote from: elmer on 11/10/2015, 02:19 PMIMHO, the worst that will happen is that we'll need the extra RAM on a TED v2 (or in Mednafen) ... but I'm still hoping that we can avoid that.

Worst case, maybe you go with the translation being an Arcade Card release?  I would far rather have that happen than those other options.

Same here! I have the V1 everdrive and would rather play on a real system than mess around with whatever else I may have to. If the Arcade Card is possible, I think that would be pretty damn cool.

However, whatever way this gets translated and works, I will play. Regardless of what I have to do. So honestly, you've got my attention either way. I'd just prefer what I stated earlier :)

The Arcade Card isn't a viable solution because all of the extra RAM that it contains sits behind a memory mapper, and therefore the system can't work with it in the way that it needs to.

Sorry. :(

-------------------

In happier news, I have finished translating the prologue into English and have also done a proofread of it. Now we get to see if it can be squeezed into the game as-is, or if we have to choose between axing some words to make it fit or going with an expanded memory card.

Progress is happening pretty much daily. Chapter 1, thankfully, only has about 60% as much text as the prologue, so that one should come pretty quickly. :)

sam is the man

These games look awesome, I hope to try it once finished.

Sam, did you get the email I sent you with part of my new VA audio? I never received a response, so I wasn't sure if I sent them to the right address.

I'll try to get the rest of my lines redone soon.

Thanks, Arjak. :)

-----------------------

In other news, I finished drafting Chapter 1. I have to proofread it still, which will take some additional days, but it's close.

I also organized all the script files according to chapter, of which there are 11 plus a prologue. The average size of one chapter is about 150 KB in elmer's dump format. The prologue was 140KB, while the largest chapter (7) is 180KB. Chapter 1 was only 100 KB, and Chapter 10 is only 80. Chapter 11, thankfully, is super small. Although I don't think we have it all, it's probably 20KB or so.

Except for chapters 10 and 11, each one will take about two weeks to translate and proofread.

Chapter 1 is finished and proofread.

Chapter 2 is currently at about 60%.

-----------------

Xanadu II has a couple of scenes that you can unlock by talking to the right people at the right times. I didn't think Xanadu I had any, but now I'm thinking it might. I just played through Chapter 2 last week and am translating it now, and I ran into some text in the script that looks completely out of place. I googled the name of the extra character involved and got nothing, so it's not in any Japanese walkthrough.

Quote from: SamIAm on 11/27/2015, 10:10 PMXanadu II has a couple of scenes that you can unlock by talking to the right people at the right times. I didn't think Xanadu I had any, but now I'm thinking it might. I just played through Chapter 2 last week and am translating it now, and I ran into some text in the script that looks completely out of place. I googled the name of the extra character involved and got nothing, so it's not in any Japanese walkthrough.

Fun! So we may have found something new, that's really cool. :D

I wonder how difficult it's going to be to figure out how to unlock it ... hopefully we can get some clues from reading the source script.   :-k

It's just a small handful of lines, and I might have simply missed it when I played last week, but I wonder if it involves a hidden song like in Xanadu II.

For now, onward!

This looks awesome....i have not played much Xanadu....i have Faxanadu for nes and Xanadu Next for N-gage. I havent played the original 2. Coincidentally i  own the first two on a japanese Sega Saturn disc but well...cant read it. Ill be following this development for sure

N-Gage, eh? You can Xanadu while you side-taco-talk! I find it interesting Falcom/whomever decided the platform had enough potential for a title in the series. How is it?

Chapters 1, 2, and the prologue are finished and proofread.

Chapter 3 is at about 10%.

Total completion is about 25%, although nothing is in final-draft form.

From now to the end of Chapter 7, things are going to be heavy. I'll try to finish Chapter 7 before January is out, but no guarantees.

I do think this is turning out pretty well, though. I really like the way this game is written and put together. It's never boring to work on.

Quote from: SamIAm on 12/01/2015, 04:47 AMChapters 1, 2, and the prologue are finished and proofread.

Chapter 3 is at about 10%.

Total completion is about 25%, although nothing is in final-draft form.

From now to the end of Chapter 7, things are going to be heavy. I'll try to finish Chapter 7 before January is out, but no guarantees.

I do think this is turning out pretty well, though. I really like the way this game is written and put together. It's never boring to work on.

Thx for the update! It's really fun to follow along with this project. Thanks again for working on this!

The nasty debugger tricks that I needed to use to get the font-hack working before are no longer needed, and both Xanadu 1 and Xanadu 2 are now being properly patched on the CD.

Here's the first dialog from Xanadu 2.

It mainly shows that it's nice to get a lot of text on a single screen, but it also shows that because of the patterned background in the dialog box, it's a lot harder to read than Xanadu 1.

I think that I'm probably going to have to risk the wrath of "purists" and add a drop-shadow to the font.

Hopefully that won't offend anyone.

(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5672/23453068435_8169ce3c6b_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/BJt79T) (https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5747/22825926323_3c29ba996e_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/AM3QDR)
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5657/23370548761_3deef01231_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/BBbaVT) (https://farm1.staticflickr.com/614/23370548641_f458353699_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/BBbaTP)
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5626/23370548591_4f40901e8d_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/BBbaSX)

[hyperventilating]

So exciting. I know I would not be offended by a drop shadow on that type.  =D>

Oh man, it looks soooo much better when the lines fit in the text boxes.

Great work!

There's nothing wrong with adding a drop shadow, though that text looks okay to me as is.  I'm just happy for the translation.  :mrgreen:

If adding a drop shadow increases text readability, for goodness sake go with the drop shadow. Purists should play the game in Japanese, because a translation is inherently impure.

Also, from what I've read of SamIAm's philosophy of translation, purists may not be happy, anyway, since it sounds like he prefers good writing to transliteration.

Quote from: guest on 12/01/2015, 06:50 PMAlso, from what I've read of SamIAm's philosophy of translation, purists may not be happy, anyway, since it sounds like he prefers good writing to transliteration.

And that's precisely why I'm working with him ... I like to read the text that he writes.  :wink:

It goes back to the recent "Wanting to learn Japanese?" thread.

It takes years of hard work to get his kind of proficiency in Japanese, and a completely different skill altogether in actually being able to make that translation fun to read.

We all benefited from those skills with Zeroigar, and now I'm looking forward to seeing the Xanadu games translated with the same flair.  :)

This is so exciting!

Keep up the good work, it is really enjoyable to read about the project and follow along.

Aw, shucks. Thanks elmer. :mrgreen:

We make a pretty good team. I'll do my best.

Now back to work!!  :lol:

(I'm almost 50% through Chapter 3)  :wink:

Chapter 3 is done, though proofreading remains.

Chapter 3 proofreading is done.

---------------------

This is a great game to be working on for many reasons, not the least of which is its easy chapter-based structure.

When I did Princess Crown on the Saturn (another complete script waiting to be hacked in), the spider-web structure of the game's progression made the text dumps difficult to deal with. Script files would typically contain text from one specific area only, e.g. a town, and they would usually contain all of the text ever used in that area. It would be normal to see sentences used in the very beginning of the game not far away from sentences used in the very end of the game, just because they happened in the same location. There was some division, but it wasn't much, and the order of the scripts had almost nothing in common with the order of the game.

Bearing in mind that Princess Crown takes 20-30 hours to beat, it was really hard to recall the contexts of a lot of sentences as I was translating. I had played Princess Crown more than once before translating it, but there were a lot of minor lines that I either couldn't remember at all or couldn't remember the details of the staging and context for. When I finally had the chance to play-test the translation, there were dozens of places where I discovered little goofs based on context misunderstanding and had to go back to make adjustments.

Xanadu I is broken down into 12 chapters, and none of the chapters take place in the same location or have any kind of overlap with each other. The result is that the text dumps are very easily isolated on a per-chapter basis. Together with the fact that it only takes a two-to-three hours to play one chapter, this makes it incredibly easy for me to follow the contexts of the stuff I am working on.

For example, last week, I spent one day playing all of Chapter 3, and the next several days translating it. Even though the lines in the scripts are not exactly in the same order you encounter them as you actually play, it was nonetheless very easy to remember what was happening in each conversation I encountered while translating. The quantity of things I can't translate confidently due to forgetting the context is down to almost nothing.

The time I'll need to spend editing should be drastically decreased because of this, which is good news for all of us.

When it comes to other RPG script dumps, I'm not really sure what the most efficient way to approach them might be. Having a recorded "Let's Play" on hand could make it easy to search out each line in the dump and translate in-order of the game. However, preparing, organizing and searching the videos themselves could be such a chore that it would mostly negate any other benefit.

I don't know, but I suppose I'd like to try the "Let's Play" approach with the next game I translate. I also really wonder how "pro" game localization outfits deal with this kind of thing.

---------------

On to Chapter 4! I played it yesterday, and I'm ready to go on it today!

Chapter 4 is at 40%.

Progress is swift not because the amount of text is small, but because I've been sinking in a lot of hours. If you're curious, take a look at this:

/xanadu1_00189800_014.txt

Calculating by filesize, that is about 1.5% of the total script.

My process is to translate somewhere around that amount every day for five or six days in a row, then proofread it all for another one or two days, then move on to the next chapter.

Thanks for sharing that.
it's great to view something like this to get an idea of how much work you guys do.

Quote from: SamIAm on 12/10/2015, 06:04 AMI'm hard at work!

Sounds really good!  It's nice to hear that the script organization allows for (relatively speaking) easy translation.  Thanks!

Chapter 4 is at 100%. Now I just have to proofread it.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are going to be "the hump", with 5 and 7 being especially large. Once I get those three done, it'll all be downhill.

Unfortunately, my real-life job is about to get really busy until the end of the month, so I don't anticipate being able to finish Chapter 5 until the first week of January. My overall goal, however, is still to have Chapter 7 done by the end of January and to finish everything by the end of February.

----------------

Elmer sent me a test build that let me see a bit of my translation working in-game. It was very eye opening.

The more I do this kind of thing, the more I understand why Working Designs took the approach they did and sprinkled in lots of jokes. It's kind of an obvious move, really. As the translator, you desperately want the script to sound nice, have a good flow, and maybe even be a little memorable, but there's a limitation even in the original writing that makes this difficult. Every line is structured like bite-sized, easily digested finger-food so that it can fit nicely in a text box and connect well with the other text boxes. It makes sense and all - anything else would be a lot harder to follow. But it does have a big impact on the rhythm and the momentum of how scenes play out.

Sometimes you look at a succession of lines you've just translated and think to yourself: This is basically working, but does it fly? Does it sing? Or is it just a string of bite-sized lines that go "thud, thud, thud" and then it's over?

And the thing is, maybe the original Japanese goes "thud, thud, thud", too. After all, these are just silly little sprites standing around saying stuff like "Here's the key to the abandoned mine. Be careful!". There's not a lot of Shakespearean depth going on in these lines. To an extent, you're kind of stuck, and this is when a little voice reminds you that if you just salt the lines with a little sarcasm or exaggeration or some other kind of joke, it will make it a bit more fun to read and memorable.

Often, too, you can't help but think "Well, why not?". For example, if there's an earthquake in the game, and every other damn NPC in a town is just saying some variation of "What a scary earthquake that was!", then where's the harm in re-writing one guy's line so that he jokes about the mayor being a lush? And if you're Working Designs, is it really such a big step to go from doing that to making a crack about Euro-Disneyland or whatever? The temptation is definitely there.

...But you do run the risk of alienating people who don't think your jokes are funny. It also is a misrepresentation of the original. In my opinion, people who think that a translation should use the exact same grammar and vocabulary as the original without exception are missing the point. However, there definitely comes a point you have to say "Is this The Legend of Xanadu in English, or is this SamIAm's original story that's heavily based on The Legend of Xanadu?". That's the kind of barrier I don't want to breach.

What I ultimately hope is that even if my translation isn't "snappy" at every turn like the script to a good Disney movie, it will still have an overall tone of simplistic charm, with just a little of its own personality. That's one thing I do think the Japanese original has, and is something that's really enjoyable in old games in general.

That's why I'm not planning on adding jokes or otherwise heavily spicing up my translation. I am taking liberties where necessary to make sure everyone sounds like they're speaking real English, and I'm also trying to mix in a nice variety of English idioms in appropriate places. Where the original does something well, I do whatever it takes to make sure the English is doing the same thing equally well. Beyond that, though, aside from a little nip-and-tuck here and there to make everything fit nicely into text boxes, I'm not really planning on changing anything. I hope it works.

When I'm in a later stage of editing, I'm going to be dealing with challenges like "Does this king really sound enough like a king?" and tweaking things to make sure each important character has his or her own "voice". That's a topic for another day, I guess. Anyway, I am going to try hard to make this good. Bear with me while I think out loud. It helps me organize my thoughts.

Quote from: SamIAm on 12/13/2015, 11:15 PMThe more I do this kind of thing, the more I understand why Working Designs took the approach they did and sprinkled in lots of jokes. It's kind of an obvious move, really. As the translator, you desperately want the script to sound nice, have a good flow, and maybe even be a little memorable, but there's a limitation even in the original writing that makes this difficult.

...

To an extent, you're kind of stuck, and this is when a little voice reminds you that if you just salt the lines with a little sarcasm or exaggeration or some other kind of joke, it will make it a bit more fun to read and memorable.

And if you're Working Designs, is it really such a big step to go from doing that to making a crack about Euro-Disneyland or whatever? The temptation is definitely there.

http://youtu.be/rY9At7Ec66Y&t=4m52s

:)

I don't think that translations should strive for being the closest a different language can be to identical. It should be balanced so that it feels as natural to the target language as the original was, assuming the source material was solid itself. But I don't think that something like Magic Knight Rayearth should have a guy going into detail about how much he enjoys the sensation of "pooping" his pants or jokes about condoms. Too often, the WD games with the most out of place references also have inconsistent dialogue which betrays the established personalities of the characters. In a fantasy game that isn't overtly wacky, a non-jokey serious character randomly delivering a wacky line as though a completely different person is speaking, using humor they shouldn't even understand and referencing specific things from our real world, totally breaks the game and disconnects you from who you thought they were. If Han Solo in the Force Awakens sees Leia for the first time in years and has the appropriate reaction, but then makes a joke about the song "Friday", then acts normal for 20 minutes until, in the middle of an action scene, exclaims "this woulda beeen WAY easier if I had mah Heelies!®", fans would be pissed.

Thanks for that write-up Sam, that was a whole new perspective I hadn't even thought of in relation to this project. I never thought of dialogue like this in terms of " rhythm" but looking back you make complete sense. You and elmer are obviously spending lots of time in this project, but it's also nice to know the care that's going into it. I'm still anxiously awaiting this and checking these threads nonstop.

I'm of the opinion that dialogue should make sense regardless of when it was written.  Ideally, it shouldn't be full of pop culture references that date the thing and make it difficult to understand the "jokes."  I recently played through Popful Mail with my girlfriend who is a bit too young to have ever seen Dragnet (I only saw it as reruns on Nick at Night as a young kid) so I told her what the cops lines about "Just the facts, ma'am" were referring toward.  Jokes are fine but referential humor generally falls flat with me.  Lunar's reference to Bill Clinton makes little sense contextually and less sense when you play it today and see it merely as a relic of the age acting as a timestamp.  I feel that timeless humor works much better than something that only works due to current trends.

I'd hope that toilet humor is left out as well.

If I had to translate that much text and it was that boring and utilitarian, sure, I'd put jokes in there. Japanese people speak differently than us, write differently, etc. Their language in general is...maybe not limiting exactly, but it's extremely normal for people to use what are, by American standards, a lot of really uninspired vocabulary, too-the-point sentence structure, etc. Like a cop on the witness stand, he just reads exactly what his captain told him to say and there's no point in pumping him for anything else. Very boring. 

For example, when you kill a boss in a Japanese video game. What does he say...in virtually every single fucking game? Something like なんで。。。ばかよ！！！ in nearly every JRPG I've cleared in the original language. I think Dracula says it too. Bosses, to a man, never seem to see their end coming, and always have a hard time believing it when it does. You'd get sick of writing that over and over again in English because in the English speaking world it's highly encouraged to use as much variety in your speech as possible.

The problem with Working Desgins was that their "humor" was for shit. An unfunny joke is less funny than just not having a joke in the first place. Jokes about TV shows and American presidents should be ruled out on subject matter alone when the setting is not a Leno monologue or your asshole uncle that thinks he's hilarious at Thanksgiving dinner.

Quote from: SignOfZeta on 12/15/2015, 04:53 PMIf I had to translate that much text and it was that boring and utilitarian, sure, I'd put jokes in there. Japanese people speak differently than us, write differently, etc. Their language in general is...maybe not limiting exactly, but it's extremely normal for people to use what are, by American standards, a lot of really uninspired vocabulary, too-the-point sentence structure, etc. Like a cop on the witness stand, he just reads exactly what his captain told him to say and there's no point in pumping him for anything else. Very boring.

There's a lot we could pick apart there, but I'll just say that the Xanadus don't suffer very badly at all compared to other RPGs of the time in terms of that kind of thing. The main cast and the important side-characters do a lot of interesting stuff together.

Old-school RPG dialogue tends to be short due to space limitations and expository due to the need to fit into the game structure. You can't really have text boxes popping up in the middle of a dungeon so that your two characters can have some witty back and forth about whether they'd give a guy a foot massage. If you've got a town full of people, you need to have the mayor or whoever tell the player where the next dungeon is and why he should go there, and you need to have all the other people who the player doesn't have to talk to say things that aren't particularly important. Any other kind of development needs to be shoehorned in carefully and discretely, or you risk ruining the pacing and turning your so-called game into a drawn-out melodramatic slideshow. Frankly, I think this is a trap that modern JRPGs have fallen into. Limitations have a funny way of making things cooler.

One thing Japanese does have that English doesn't which helps enliven short little RPG lines quite a lot is dialects and modes of speech that are easy to represent in written form. Without actually adding any whole extra words, it's easy to see if a character is a kooky old man, an air-headed teenage girl, a swashbuckling pirate, a "friend of Dorothy", a hardened boss, a polite servant, and more. In Japanese, it's all a matter of tweaking a few syllables.

In English, if you try to phonetically represent different styles of speaking, you quickly start toeing the line of annoying the reader. Chrono Cross's auto-dialect system was very ambitious, but it also gave us lines like "What'z zis? Non apologiez for bumping into moi? Ooh la lah, don't you know any mannerz?" To quote the blog where I found a screenshot of that line:

To repeat myself, dialect is hard to write properly. It is definitely not to be treated like some kind of textual garnish that you add by shoving your script into the Oi-Mate-O-Matic. Otherwise, you wind up with a big pile of what Chrono Cross is serving: Characters that are hard to relate to because their shitty "French" accents (or shitty Australian accents, or inexplicable dialogue quirks, or whatever) ping against your forehead like tiny pebbles.

QuoteFor example, when you kill a boss in a Japanese video game. What does he say...in virtually every single fucking game? Something like なんで。。。ばかよ！！！ in nearly every JRPG I've cleared in the original language. I think Dracula says it too. Bosses, to a man, never seem to see their end coming, and always have a hard time believing it when it does. You'd get sick of writing that over and over again in English because in the English speaking world it's highly encouraged to use as much variety in your speech as possible.

If terms of being an overly-used set phrase for that kind of occasion, the English equivalent of ばかな would have to be "Noooooo!!!!" By itself, it's mostly just an expletive.

It's definitely a thing in Japanese writing for the bad guy to have a death monologue featuring "For someone as strong as me to have lost to a puny little weakling like you...it doesn't make any sense!"

None of those in Xanadu I so far!

And yeah, keeping the language varied is just par for the course when you're doing translation into English. I frequently do text searches on my whole translation just to make sure I'm not over-using certain words and phrases.

QuoteThe problem with Working Desgins was that their "humor" was for shit. An unfunny joke is less funny than just not having a joke in the first place. Jokes about TV shows and American presidents should be ruled out on subject matter alone when the setting is not a Leno monologue or your asshole uncle that thinks he's hilarious at Thanksgiving dinner.

OK, but people might think my humor is shit, too. They might prefer to keep the tone of the original, utilitarian lines about the weather and all. Again, I do find a charming simplicity in these old RPGs. "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!" spells adventure for me. Adding a little dry sarcasm or whatever would tarnish the innocence of it.

My final thoughts on adding humor to the Xanadus is that I just might do it on occasion, but it would have to be things so slight and subtle that nobody would be able to guess that it wasn't in the original script.

Chapter 4 proofreading is done.

I had some unexpected free time and managed to get the first ~15% of Chapter 5 done. It would be great to get it finished off in December, but no bets on that one.

When this chapter is more like 50% finished, I'll be roughly halfway through the entire game. Of course, that's just making up the first draft, but that is one great big heavy step.

Chapter 5 is 50% done, and therefore the first draft of the entire game is 50% done.

Whenever it is that I do cross the finish line, I'm going to have to treat myself to something nice.

