Nexus222 wrote:I have reached out over 2 weeks, messaged every human i could find associated with any project for segagaga. Got like 2 replys, and i am teaming up with one, hes lived in japan for 15 years onw, english as his first lanuage, so This will finsh off the translation. But this will be done in weeks, not years. I am tired of people "claiming" to be doing this, because they look at the folder holding the work once every other month and decides" yup, Ill get there eventually, PROJECT STILL IN MOTION" So, I will keep you guys upto date here. This is what i accomplished in about 72 hours of looking in to this project.
1. I have about 75% of the game totally translated at this moment, and i got native speakers to help finsh.
2. I have tested the fix for the spacing issue, the one part that should have been the ONLY reason for stalling this project back in the day, but ha been sense solved.
3. I found what i believe to be the games text, ( or some of it) but i only peaked at it breifly yesterday. So the only way to help this along faster right now, Is to find any info on the specific replacement of the text.
I am not some pro here. This is my first translation. I have never done a translation before. I AM the only one making DC HD texture packs, but I just want to give to the community i love so much. So no.... I wont sped an hour a month and call it progress.... I want this done in the next 30 days MAX. So if anyone wants to help out, feel free to reach out. But I am not waiting on anybody else. I have done that for like 8 years now.
Firstly, let me say I admire your ambition and also your desire to give back to this scene. By and large, that's what drives me as well.
However, I felt it prudent to say a few words...
For your "weeks not years" project, may I ask who is writing the compression/decompression tools? As I'm sure you're aware, the graphics are all compressed (as are potentially other assets), and live inside various containers (I believe they had the .MRG File extension).
An MRG container extractor and file decompressor was publicly shared on the Dreamcast-Talk forums, but to my knowledge nobody had shared any container rebuilder or compression tools.
Moreover, how do you plan to do the extraction and rebuilding of the .MES files holding the dialogue (and other) text? Or the text extract/rebuild of strings embedded in the game executable? This is another area where custom tools come into play.
I sincerely hope you don't plan on opening a hex editor and doing an in-place update of the text, as this will surely result in an inferior translation. If you can use ASCII instead of Shift-JIS encoded text, you at least have twice as much space to work with, but it will not come without considerable concessions and compromises. Part of what makes quality translation projects is
polish, and the ability to more-or-less use as much localized text as you need in order to convey an idea. SGGG, in my opinion, is a game sorely deserving of such treatment.
There's "icing on the cake" components to this as well, like altering assembly code to accommodate different texture sizes when the original one holding some stylized Japanese text is too small. However, these are not 100% necessary for a good patch, in my opinion. They do help make a great one, though.
I'd also like to comment on the tile-spacing. This was not the big (biggest?) challenge many faced. In fact, modifying the game's assembly to use narrower tile-spacing isn't difficult for most seasoned romhackers. However, SGGG uses the Dreamcast's baked-in BIOS font. Additionally, it only supports two-byte Shift-JIS encoding, rather than single-byte ASCII.
That said, I don't recall if the modified version of the game's executable that megavolt85 shared was
also modified to use the ASCII portion of the BIOS font, as well as modified so that all of the text-rendering functions now interpret single-byte ASCII rather than two-byte Shift-JIS. I presume this is something you've already tested.
You may also want to verify that the modified text-rendering code handles text rendered in
every part of the game. There's a good chance it does, but I've seen it go the other way many, many times. There's often duplicate or similar code strewn throughout a game for handling similar tasks in different areas.
Last item for you to consider is subtitling FMVs, though this is honestly probably the easiest part of the whole project, as they're all standard SFDs and not encrypted in any way.
Anyway, best of luck!