Sakura Wars 3 English Translation Project

[The Opponent]

My current task is to determine how name labels in the team status screen are placed. The texture has all of the names aligned to the left, 8 pixels from the edge. Replacing names directly causes the names to be misaligned.

Disregard the slightly malformed strings in these screenshots—they're the original strings, but in our font sheet, the hiragana were replaced with accented letters for French words.

To find exactly where the sub-textures are placed within the badge graphic, I created a test case by drawing a 10 x 10 grid over the texture for name labels on this screen. From this, we see that the texture is is drawn starting 8 pixels from the left edge, and the label for Ogami is 52 pixels from the left edge of the badge texture. The label for Erica is 38 pixels from the left, and the label for Glycine is 23 pixels from the left. My guess is that these numbers are either in TAIN_DTS.CBD, where the compressed graphics for these labels are located, or EYECATCH.BIN, which has strings and other data for this screen.

[The Opponent]

While we were looking at editing graphics for the SRPG stages, I took it upon myself to search for the graphics that introduce enemy units and place names where the battlefields are set. They weren't in any of the files in the SLG directory, so I created more texture dumps and found that these fullscreen graphics were dumped as a series of 64 x 64 textures. Examining a RAM dump of this moment revealed that these textures can be found under the header ADCG. Ultimately, I sought advice on getting TapamN's Dreamcast Texture Studio working on my system and looked at CG_ALL1.DAT, which is composed of 788 PRS-compressed ADCG chunks. Very late in the file, I found the nameplates in sequence, starting at the ADCG region at 0x7a77808.

The ADCG header and offset table describe PVR textures of a single size and format. These subtextures are placed on-screen according to coordinates in the offset table. They typically start at the top-left corner of the region of the screen they will be placed at—usually (0,0) but lower if they are not fullscreen—and assembled vertically, starting from the top-left and moving to the right. The scripts I wrote to edit them will extract the PVR textures and individually convert them to PNG, then weave them into a complete image, and vice versa for the conversion to ADCG.

As the process of editing these graphics requires overwriting compressed data in CG_ALL1.DAT in place, this required hardware testing as well.

[wakabayashy]

hi there

thanks for all your hard work!

it's the best projet ever!

I have a question, is someone working on sakura wars 2?

good luck

[The Opponent]

A preview of translated map labels: https://twitter.com/TaishoRoman3/status ... 7612663809

Most of these labels were strings in the executable that could be edited fairly easily (consisting of writing a new string into SKFONT.CG and changing pointers and length values in 1ST_READ.BIN), but some of them were in script files. These had to be translated by redefining kanji tiles into English words, as the label graphic length was calculated by the number of characters in the script line that contained the label. The process is documented on the wiki: https://github.com/TheOpponent/st3-tran ... map-labels

[The Opponent]

I wrote the first Python programs to extract and inject principal script data for Sakura Wars 3 for the Taisho Romanization in March 2022, which were themselves based on Python programs by ZetpeR, who did preliminary examination of this and other games in the series in 2018. Over the last few days, I completed a rewrite of those programs based on better understanding of the script formats, and took the important step of documenting their use. I also included basic instructions on using Google Sheets for localization, based on my own professional experience. Though currently incomplete, by taking the initiative in documenting my project workflow, it is my hope that other fan translation teams will be encouraged to do the same.

[wakabayashy]

no one respond... thanks anyway

[Ro Magnus Larsson]

Good luck with this project, it seems you have a strong team for doing it

[panzer86]

How's the project going? When and where can we download your translated game?

[MD_Prometh]

This project is looking very promising.

Are there any plans to translate the DC versions of SW1 and 2? I tried playing the Saturn English fan translation of SW1, and one really annoying thing I noticed was that the subtitles were stupidly slow, meaning voiced dialogue would finish before the subtitles finish. While you can press a button to see the full text, the lip movement stops when doing so, so a bit of a lose-lose situation. I love that fast text is being implemented into the fan translation of SW3, something like that for the DC versions of SW1 and 2 would be ace.

[fafadou]

the project is still alive ?