I am crying. The progress has been wonderful.

:) :)

Quote from: guest on 11/28/2015, 12:40 PMN-Gage, eh? You can Xanadu while you side-taco-talk! I find it interesting Falcom/whomever decided the platform had enough potential for a title in the series. How is it?

Wow. Im late at seeing this. Ha. Well honestly...its still sealed. I havent popped it in yet. Ill post when i actually play it. From what ive read its apparently one of the best on n-gage. And yes...i will taco talk! Haha well ots not active as a phone. Honestly its an impressive device when you think of the time frame it was released. My version is the first...and taco one. Not the QD(2nd version).

Quote from: esteban on 12/20/2015, 04:42 PMI am crying. The progress has been wonderful.

Well, here's a little bit more to get the "tears" flowing again!  :wink:

xanadu1-shoptest-1.png (https://flic.kr/p/BXAVzN)

The Weapon Shops (Buy/Sell) are now working.  :D

They were the last major un-extracted parts of the main game in Xanadu 1.

Falcom put them together a bit differently from the rest of the main game, and it required some messing around to locate the scripts, and to deal with the item display code, which is unique to those sections.

From my POV, the major code hacking in Xanadu 1 is nearly complete (barring any bugs).

There's still the Boss sections and anything that's in the Cinematic sections to deal with ... but hopefully those are going to be minor ... we'll see.

Then there's some text that is pre-baked into tiles/sprites (like the Main Menu options) that will need to be replaced ... but that can wait for a while until I've looked at Xanadu 2 again.

There's still the actual translations to complete, and then a lot of testing/refinement ... but it's all looking good.  :dance:

The progress you've made on this is amazing!  We're lucky to have you working so hard on it to the benefit of nearly everyone, and I think I speak for everybody when I say thanks for that!  Can't wait.

Quote from: elmer on 12/22/2015, 11:19 AMxanadu1-shoptest-1.png (https://flic.kr/p/BXAVzN)

...it's so beautiful.

^ What he said.

Looking good! :)

The end of December was super busy for me at work, and New Year's involved visiting in-laws and getting sick (not that those two necessarily had anything to do with each other).

Anyway, I'm back on the case now. Elmer got me a whole bunch of weapon-shop and menu-related stuff to work on for both games, so I paused my progress on Chapter 5 of Xanadu I to get all of that done. While there is going to be some length adjustment to do down the line, we are at least good to go for testing purposes.

I almost got a little choked up working on the Xanadu II menu stuff. I've been waiting to do that for SO long.  [-o<

Back to work on Xanadu I!

God damn, the language barrier is crumbling, brick by brick.

Quote from: esteban on 01/03/2016, 10:21 AMGod damn, the language barrier is crumbling, brick by brick.

Piece-by-piece!  :wink:

Hopefully, everyone here can see by now that it's going to get finished this time around ... it's just a matter of giving us the time to polish it all up to where we're satisfied that we've done the best job that we can do.

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/03/2016, 03:27 AMAnyway, I'm back on the case now. Elmer got me a whole bunch of weapon-shop and menu-related stuff to work on for both games, so I paused my progress on Chapter 5 of Xanadu I to get all of that done. While there is going to be some length adjustment to do down the line, we are at least good to go for testing purposes.

Thanks!  :)

It's been really great to get to work on those "missing" pieces and make sure that they're going in smoothly.

The Xanadu 1 script files have gone in with no trouble ... and I'll blog about the Xanadu 2 technical niggles in the other thread.  :-k

Here are some more pretty pictures ... in particular, take notice of what the "bold & outlined" text is looking like now.

I'm not really loving how the overlap between the characters is looking ... but I can't eliminate it without switching from the current bi-width font to a proper variable-width font.

That's going to have to wait until sometime later (if there's enough memory for the extra code).


(https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1560/23812552929_dc9deb0662_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/Cheynp) (https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1517/24180358015_739399fd1f_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/CQJE1p)
(https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1671/23553591733_8c5aabd72a_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/BTmjec)

I prefer this font, but that's just me...

(https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1517/24180358015_739399fd1f_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/CQJE1p)

I prefer the slimmer font, too, but we really ought to see how it looks running on real hardware through composite video.

That shouldn't be far off!

I agree too. The fatter font makes it look shadow-ey, I like slim letters. But whatever pans out works for me! I love seeing news in this thread, big or small!

I prefer the slimmer font, too.

In fact, I've changed the default in Xanadu 1 from the bold-and-outlined font to the normal (slim) font.

Remember ... it's just an option that you can change in the game's Pause Menu.

I suspect that Falcom didn't really love it either, since they completely removed that bold-and-outlined effect in Xanadu 2.

There's some temptation to just remove the option in Xanadu 1 ... but it feels a little bit like "cheating".

I don't really see it as my job to apply "fixes" (a.k.a. my personal preferences) to Falcom's game.

The only exception to that is going to be trying to implement a drop-shadow on the font in Xanadu 2 ... and that's because in-my-experience it is really important to have good contrast between the font and the background when displaying a single-pixel-width line on a CRT TV at 256-wide resolution.

Chapter 5 is now completely translated and proofread.

It's the biggest chapter I've done so far and the second biggest in the game. Only Chapter 7 is larger, and only by another 7% or so.

On to Chapter 6! That one's a little smaller. Actually, I think it's the third biggest in the game.  :dance:

Xanadu I is huge, you guys.

You are, too.

Quote from: elmer on 01/06/2016, 11:58 AMThe only exception to that is going to be trying to implement a drop-shadow on the font in Xanadu 2 ... and that's because in-my-experience it is really important to have good contrast between the font and the background when displaying a single-pixel-width line on a CRT TV at 256-wide resolution.

At least the resolution is 256 pixels wide and not 320. Also the typeface isn't RED :)
NTSC artifacing is great until it isn't.

Quote from: TailChao on 01/07/2016, 03:31 PMAt least the resolution is 256 pixels wide and not 320. Also the typeface isn't RED :)
NTSC artifacing is great until it isn't.

Hahaha! The joys of "safe colors" and "border zones" and the different bandwidths for luma vs chroma that nobody has to bother about anymore!  :wink:

Yep, I always go for 2-pixel-wide stems on fonts at 320-resolution ... but we can get away with 1-pixel wide stems here in the Xanadu games (and most other PCE games).

I used an editor to mock-up a couple of variations to see what they'd look like ...


Default ...

(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5786/23449463943_aea9fb8255_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/BJ9CEt)


With drop-shadow ...

(https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1651/24050166696_f7fc054040_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/CDeoEu)


With drop-shadow & old-style "i" and "l" ...

(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5815/23449464053_0110944dda_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/BJ9CGn)


I definitely prefer the drop-shadow, and I also prefer the old-style "i" & "l" if we're going to leave the font-width as it is.

If I can switch to a variable-width font later on, then I'll probably want to go back to the sans-serif "i" & "l".

What do other people think?

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/06/2016, 11:53 PMXanadu I is huge, you guys.

Hahaha ... I can tell ... I keep on having to increase the amount of memory that I'm allocating for all the extra English text in the script chunks!  :lol:

Great job!  :D

Def like the drop shadow action...

I like the old style 'i' and 'l' more.  Feet on the letters just make it more pleasant to read.

Just checking it to see the progress and it really looks like it is coming along nicely! Looking forward to finally being able to understand and enjoy these titles. :) I'm a huge Xanadu series fan.

Btw, if you do happen to do a dub for the games, I'd be interested in auditioning for a part, though I am afraid I don't know the characters well enough yet. I did Lefance in the Ys IV dub.

-Thomas

Drop shadows definitely, I like either version of the letters but I'm leaning more towards the sans-serif ones.  Definitely looking really great no matter what you go with.

I finished preview-playing Chapter 6 today and got about 5% of the translation done. I'd like to have it at 100% and proofread within ten days.

Also, I tested a Xanadu I build on real hardware through composite video on a 29 inch HD-CRT. In short, both the fat and skinny fonts look fine, and shouldn't need any drop-shadow. There's a small chance the skinny font would be hard to read on tiny/cheapo/ancient SD-CRTs, but the low composite video signal quality itself should not cause any readability problems.

Quote from: elmer on 01/07/2016, 07:23 PMWhat do other people think?

The drop shadow would be my preference, but really they all look good and are easy to read.

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/08/2016, 05:55 AMI finished preview-playing Chapter 6 today and got about 5% of the translation done. I'd like to have it at 100% and proofread within ten days.

Excellent!  :D

QuoteAlso, I tested a Xanadu I build on real hardware through composite video on a 29 inch HD-CRT. In short, both the fat and skinny fonts look fine, and shouldn't need any drop-shadow. There's a small chance the skinny font would be hard to read on tiny/cheapo/ancient SD-CRTs, but the low composite video signal quality itself should not cause any readability problems.

I agree, Xanadu 1 definitely doesn't need the drop-shadows ... the text is already on a dark and non-patterned background, so the contrast is already perfect. You wouldn't even be able to see a drop-shadow against those backgrounds.

It's only Xanadu 2 that needs (IMHO) a drop-shadow, which is because the text is displayed on top of those blue or brown textured patterns. The drop-shadow helps to visually pull the text off that backdrop (on a high-resolution display) and gives the lousy NTSC composite signal time to cleanly display the 1-pixel text stem (on a lower-resolution TV display).

We used 1-pixel text (in the 5x12 speech font) in Zeroigar, and it's the standard width for the PCE's System Card font.

AFAIK it just normally gets displayed on a single-color backdrop, or with a drop-shadow if it's on top of a "busy" backdrop.

I'm sure that people here can happily point out plenty examples that contradict that statement, but I'd still personally like to see that drop-shadow in Xanadu 2.  :wink:

The way you guys are working and thinking on that translation is fantastic. I think everybody here would have been content with a averagely correct translation of the Xanadus but you're going to offer us an over-polished one, that even a big editor wouldn't have done. That's amazing.

Very excited to see both of these games translated! Falcom is one of the best, and from what I played stumbling thorough Xanadu 1 with no functioning use of the Japanese language I still had a great time. Will be 100x better when I can understand it!

Chapter 6 is 50% done.

Thanks to elmer's spectacular hacking work, I was able to use an easy toolchain and a fully working inserter to play-test-edit the prologue chapter for a stupid amount of time today. All kinds of little problems related to my end cropped up. There were typos, formatting errors, a few contextual mistakes, and lots of lines that just plain didn't work well and needed tweaking. I don't know how many lines I edited, but it was several dozen at least, I'm sure.

I have a workflow down a little bit, and I'm pretty sure I made fewer dumb mistakes as I went into later chapters, but this editing process will be very time consuming nonetheless. I'll probably have to spend up to 10 hours on each chapter for one really good play-test-edit, and I'll probably want to do up to three of those for each of the twelve chapters before we're done.

This prologue chapter works a whole lot better now, but it doesn't sing yet. I want to get it there.

Every time I click on this thread I get so excited. Always wanting to know what was said for the next little tidbit of info you guys give out.

Then I see other people post and I don't see anything new, kinda like this post I just typed and I get let down because it wasn't new info. lol

Anyways, I can't wait for this. I love old RPG's especially ones I can understand. :D

I play-tested through the first part of Chapter 1 (not to be confused with the Prologue) this morning, and my guess about getting my bearings and doing less dumb stuff from one chapter to the next seems to be right so far. What I saw still needed some touching up, but on the whole, things were functioning at a higher level and needed less reworking.

If I'm lucky, my drafts of Chapters 3 and beyond will be even closer to the mark.

Now back to work on Chapter 6! I want it finished and proofread within a week!

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/11/2016, 08:33 PMI play-tested through the first part of Chapter 1 (not to be confused with the Prologue) this morning, and my guess about getting my bearings and doing less dumb stuff from one chapter to the next seems to be right so far. What I saw still needed some touching up, but on the whole, things were functioning at a higher level and needed less reworking.

Excellent! I'm glad that the toolchain seems to be working properly, and that you've not found anything missing (so far).  :dance:

The pretty screenshots are your responsibility, now!  :wink:

This is spectacular guys!  Completely floored.


+50 Turbo Karma to you both!

I have a question.

I bought both Xanadu 1 and 2 a month or two ago because I saw this translation project.

Today... I finally put the discs into my system for the first time ever. All I can say is, I have no idea what is going on in the intro's but I can already feel the story must be intense from the music and omg!! the intro to Xanadu 2 was like what? 30min? I have no idea but it was long and the music made me want to play this now but I am waiting. Waiting ever so patiently. Also, you guys need to figure out a paypal or something for donations and make it public for us, imo.

My question is, I know you guys are doing text, but is the voice being done as well?

I actually made a dub for Xanadu II already, back in 2011. I intend to make one for Xanadu I, as well.

Xanadu II has about 20 minutes of voice-acted scenes, while Xanadu I has nearly one hour. Xanadu I is also going to need a lot of actors. I'm not going to worry about all that for a few more months, though.

Thanks for your interest and encouragement. It's invigorating to see people talking about this.

Money is...something else. We'll talk about it another day. For now, don't worry, this project is in no danger of stagnating due to lack of monetary motivation.

I had a really good couple of days at my job where cancelled appointments and a low workload helped me get to 100% for Chapter 6. Now I just have to proofread.

Doing that will put me at approximately 64% complete for the whole game, not counting the play-test-editing phase and whatever else. My wife is having our first kid in June, so I'm gunning hard to get this as close to releasable as possible before the big day arrives.

I'm thinking April will probably be a good time to get started on the dub project(s).

Booyah. Chapter 6 is 100% proofread, Chapter 1 has had one complete playtest, and I'm midway through playing Chapter 7 in order to begin translating it.

That one's the fat chapter. When it's finished, I'll be 3/4 of the way done with this entire first draft phase.

Also, Chapter 1 definitely didn't need much reworking in the play-test phase. If the other chapters go similarly well, this shouldn't be too bad at all.

Your rolling down hill SamIAm.

Well done keep it up.

Chapter 7 is at 35%.

My goal is to get it done by the end of the month.

In addition to having the most text, Chapter 7 has some of the roughest fetch-questing in the game. I remember it having me at my wit's end the first time I played Xanadu I three years ago. This time, with the help of a map I found on the Japanese internet, it was nowhere near as bad.

I'm hoping we can get maps of every chapter and release a guide on gamefaqs.com or something, because even if you don't want to use them at every turn, just being able to firmly grasp the general layout of each chapter-area makes a huge difference. Also, it prevents Chapter 3 from being a maddening chore.

I have maps for chapters 0-5 from a preview-guidebook I bought and scanned, and handmade maps for chapters 7, 10 and 11 are available online. I wonder if we can do anything to fill in the blanks?

Has anyone heard of a tool that helps assemple multiple screenshots into a single seamless image? With the debug mode, and with the way the main character turns into a ghost that can wander anywhere when he dies, we could actually make our own maps without too much trouble if we don't have to manually line up dozens and dozens of screenshots.

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/19/2016, 04:34 AMHas anyone heard of a tool that helps assemple multiple screenshots into a single seamless image?

Photoshop does a pretty good job of it, either using its built in panorama stitcher tool thing or doing it manually by nudging layers until the line up.

I've used gimp for that a few times but I did it with a very low-tech method of copy/paste and lining stuff up manually.

Quote from: guest on 01/19/2016, 12:54 PMPhotoshop does a pretty good job of it, either using its built in panorama stitcher tool thing or doing it manually by nudging layers until the line up.

"Stitching tool" sounds like just what I need. Googling that brings up a bunch of promising-looking stuff.

I don't really have time to burn on this now, but I might check later (or someone else could, wink wink nudge nudge). I'm a little afraid of tools that are too "smart" for their own good and wind up distorting things when there should be just a simple pixel-for-pixel overlap along the edges.

Although animating water tiles would be a pain. Damn, I didn't think about that...

This is something I would do by hand until I find a pattern that can be recorded into an action and batch processed onto a selection of files, or use imagemagick.

Do you have access to photoshop? I can setup the action for you if you send me example files and tell me how you want them processed/end goal.

There are a lot of shareware options out there, as you said from your google searching. ( https://www.photostitcher.com/ (https://www.photostitcher.com/) is the first one I saw that stood out as a easy option)


Also, if you have windows 10 you can use in OS tools to make it happen,

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/photo-gallery-create-panoramas-fuse-photos (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/photo-gallery-create-panoramas-fuse-photos)

Excerpt of the pertinent info:

QuoteTo create a panorama [ or fuse multiple images together]

Take a series of photos from a single vantage point so that each photo overlaps the one preceding it and import them into Photo Gallery.

Select the photos you're going to use, and on the Create tab, in the Tools group, click Panorama. Photo Gallery will align the photos and combine them into a new composition.

To crop a finished panorama, on the Edit tab, in the Adjustments group, click Crop"

I can look into gimp a bit and see if there's a easy script you can use, gimps scripting tools are pretty nice and the community has hobbled together a large repository of useful tools though I have little experience with gimp outside of using it to correct palettes for sprites

Thanks, Gredler. If you're interested in looking into this further yourself, I can provide you with a few screenshots. Right now, I'm too deep in the translation side to look into anything else. If you're busy, though, I'll still take the information you've provided and try some things myself later.

-------------------------

Chapter 7 is at about 65%.

Also, I'm almost done with the first play-test of Chapter 2.

There's been a few more bumps this time around. In particular, there was one scene that I had really goofed up. There are about five people in it, and I was assuming that one set of lines was being spoken by one character when it was really spoken by another. There are codes in the script to tell me who is speaking, but they change from script to script, and I don't always check every last one.

Extensive play-testing is very, very important. :D

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/21/2016, 08:47 PMThanks, Gredler. If you're interested in looking into this further yourself, I can provide you with a few screenshots.

Sure, that's super easy and I'm happy to help. I will PM you my email.


Pm sent :)

It's been a productive few days.

- I got Chapter 7 to 100% and started proofreading it. I expect to finish that within two days.

- I preview-played Chapter 8, so I'll be ready to go on that as soon as Chapter 7 is fully finished.

- I finished my first test-play-edit of Chapter 2 and started Chapter 3.

Because this game revolves around going back and forth to talk to people in order to trigger events, there are lots lines that only appear in very out-of-the-way places. The best example is when, say, you've rescued someone trapped inside a dungeon right before gaining access to the boss-area, but instead of going forward to fight, you go back to the town(s) and see how people react now that this guy is free.

It's going to actually be quite difficult to make sure I've seen every single line in the script actually display in the game. I'm doing the best I can right now, but there have been a few of times when the thought of doing something extremely time-consuming just to hunt up just a couple of obscure lines has been too much to bear.

Hopefully, the next time I do a full test-play, the lower number of problems in the text and the savestates I've been making to streamline the process will help me get at that stuff more easily.

Out of curiosity, how accurate is everything by the time you actually run through a play edit?  Do you still find errors or by that time is it close to the way you want it in the final version?

If "how accurate" means "how many straight-up mistakes are there", then there aren't very many of those. Typos and formatting issues affect maybe 1 in 20 text boxes. Contextual mistranslations only happen once or twice a chapter.

Have you ever looked at the script of a movie you really like? You know how the plain text on a plain white page can come across in a very different way than the real lines in the movie? The same thing happens in reverse. There are all kinds of things that look good enough when they're in a text file, but are a bit out-of-wack when they're playing out on the screen. Most of what I do during play-testing is just re-wording things to make them sound more natural and flow a bit better. That's kind of vague, I know, but if you want to know more of the nitty-gritty, that will have to wait for another day when I can dig up some examples.

In addition, there's the simple fact that most things benefit from editing and revision. Translation is not an exact science, that's for sure. You write something, you come back to it a week later and think you should change this, that, and the other thing. The best way to judge how well a translation is working for something like this is to see it happening in the game itself.

When I do the "proofreading" after I get a chapter to 100%, I'm really just scanning for typos, missed spots, inconsistencies, and anything else that's easy to fix.

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/25/2016, 03:34 AMIn addition, there's the simple fact that most things benefit from editing and revision. Translation is not an exact science, that's for sure. You write something, you come back to it a week later and think you should change this, that, and the other thing. The best way to judge how well a translation is working for something like this is to see it happening in the game itself.

Even after the years of work that SamIAm had put into Zeroigar before I started working on it, we still went through many, many playthroughs in order to get the translation "sounding" as good as we could when you see it on the screen ... and by "we", I really mean 99.5% SamIAm.

We were changing single words right up until the day before the release.

It was a lot of work, but (IMHO) the attention to detail really shows when you are reading the text on the screen, and nothing sounds "off".

When he says "I finished my first test-play-edit of Chapter 2 and started Chapter 3.", I fully expect that he'll end up wanting to do a lot more passes after all the levels are translated and everything has had its "first-pass".  :wink:

Here goes nothing. Behold, a preview of the Xanadu translation:

wayback://youtu.be/EE_iYw4vdOs (https://web.archive.org/web/20190510040159/https://youtu.be/EE_iYw4vdOs)

Background: the game starts with a 10-minute cutscene, which you can watch here (https://youtu.be/UnfsHJod44I) (in Japanese).

In it, the audience learns that Arios (yes, that's how we're going to spell it), is the descendent of a great hero and has quickly climbed to a high-ranking position in the Imperial Army of Ishtaria. His lineage, however, is not widely known.

Arios's superiors send him to the distant frontier to fight monster hordes with little support. He's accompanied by his friend, a great warrior and general named Daimos; however, they find themselves on the losing side of a huge battle with the monsters. Daimos tells Arios to get himself to safety and dives back into the fighting. Suddenly, Arios is knocked out by a mysterious purple-haired man.

He awakes aboard a ship. The mysterious man explains to him that he cannot say who he is or why he is doing what he is doing, but that Arios has an important destiny. Arios is dropped off on an island and told simply to wait. This is where the video begins.

---------------

I made this an unlisted video, and I might delete it in a few days. Please do not share the link outside this forum. I wanted to show this to you guys because PCEFX is like my home-base, and I think it would be fun. However, it's not ready to share with the whole world yet.

Bad ass!  Nicely done, Sam!

Thanks for sharing the video and great job on the translation.

 It looks really good so far.

Thanks, guys!

Elmer's hacking work looks really nice, doesn't it? ;)

Also, I wrote "you're inventory" and didn't capitalize "Sister" in one instance when I should have.  ](*,)

The contents of a few of the lines themselves are probably going to be different by the end (a couple in particular bug me already), but this is fairly close to done. Once I get through that first play-test of Chapter 3, I might go back and give the Prologue here another pass.

Utterly.
Fantastique.

:)

I can't begin to express how excited I am to be able to one day play this in English! Back when we were doing playthroughs here, I had a lot of fun even though I didn't know what to do. Did a ton of backtracking, picking out bits of kana in the text and finding other matching words in dialogue to stumble my way through, and I only got through the 1st Chapter. Someone on here finished the game (was it you esteban?) but as good as it was, its going to be infinitely more enjoyable for me translated.

The work you've put in looks amazing, and the final product will definitely show the dedication given to this title. Its painful to think that certain text in the game I would have viewed in Japanese because I had no idea what was going on, but because I will be playing in English will inadvertently skip entire sections of text that was translated just because I won't have to backtrack as much.

Ah it looks SOOO much better when it's actually in action! I'm so excited for this I can't wait!! :mrgreen:

It was hardly imaginable to have thought a Legend of Xanadu translation could've been possible ten years ago. The dream has come true!

Thanks for the positive feedback, guys. It really helps. :)

Chapter 7's proofreading is finished. The "hump" is officially passed.  :dance:

Chapter 8 is average-sized and slightly smaller than any chapter I've done since Chapter 4. Chapter 9 is smaller still. Then, Chapter 10 is literally half the size of a normal chapter, and Chapter 11 is so tiny, I knocked it out in one short session a couple of weeks ago. We're getting really close now.

I'm still play-testing Chapter 3. These things really just take time. The triggering of events in the game makes you talk to Guy A, talk to Guy B, then talk to Guy C in order to proceed. However, if you talk to Guy B before you talk to Guy A, he'll say something different when you come to talk to him after you talk to Guy A. I need to test all of that, and this is just the kind of area where contextual mistakes tend to happen.

When things get fixed up, though, they look pretty good. I'll still need another pass or two, but we'll be chasing smaller and smaller problems each time.

Quote from: SamIAm on 01/27/2016, 08:47 PMI'm still play-testing Chapter 3. These things really just take time. The triggering of events in the game makes you talk to Guy A, talk to Guy B, then talk to Guy C in order to proceed. However, if you talk to Guy B before you talk to Guy A, he'll say something different when you come to talk to him after you talk to Guy A. I need to test all of that, and this is just the kind of area where contextual mistakes tend to happen.

Ouch!  #-o

I know that I saw a lot of tests for specific flags and states in the scripts that we extracted, but I had no idea that it was that complex.

The original Falcom team must have really put their heart-and-soul into this game!

Quote from: elmer on 01/27/2016, 10:02 PMOuch!  #-o

I know that I saw a lot of tests for specific flags and states in the scripts that we extracted, but I had no idea that it was that complex.

It's certainly not that complex all the time. Basically, you just have to be on your toes about when someone might have a unique line to say, and be aware of what "flags" trigger progression and what options the player has around them.

Not letting any lines slip through the cracks is going to be a major challenge as we edit this. I might want to look at the text dumps again and check off things that I see while I test-play.

QuoteThe original Falcom team must have really put their heart-and-soul into this game!

Xanadu I was absolutely a big deal for Falcom. This was their first console game and their first CD-ROM game made in-house. The marketing effort was huge, and there was definite buzz in the gaming world. But in addition to all that, Legend of Xanadu is the final game that the guy who made Falcom's Dragon Slayer series worked on at that company. I think he wanted to go out with a bang.

I ought to search my PCE magazines for more interviews about it. For now, though, I want to focus on getting that first draft of the game-script done.  :wink:

Chapter 11 is the one with the endless desert maps, right? I took a long time on that one but primarily because navigating through that desert required me to draw my own map.

But which area is the mountain one with the slave/worker guys? That's either 9 or 10, or maybe 8. That one took me awhile too, but I can see there being not a whole lot of dialogue, it was just really goddamn confusing.

The numbering of the chapters is confusing because there's a prologue, and the second chapter you play is titled Chapter 1. Going by chapter-titles:

Chapter 11 is the final one.

Chapter 9 is the one with the desert maps.

Chapter 7 is the one with the worker guys. I found an online map for this one, and it helped immensely. Just glancing at it three or four times over the course of the whole thing made it waaaaay less confusing. Back when I first played Xanadu I a few years ago, this one was definitely driving me nuts.

Chapter 8 is now 100% translated and about 50% proofread.

Chapter 9 is preview-played as of this morning, so I can start on it next week. There will be some translation challenges in it, which I probably shouldn't spoil, but at least it's on the short side.

Chapter 3 is now fully test-played. That's a long one, but at least the next time I got through it, I'll have savestates to make the process faster.

Elmer's Xanadu II dump is finally in my hands, and it looks great. We're exploring options for merging the old translation as it exists in Esperknight's dump with this new one. Elmer has so far gotten the old lines to sit at the top of each file where they exist in the new dump (and there are 300+ files). If I have to copy/paste everything manually, that saves me a big couple of steps. Next is to see whether the old lines can be placed exactly where they're supposed to go throughout the new dump without too many errors.

Even if they can't, I'm satisfied. After the work I've been doing on Xanadu I, getting this together will be like making a Thanksgiving feast vs. microwaving a TV dinner.

Chapter 8 is now completely proofread.

-----------------

In addition to repetitious and/or mundane NPC dialogue, another common occurrence in JRPG scripts that invites a little liberal "punching up" when translating into English is characters that are defined by the way they speak above anything else.

A while ago in the thread, I posted this:

QuoteOne thing Japanese does have that English doesn't which helps enliven short little RPG lines quite a lot is dialects and modes of speech that are easy to represent in written form. Without actually adding any whole extra words, it's easy to see if a character is a kooky old man, an air-headed teenage girl, a swashbuckling pirate, a "friend of Dorothy", a hardened boss, a polite servant, and more. In Japanese, it's all a matter of tweaking a few syllables.

I don't want to say who, but in Xanadu I and II, there are two characters in your party who stand out mostly because of their modes of speech. One sounds like a tightwad middle-manager, while the other sounds like a samurai straight out of a period-drama. The latter one is particularly concerning, but in both cases, you can't help but lose something when you translate their lines straight to English because the same modes don't quite exist there.

Here's a not-perfectly-analogous example of the kind of problem this can give rise to:

Remember that scene in Die Hard where John McClain finds Hans Gruber (RIP Alan Rickman) on the roof, and Hans starts speaking in clean American-accented English? I know Japanese people who have seen this movie countless times, and none of them were aware of the accent switch. Whoever translated Die Hard to Japanese must have just given up trying to work that in, because it's completely unrepresented. I've seen it once with Japanese subtitles, and they just let the scene play out as you'd expect it would if Hans weren't German to begin with.

There are things vaguely akin to that in Japanese scripts. Sometimes a character will say something like "It's cold outside"...not a particularly exciting line, but because it's in archaic samurai-ish talk, it's still kind of interesting. It gives the character some color. In the right situation, it mixes things up nicely in the overall scene and maybe adds a little depth.

If I really didn't want to go with "It's cold outside", there are two ways I could deal with that in translation. One is to use ye olde English and say "Mine ears doth freeze" or whatever. The other is to toss the original line out the window and write something completely different that tells the audience about the character in another way. For example, I could have them mention something that's important to them. The easy way out of that is to make a joke, which can be done to various degrees...Working Designs might have the samurai-ish character insist on taking a break to do some P90X.

I don't really like either of those options, though. Ye olde English is corny and distracting in most cases, and this Xanadu case, I believe, would be one of them. As for completely rewriting the line, even without any jokes...I just don't want to assume that much. It's not my script, and these are not my characters. To tell you more about them, I would have to invent things about them, and it doesn't seem right to twist them into different people just to spice things up a little.

It's kind of like how I feel about adding jokes where there were none before: on the rare occasion that I get an idea that's so subtle, so safe, and so good that you couldn't be sure it wasn't in the original game, well, I just might slip that into the script. I think that before I do my next play-test, I also ought to isolate both of those character's lines (again, especially the latter one) and see if I can't do a little minor stylizing or other punching-up in places. I really don't want them to be boring. But whatever I do, I want to keep it minimal. The result is that, more often then not, you're going to get the plain "It's cold outside" and that's it. I hope that's OK.

I know that "pro" translation outfits lean toward taking more liberties, and if I ever wanted to be "pro" myself, I'd probably need to get good at doing that. I once watched Kiki's Delivery Service with Japanese audio and English subtitles that were actually closed-captions of the English dub. It really surprised me how often the English dub added entirely new lines when nobody was speaking at all in the Japanese original, especially for Kiki's black cat.

Sam, fantastic work on this translation. I can't believe how fast you are going through the script.

Your dilemma about what to do with the middle-manager and samurai characters sounds tough. What if you played with the adjectives? That could add some flavor without going full ye olde English. For example your "It's cold outside" line could be changed to "It's frosty outside". It conveys the same meaning but most people wouldn't say it that way, so that character stands out a little more.

What can I say Sam ... wow!  :shock:

I'm glad that it's you that has to pay attention to these things and not me!

As Ivan suggested, consider using word order or word choice to represent a similar or analogous character element. Again, you may have to be putting a few words in the character's mouth, but I think you can be forgiven if you give it the proper care.

Quote from: IvanBeavkov on 02/02/2016, 09:35 AMSam, fantastic work on this translation. I can't believe how fast you are going through the script.

Your dilemma about what to do with the middle-manager and samurai characters sounds tough. What if you played with the adjectives? That could add some flavor without going full ye olde English. For example your "It's cold outside" line could be changed to "It's frosty outside". It conveys the same meaning but most people wouldn't say it that way, so that character stands out a little more.

Thanks! :D

"Frosty" is a nice alternative to "cold", but it's important to think about what kinds of characters actually use that word, and when. Particularly in the absence of actual frost, I can't imagine a no-nonsense muscle-character saying it very often. If you imagine a context where this character is actually informing other characters that the temperature is low, then the straightforward, utilitarian "cold" is preferable IMHO. You could try to work in something about the "biting cold" or "chilling to the bone" or other unpleasant metaphors, but then you start running the risk of over-writing what's supposed to be a short little observation.

There are other times when big, fancy adjectives look out of place against the game's simple backdrop, too. I don't want to dumb things down, but I don't want to ruin the charm by trying to impress people with my vocabulary.

Let me put it this way: I use a thesaurus, but I don't want it to look like I use a thesaurus.

Quote from: elmer on 02/02/2016, 08:26 PMI'm glad that it's you that has to pay attention to these things and not me!

That's pretty much how I feel when I read your (excellent!) development blog.  :wink:

Quote from: guest on 02/02/2016, 10:21 PMAs Ivan suggested, consider using word order or word choice to represent a similar or analogous character element. Again, you may have to be putting a few words in the character's mouth, but I think you can be forgiven if you give it the proper care.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I do. The reason why I posted all that was just to illustrate the kinds of things that happen in a translation. It's all good.  8)

Chapter 4 play-testing (first pass) is done.

Chapter 4 is perhaps the single most complicated one in the game. It's not that it has the most text or the most complex maps or anything, although it's no slouch in either of those categories, either. It's more that it has a high number of characters, with a lot of variety between them and many who are important to the story. I also think it has the highest number of "tasks" you have to do and mini-events that push the story forward.

I tried to be pretty diligent when I edited things, going back and checking anything I changed. Altogether, I think I spent at least 15 hours going through this one, but it should be worth it.

Just like it was with writing the rough drafts, play-testing Chapters 5, 6 and 7 is going to be its own "hump" to get over. Whenever it is that I finally finish this first pass, I think it will really start to feel like we're rolling downhill.

I better start getting the dub-script ready this month. I've got a complete draft that's been edited once, but it needs some tweaking and LOTS of notes added for the actors. It will be a busy spring, that's for sure.

Chapter 9 is 100% translated and only needs proofreading.

Chapter 10 is pre-translation preview-played as of this morning. Bear in mind that this is the last chapter I have to translate and it's half the size of a normal chapter. I aim to have this done and proofread before the 20th.

Chapter 5 is half test-played, which means that the entire game is about half test-played. Given how much time it took, I hope to finish this first run-through by mid/late-March.

Elmer has done some really amazing hacking to spruce up the font recently. It's now fully variable-width and uses kerning. I'll leave it to him to post the lovely screenshots. There may be a minor tweak or two later, but the font is basically locked in and looking good.  :D

Thanks for the update SAMIAM.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached a major milestone. The first draft of the Xanadu I script is complete. I think I started working on the cutscenes sometime in October, and elmer gave me the main script-dump sometime in early November, so this has been roughly five months in the making.

I also finished play-testing Chapter 5 the other day, so that's coming right along, too. If I can keep up the current pace, I should finish by April.

I definitely want to give the game at least one more pass after that, but the next round should go more quickly. I hope that I can have the dub completed AND the second pass finished by the end of May. What should happen after that, we'll just have to decide when the time comes.

Now I will begin to look at Xanadu II's new script-dump and the English that's been merged from the old dump. With a little luck, it will only take a few weeks to get everything ready for a play-test of its own. Thankfully, Xanadu II is so much shorter than the first game that that shouldn't take long at all.

Quote from: SamIAm on 02/13/2016, 11:29 PMLadies and gentlemen, we've reached a major milestone. The first draft of the Xanadu I script is complete. I think I started working on the cutscenes sometime in October, and elmer gave me the main script-dump sometime in early November, so this has been roughly five months in the making.

Woo hoooooooo, great job, SamIAm!!! :D =D>

But seriously ... 5 months already ... jeez, where did the time go.  :-k

I'm pretty amazed that we've not come across more missing text, or bugs in the insertion, yet ... but there's still time!  :wink:

Congrats guys!

Quote from: elmer on 02/13/2016, 11:44 PMWoo hoooooooo, great job, SamIAm!!! :D =D>

But seriously ... 5 months already ... jeez, where did the time go.  :-k

I'm pretty amazed that we've not come across more missing text, or bugs in the insertion, yet ... but there's still time!  :wink:

Thank you kindly, elmer.  :wink:

If everything up to Chapter 5 works fine, I see no reason why the others are going to pose a problem. Famous last words, I know, but I've played them all recently, and it certainly appears they don't do anything different or special.

Anyway, great work yourself on making the font look so dang good. I just hope I can make the script high enough quality to match it.

Onward!  :D

Quote from: johnnykonami on 02/13/2016, 11:48 PMCongrats guys!

Thanks to you, too!

Fuck yeah!

Congratulations Elmer and SamIAm! Looks like the project is coming along very well and I'm happy to hear that the first draft of the script it finished.

Is an English dub project already open for this?

-Thomas

(https://archives.tg-16.com/images/9303_dangerous_blink.gif)

UTTERLY
MAGNIFICENT
PROGRESS

(UMP)

Quote from: SkyeWelse on 02/14/2016, 04:57 AMIs an English dub project already open for this?

Not just yet, I'm afraid. Depending on how many people are capable of doing multiple parts, we're going to need anywhere from thirty to fifty actors total to pull this off. That's going to be incredibly time consuming to deal with, and I am going to need everything in place...from a finalized script to ready-to-bake audio mixes...before I open those floodgates.

I'm basically going to do the Xanadu II dub over again, as well.

----------

In other news, I have play-tested Chapter 6 about two-thirds of the way through. Unlike Chapter 4, this one is very pleasantly simple and centralized. Chapters 8 and 9 are just like it, and Chapter 10 and 11 have little text to them at all, so once again, Chapter 7 will be the big challenge to get through. If I'm lucky, we'll have that one done by the end of the month.

Also, I spent some time today looking at Xanadu II. It has next to nothing to do with the first game in terms of story, but the introductory scenes still refer to it a lot. As much as I hate to admit it, I made a good few incorrect assumptions about the story of the first game when I wrote this stuff five years ago, and I've had to work at fixing problems related to that in the script.

Perhaps it's not surprising, but doing Xanadu I first really was the proper way to go. Now everything will be nice and consistent...although I can already tell that whoever wrote Xanadu I didn't write Xanadu II. That's kind of good, though; Xanadu II will be a fresh experience both to work on and to play.

Xanadu II is moving forward fast. And when I say fast, I mean that I got the entire prologue chapter smoothed over in the new script dump and ready for play-testing in one day.  :mrgreen:

The other chapters are all a lot bigger, but still, this is some damn fine progress. I'll try to get chapters 1 and 2 done by the end of the month. IIRC, Chapter 4 is the big fat one in Xanadu II.

Anyway, I'd put money on being able to have this ready for play-testing by the end of March.  :mrgreen:

I've waited five years to see this.

Legend of Xanadu II - English Translation WIP (2/17/2016) (https://web.archive.org/web/20190509234928if_/https://youtu.be/C2Z7fagH5Yw&feature=youtu.be)

Once again, please don't share this link. It's very much a work in progress.

The back story is that after the first game, Areios*  spent three years going all around the land of Ishtaria helping people get their lives back together. While he was busy doing that, a new continent was discovered, and one of Areios's friends and former party members from the first game, Lykos, sailed off to investigate it. When Areios returns to the capital city and learns that Lykos has been gone longer than planned, he decides to set out after him. The prologue you see here is Areios and his right-hand man Daimos aboard a ship approaching the new continent.

*We've decided to switch to name spellings we found in official Falcom materials.

I decided not to talk to all the sailors, but all of their lines are working fine and looking good. They actually change what they say frequently. A lot of little things are different if you talk to Daimos again directly after getting all the equipment from the treasure chests.

Very impressive good work guys and thanks for sharing the video.

Are you actually testing on real hardware when you do your play-testing?  I liked the blue font when he marked the map.  I been playing through Dragon Slayer and they used a similar green font to emphasize actions the characters were doing.

That is so frickin' awesome.  :mrgreen:

Wasn't sure if I was watching some sort of pron or a game.

But both seem to excite me in interesting ways. :)

C'est magnifique  =D>

Wow, seeing the Xanadu II footage is really throwing me for a loop. Congratulations you guys, it has been a long time coming.

Quote from: SamIAm on 02/17/2016, 10:25 AMI've waited five years to see this.

Legend of Xanadu II - English Translation WIP (2/17/2016) (https://web.archive.org/web/20190509234928if_/https://youtu.be/C2Z7fagH5Yw&feature=youtu.be)

Once again, please don't share this link. It's very much a work in progress.

Bah, I wanted to share it... :(

So, I noticed, do you like the idea of showing the character's name once in a text box on the first line, and if they have a lot more to say, excluding the name thereafter ? I saw it was being done with the navigator's text.

I really think I'll have to do that for Emerald Dragon to compress text blocks enough to fit them back in place. Seems like a simple enough idea to go with. Games like Ys IV never even showed anybody's name, the whole textbox was always dedicated to text, so that style varies.

EDIT: Yeah, confirmed, you're already doing what I was thinking of doing too for ED. Show the character's name once, any more text, skip the name, but if it's somebody else's turn to speak, you show the name again to make that clear, and exclude it if they have more to say on that turn. Repeat. This might be all the space-saving tricks needed in ED's case.

Quote from: NightWolve on 02/17/2016, 01:44 PMSo, I noticed, do you like the idea of showing the character's name once in a text box on the first line, and if they have a lot more to say, excluding the name thereafter ? I saw it was being done with the navigator's text.

That's just how Falcom have done it in the game ... I'm not sure if it's a specifically-considered decision to do it that way on SamIAm's part.

We have pretty-much-complete control over the script language at this point, so it's trivial to split text boxes and make new ones, and to add/remove the speaker's name however SamIAm desires.

Aaah, that was their style already. Well, it might just save enough space in ED's case cause they're printing the name and linefeed character every time, so done deal.

Quote from: ginoscope on 02/17/2016, 10:51 AMVery impressive good work guys and thanks for sharing the video.

Are you actually testing on real hardware when you do your play-testing?

Thanks!

I don't use real hardware at the moment because I'm always fixing things and checking them as I go. That entails essentially building a new CD image every time I want to see a change. An emulator is the clear best choice for this phase.

A real hardware test will happen eventually, though, and I'm confident it will work.

Quote from: NightWolve on 02/17/2016, 01:44 PMBah, I wanted to share it... :(

Soon, don't worry. And thanks for wanting to spread the word!

--------

Chapter 6 of X1 is fully play-tested now. :)

There's one important conversation near the end that I'll probably want to tweak a bit more, but anyway, the big stuff that needed fixing is fixed.  8)

It's hard to choose, but Chapter 6 might be my favorite one in the game.

VERY cool can't wait to see more

Quote from: SamIAm on 02/17/2016, 10:25 AMI've waited five years to see this.
Legend of Xanadu II - English Translation WIP (2/17/2016) (https://web.archive.org/web/20190509234928if_/https://youtu.be/C2Z7fagH5Yw&feature=youtu.be)

I love little details like Areios being a "poor" artist (or cartographer, as it were). :) Everything from the moment the crew spots land onward is golden :)

Wow Sam, you and Elmer have been busy! It always makes me happy to see the rapid progress you guys have been making on this project. I cannot wait to see the final result; I know it will be spectacular! :D

This is like a dream, but I am awake...

Does this rapid progress means we could see the release of this game in 2016 on NX Virtual console?

Quote from: True Puffer on 02/23/2016, 09:21 PMDoes this rapid progress means we could see the release of this game in 2016 on NX Virtual console?

No, however, we are currently awaiting approval for a ZX Spectrum conversion, once the Game.com port is done!

Quote from: True Puffer on 02/23/2016, 09:21 PMDoes this rapid progress means we could see the release of this game in 2016 on NX Virtual console?

You've brought up the whole "repro/translation" thing before in another thread and been shot down.

From a practical POV, "yes" Falcom do have a relationship with Nintendo, and "yes" both Legend of Xanadu games are available on the Virtual Console in Japan, and so "yes" they've already got a PCE-emulator running on Nintendo's hardware.

Therefore, if Falcom got on board and wanted to release it officially on the forthcoming NX, then it would probably be technically possible ... but the chances are slim-to-none, and even if the Porcine Aerobatics Stunt Team did take-off, then it still wouldn't be in 2016.

I am glad to hear that you remember my thread on "repro/translation" thing.

The reason i am asking is because there is a rumour that Mother 3 could be published on Virtual console and if they make use of Tomato's work he could get a nice paycheck from Nintendo. The same thing could happen with yours and Sams work provided Falcom is aware that such a quality translation even exists. I would suggest to inform people at Falcom about your work before the patch is released because there is a better chance of success.

I just wanted to say this is crazy impressive, what you guys are doing is amazing.  Everything is looking killer so far, and thank you for doing this!  Can not wait to get to play these games in english!

Quote from: True Puffer on 02/24/2016, 01:16 PMThe same thing could happen with yours and Sams work provided Falcom is aware that such a quality translation even exists. I would suggest to inform people at Falcom about your work before the patch is released because there is a better chance of success.

It's strange/silly hearing people think that such rare 1-in-a-million occurrences could be just around the corner again when there's little evidence to support that level of enthusiasm for it...

Bear with the soapbox tangent here:

How many times has this occurred in history, an official videogame publisher deciding to acquire fan translated results in the last 20 years ? The first that I know of in videogame history was with me and the main translator I recruited, Jeff "DeuceBag" Nussbaum, in May 2010, and that was handled horribly in a criminal, divisive, discriminatory fashion where they intentionally pit the language translator against the programmer, as the employee (Thomas Lipschultz) that pitched the idea to his boss, Ken Berry (an ex-SquareSoft manager!), hated me and his presentation about me guaranteed the criminal end result...

Whatever the case, a horrible precedent was set which they stand by and their rabid fans agree, the translator can sneak around with translated results sitting on his/her computer, run off with them with a commercial entity, profit/pocket 100% of the payment, 100% of the credit, then disappear ever since and play stupid about it... According to them, that's how it's always supposed to work, and maybe if they don't hate the programmer, they could throw a nice little Special Thanks back-of-the-bus credit, assuming their employees don't dig up any dirt on him/her to then deny even that show of respect/appreciation...

You really have to trust who you're working with, and backstabbing is common place all over when it comes to fan translations... Shimarisu, my main Ys IV translator, was caught selling prepatched CD-Rs on eBay thanks to our translation project with original Ys IV CD-ROMs. Somebody reported it to me, I confronted her, and she just declared, "It's MY translation!" and that was all there was to it, much like how DeuceBag behaved with X.X.XSEED Games... (http://www.xseedgames.com)

Before all of that, before even Tobias crawled out of the sewers to press his first Sapphire bootleg, a guy called Tru put up CD-Rs on eBay for sale with my Xak III patch on them! It broke our friendship for years, but he eventually apologized and it even led us to doing the Startling Odyssey II project... Shimarisu eventually apologized too, but our friendship never really recovered after that either. I wouldn't have cared if she had informed me about it, I would've told her to keep 100% of whatever she made, of course I would have to tell others in the project as it wouldn't technically be fair to them for such a public commercial situation, but it's the sneaking around, the backstabbing that gets to me... You can't trust anybody, I don't care how much you might think you're friends with said person so fair warning!

So, you have a horrible commercializing precedent with future implications where the programmer(s) has to watch his/her back in any fan translation team and must have absolute trust in their translator if something like this ever occurs again on a very modern game... It's never gonna happen with old retro games or the odds are just way way smaller, but if you're fan translating modern, powerful Windows PC games, it's something to keep in mind and really trust the person you're working with, and perhaps make agreements with your translator on the possibility, as small as it is if it ever happened again. In my case, any agreements with DeuceBag, all would've been ignored as he had contempt for me all along that he hid well, he broke and lied about other agreements, so yeah, even then you really have to know and trust the other person(s) you're working with!

In short, don't worry about this ever happening with old retro games... It's a silly, fanboy wet dream. I know of no precedent for it - feel free to provide one if you do (your citing a case with Tomato/Nintendo which never happened, only your hope)... But, I do know of a precedent if working on powerful, modern 3D Windows PC games or PSP such as "Ys: Oath in Felghana" which have real, future market potential to sell well, just that, you also have horrible shenanigans that go along with it and I wouldn't be all that excited as a programmer in a fan translation team given how that went down and all the claims that's how it's "supposed to work..."

Even when Sega finally brought over MWIV to VC so many years after the fan translation, they still did their own translation. If ever there was a company that would absolutely never even consider using a fan translation, it's Nintendo. To believe even a rumor to the contrary only shows how little you know the company you collect for. I'm sure that MrSega honestly believes that his Dreamcast 2 project is legit and that he and Sega are simply hammering out the details, but the reality is that he's just mentally ill.

Just ignore Puffer. He's a repro collector who has already encouraged people to stab translation team members in the back, the way that Nightwolve described. He also refuses to donate towards any of the projects he demands be completed, until he is provided "Working Designs" style packaging. Because "donations don't look good on his shelf".

Yes, it is  truly my hope that Tomato gets the credits from Nintendo and set a precedent for future projects.

Quote from: NightWolve on 02/24/2016, 04:24 PMHow many times has this occurred in history, an official videogame publisher deciding to acquire fan translated results in the last 20 years ?

Well, Virtual console existed only for 10 years but it never reached it's full potential. Virtual console and Steam are still untapped markets for japanese game developers.

The first real successful story of unpublished game in the west was Earthbound Zero on NES and the Mother 3 could be the smashing success which could open the door to other games such Secret of Mana 2 etc.

I still think that Gofundme and Kickstarter are untapped sources for retro game translators and it is sad that nobody has even tried it!

P. S.
I am wondering if people at Falcom are even aware of your translation/dub of Ys 4?

Quote from: guest on 02/24/2016, 04:53 PMJust ignore Puffer. He's a repro collector who has already encouraged people to stab translation team members in the back, the way that Nightwolve described. He also refuses to donate towards any of the projects he demands be completed, until he is provided "Working Designs" style packaging. Because "donations don't look good on his shelf".

I am amazed that you still remember what i have written so many months ago. This proves that my thread didn't go unnoticed.

Quote from: True Puffer on 02/24/2016, 05:09 PMThe first real successful story of unpublished game in the west was Earthbound Zero on NES...

I'd say the dozen or so PCE games released on VC in NA were successful.  I never saw any solid sales numbers, but I can't imagine they'd keep cranking them out if they weren't selling.

Quote from: True Puffer on 02/24/2016, 05:09 PMI still think that Gofundme and Kickstarter are untapped sources for retro game translators and it is sad that nobody has even tried it!

So go start one and quit sitting on the sidelines, pissing and moaning that the world isn't catering to your whims.

Quote from: True Puffer on 02/24/2016, 05:09 PMP. S.
I am wondering if people at Falcom are even aware of your translation/dub of Ys 4?

Only if some bilingual Japanese/English speaker translated information about it to Japanese and emailed them. And even then, such a person would have to know someone important above the email clerks in the company who likely don't forward general fanboy pie-in-the-sky hopes/dreams which I think this falls under. It's also not a game they developed, just guided and provided the music for. I would guess part of the ownership of it now lies with Konami since they absorbed Hudson Soft.

It's a money loser likely, and in an alternative reality, I suppose someone inside of XSEED Games could've attempted to get the ball rolling on this perhaps (though I know of no other retro games they might've tried to add to their library in some way), but as they burned all bridges with me given that Lipschultz used his company for petty revenge (brazenly so), there's no way they'd even hypothetically consider it because they'd have to reconcile with me on their past wrongs. At present, they're hoping they escape accountability for what they did on the PC Ys scripts with enough passage of time and me failing to hire a lawyer all these years (which was my last Hail Mary shot at correcting the situation, if ever).

I'm not making fun of you, honestly. But I think you're being a bit too fanboy-ish with such hopes/dreams in my opinion and you don't have precedent for it. And the one I mentioned for modern Ys PC and PSP games doesn't speak well for the industry in how they handled it... I wouldn't want something like that to happen to somebody else... It's better that a publisher hires a professional translation company like they always do rather than repeat XSEED's criminality.

Quote from: guest on 02/24/2016, 05:21 PMSo go start one and quit sitting on the sidelines, pissing and moaning that the world isn't catering to your whims.

I will be the first one to support such a campaign but the people like elmer, Sam or NightWolve should start such a campaign with the marketing help from the big youtubers like the guys from finalbosses.com who are all members of this forum. In this video between 6:25 and 6:35 Happy Console Gamer mentions NightWolve:
http://youtu.be/min6AhV7FZQ?t=6m12s

So he obviously knows about you only if you manage to persuade him to make a video about your future gofundme or kickstarter translation campaigns. He also could  persuade the rest of the finalbosses youtubers to promote the campaign.

Quote from: NightWolve on 02/24/2016, 05:41 PMOnly if some bilingual Japanese/English speaker translated information about it to Japanese and emailed them.

In the translating community i think this shouldn't be much of a problem doesn't it? You are a insider, right?

TruePuffer: We've already gone through all of this with you once.

Now, could we please just move all this off-topic fantasy talk of publisher-funded translations and KickStarters off into some other thread, just like your last one?

pcengine-fx.com: Kickstarting translation projects? (https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=19409.0)

Then perhaps we can leave this thread for talking about the actual translation that's being done, and move all the discussions of what we "should" do to a different thread.

Note: Don't anyone go getting any bright ideas and contacting Falcom now. They might give us a Cease-and-Desist order.

True Puffer: What we are doing is ethically in the grey-area as it is. Accepting money without official authorization is a big step toward the darker end of the spectrum, and it's not something I care to do. Thanks for your enthusiasm and all, but frankly, just seeing this topic come up makes me nervous and uncomfortable.

OK guys i will cease and desist. I will be watching your progress.

Quote from: SamIAm on 02/24/2016, 07:17 PMNote: Don't anyone go getting any bright ideas and contacting Falcom now. They might give us a Cease-and-Desist order.

Honestly, I'd never worry about that in the context of these old PC Engine Xanadu games. Plus, with their US partner XSEED Games snagging unlicensed fan translations for the Ys games, shady as it was, they're kind of essentially neutralized if you ask me. Business is tough, PC gaming market crashed in Japan, they lost their distribution partner hence why they no longer make many PC games and switched to consoles to save themselves, etc. It's so doubtful they would ever want the bad PR of this in the face of fans and have extra cash for paying lawyers to punish something that in no way affects their current business!

I actually worried about that with Ys: Oath in Felghana which is partly why I scared pirates away by playing to their crazy paranoias about me at one point (they accused me of patch viruses to stop their pirating), but you see the BIG difference, it was a newly released modern PC game at the time and we could've released the English patch ONE MONTH later after it was published in Japan, so I purposely delayed the project for another year and a half (we moved too fast)!

But yeah, if you really have this fear, I will safely say I'm 100% sure there's nothing to worry about here. The president of Falcom already knows about our fan translations on their games, FYI, if you're curious:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ysinterviews/ysinterviews.htm (http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ysinterviews/ysinterviews.htm)

Quote from: Psycho John SchizomaniakJS: English speaking fans are so passionate they've made unofficial translations of Ys - what does Falcom think of this?

Quote from: Toshihiro KondoTK: We're really honored that people are interested in the Ys world so much. However, at the same time we always felt guilty for not being able to bring an official product to their hands. We're very pleased that after a long time we were finally able to bring over an official English version for this audience.

Falcom is "honored" that we hacked away at their games. ;)

Quote from: True Puffer on 02/24/2016, 07:46 PMI will be watching your progress.

Why did that sound a little creepy to me ? ;)

Lol to get back on topic, the translation is looking beautiful. I can't wait to give this game a playthrough.


Oh yeah, on the subject of Earthbound Zero, that wasn't even a fan translation. It was a leaked prototype already translated by Nintendo. It can hardly be used as a success story for geting fan translated games published. I'm certain the sales of EB on Wii/Wiiu had a much bigger impact on the releasing of EBZ than a ROM floating around the internet or a few repro carts.

Just caught up on the pr0gress on this translation.
Well done guy's

Good news, everyone. The Xanadu II translation is now ready for play-testing.  :dance:

The primary reason why this happened so quickly, of course, is that the translation was done a long time ago. However, I owe a lot to elmer for writing up some code to automate the copy/pasting from the old dump to the new dump. I'd have been searching->copying->pasting for weeks if it weren't for that. Once the automated copying did its thing, though, all I had to do was go through and do a little extra massaging to make sure everything was fitting like it needs to. There were a couple little spots that hadn't been dumped before, but those didn't take long to get done, either.

Of course, it also helps that Xanadu II has less than half as much text as Xanadu I. :)

Besides play-testing, the big thing that remains to do on my end is the dub. On elmer's, it's primarily hacking in the graphics and getting ADPCM tools ready. Anyway, big progress is happening every week, so hopefully these things will start coming together soon!

Quote from: SamIAm on 02/27/2016, 01:49 AMGood news, everyone. The Xanadu II translation is now ready for play-testing.  :dance:

!!!

...seriously, this is the best news.

Definitely awesome news. Can't wait.

Woohoo!!!  :D

But ...

Quote from: SamIAm on 02/27/2016, 01:49 AMBesides play-testing, the big thing that remains to do on my end is the dub. On elmer's, it's primarily hacking in the graphics and getting ADPCM tools ready. Anyway, big progress is happening every week, so hopefully these things will start coming together soon!

That was incredibly quick. OMG ... I've got to get off my lazy butt and get more stuff done!  #-o

The Xanadu I cutscene draft script has advanced from "at least we have something in English" to "we could use this now if we needed to".

In order to make a good dub script, you really have to carefully measure how long each Japanese line is, then test-read each English line to see if it can fit in the same amount of time. Adjusting your reading speed and adding sighs, laughs, pauses etc. can help, but some lines simply have to be either cut down or padded out for them to work.

Once you've done that, you need to go back and re-read all the lines focusing more on whether they sound good, all the while re-testing for length anytime you make a significant change. Since you're doing everything out loud, working on a dub script gets tiring faster than when you're editing something that's only going to appear as text.

If I wanted to rush, I think we could start recruiting for the dub in just a couple of weeks. However, elmer and I have been putting a lot of work to make this whole translation look as good as we can, and I'd hate for this one part to be so rough around the edges that it distracts from everything else. A fan-dub is going to have a bit of an amateur feel to it no matter what, but I definitely think that putting in the time to double and triple check everything before we start asking people to record is going to pay off down the line. It just means you'll have to wait a few more weeks before we release this.

I'm honestly considering making a full test-dub consisting only of me reading every line, just so it'll be easier to judge what's working and what's not. That would be interesting.  :mrgreen:

I kind of expect that when we get people to agree to play parts for us, they'll be really enthusiastic for a week or two, and then they'll start falling off the radar. When we do start asking people for recordings, I want to be able to spend all my time on helping them get the best takes they can while they're interested, rather than asking them to wait while I re-write something that isn't working so well.

------

By the way, I'm still play-testing Chapter 7 of Xanadu I. I have a day off tomorrow, and I'm going to try to finish it all then.   :)

I don't know how long it took to dub Ys4, but if you can reach the same quality for the Xanadus, take the time you want! And that's anti-dub, pro-subtitles guy's  words.

Subtitles are just too tough in games like these, easier to simply find/replace APDCM voice-acting clips... If anybody could ever do it if they put their mind to it, it'd be elmer though. But, given he's already mentioned how tight memory is, and that's the same thing Neill Corlett told me about Ys IV 12 years ago, it's likely impossible, not without perhaps using a hacked system card with a flashcart that allows reads/writes as was talked about around here in the past.

Quote from: SamIAm on 03/02/2016, 04:33 AMIf I wanted to rush, I think we could start recruiting for the dub in just a couple of weeks. However, elmer and I have been putting a lot of work to make this whole translation look as good as we can, and I'd hate for this one part to be so rough around the edges that it distracts from everything else. A fan-dub is going to have a bit of an amateur feel to it no matter what, but I definitely think that putting in the time to double and triple check everything before we start asking people to record is going to pay off down the line. It just means you'll have to wait a few more weeks before we release this.

As eager to play this in English as I am (and I'm sure everyone else is too), I'd much rather wait for a final, well-polished, professional seeming finished product.  There's no need to rush whatsoever.  I'd much rather this continues as the current pace; stuff is being accomplished fairly rapidly, yes, but the attention to detail and the level of perfectionism is what makes me excited most about this project.

Glad to hear about chapter 7 play through, too.

Excellent progress as always and when it comes time around for voices, please allow some submissions, I'd love to voice something even minor, just to be a part of this, these are games I've wanted in English since release, second only to the FEOE titles, which you guys should totally tackle next ;)


Keep up the amazing work...

Quote from: NightWolve on 03/02/2016, 02:55 PMSubtitles are just too tough in games like these...

Yes, I'm aware of that.. :wink:

What I tried to say is that as a subtitle elitist, Ys4 dub's quality totally changed my mind.

Now I'm all for a Xanadu dub, all my doubts and disapointment disappeared! :)

Quote from: Dicer on 03/02/2016, 05:44 PM... the FEOE titles, which you guys should totally tackle next ;)

Keep up the amazing work...

That would be a dream come true [-o<

Being a pc engine shooter based fan I'm still looking forward to these translations. Do we get to try this before the English voice overs?

We're not going to do any releases until everything is done, if that's what you're asking.

When the day finally comes that we do release the finished translation, however, we'll make it easy for a person to elect not to use the dub. I'll release the script, so you can print it and keep it nearby to read when a cutscene happens if that's what you prefer.

For the two games combined, it will be about 60 pages.  :wink:

Finally, I've finished my first pass of Chapter 7. I've got 76 savestates archived for this chapter alone.

Also, I went ahead and made a test of me reading my script of the intro for Xanadu I. The script was good. My reading sucked. What can I say? I'm not good at playing wise old men. Too bad there aren't any nerdy middle aged guys in the game.

Finally, for a change of pace, I went and translated a no-frills Japanese walkthrough of Xanadu I to English. Its format is pretty simple:
1. Talk to Person A in (Location)
2. Talk to Person B in (Location)
3. Talk to Person C in (Location)
...etc.

Already, though, I dare say it is the most thorough and accurate walkthrough ever made in English. My plan for now is to release it with the game, hopefully with maps included.

Holy shit, Sam! I can see the finish line from here! I'm going to need to buy a copy of LoX1 soon! Keep it up! :D

Quote from: SamIAm on 03/03/2016, 08:29 PMWe're not going to do any releases until everything is done, if that's what you're asking.

When the day finally comes that we do release the finished translation, however, we'll make it easy for a person to elect not to use the dub. I'll release the script, so you can print it and keep it nearby to read when a cutscene happens if that's what you prefer.

For the two games combined, it will be about 60 pages.  :wink:

Script sounds good. 
Really looking forward to playing this game now.
How many voice actors do you need.

QuoteHow many voice actors do you need.

Assuming we don't get several super-talents who can convincingly pull off multiple characters, probably about 30.

There are actually about 50 different characters in the games if you include all the bit-parts, but I think we're going to be able to recycle some voices without anyone noticing.

When it comes to casting, I'll be looking for four things, in descending order of importance:
1. That you can pull off a voice that fits the character.
2. That you can act.
3. That your recording quality isn't terrible.
4. That you can accurately check to see whether your take of a line fits the prescribed time, and otherwise export it according to the criteria I set.

This is still weeks away, though, so sit tight.  :wink:

I've always wanted to try voice acting, although I don't think I'll be good at it. I would like to try something where I would have to "change" my voice like trying to sound like an old man or something.

Chapter 8 is about 40% tested.

---------------------

This week, I've been sinking huge amounts of time into something that I always knew was going to need it. In Xanadu 2, the "Prologue" that you can choose to view as you start a new game is not a typical cutscene, but is rather the normal game engine on auto-pilot with every line of dialogue being voiced via redbook audio while simultaneously being printed in ordinary text boxes.

What's challenging about translating this is that first of all, the game engine and the CD audio never really check to see where the other one is; they just start at the same time and depend on everything going smoothly. The text boxes have delay variables at the end of them, denoted in frames, and when the game counts off the delay, the next text box is loaded. But there are lots of other factors involved:

1. Both the Japanese and the English translation print at one character per frame. If the Japanese text box has 20 characters and the corresponding English text box has 35 characters, then you need to subtract 15 frames from the delay variable.
2. Many names in the Japanese version are printed using an alternate font that takes one frame to turn on, and one frame to turn off. The English names are not.
3. If you split one text box into two text boxes, you have to factor in six* frames to the English frame count total for the transition.
4. Wrapping to another line takes a frame by itself, except in certain complicated circumstances.
5. For some reason, the original game has lots of delay variables paired. Sometimes, it's necessary when the delay is greater than 255 frames, but often, that's not the case. Instead of one variable with a value of 120, it will have two with values of 60 each. And guess what? The game takes one frame to begin counting down a delay variable, so if you want to use one variable instead of two (which is easier, because you're recalculating all the delay variables to match the English anyway), then you need to add one extra frame. I actually said to hell with it and started splitting my recalculated variables.

There are dozens and dozens of text boxes worth of lines, and just figuring all this crap out took hours. I've done a lot of the recalculating now, but it will still be hours of exhausting work more to get everything truly synced up, which it needs to be. You might not think it's such a big deal if the timing gets off by a frame or two, but since the game and the CD are running separately, little mistakes can compound. It would be very easy for the audio and the text boxes to be de-synced by a half-second by the end, and if all the mistakes are little, it will be very difficult to pinpoint where things got off track.

I'm probably going to have to record footage via Mednafen of the original and the translation, and carefully check one box at a time whether everything is synced. It's a damn mess.

The only bright side is, if we're paying this much attention, it actually won't be that hard to clean up little mistakes that Falcom themselves made. Some of the sound effects are ever-so-slightly not in sync, and I'll be able to improve their timing.

So yeah, that's what I'm doing with myself this week.

*I still have to verify this.

Holy shit, that you're taking the time to do that, and do it right, is INSANELY impressive.

Sam: INSANITY! :)

It's starting to work! Ha ha ha ha!!  :twisted:

There's some variable that I haven't been able to pin down which is causing some English text boxes to hang around for a few frames longer than they should, but that's OK. I made a video rip of the Japanese game and used VirtualDub to count the frames between each and every text box, recording the results along the way, and now, I'm going through an English video rip and doing corrections. Add a frame here, subtract a frame there...I've already got the first few scenes lining up with the original Japanese exactly. And I do mean exactly.  8)

There is one more variable that's a minor pain to deal with right now, and also has the potential to bother us again later. Elmer went all out and has a great new compression scheme working in the game that gives me all the space I'll need for text; however, the amount of time it takes the CPU to move around and decompress things has changed. For example, in this prologue, there's a moment when the characters enter a castle, the screen fades to black, and a new block of data is loaded behind the scenes before the castle interior fades in. In the translated game, this transition is taking an extra several frames. For the player, this is only another tenth of a second or so of waiting, but for me, this is another delay that needs to be factored in.

The reason why this might bother us again later is that we're using Mednafen to test all this stuff, and there's a chance that real hardware might take a significantly different amount of time to decompress stuff. Fortunately, there aren't that many transitions where things are loaded like this, and if we're only off by a frame or two each time, it won't be a big deal. However, this is why it's important to be diligent everywhere else. If, toward the end of the scene, we've drifted five frames off, it's not really a problem. If we're drifted twenty or thirty, on the other hand, our translation will look like crap.

Part of me is eager to get this done and get back to editing. Another part of me, though, is happy for the chance to take a break from dealing with words and spend some time playing with my calculator.  :mrgreen:

The first pass of Xanadu 1 is now done all the way through Chapter 8!

Although my job will be busy through the rest of the month, I am going to attempt to get the rest of the game done before April, or at least to reach Chapter 10.

In other news, the Xanadu 2 prologue text boxes are now fully synced to the voices. There's some kind of factor going on which I don't quite understand that's causing tiny shifts in the real delays of each text box. In the end, when they're all played, the last box will finish within one or two frames of where the last box in the original game finished. However, if I locate which box(es) are off and correct them, it can give rise to desyncronizations in other places. Anyway, these differences are literally imperceptible, and the game functions just fine. Editing will be a bit more of a pain, but we'll get through it.

I'm going to keep taking my time putting the dub scripts together. It will definitely pay off if I make them as good as I can before opening auditions and beginning recording/mixing. If you want to try out, it's probably a good idea to start checking back here around mid-April.

Quote from: SamIAm on 03/17/2016, 06:18 AMThe first pass of Xanadu 1 is now done all the way through Chapter 8!
...
I'm going to keep taking my time putting the dub scripts together. It will definitely pay off if I make them as good as I can before opening auditions and beginning recording/mixing. If you want to try out, it's probably a good idea to start checking back here around mid-April.

We're really getting there! It's just one heck of a long-slow-and-detailed job.  :wink:

Guy's you are the Elite.

congrats Sam. Very interested in this, I played it previously all the way through, but it was difficult with my limited japanese lol

Update time.

Chapter 9 of Xanadu 1 is finished, except for literally two or three text boxes that sit behind a weird bug that elmer will hopefully have worked out soon. It happens at a moment when the game does something that it never does anywhere else, so it's neither terribly surprising nor worrying that the same bug will pop up elsewhere.

I have spent the last several days doing pre-production work for the dub. Primarily, this means setting up project files in Audacity with the background music and sound effects totally mixed in, and the positions of every spoken line marked so that when I get actual takes from people, I can very quickly copy/paste them in and produce previews within minutes. I'll need another week or two to finish this process. The real objective is to make it so that I can immediately have all the actors hear what they sound like together, and do retakes to improve the overall performance while their interest is fresh.

I'm also working on doing a complete test-dub using my own voice. It's pretty embarrassing listening to the playback, but it's also teaching me a lot. The English lines are all measured so that they'll fit in the same slot of time as the original Japanese lines, being neither longer nor shorter. However, if I were to just leave it at that, it would lead to another problem: the pauses between the lines would be the same as the original Japanese, and that leads to some unnatural sounding exchanges in places. It's one of those differences between languages that's easy to overlook. Anyway, by putting my own voice in there, it's really easy to hear when the English actually needs to end a half-second earlier or later than the Japanese, and noting that in the script ahead of time is going to save the actors a lot of trouble.

I didn't do either of the above-mentioned steps when I made the first Xanadu II dub five years ago. I was in some kind of big hurry back then. When I finally got everyone's takes in, I had to start on the mixing from square one, which lead to sloppiness, and also to delays that made some people start to lose interest. Also, when playing back the results, even though (most) people had done a really good job following the target-time numbers after every line in the script, the pauses in between certain lines were strange, and I knew it was going to need some major reworking.

Of course, the old project began its first major stall around that time, so I never quite got around to it.

Anyway, it really makes me wonder how professional dubbing studios handle this sort of thing. It seems like if you didn't want a product that sounds totally weird and detached from the video, you would have no choice but to go through these steps before declaring your script finished and bringing in actors. However, it's all very time-consuming, and it would have been relatively difficult with 20+ year old technology. If I had to guess, I'd say they probably print off lots of copies of the draft-scripts, get a few people to sit around a TV or a projector, then repeat the video footage over and over with the sound off, with people test-reading the lines to each other in real time and making notes.

I could be wrong, though.

Quote from: SamIAm on 03/29/2016, 10:42 AMChapter 9 of Xanadu 1 is finished, except for literally two or three text boxes that sit behind a weird bug that elmer will hopefully have worked out soon. It happens at a moment when the game does something that it never does anywhere else, so it's neither terribly surprising nor worrying that the same bug will pop up elsewhere.

Found it! Thanks for the savestates!  :D

I tell you guys ... without Mednafen, this translation would never have been done, at least by me, and possibly by anyone-else either.

Anyway ... that one particular piece of assembly-code in the script is directly calling some cursor-display code at the lowest-level, rather than using the game-code's cursor-flashing routines (that have been patched for the new font code).  :roll:

It's an easy fix ... I just need to add another special-case-command to the script-compiler to fix this one specific script-chunk.

While I'm doing it ... I should probably scan all the other script-chunks in Xanadu 1 and Xanadu 2 and see if this new patch needs to be applied anywhere else.

QuoteIf I had to guess, I'd say they probably print off lots of copies of the draft-scripts, get a few people to sit around a TV or a projector, then repeated the video footage over and over with the sound off, with people test-reading the lines to each other in real time and making notes.

Yep ... I think that's what normally happens. AFAIK the actors get to watch the video, and hear the foreign audio on their headphones (if they want), all while recording the dub.

This would all be in a studio, with an engineer there to politely point out if the actor has mistimed their lines.

You might think about making videos of everything available to the folks that are doing the dub, complete with timestamps for every line that they're supposed to do.

But that would be a crazy amount of work!  :shock:

We're all about the crazy, 'round these parts.

QuoteFound it! Thanks for the savestates!  :D

Woo hoo!

There might-just-might be something similar in the next chapter, so I'm glad that was apparently not too terribly complicated.  :D

QuoteYep ... I think that's what normally happens. AFAIK the actors get to watch the video, and hear the foreign audio on their headphones (if they want), all while recording the dub.

This would all be in a studio, with an engineer there to politely point out if the actor has mistimed their lines.

I mean before the actors come in, though. How do the writers get the script to the final draft? I assume they can't be re-writing too much on the fly during recording, or else it would get sloppy and/or they would have to start paying lots of money to the actors just for sitting around.

It's amazing how sensitive the timing can be. When you've got two seconds for a line and no leeway to go over, you have to test it... and in order to test it properly, you need to see how it fits with the lines around it.

Maybe one person could do it alone, but I imagine that it would work better if you had two or three "testers" watching short clips on loop and reading the dialogues out loud to each other.

QuoteYou might think about making videos of everything available to the folks that are doing the dub, complete with timestamps for every line that they're supposed to do.

But that would be a crazy amount of work!  :shock:

Ha ha...that would be a a breeze compared to the other steps I've gone through so far.  :wink:

But my real plan is to just give everyone a youtube link with timestamps to each individual scene, rather than each individual line. They're all short enough that I don't think people will have a lot of trouble finding where their lines are supposed to go.

By the way, one thing that might be fun for people on this forum would be to help me make background chatter for a couple of the tracks. Off the top of my head, I'm going to need:

- People cowering as the sky turns black and everyone loses the ability to use magic
- People cheering for Areios as he comes home
- People cheering for Areios as he prepares to leave on a sea voyage

Even if you're shy to try out for a more major part, this could be a neat way to get your voice in the translation. It's kind of like being an extra in a movie. The volume of your voice would be turned way down and have lots of other voices layered around it, but it would be there.

Post in this thread to let me know if you're interested. I could probably use 10-15 of you, and if I can't get any women directly through this, I hope you won't mind recruiting your wives/girlfriends/landladies/whoever to join in. It will all be really simple stuff, like "Bon voyage!" "Welcome home!" and "What's going on!?"

You wouldn't need a great mic, but you would need a minimal level of quality, and you would also need to convincingly shout. You might alarm your neighbors while recording.

If you plan on trying out for a real part, you can still join in. However, if you wind up getting a real part, don't be too surprised if I have to basically bury your background chatter to keep people from recognizing that it's the same voice.

Don't be shy - I'm going to join in, too!  :mrgreen:

I'd be happy to at least be a cowering peasant; the thought suits me just fine!

Sorry my bad english.
I complete many rpg pc engine in Japanese, when they went on sale, gulliver boy, xanadu2, ys1-2-3-4, xak1-2-3 fray, alnan, cosmic fantasy 4 part 1 and 2, tengai kabuki, but there are some that without the language are impossible, xanadu1, tengaimakyo, anearth. I will often I started, but I get stuck.

In xanadu1, i arrival 6 stage, and the game is one the best rpg all rpg of 16 bits (and the most fucker)... and 32 bits... I hope could complete the translation and after 22 years to complete game, I would be thrilled.
Thank you.

I really appreciate that you took the time to write a nice message.   :)

Chapter 6 is not very simple, and Chapter 7 is even worse. Hopefully, understanding the language and having a good English guide will make the game much more enjoyable.

Please tell me your opinion of the game again after you try it in English!  :D

I'd be happy to do some background voices, I have a Snowball mic so hopefully my audio quality should be adequate.

I'm in to do some background voice(s), kind of tempted to try out for a bigger roll too!

The first test-play-edit of Xanadu 1 is complete. Today, I started on Xanadu 2.

Later, I'll go back to Xanadu 1 for another pass, and that should be the last one that involves any major editing. I'm anticipating that the early chapters will need more work, in part because my first drafts of those were rougher in the first place, and in part because I didn't play-test those quite as thoroughly. Call me lazy, but at the time, I hadn't refined my process to be as efficient, and there was just so much left to do that I had to go fast to keep up my morale.

Anyway, after the next round, I'll do another quick pass with some playtesters to nab typos and get feedback, and that should be it.

Xanadu 2 is so much smaller than Xanadu 1, I'm hoping I can get a first pass of it done within a month.

-------------

Oh, and I'll have some background-chatter lines written up soon. Right now, I have a few days off work in a row, and I'm using that to really focus on play-testing.

I'll volunteer for some background sounds. I hope my mic quality is good enough! It'd be so awesome to  have some contribution to this project. Really really really really appreciate all your guys dedication and expertise.

Is there a french character in the game?  :-k

Quote from: deubeul on 04/04/2016, 05:51 PMIs there a french character in the game?  :-k

Was this what you had in mind?  :wink:

http://youtu.be/M9DCAFUerzs

Sorry, I know that's a terribly stereotyped joke ... but I love the movie anyway!

P.S. I'm still hoping that someone from the French PC Engine forums will eventually show some interest in doing a French version of Zeroigar!

Quote from: SamIAm on 04/04/2016, 08:16 AMThe first test-play-edit of Xanadu 1 is complete. Today, I started on Xanadu 2.

Wow, you guys got a lot done!

Quote from: elmer on 04/04/2016, 06:59 PM

Quote from: deubeul on 04/04/2016, 05:51 PMIs there a french character in the game?  :-k

Was this what you had in mind?  :wink:

http://youtu.be/M9DCAFUerzs

Sorry, I know that's a terribly stereotyped joke ... but I love the movie anyway!

Lol, I was more asking Sam if he needed a french accent dubber, but thanks for the reminder and the good laugh  :D

Quote from: elmer on 04/04/2016, 06:59 PMP.S. I'm still hoping that someone from the French PC Engine forums will eventually show some interest in doing a French version of Zeroigar!

If you only need someone to translate the script to french, and if there's no hacking involved, I'd love to do it!

Quote from: TurboXray on 04/04/2016, 09:47 PM

Quote from: SamIAm on 04/04/2016, 08:16 AMThe first test-play-edit of Xanadu 1 is complete. Today, I started on Xanadu 2.

Wow, you guys got a lot done!

Well, SamIAm has, he deserves the credit ... I've been twiddling-my-thumbs for a while, now!  :wink:

Quote from: deubeul on 04/05/2016, 07:12 PMLol, I was more asking Sam if he needed a french accent dubber, but thanks for the reminder and the good laugh  :D

I'm glad that you didn't take offense.

The British and the French have been poking fun at each other for hundreds of years (punctuated by the occasional war).  :lol:

Quote from: deubeul on 04/05/2016, 07:12 PM

Quote from: elmer on 04/04/2016, 06:59 PMP.S. I'm still hoping that someone from the French PC Engine forums will eventually show some interest in doing a French version of Zeroigar!

If you only need someone to translate the script to french, and if there's no hacking involved, I'd love to do it!

The Zeroigar translation patch ships with the entire in-game text as editable text files, and with exactly the same tools that SamIAm used to insert the text into the game for testing.

The video subtitles are also supplied in the form that was created by MP2Conv tool that we've talked about in the PC-FX Homebrew thread ... and the tool to merge them into the game is also supplied.

That was a deliberate decision by both SamIAm and myself in order to make it easy for people to "play" with the translation itself and to encourage people to get into "translating" a game.

If you're really interested, then we should move the discussion to the Zeroigar thread, or open a new one.  :wink:

Dragon Slayer II - Xanadu it´s one of my favourite game on the MSX.
But i never play it on the PC Engine cause the language barrier.
Perhaps it´s time to play it soon.

Quote from: Tolvatar on 04/06/2016, 10:47 AMDragon Slayer II - Xanadu it´s one of my favourite game on the MSX.
But i never play it on the PC Engine cause the language barrier.
Perhaps it´s time to play it soon.

That game is not on PC Engine.

Checkout youtube videos to see what The Legend of Xanadu series is like.

Quote from: guest on 04/06/2016, 01:45 PMThat game is not on PC Engine.

Checkout youtube videos to see what The Legend of Xanadu series is like.

Yep, Falcom and their confusing naming.  #-o

"Legend of Xanadu" 1 & 2 are the last 2 games in the Dragon Slayer series ... basically numbers 8 & 9.

They're exclusive to the PCE (well ... except for the PCE-emulation Windows release in 2003, and the more-recent PCE-emulation Virtual Console release).

Ups, i´m sorry.
I thought it was a remake like Xak I+II or YS 1, 2 & 3
I love Dragon Slayer series. I have more desire to play this games now.

Update:

Xanadu 2 play-testing is done through Chapter 2 now. That means three out of eight chapters are finished.  :dance:

Keep in mind, however, that the next two chapters are basically the largest in the game. Chapter 4 is probably the size of two smaller chapters put together.

Also, the pre-production mixing for the dub is coming along nicely. Elmer and I will hopefully be able to do some testing of the ADPCM-based audio within the real game itself very soon.  :D

Great! you know, one of the main reasons why I want to buy a PC-Engine DUO is because of this series!

The pre-production work on the dub is almost done. There are only sound effects to get in there now. Luckily, there are lots of places where I can get the sounds out of the original audio and seamlessly splice it with the new audio (and in fact, I've already done this).

Anyway, this is what one of about 35 Audacity project files looks like. (http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u305/sirsinnes/Clipboard01_zpsjrm8bigr.jpg)

(https://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u305/sirsinnes/Clipboard01_zpsjrm8bigr.jpg)

There's BGM from the soundtrack, the original Japanese audio for comparison (to be muted later), and then each character's line set up as its own track, with numbers corresponding to the line numbering in the script. The audio you see in each character-line track is white noise filler, placed exactly where it needs to go and occupying exactly as much time as the original Japanese.

Dropping in English lines that people send will literally be as simple as double-click/Ctrl+V for each one, and this will be very useful for showing people how their takes are mixing very quickly, ideally encouraging them to do retakes before they lose interest.

Quote from: SamIAm on 04/14/2016, 07:54 PMThe pre-production work on the dub is almost done. There are only sound effects to get in there now. Luckily, there are lots of places where I can get the sounds out of the original audio and seamlessly splice it with the new audio (and in fact, I've already done this).

Excellent!  :D

But now I'm struggling to get my side of things done and catch up!  :wink:

Say, if anyone here happens to be aware of any sites that host lots of classic early 90's anime sound effects, please let me know. Xanadu 1 in particular is full of effects that sound like they came from some generic reel.

There are a lot of magical-energy sounds that really ought to come from an "authentic" source.

Quote from: SamIAm on 04/14/2016, 07:54 PMAnyway, this is what one of about 35 Audacity project files looks like. (http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u305/sirsinnes/Clipboard01_zpsjrm8bigr.jpg) There's BGM from the soundtrack, the original Japanese audio for comparison (to be muted later), and then each character's line set up as its own track, with numbers corresponding to the line numbering in the script. The audio you see in each character-line track is white noise filler, placed exactly where it needs to go and occupying exactly as much time as the original Japanese.

Yeah, looks like Audacity is pretty powerful for freeware. I didn't realize its mixing features were as instant as opening another audio file via drag'n'drop.

Hmmm, sound effects, that's definitely one of the things I've always worried about when it comes to dubbing games.  I've never personally found any resource for these sounds, but, I've always wanted one, even for my music.  I feel like Telenet used a lot of the same generic anime sounds that I so love.

Quote from: ParanoiaDragon on 04/15/2016, 02:07 AMI've never personally found any resource for these sounds, but, I've always wanted one, even for my music.

I suspect that you really mean "free" resource ... but just-in-case you're willing to actually spend money ...

https://www.sound-ideas.com/Collection/47/2/0/Comedy-and-Cartoon-Sound-Effects (https://www.sound-ideas.com/Collection/47/2/0/Comedy-and-Cartoon-Sound-Effects)

/NeededSFX.wav

In this one clip are all of the very "anime" sound effects that I'm going to have some trouble locating. If you know where I can get clean, reasonably high quality sounds that are similar, please tell me.

I did some random Googling and found a site that I think has what you are looking for. It is call Sound Effect Lab (http://en.soundeffect-lab.info/) and a lot of the stuff sounds like it came straight from a 90s anime, especially in the "Battle" and "Cartoon/Production" tabs. It appears to all be free as well so I hope that helps.

Quote from: elmer on 04/15/2016, 09:59 AM

Quote from: ParanoiaDragon on 04/15/2016, 02:07 AMI've never personally found any resource for these sounds, but, I've always wanted one, even for my music.

I suspect that you really mean "free" resource ... but just-in-case you're willing to actually spend money ...

https://www.sound-ideas.com/Collection/47/2/0/Comedy-and-Cartoon-Sound-Effects (https://www.sound-ideas.com/Collection/47/2/0/Comedy-and-Cartoon-Sound-Effects)

Holy hell, those are some expensive sound effects!  Cool though, it's got Hanna Barbera.  It's funny, for the most part, I'm not a Hanna Barbera fan, but I've always loved their sound effects!  Man, they got Looney Tunes & Tom & Jerry, that's awesome!

Quote from: LentFilms on 04/16/2016, 02:23 PMI did some random Googling and found a site that I think has what you are looking for. It is call Sound Effect Lab (http://en.soundeffect-lab.info/) and a lot of the stuff sounds like it came straight from a 90s anime, especially in the "Battle" and "Cartoon/Production" tabs. It appears to all be free as well so I hope that helps.

Sadly, they don't have quite the sounds I'm looking for.

But thanks for the link anyway. :)

I finished test-playing Chapter 3 of Xanadu 2 this morning. That puts us over the 50% mark for the game as a whole.

The sound effects for the dub are coming right along. It's a slog - the amount of time I've spent listening to hundreds of 1-second clips back-to-back is starting to get ridiculous - but progress is happening. There are three tracks from Xanadu 1 that have more sound effects in them than any others by far, and they're all done.

Sit tight for the dub to begin. I want quality over speed, and that means it's just going to take time.

Quote from: SamIAm on 04/20/2016, 09:40 PMI finished test-playing Chapter 3 of Xanadu 2 this morning. That puts us over the 50% mark for the game as a whole.

The sound effects for the dub are coming right along. It's a slog - the amount of time I've spent listening to hundreds of 1-second clips back-to-back is starting to get ridiculous - but progress is happening. There are three tracks from Xanadu 1 that have more sound effects in them than any others by far, and they're all done.

Sit tight for the dub to begin. I want quality over speed, and that means it's just going to take time.

Take all the time you need. If you need some help beta testing please let me know and I'll take some time off work to do it.

Damn I really wish I had some decent recording equipment to get my voice in these games. But just hearing it in English alone is fine by me! Thanks for constantly updating this thread, it's a real treat to see it inch closer and closer. I cannot wait until this is finally finished and your work can be admired!

I suppose I should hit you guys with an update.

Chapter 4 of Xanadu 2, the largest one in that game, is now fully play-test-edited. Chapter 5 is smaller than average, and 6 and 7 are tiny, so we're really getting near the finish line for that one. Since I have some time off work (Golden Week in Japan), I'm going to try to get Chapter 5 done within the next few days.

As for the dub, the sound effects are all lined up and mixed in for both games, though there are a few that are going to need work. It's all minor stuff. The project files are fully built up and organized, and all-told, it represents over a month of hard work.

I'm still test-reading and editing the dub script. That went on the back burner for a while, but it's about ready to get first priority.

Generally, I'm pleased with the results of things. Also, Xanadu 2 is one gorgeous PCE game.  :)

Hoffman!

^ I tried typing "Goddamn!" and autocorrect fixed it.

HOFFMAN! That is great news. :)

Hoffman! That sounds like some kind of obscure British euphemism. I like it!

Got Chapter 5 done.

It's nice when I have enough free time to work on this for a good couple of days straight.  :D

Hurray!

The progress on this has been amazing, you guys rock!

Major milestone reached: The first pass of Xanadu 2 is done.

Both games are now essentially playable in English. It's all about polish from here out. That, and the dubbing project.

Elmer recently gave me the ADPCM stuff from Xanadu 2. Unlike the first game, Xanadu 2 only uses ADCPM for very short (~1 second) voice clips in and around boss fights. A lot of it is just "Yaa!" type noises. Sadly, these seem to be mushed together in a way that is going to be very inconvenient to deal with, so the dub project is going to need yet another week or two to kick off. At this point, I'm thinking late May or early June.

This is the right way to do it, though. By getting everything in line before we ask anyone to record, we are saving everyone time and trouble down the line. Anyway, don't worry, this is all coming right along.

:dance: :dance: :dance:

If you had told me one day that both Xanadus would be getting fan-translated simultaneously, I wouldn't have believed it. Still hard to believe and with the level of detailed updates, persistence, determination, etc. that we've seen here... Don't get burned out. ;)

Quote from: SamIAm on 05/04/2016, 06:06 AMMajor milestone reached: The first pass of Xanadu 2 is done.

Both games are now essentially playable in English. It's all about polish from here out. That, and the dubbing project.

Woohoo! Congratulations, Sam! :dance:

Now, perhaps, you'll actually let me play the game and see all your hard work!  :wink:

We've definitely come a long way:

...from...	...to...
(https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7169/26210186344_062abd1ac5_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/FW74fy)	(https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7716/26720963742_43fdce0fa6_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/GHeVzq)

Heh, "we're almost there" indeed.

You guys are doing great work and much more quickly than I was expecting.  You're animals!

Great news keep up the good work. 

I am really amazed at the attention to detail.  The update posts have also been really awesome so thanks for the updates.

Dreams do come true...

 :dance:

"Don't let your dreams be dreams... Yesterday, you said tomorrow. So just do it!!!!"

"Just do it!!! DDDDOOOOO IIIIITTTTT!!!"

(https://i.imgur.com/laQlZZO.gif)

Sorry, I just had to... DO IT!!!

This is so awesome!

Quote from: NightWolve on 05/04/2016, 04:03 PM"Don't let your dreams be dreams... Yesterday, you said tomorrow. So just do it!!!!"

http://youtu.be/lEYjZL7WWKc  :wink:

When you guys release the translation patches, we'll have the option to Not use the English dub, right?

edit:  I'm not trying to be rude here, I'll definitely play the English dubbed version as well.  I just want the option to pick either.

Wow.  I'm really impressed at the amount of time you guys put into this and that it's almost finished.  I've been kind of inactive on here lately due to my workload increasing, but I would love to be part of the dub if you have need.  Ideally, I'd like to have an excuse to buy the nice mic setup I've been eyeballing on Amazon, too. :D

Quote from: seieienbu on 05/04/2016, 06:24 PMWhen you guys release the translation patches, we'll have the option to Not use the English dub, right?

edit:  I'm not trying to be rude here, I'll definitely play the English dubbed version as well.  I just want the option to pick either.

I was actually going to ask the same question. I'm really looking forward to playing the game, thanks a lot for all your hard work.

Yes, the option will be available. :)

The ole' subbed vs dubbed debate is SO polarizing. So glad you will give folks the option. That way people can continue to grumble at each other and yet still win.

Quote from: SamIAm on 05/08/2016, 11:52 AMYes, the option will be available. :)

Great news. It's always nice to have the option to play a game undubbed. Thanks.

A little update.

I started my second pass of Xanadu 1, and I'm already through the first two chapters.

The first chapter, the prologue, was still very rough. When I did the first pass, this was the very first area that I ever tackled, and since I was just getting my bearings, I wasn't very diligent. In a sense, this second time was my first proper pass of it. I'll definitely want to give it another careful go-through before I say it's done.

The process is, you translate something in the text dump, you get it running in the game, and when you see a line you don't like, you change it...but then what? Do you move on to other lines? Or do you shut the game down, re-insert your latest script, and restart it to see if the updated line is actually better and displaying properly?

During my first pass of Xanadu 1's prologue, when I altered something that wasn't working well, I was usually reloading and checking only once or not at all. For big overhauls, I might have gone through two cycles. However, if you really want to do it right, you need to reload and test every alteration as many times as it takes until you see the line (and the lines around it) running in the game in a fully satisfactory way.

I did that a little more during my first pass of the second chapter, and it definitely made the second pass a lot easier. IIRC, I was doing things the proper way from the fourth chapter onward, so hopefully things will be smooth from there out. The third chapter, I'm expecting to still have problems.

--------------------

Thank goodness Xanadu 1 and 2 let you save and load anywhere. It would take an excruciating amount of time to test changes if it didn't. See, if you're doing a fan-translation of a cart game, chances are that the game engine calls text directly from the ROM each time, and that means that you can often get away with using savestates to test changes. Since CD games load blocks of text into a RAM cache, however, you can't really do that. PCE-CD games especially tend to load up huge chunks of game at once to keep loading times down, so you might have go through an entire dungeon again from the start just to test changes to a conversation with a boss.

If and when someone tries to do another translation of a PCE-CD RPG in the future, I expect this to be a big problem. I'd recommend three things to deal with it:

1. Do your initial translation of each line while watching it appear in a recorded playback of the original game so that you make the best judgement calls possible right from the beginning. Look on nicovideo for a playthrough, or record your own with Mednafen.

2. Convince whoever is doing the hacking that you need cheat codes. You'll want to be able to turn off random battles, and also to make yourself so strong that you can wipe out any boss immediately.

3. Record your test-playing. Being able to rewind and rewatch something a few times will help you catch all the things you'll want to tweak.

---------------------------

Anyway, once I finish the second pass of the third chapter of Xanadu 1, I'm going to hand the translation to elmer to look at. I hope he doesn't think it sucks!

My wife is due with our first baby in mid-June, so I really want this as done as possible before then.

Great news!  Thanks for the updates!

Update time.

My second pass of Xanadu 1 is complete up to the start of Chapter 4 (aka the fifth chapter).

While the first two chapters were still rough, I am pleased to be able to say that by this point during my first pass, I was definitely doing a better job. The result is that during this second pass, what I'm doing to the lines is less like reforging and more like polishing.

Still, I'm testing every line repeatedly until I am happy with it, so it takes a while.

Elmer is going through Xanadu 1 for the very first time now. Can you believe he was nice enough to commit hundreds of hours to hacking a game he had never even played? He's completed the first three chapters, and the verdict so far seems positive.

Work on the dub is continuing on an almost daily basis, by the way. When is the script going to be ready? I don't know. But there's really no rush, because we're not going to release the game until everything is done, and that's a ways off.

Little update.

All of the logo-business in the other thread took most of my focus for about a week. Once elmer got the dimension for that increased from 240x32 to 240x64, however, I could rest easy knowing it wasn't going to take a compromise to get something nice in there.

I'm finally back at my second pass of Chapter 4 of Xanadu 1, and it's coming along well. As I mentioned ages ago, this one might be the most complex in the game just in terms of the sheer number of locations and characters. Doing another pass has helped me tweak some things that will make the story easier to understand.

Also, I'm now almost done making my own test-dub, which I'm doing to polish the dub script. I try to put an hour or so toward this every day.

Quote from: SamIAm on 06/03/2016, 09:46 PMLittle update.

All of the logo-business in the other thread took most of my focus for about a week. Once elmer got the dimension for that increased from 240x32 to 240x64, however, I could rest easy knowing it wasn't going to take a compromise to get something nice in there.

I'm finally back at my second pass of Chapter 4 of Xanadu 1, and it's coming along well. As I mentioned ages ago, this one might be the most complex in the game just in terms of the sheer number of locations and characters. Doing another pass has helped me tweak some things that will make the story easier to understand.

Also, I'm now almost done making my own test-dub, which I'm doing to polish the dub script. I try to put an hour or so toward this every day.

You and everyone else are doing the lords work...tyvm

^ The Lord's Work. Thank you.

The Lord's Wok is how you make Holy Stir Fry.

Quote from: guest on 06/07/2016, 09:32 PMThe Lord's Wok is how you make Holy Stir Fry.

Indubitably.

:)

Chapter 4's second pass is done.

The next three chapters are the big fat ones. I'll probably need until the end of the month to get through them. The good news is, it's downhill after that; story-wise, the last third of Xanadu 1 is relatively short and fast-paced, and Xanadu 2 only has about 40% as much text as the first game.

My current prediction is that I'll finish the second pass of both games in August.

The work won't end there - aside from the dub madness, I'll probably want to have people test-play the games and give them a light third pass myself. However, after this second pass, I think I'll be able to say that I've done most of what I can for the scripts on my own. Hopefully, that will mean they're already pretty decent.

By August I will probably have beaten Xanadu 2 on my first go around, so I'd love to give both games a light passover once you've done your part. Count me in for helping out on that front if you'd like the help :)

Help!!!

SamIAm has a few important distractions right now, and I'm really, really enjoying playtesting his wonderful translation and want to get passed this blockage.

I'm stuck on Ch.5 (the one with the rock-slide, and the underground section where you dynamite your way through an underground section to get to a town).

I've got to the forest where I'm supposed to capture a Spirit's Tear (the small white sprite that's moving around), in order to take it back to the Head Nun in the Church.

I can't figure out how to trap the darned thing!!!

Can anyone give me a clue? Please?  [-o<

Quote from: elmer on 06/22/2016, 07:55 PMHelp!!!

SamIAm has a few important distractions right now, and I'm really, really enjoying playtesting his wonderful translation and want to get passed this blockage.

I'm stuck on Ch.5 (the one with the rock-slide, and the underground section where you dynamite your way through an underground section to get to a town).

I've got to the forest where I'm supposed to capture a Spirit's Tear (the small white sprite that's moving around), in order to take it back to the Head Nun in the Church.

I can't figure out how to trap the darned thing!!!

Can anyone give me a clue? Please?  [-o<

Let me test and I'll help ya out...

Quote from: Dicer on 06/22/2016, 09:07 PMLet me test and I'll help ya out...

Thanks!  :D

SamIAm popped up out of nowhere and gave me a clue, and I finally got the darned thing.

It was as simple as pressing the "action" button at the right time as the sprite passed through me.

I thought that I'd already tried that ... but apparently not.

I feel like a total idiot!  :oops:

<EDIT>

BTW ... this game is great!

SamIAm has done such a great job on the translation!

I' really loving all the detail that Falcom put into this game that SamIAm is conveying so well in his words as I'm playing it.  :D

Update time.

The second pass of Xanadu 1's Chapter 6 is done, and Chapter 7 (the biggest in either game) is about a third complete. Thankfully, the amount of polishing I have to do keeps going doing with each chapter, as it seems I kept doing things in a smarter and smarter way as I went on during the first pass.

I think you guys will be impressed with the sheer volume of story in Xanadu 1 in particular. Each chapter is practically a bite-size RPG all by itself.

My first child was born on the 18th. He's a cute little dude and I'm happy to give him all the attention he needs, but he does cut into my time to work on the project.

Also, my job's six weeks of peak business is coming in mid-July. Whether I can keep up the pace will depend on how much overtime I have to do and how mentally burnt out I get.

I still spend time on this project every day - at least an hour on work-days, and a lot more on my few days off. I also usually manage to make progress on both dub side and the in-game text side.

There's really no reason to rush the dub, so I'm not going to. Getting it done now won't make the project finish any faster, and taking it slow is probably going to result in better quality.


I hate to say it, because it's going to become another big "thing" to do, but we really ought to get a project page going for this.  #-o

Just don't burn yourself out. It's easy to do on these large projects.

Quote from: TurboXray on 07/03/2016, 12:55 AMJust don't burn yourself out. It's easy to do on these large projects.

Seriously.

These two have accomplished so much in a comparatively short period of time.

I still have novels I want to read on my "to do list" ...they have been there for over 20 years now...

:)

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/02/2016, 11:00 PMMy first child was born on the 18th. He's a cute little dude and I'm happy to give him all the attention he needs, but he does cut into my time to work on the project.

Woohoo, finally a chance for a public "congratulations", Sam!  =D>

QuoteThere's really no reason to rush the dub, so I'm not going to. Getting it done now won't make the project finish any faster, and taking it slow is probably going to result in better quality.

Ack ... I'd forgotten that I need to get those "insertion" scripts written for you to test stuff!  :oops:

QuoteI hate to say it, because it's going to become another big "thing" to do, but we really ought to get a project page going for this.  #-o

I've spent many years carefully cultivating a blissfull ignorance of web-page design techniques, so I'm afraid that I'm not going to be much help there.

Quote from: TurboXray on 07/03/2016, 12:55 AMJust don't burn yourself out. It's easy to do on these large projects.

Yep, SamIAm's been doing a lot of work on these for a long time.

Occasionally it's important to just kick back for a while and recharge ...

http://youtu.be/FSqVtmfDDFg

Congrats, SamIAm! I have one on the way. Take your time. We've waited this long. I think we'd rather have you happy and healthy, as that's a better guarantee this'll get done. You get burned out and all bets are off the table  ; )  Besides, you have a little OBEY to raise into the PCE family.

Quote from: TurboXray on 07/03/2016, 12:55 AMJust don't burn yourself out. It's easy to do on these large projects.

Ha ha...if that was going to happen, it would have happened already.  :wink:

I can't even believe it when I say it, but we are honestly and truly getting close to having two full size PCE RPGs completely translated at the same time.

I've wanted to do something like this for over a decade. There is nothing that is going to stop me from getting these games done now.  :twisted:

Quote from: elmer on 07/03/2016, 12:22 PMWoohoo, finally a chance for a public "congratulations", Sam!  =D>

Thanks!  :D

The little guy is beginning to figure out when he's only being held rather than actively being paid attention to, which means that when I park him in my lap while doing some play-test-editing, I have to give him running commentary.

QuoteAck ... I'd forgotten that I need to get those "insertion" scripts written for you to test stuff!  :oops:

*cracks whip*

...Nah, I won't actually need it too quickly. In terms of what you have left to do, there's the ADPCM insertion, the chapter-title graphics for Xanadu 2, the credits...anything else?

QuoteI've spent many years carefully cultivating a blissfull ignorance of web-page design techniques, so I'm afraid that I'm not going to be much help there.

Maybe we can just provide some text and graphics, and some brave champion will volunteer to pretty it up a little.

Actually, it really doesn't need to be much. For the dub auditions, we need a nice table that lays out the name/image/bio/voice-type/audition line/link to Japanese sample for each character, probably put into separate pages for male and female roles.

For the main page (note the singular), we mostly just need something that we can link to in our announcements, including the RHDN news bulletin. This would have a generous number of screenshots, links to a couple of teaser videos on youtube, and a full-bodied, nicely written introduction.

Bandwidth allowing, we could also host scans of advertisements and other things.

QuoteYep, SamIAm's been doing a lot of work on these for a long time.

Occasionally it's important to just kick back for a while and recharge ...

http://youtu.be/FSqVtmfDDFg

Ha ha ha...

My unofficial theme song while I work on these games is this (https://youtu.be/ParUJ9Ll7dk).

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/05/2016, 12:58 AMHa ha ha...

My unofficial theme song while I work on these games is this (https://youtu.be/ParUJ9Ll7dk).

Hahaha, listening to that immediately made me think of this ...

http://youtu.be/rdk2hOnuFhk

Gotta watch that again, soon.

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/05/2016, 12:58 AMMy unofficial theme song while I work on these games is this (https://youtu.be/ParUJ9Ll7dk).

Fine choice from a masterpiece, I really loved that game! That final battle was truly epic, just incredible, and it reminded me why I ever got into gaming in the first place! Glad I picked it out of my backlog and finished it off a few years ago.

Update time.

The second pass of Xanadu 1's beastly Chapter 7 is done. Chapter 8 is just shy of being halfway. The next two chapters are both happily on the skinny side, and they are also essentially the last ones since the final Chapter 11 barely has any text in it.

Sadly, the busy time at work is upon me. I have a week to prepare, and then it's going to be crazy until the end of August. My progress is going to slow down, and I might not be able to participate in some of the time-consuming discussions we've been having around here or keep in touch with elmer quite as frequently.

The good news is that I do have days off, including an entire week from August 11th to the 16th and the last three days of that month. Tomorrow is a day off as well, and if I can finish Chapter 8, I might be able to manage getting all the way through Xanadu 2 by the end of August as I originally hoped.

After that, I'll focus exclusively on the dub for a while. When we have that in the can, I'll do a (hopefully faster) third pass that will be include some testers...and that might be it.

When elmer and I were working on Zeroigar, I was able to approach editing in a truly perfectionist way. That game only takes about an hour to beat, and we went through it again and again over the course of a few months. It was easy to savor each line both on its own and as part of the whole, and tweak things over and over until we really felt like everything was as good as it could be. You could show me any line from that game, and I could tell you why I think it's in the best form possible.

These Xanadu games are just too big for that. Word-count wise, we're probably talking about over 100x as much text. We can polish out all typos, grammar errors, inconsistencies, and really flat-sounding lines. For the most part, this is already done. However, if we try to make it so that every single text-box is phrased in the absolute most ideal way possible, we'll never get this done.

It think this will be an exercise in leaving well-enough alone and hoping that anything that is less than awesome won't really detract from the overall experience anyway.

Whoo! This is so exciting. I forget if I've already commented in this thread before, but I'd like to volunteer for any help with audio/testing. I have a duo-r with an everdrive and also am a recording musician with a good vocal mic and outboard gear/effects and could help out in that capacity, if there's a need. Please feel free to ask me anything in here or via PM if you think I might be able to help!

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/09/2016, 10:52 PMThese Xanadu games are just too big for that. Word-count wise, we're probably talking about over 100x as much text. We can polish out all typos, grammar errors, inconsistencies, and really flat-sounding lines. For the most part, this is already done. However, if we try to make it so that every single text-box is phrased in the absolute most ideal way possible, we'll never get this done.

It think this will be an exercise in leaving well-enough alone and hoping that anything that is less than awesome won't really detract from the overall experience anyway.

Yeah as long as it reads pretty well and is devoid of any glaring grammatical errors, I'm completely and utterly happy with this! I still just can't even believe it's gotten as far as it has

Quote from: destructive cactus on 07/10/2016, 09:09 PMWhoo! This is so exciting. I forget if I've already commented in this thread before, but I'd like to volunteer for any help with audio/testing. I have a duo-r with an everdrive and also am a recording musician with a good vocal mic and outboard gear/effects and could help out in that capacity, if there's a need. Please feel free to ask me anything in here or via PM if you think I might be able to help!

Hi, and thanks for your interest!

Basically all of the mixing is going to be done digitally via Audacity, which is adequate for the job. However, one thing we're going to want to have that I'm not really familiar with is cool distortion effects for some of the boss voices. If you happen to be familiar with how to do this, whatever the method, I'd love to chat.

Anyway, with a good microphone, you and/or any of your friends would be in a good position to play one of the roles in the dub. One of these days, I'll get around to casting, and I hope you'll be up for trying out!

-----------------------------

In other news, I finished Chapter 8 and actually got a lot of Chapter 9 done already. My money is on having the second pass of Xanadu 1 complete by the end of the month, and that's a very nice place to be.

Quote from: guest on 07/11/2016, 01:41 AMYeah as long as it reads pretty well and is devoid of any glaring grammatical errors, I'm completely and utterly happy with this! I still just can't even believe it's gotten as far as it has

I think people will be happy with the quality. Each time I do a pass, I reload every conversation repeatedly until I test every change and otherwise see the whole thing working well enough that I'm not hit with any ideas about how to improve it. Even in this second round, it's completely normal to reload a conversation more than 10 times before it's done.

It's just that I know that if I did a fourth or fifth pass, I'd probably bump into things I'd want to change. Sometimes it's a matter of not being able to notice one problem because it's surrounded by the noise of other problems. Other times, it's a matter of having gone with an idea that's only "good enough" because I just couldn't think of anything better, but upon coming back to it weeks or months later, I can go at it with a fresh mind and come up something that's actually "good".

Hopefully, by now, there's not much of either kind of issue left, and whatever is there can be zapped in a quick third pass.

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/12/2016, 11:32 PMcool distortion effects for some of the boss voices

Yeah, I think I could help here - would be glad to talk it over and/or try some things! All the 90s vocal 'tricks' are pretty easy and fun to do nowadays.

Chapter 9 is done!

I think I'll have the second pass of Xanadu 1 complete within the next four days.

Xanadu 2 should be relatively smooth sailing the second time around. It's a smaller and simpler game to begin with, and my editing was firing on all cylinders by the time I got to it for its first pass. I'm definitely gunning to have it done by the end of August.

I can't wait to find out which game elmer likes more. :)

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/16/2016, 11:00 PMChapter 9 is done!

And Chapter 9 is played through! Dang, I'm enjoying this game.  :dance:

Falcom really went overboard with all the different things that people say.

Since the lines are in the separate scripts that correspond to each different location, and you visit each location multiple times as the story progresses ...  it must have driven SamIAm absolutely mad trying to figure out which line was said exactly when in the overall progression of things in order to give just the right nuance to each line.  #-o

I'm glad that only have to deal with the coding.

But now I'm stuck waiting for Chapter 10 ... and I really want to know what happens next!!!  :-({|=

After a marathon-couple of days, the second play-test pass of Xanadu 1 is done.  :dance:

I'm going to wait until maybe Friday before starting Xanadu 2 just to clear my head a little bit.

In the meantime, I hope elmer enjoys finally being able to finish one of the games.  :D

Out of curiosity, who here has completed the dungeon at the end of Xanadu 1 before? If you have, you should give elmer some encouragement now. :D

I don't want to spoil too much for people who aren't familiar with it, but that last dungeon is dumbfoundingly huge and complex. It's a tower with 30 (31?) floors, and each one is practically as much of an ordeal as any single dungeon in any previous chapter. You could split the whole thing off as a separate game, and it would stand.

The good thing is, you can go back to a checkpoint after each floor, and the middle ten are actually the easiest, so it's not that hard to work at. It just takes a little perseverance, that's all.

You can doo eeet!  :mrgreen:

If my dumb ass could make it through with zero moon rune skillz, you should cruise right through soon enough.

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/20/2016, 04:32 AMI don't want to spoil too much for people who aren't familiar with it, but that last dungeon is dumbfoundingly huge and complex. It's a tower with 30 (31?) floors, and each one is practically as much of an ordeal as any single dungeon in any previous chapter. You could split the whole thing off as a separate game, and it would stand.

It's not SO bad since they've given you a map if you buy the CD ... but OMFG ... I'm only on level 4/5 and they're making me go up one or two levels and then drop back down through holes in the floor just to get to different parts of earlier floors to unlock things!!!!  ](*,)

I've scanned the map to make it large enough to read, but I'm probably going to have to print it out so that I can mark stuff on it like where the holes go, and where the waterfall warp points go, just so that I can see which bits of each level I've actually explored.

This really does look large enough to be a separate game itself.

It ain't easy and it's definitely daunting to say the least. I felt so damn accomplished when I beat it. You can do it elmer!!! Just play for hours on end, don't take many breaks. The more you're at it, the better you'll get.

Quote from: guest on 07/20/2016, 10:11 AMIf my dumb ass could make it through with zero moon rune skillz, you should cruise right through soon enough.

Quote from: guest on 07/20/2016, 03:34 PMIt ain't easy and it's definitely daunting to say the least. I felt so damn accomplished when I beat it.

Thanks guys!

I have absolutely zero moon-rune skills ... but luckily, the final level doesn't seem to require them ... just major mapping skills.

If it wasn't for the printed map in the game CD package that I scanned, I would have given up by now!   ](*,)

As it is ... I can see (and mark) exactly where I've been on the scanned map, and see exactly what the "hidden" bits are that I've missed.

After a number of "marathon" sessions, I'm at the start of the 23rd floor, with all other floors completely finished (including all the "hidden" treasures that only a lunatic would normally find!).

I'd like to say that SamIAm's translation has been flawless on this level ... but there's really no speech at all except for on the bottom "basement" level, and it's hard to comment on things that hardly exist.  :wink:

I'm looking forward to getting to the top level(s) of the tower and seeing the final scenes of the game in their English glory!

I'm really missing all the story-telling from the previous levels.

Quote from: elmer on 07/30/2016, 10:15 PMI'm looking forward to getting to the top level(s) of the tower and seeing the final scenes of the game in their English glory!

I'm really missing all the story-telling from the previous levels.

Uh-oh. The stuff at the top is all done in voice-overs. You're going to have to wait until the dub is finished!

(Or I could PM you that section of the script)  :D

Quote from: SamIAm on 07/30/2016, 10:34 PMUh-oh. The stuff at the top is all done in voice-overs. You're going to have to wait until the dub is finished!

(Or I could PM you that section of the script)  :D

After many, many, many hours, I've finally finished it ... and with 23 Elixirs, so by the time that I got to the end of the 31st floor of the tower, all that I had to do was button-mash and wait for the bad guys to die.  :dance:

And the payoff is a darned cutscene with a Japanese voice-over that I can't understand!!!  ](*,) ](*,) ](*,)

We either need to get that dub done, or I've got to figure out how to implement subtitles ... or else people that play the game are going to be roaming the streets with firearms and a crazed-look in their eyes!  :shock:

But apart from that ... It's one heck of an epic game, and I'm glad to have had the chance to play it in English and understand what the gameplay and story is basically all about.  :D

Now I just want to see those cutscenes and see how they fill out the blanks in the story, and end it off.

But even with the missing bits, it's the most interesting story and characters that I've seen in a game for years.

Quote from: elmer on 08/02/2016, 03:19 AMAfter many, many, many hours, I've finally finished it ... and with 23 Elixirs, so by the time that I got to the end of the 31st floor of the tower, all that I had to do was button-mash and wait for the bad guys to die.  :dance:

And the payoff is a darned cutscene with a Japanese voice-over that I can't understand!!!  ](*,) ](*,) ](*,)

We either need to get that dub done, or I've got to figure out how to implement subtitles ... or else people that play the game are going to be roaming the streets with firearms and a crazed-look in their eyes!  :shock:

But apart from that ... It's one heck of an epic game, and I'm glad to have had the chance to play it in English and understand what the gameplay and story is basically all about.  :D

Now I just want to see those cutscenes and see how they fill out the blanks in the story, and end it off.

But even with the missing bits, it's the most interesting story and characters that I've seen in a game for years.

Congratulations! Completing Xanadu 1, final dungeon and all, truly puts a feather in the cap of any PCE player.

Also, 23 elixers? Holy crap. I think you only arrive at the last chapter with about 10 if you picked up every one along the way. Did you buy some of those, or did you find all of them?

Sorry about that last language barrier. We'll get it down soon enough.  :mrgreen:

I'm glad you liked the characters. I really don't want to spoil anything for people, but I think that the complete cast of characters in this game, both playable and non-playable, is probably its most charming feature.

Now it's on to Xanadu 2! Being able to talk to you (and eventually everyone else!) about the differences between the two games is one of the things I'm looking forward to most about completing this project. Again, I don't want to spoil anything, but I think you'll be surprised at just how deep the differences run. It makes complete sense that they were directed by different people.

-----------------------------

By the way, general news update time: I have finished the second pass of Xanadu 2 up to the start of Chapter 3, aka the fourth chapter.

Except for one five-day period that I have off, I'm going to continue to be busy as hell at work until the end of the month. I still think I can finish Xanadu 2 by that time, but making whatever progress I can on that is going to consume all of the free time I have.

Anyway, it's coming right along.

Subs sounds great.

It's easy to mishear what being said.

Subs would be nice...they're certainly easier for me, and the fact of the matter is, we're just not going to get top acting talent with top recording equipment for every part for a dub...but there just don't seem to be resources for a subtitle system.

Elmer and I once talked about setting up subs to work on a SuperGrafx/CD combo, because the extra video processor and RAM should make it much easier, but even then, it might turn out to be a total pain.

Chances are, the only way this is going to be fully experience-able in English on a Duo is with a dub.

Quote from: SamIAm on 08/02/2016, 11:33 AMChances are, the only way this is going to be fully experience-able in English on a Duo is with a dub.

Yeah, that's pretty much the most feasible way given the technical issues. 1:1 byte replacement of audio streams is easiest if you can get it all recorded. But then recruitment/management of voice actors is the grunt work that presents another type of obstacle/challenge.

I was tapped to be the narrator on a short documentary about pulp magazines recently. Eventually it will make it to YouTube, and I'll share so you can decide if I have a voice for video games (but maybe not a face for radio?)

Quote from: SamIAm on 08/02/2016, 09:43 AMAlso, 23 elixers? Holy crap. I think you only arrive at the last chapter with about 10 if you picked up every one along the way. Did you buy some of those, or did you find all of them?

I think that I found 1 or 2, but the rest were purchases.

I was frugal throughout the game and still had lots of Wings and all-but-one Elixir.

So all my money went into buying more Elixirs when I had some ... I didn't need to buy anything else in the last level.

Because I was trying to visit every single treasure-chest, I ended up doing a lot more back-and-forth than an experienced player-wth-a-map might have done.

Don't tell anyone ... but I *might* admit to doing a bit of grinding on the 23rd floor since it had a couple of spots that were perfect for that (if you have the Bell).  :wink:

Quote from: SamIAm on 08/02/2016, 11:33 AMSubs would be nice...they're certainly easier for me, and the fact of the matter is, we're just not going to get top acting talent with top recording equipment for every part for a dub...but there just don't seem to be resources for a subtitle system.

Elmer and I once talked about setting up subs to work on a SuperGrafx/CD combo, because the extra video processor and RAM should make it much easier, but even then, it might turn out to be a total pain.

Quote from: NightWolve on 08/02/2016, 12:05 PMYeah, that's pretty much the most feasible way given the technical issues. 1:1 byte replacement of audio streams is easiest if you can get it all recorded. But then recruitment/management of voice actors is the grunt work that presents another type of obstacle/challenge.

While *technically* I'd like to see if it's possible to get SuperGrafx subtitles working ... it would be one heck of a lot of work to try it, and it might not work anyway.

The dub is by-far the safest solution.

I guess that most people already know this, but some guy has been uploading a ton of Falcom's music CDs onto YouTube under Falcom's "fair use" policy.  :)

It was fun to compare the game's final version of the Xanadu 1 theme ...

The Legend of Xanadu OST - Legend of the Wind
http://youtu.be/9433h1EeqcQ

With what was probably the composer's original PC-98 version before it got recorded by the full live band ...

The Legend of Xanadu J.D.K. Special - Legend of the Wind
http://youtu.be/25g2QSjhjWg

And then the crazy "extended" rock version ...

The Legend of Xanadu Super Arrange Version - Legend of the Wind
http://youtu.be/8liNmr2E_Nc

Quote from: SamIAm on 08/02/2016, 11:33 AMSubs would be nice...they're certainly easier for me, and the fact of the matter is, we're just not going to get top acting talent with top recording equipment for every part for a dub...but there just don't seem to be resources for a subtitle system.

Elmer and I once talked about setting up subs to work on a SuperGrafx/CD combo, because the extra video processor and RAM should make it much easier, but even then, it might turn out to be a total pain.

Chances are, the only way this is going to be fully experience-able in English on a Duo is with a dub.

Maybe you should ask all applicants to say " 1 2 3" . Would be an easy quick test

Quote from: elmer on 08/11/2016, 11:15 AMI guess that most people already know this, but some guy has been uploading a ton of Falcom's music CDs onto YouTube under Falcom's "fair use" policy.  :)

Yeah, that's Josep ( https://twitter.com/jdkluv ), I uploaded audio rips from my Ys IV CD to help him some months back. He's been a Falcom fanboy machine, on track to damn near uploading everything Falcom ever made on there... Somehow I don't think "fair use" technically covers full rips of CDs, but whatevers, you say legal, others say illegal, much like the raging tomato versus tamoto debate, who's to say who's wrong or right these days, ya know ?  :lol:

A voiced translation would be great, but I'm sure it'd also be hard to make happen, particularly for two games at the same time.  The absolute minimum would be to have a text file script saying what they're saying in all the cutscenes, so at least you can follow along with what's going on in that part.  It'd spoil the game of course, but that's better than not knowing what's being said at all...

On a related note, is there any such file for Xak III?  It'd be nice to know what they're saying in the cutscenes in that game...

Quote from: NightWolve on 08/11/2016, 06:41 PMSomehow I don't think "fair use" technically covers full rips of CDs...

Falcom is a bit different than other companies, as they specifically allow their music to be freely used in all sorts of usually protected ways.  About the only thing they don't allow is its use in other games or to charge money for it.

Quote from: guest on 08/12/2016, 10:31 AM

Quote from: NightWolve on 08/11/2016, 06:41 PMSomehow I don't think "fair use" technically covers full rips of CDs...

Falcom is a bit different than other companies, as they specifically allow their music to be freely used in all sorts of usually protected ways.  About the only thing they don't allow is its use in other games or to charge money for it.

That would be interesting if they really do allow full rips to be shared everywhere but then I could swear they joined some iTunes thingy (or itself) to sell tracks at .99 cents a pop some time back.

Small update:

After a month of hell at work, I had a full week off, which I used mostly to relax and play around with my new baby. Now I've got another 10 days of rough seas to get through, including a literal trip on an overnight ferry (long story). After that, things will settle down again.

I did manage to get through Chapter 3 and make a dent in Chapter 4 of Xanadu 2. Once that's finished, the rest will be a breeze.

Elmer is going to busy until the end of the month anyway, so I'm not in a rush.

i didnt know a translation was into work. #-o
it just made my day.  8)

Update:

I'm basically back now. My job's crazy-busy period has passed.

The second play-test-edit of Xanadu 2 is done, and the translation is waiting for elmer to give it a go. This project is truly at a very advanced stage, and is approaching completion.

From here on, I'm going to be focusing exclusively on the dub stuff until it's done. When I left off before, I had recorded myself reading every line, but hadn't mixed anything yet. Happily, the Audacity project files I had set up before made dropping in the recordings super-easy, which is what I did today. Now I just have to listen to everything and tweak the script until I'm really ready to call it final and get auditions rolling.

That is an awesome update!  You guys rock!

Why even involve other people in the dub? You already voiced all the characters; that sounds authentically Turbo/TTI to me!

Xanadu 2: SamIAm Edition

Quote from: SamIAm on 09/13/2016, 06:47 AMUpdate:

I'm basically back now. My job's crazy-busy period has passed.

The second play-test-edit of Xanadu 2 is done, and the translation is waiting for elmer to give it a go. This project is truly at a very advanced stage, and is approaching completion.

From here on, I'm going to be focusing exclusively on the dub stuff until it's done. When I left off before, I had recorded myself reading every line, but hadn't mixed anything yet. Happily, the Audacity project files I had set up before made dropping in the recordings super-easy, which is what I did today. Now I just have to listen to everything and tweak the script until I'm really ready to call it final and get auditions rolling.

I hope you do any female voices in a falsetto!  You should leave those in the final product!

Today I got things set up to easily export the audio and play it in-game with Mednafen.

Even with headphones on, I am frequently looking around to make no one else is listening to how much I suck.

The good news is, this test-dub phase is paying off. I'm quickly noticing little problems that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

If I were doing all of this from square-one again, I think it might be best to prepare all of the audio-project files and the whole testing system before doing any translation, and speak-test every line while writing the first draft. It would take more time to write it, for sure, but it would be a much better first draft.

Quote from: EmperorIng on 09/13/2016, 10:59 AMWhy even involve other people in the dub? You already voiced all the characters; that sounds authentically Turbo/TTI to me!

Xanadu 2: SamIAm Edition

The South Park guys use sound software to voice everything themselves, no ? We live in a time where it could be voiced competently enough by one or two dudes, but I'm guessing said software is expensive.

We're almost there with the dub scripts.

In Xanadu 1, a lot of the lip-movement in cutscenes isn't really synchronized at all. It's animated with a constant-interval cycle that has no relation to what the characters are actually saying, and continues even if they're momentarily saying nothing. In a situation like that, I think it's best not to try too hard to have the English dub match the lip movements, so I'm not going to worry about it.

However, in Xanadu 2, they made a lot more effort in this area. It's not perfectly matched, but at least the characters' mouths stop moving if they pause between sentences. Making it so that there will be no English-speaking during these pauses is the last major round of tweaking I have to do, and I've about finished it.

How many characters are there?

And sticking with American tradition in the movies are you making the baddie English ;)

Quote from: Vimtoman on 09/23/2016, 03:27 PMHow many characters are there?

There are about 50, but only 20 or so of them have more than just one or two lines.

QuoteAnd sticking with American tradition in the movies are you making the baddie English ;)

I think antagonizing the British might not sit well with the other half of the translation team. ;)

But it doesn't really matter, because I don't think the bad-guys really call for unique accents.

Probably just due to availability of actors, I think American English will wind up being the "base" for the dub, but I have no objection to mixing in other accents as long as they're not too extreme. Whether a person can act is much more important than what their accent is.

QuoteAnd sticking with American tradition in the movies are you making the baddie English ;)

I think antagonizing the British might not sit well with the other half of the translation team. ;)

But it doesn't really matter, because I don't think the bad-guys really call for unique accents.

Probably just due to availability of actors, I think American English will wind up being the "base" for the dub, but I have no objection to mixing in other accents as long as they're not too extreme. Whether a person can act is much more important than what their accent is.[/quote]
I'm british & do a lot of radio, so wouldn't mind giving the bad guy part a shot (if it not already taken) as we british do make a good bad guys.

Quote from: Nighttrate on 09/24/2016, 04:53 PMI'm british & do a lot of radio, so wouldn't mind giving the bad guy part a shot (if it not already taken) as we british do make a good bad guys.

Yes, we do!  :wink:

Lol.  :wink:

Nighttrate, I'd love to have you. Please check back soon, because I really am going to post a list of roles and open up auditions soon.

After sitting and waiting for five years, am I going to have to re-audition for Nuse? I hope not... 8-[

Quote from: SamIAm on 09/24/2016, 09:12 PMLol.  :wink:

Nighttrate, I'd love to have you. Please check back soon, because I really am going to post a list of roles and open up auditions soon.

will do mate

I'm British but I think it's got to be a well spoken for the baddie :) I'm from north London so the accent wont do..

Quote from: Vimtoman on 09/26/2016, 04:26 AMI'm British but I think it's got to be a well spoken for the baddie :)

Haha ... good point!  :lol:

For some reason, the bad guy always has the classic public-school/Oxford/BBC accent.  :-k

I can do "supercilious" really well, but I'm a lousy actor (I always preferred to work back-of-house or lighting).

While Xanadu 2 seems like it might be a bit more homogeneous (to me), Xanadu 1 covers a really wide geographical area, and a huge cast, where a North London accent might not seem out-of-place ... if you're interested in auditioning when SamIAm opens up the casting-call.  :wink:

Only fools and horse's :) just dont think that fits somehow.
God I would be redoing the voice over too many times.

Looking forward to seeing this finished.

I will have two SNES2PCE V2 adaptors ready as a thank you for your hard work.

Will PM you two .

How goes preparation for the dub, Sam? Are we getting close to auditions? :)

It's definitely coming. Hours are being put in on a daily basis. :D

I now have a working insertion tool that quickly and easily gets all of the ADPCM clips into Xanadu 1, and was just able to listen to my test-dub running in the game via Mednafen.

The audio quality is distinctly better than the original!

Thanks to the high quality background music provided by the official soundtrack, and thanks to elmer and SOX, our converted tracks are squeaky-clean.

Whatever tool Falcom was using in 1993 was simply not up to this standard.

I've got web pages for casting and recording made up. I just need to make all final adjustments to the script, and tweak the mixing here and there.

Quote from: SamIAm on 10/28/2016, 01:11 AMThe audio quality is distinctly better than the original!

Thanks to the high quality background music provided by the official soundtrack, and thanks to elmer and SOX, our converted tracks are squeaky-clean.

Whatever tool Falcom was using in 1993 was simply not up to this standard.

That's great to hear (pun intended)!  :wink:

I can't imagine that my ADPCM conversion is really doing anything that's noticeably better than Hudson's, even though I handle clipping and rounding a little bit differently to the official OKI algorithm for the chip.  :-k

Falcom's original audio didn't even come close to maxing-out the signal level, which probably hurt the amount of noise that you hear in the originals. So, if your new audio is set to a similar low volume level, then my changes to the clipping would never be activated.

I suspect that the real winner here is using SOX for the conversion from 44100Hz to 16044Hz.

The technology for doing that cleanly, with all of the necessary pre-filtering, has improved by leaps-and-bounds since the 1990s.

You just can't use SOX for the conversion from uncompressed-WAV to ADPCM for the PCE/PC-FX, because their algorithm is broken.

I signed up just so I could keep an eye on this project

I love falcom, and this looks really wonderful, I'm really grateful this project exists and excited to play it when it's finished

Quote from: varikares on 11/01/2016, 10:46 AMI signed up just so I could keep an eye on this project

I love falcom, and this looks really wonderful, I'm really grateful this project exists and excited to play it when it's finished

Welcome!

I'm curious ... where did you hear about the translation?

So exciting to read about all the progress being made!

My parents are here to spend time with their first baby grandson, so things have been busy. Four more days to go...


This morning, I finally got around to burning a CD and trying the ADPCM cutscenes on real hardware.

Everything works really well! Again, the quality is much better than the original game's.


Welcome, varikares! Thanks to you (and everyone) for the kind words.  :D

Maybe I missed it, but where do I sign up to try out for the voice acting?  I might actually have time (for a change) to do this, if there's any roles that I would work well with.

Hey all,

Heard about this Project from someone while talking about my love of Falcom, just signed up to check out this project and say thanks in advance for the hard work you guys put in!

Quote from: SamIAm on 11/01/2016, 11:53 PMMy parents are here to spend time with their first baby grandson, so things have been busy. Four more days to go...

Be strong, Sam, you can get through it!  :lol:

I suspect that when you recover from the disruption and stress, you'll look back on this visit with great fondness in future years.  :)

Quote from: ParanoiaDragon on 11/02/2016, 12:56 AMMaybe I missed it, but where do I sign up to try out for the voice acting?  I might actually have time (for a change) to do this, if there's any roles that I would work well with.

See above ...SamIAm is a little preoccupied at the moment.  :wink:

The official casting-call and sign-up hasn't been started, yet.

Quote from: varikares on 11/01/2016, 10:46 AMI signed up just so I could keep an eye on this project

Quote from: Totallydrew on 11/02/2016, 03:25 PMHeard about this Project from someone while talking about my love of Falcom, just signed up to check out this project and say thanks in advance for the hard work you guys put in!

Wow, 2 new people in 2 days ... was someone talking about the project in a bar at the Portland Retro Gaming Convention?  :-k

Welcome!

Quote from: elmer on 11/01/2016, 07:27 PMI'm curious ... where did you hear about the translation?

I saw a thread about it on romhacking.net while I was looking around for Falcom games to play

Quote from: ParanoiaDragon on 11/02/2016, 12:56 AMMaybe I missed it, but where do I sign up to try out for the voice acting?  I might actually have time (for a change) to do this, if there's any roles that I would work well with.

As elmer said, I am a little busy at the moment.  :mrgreen:

With 58 parts and well over an hour of solid talking, I really need to get every single duck in line before I open the doors for people to audition and start recording. I'm expecting nothing less than a tornado of takes and emails for a good month or so.

Quote from: elmer on 11/02/2016, 08:38 PMBe strong, Sam, you can get through it!  :lol:

I suspect that when you recover from the disruption and stress, you'll look back on this visit with great fondness in future years.  :)

The day I look back on most fondly from my father's last visit is the day he left.  :roll:

Maybe it just needs a few more years.  :)

Ok, cool.  My schedule is starting to loosen up a bit, so I figured it would be a good time to audition, keep up the good work, ridiculously looking forward to this! :D

We've been quiet for a while now, so I thought that I'd let folks know that we're working on polishing up the script for the dub and trying to iron out any inconsistencies between the two games before SamIAm opens up the audition process.

As you can imagine ... it may prove difficult/impossible to ask people to do lots of changes/retakes after we've got their recordings, so it's super-important to try to massage things as-much-as-possible now.

The whole process has been a bit delayed because of my strange fascination with actually playing with the HuC codebase rather than getting on with the things that I'm supposed to be doing.  :oops:

But we're still moving forward!  :wink:

take all the time you need, better to get it perfect the first time around

I'm really looking forward to playing it when it comes out :)

 :)  always happy to see an update , I check this thread almost every day  :lol:

Quote from: poponon on 12/13/2016, 08:00 AM:)  always happy to see an update , I check this thread almost every day  :lol:

Really? Shoot, I better update it more.

Recently, I've been a bit preoccupied with being barfed on by a tiny human. Lucky for him, he's also the cutest baby in the world.  :wink:

Elmer and I exchange PMs about the project basically every day. As we've both said, this dub-thing is going to be like a rocket launch. We have to be confident that everything is as finished as-can-be, fully in place, and that all other conditions look good.

The plus side is, once we do hit the big red button, it will be over quickly. Relatively speaking, anyway.

Quote from: SamIAm on 12/14/2016, 05:43 AMRecently, I've been a bit preoccupied with being barfed on by a tiny human. Lucky for him, he's also the cutest baby in the world.  :wink:

This may call for a baby picture showdown, because I am pretty sure my baby human is the CUTEST EVAR!!!!1111!11one

Quote from: guest on 12/14/2016, 08:47 AM

Quote from: SamIAm on 12/14/2016, 05:43 AMRecently, I've been a bit preoccupied with being barfed on by a tiny human. Lucky for him, he's also the cutest baby in the world.  :wink:

This may call for a baby picture showdown, because I am pretty sure my baby human is the CUTEST EVAR!!!!1111!11one

Sounds like baby pic showdown thread needs to start!

Quote from: SamIAm on 10/28/2016, 01:11 AMI now have a working insertion tool that quickly and easily gets all of the ADPCM clips into Xanadu 1, and was just able to listen to my test-dub running in the game via Mednafen.

The audio quality is distinctly better than the original!

Thanks to the high quality background music provided by the official soundtrack, and thanks to elmer and SOX, our converted tracks are squeaky-clean.

Whatever tool Falcom was using in 1993 was simply not up to this standard.

I've got web pages for casting and recording made up. I just need to make all final adjustments to the script, and tweak the mixing here and there.

Cool, I'll have to get a copy of that from you guys some time to re-encode the Ys IV dubs from their source waves if elmer has finalized it all. :)

Quote from: NightWolve on 12/19/2016, 02:48 AMCool, I'll have to get a copy of that from you guys some time to re-encode the Ys IV dubs from their source waves if elmer has finalized it all. :)

I can send you the latest binary anytime ... but I'm going to need to strip out a lot of old cr*p from the source in order to release it as open-source on github, and that may take a while (it's not high on my list of priorities).

Hey, how are things going with preparing the dub? Are we any closer to recording? :)

I heard that Sam will be voicing all the characters including the female ones.

Quote from: Arjak on 01/22/2017, 02:33 PMHey, how are things going with preparing the dub? Are we any closer to recording? :)

We're definitely closer!  :wink:

I'll leave it for SamIAm to say how close we are ... I'm just amazed at the sheer amount of detail we've gone through in polishing up the scripts, and then in SamIAm making sure that the in-game text matches with the cutscenes.

What do you think Sam, I just counted nearly 60 versions of cutscene and intro files, and that doesn't include stuff that's been in emails!

I'm actually quite shocked at how much work SamIAm must have put into those files in the first place, before we even started this round of editing.

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to hearing more as it progresses.

Quote from: elmer on 01/22/2017, 08:36 PMWe're definitely closer!  :wink:

I'll leave it for SamIAm to say how close we are ... I'm just amazed at the sheer amount of detail we've gone through in polishing up the scripts, and then in SamIAm making sure that the in-game text matches with the cutscenes.

What do you think Sam, I just counted nearly 60 versions of cutscene and intro files, and that doesn't include stuff that's been in emails!

I'm actually quite shocked at how much work SamIAm must have put into those files in the first place, before we even started this round of editing.

It's been a long journey.

I've said this before, but a big motivator for me in this project is that it's a chance to try doing something as well as I can do it. I don't want to make big claims about how good the dub-scripts are now, but I can say with confidence that they are much better than they were a few months ago, and I'm really glad that we took the time to do go through this editing stage.

Things have slowed down in the last few months, yes, but they have never stopped. In spite of how few updates this thread has seen, elmer and I have been PMing each other literally every day, and often at length. Deciding how we really want to say things in these cutscenes has forced us to decide how we want to say things throughout the entirety of both games, and the game-world is so huge that there is an incredible amount of minutia to deal with.

Do you remember when we publicly discussed what the main title should be (The Legend of Xanadu vs: Legend of the Wind - Xanadu) and what Xanadu 2's subtitle should be (The Last of Dragon Slayer vs. a bunch of other options), and how that dragged on for longer than anyone expected? It's been that x100.

The good news is, I think we're done. Elmer and I have both "signed-off" on the most recent versions of the scripts, and all we're doing now is tying up loose ends before we start inviting auditions. If things go well, we'll have a big roll-out within a week or so, so stay tuned if you're interested in participating.

Thanks to everyone for following along. It's always encouraging to see people talking about the project, even when they're just asking how it's going. We'll keep you posted. :D

Woot!  The end is in sight.  =D&gt;

I think I say this everytime I post here but it is really exciting to see this project coming so close to completion after so many years of progress. Congratulations guys!

After completing this mammoth project i wanna know how do you guys feel? Are you like can't wait for the next mammoth translation project to sink all of my free time for free or are you more like never the f**k again!

You goof, when this is done they're going to Disney World! That's still a thing, right?

Quote from: guest on 02/02/2017, 08:13 PMYou goof, when this is done they're going to Disney World! That's still a thing, right?

I live in SoCal, so it's "Land", not "World".  :wink:


http://youtu.be/daa9pZDxfIY

We've been spending a lot of days going over the formatting of the scripts to make them consistent, easy to read, and fully informative.

With generous spacing between character lines, lots of notes for actors, and thorough numbering and timing information, the combined length of both scripts is 148 pages. The total word count is over 22,000, although probably close to half of that is not actual dialogue itself. Regardless, it's on-par with a medium-sized movie script.  :mrgreen:

Just to let you guys know ...

Tobias will be including fake developer-signed copies of the Director's Edition of these milestone scripts in the forthcoming PCE Works special "Falcom Collector's Edition Box Set" of the Legend of Xanadu translations that he'll start duplicating as soon as we'd made his life easy by finishing it off and releasing it for free to everyone.  ](*,)

With a bag of Limited Edition Corn Nuts Roda Tree Nuts!

Marooga nuts are better.

Quote from: guest on 02/08/2017, 10:02 AMWith a bag of Limited Edition Corn Nuts Roda Tree Nuts!

If people can't talk to trees after eating those, I'd demand a refund. :lol:

This is a good joke.

Quote from: elmer on 02/08/2017, 12:52 AMJust to let you guys know ...

Tobias will be including fake developer-signed copies of the Director's Edition of these milestone scripts in the forthcoming PCE Works special "Falcom Collector's Edition Box Set" of the Legend of Xanadu translations that he'll start duplicating as soon as we'd made his life easy by finishing it off and releasing it for free to everyone.  ](*,)

Insert one line  in title "work in translate game is xxxx and xxxx, Pce works and tobias only takes advantage of our work to earn money"
Publicity in all arround, tobias sell copy not copyright konami tittles, sending information konami.
Tobias has done very good things, force gear.
A few days ago a seller in Spain bought a shappire tobias by 1000e, I advise the seller that he sold a copy, but he did not care, and sell.
Is the problem and the danger of tobias games, that at least in Spain, almost nobody has a fucking idea of the system, is more, they are very ignorant of everything that is Japanese.
If the same that translate these two games will get physics in a nice edition, I would be happy to pay what they asked me for their work and for the physical edition. But if you do not it is normal that another, take advantage of your work.

Quote from: geise on 02/08/2017, 11:16 AMMarooga nuts are better.

Not a bad idea actually, I hear there was a good harvest this season!

Wow, where did the last month go!  :shock:

Time for a quick update ...

SamIAm and I are pretty-much-ready to get started on the dub ... we're just waiting for the web pages to be finished.

Hopefully soon!

Very awesome to hear, thank you guys again for your hardwork!

Quote from: elmer on 03/12/2017, 05:50 PMWow, where did the last month go!  :shock:

Time for a quick update ...

SamIAm and I are pretty-much-ready to get started on the dub ... we're just waiting for the web pages to be finished.

Hopefully soon!

this excites me beyond words

I'm looking forward to submitting my audition.

Falcom going on a nostalgia trip reminding their Twitter followers of Xanadu. They call this "Nostalgia Illustration #23." :)

http://twitter.com/nihonfalcom/status/846260726649929728

(?action=dlattach&topic=19968&attach=7172&image)

Quote from: NightWolve on 03/27/2017, 01:07 PMFalcom going on a nostalgia trip reminding their Twitter followers of Xanadu. They call this "Nostalgia Illustration #23." :)

So beautiful! Thanks for finding that.  :D  :dance:

Quote from: pnauts on 03/27/2017, 01:24 AMDo you consider releasing as it and giving just some translation sheets for the dubbing part ?

Nope.

AFAIK we're still planning on releasing an undubbed-version with scripts for those crazy folks that hate the idea of a dub, but the point is to do this as faithfully as possible, and that means telling the story with voice-acting, just as it would have been done if the game got a real US release.

We definitely don't want to release a half-completed translation just because some people are impatient. Too much time and work has gone into this for that.

It shouldn't be too long ... the web-pages made great progress this weekend.  :D

This is so exciting! Great work so far.

Again, feel free to hit me up for audio stuff if it ends up being needed (I know I'm not active in the forums but I'd be glad to submit an example mix or something)! Aside from that, I look forward to auditioning for the dub.

I have zero interest in a dub, however I'm not so dumb as to not know how to leave the OG tracks in. :)

Quote from: SignOfZeta on 03/27/2017, 04:34 PMI have zero interest in a dub, however I'm not so dumb as to not know how to leave the OG tracks in. :)

That's not going to work for all the ADPCM stuff.

Quote from: elmer on 03/27/2017, 01:34 PMWe definitely don't want to release a half-completed translation just because some people are impatient. Too much time and work has gone into this for that.

It shouldn't be too long ... the web-pages made great progress this weekend.  :D

it's not about impatience, just personally I prefer the Japanese acting when it's related to voices.
the top would be to release a dubbed and no dubbed version as you mentioned it.

Quote from: guest on 03/27/2017, 05:05 PMThat's not going to work for all the ADPCM stuff.

Yep, most of the cutscenes in LoX1 are ADPCM.

Quote from: pnauts on 03/27/2017, 06:17 PMit's not about impatience, just personally I prefer the Japanese acting when it's related to voices.
the top would be to release a dubbed and no dubbed version as you mentioned it.

Sure, we know some people feel that way, even though it's going to really suck to watch a cutscene in Japanese, and then break-concentration to read the English script in order to understand what was said.

If we could possibly have implemented subtitles, then we'd have done that for the folks that don't want to hear English voices ... but it's just not technically possible for us.

For the (hopefully few) folks that are just going to impatiently sit through the Japanese cutscenes and NOT read the English script ... well ... ... ... that's just plain sad.

Can I just say again I'm super excited for this!  I know I haven't been able to get on the board much in the last few months but hopefully auditions for the dub haven't happened yet.

I get excited every time I see the Xanadu threads with new posts.  Eagerly looking forward to auditioning for the dub.  I asked my girlfriend and she seems interested in trying out as well.

Thanks for staying with us through the delays. Elmer and I still PM each other about this almost every day and try to make progress wherever we can.

Mum's the word, but the actor-recruitment website is finally ready to go, and we've set a tentative launch date for April 7th.  :twisted:

Here's to hoping you guys don't end up with Rina-chan voicing nearly every female voice in her "exactly the same for 10+ years" anime voice!  [-o<

Quote from: SamIAm on 03/29/2017, 05:49 AMThanks for staying with us through the delays. Elmer and I still PM each other about this almost every day and try to make progress wherever we can.

Mum's the word, but the actor-recruitment website is finally ready to go, and we've set a tentative launch date for April 7th.  :twisted:

I'm happy that these threads have been updated as frequently as they have been.  I'm sure it helps keep interest and discussions like what specifically to name the game or what font to use have been entertaining to read. 

...that being said, nothing has been as exciting about this as a new aspect of the project finally rearing it's ugly head.  I'm definitely looking forward to seeing that webpage.

Quote from: pnauts on 03/27/2017, 06:17 PM

Quote from: elmer on 03/27/2017, 01:34 PMWe definitely don't want to release a half-completed translation just because some people are impatient. Too much time and work has gone into this for that.

It shouldn't be too long ... the web-pages made great progress this weekend.  :D

it's not about impatience, just personally I prefer the Japanese acting when it's related to voices.
the top would be to release a dubbed and no dubbed version as you mentioned it.

Yeah of course there is no way hobby voice-actors will be able to compare to the professional voice-actors of the original. Japan has a very nice climate for professional voice-acting (I think they are alone in the world to have dedicated voice-acting schools), unlike most other countries that would use normal theatre or movie actors to do the voices. And they are almost never able to compare with the original voice-actors (Snatcher for Mega CD is a notable exception).