Hacking Possible Summon Night 4 Project

[Deleted User]

Hey, all. I'm new here, so sorry to burst in unannounced. I originally posted about this in the Official PSP Request Thread, but was told I should try out here in the main forums to see if there'd be anyone interested.

I'm an in-house translator/editor at a game localization company and have also done freelance game translation work in the past (the English version of Phantasy Star Online 2 to name one of them), but since I have the ability, I've been wanting to work on personal projects too for some of the games I love that never got brought over. One such game is Summon Night 4. I originally played this on the PS2, but I have the PSP version now as well, and ever since I played it around a year and a half ago, I'd thought it would be fun to translate.

If you want more information on this game, see my full post detailing it in the original thread here: https://gbatemp.net/threads/hopeful...t-your-translation-topic.370128/#post-5171471

Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about programming, coding, and working with roms, so I've always been pretty stuck in the "wouldn't that be fun" stage, but just recently (aka today) thought I'd see if there was anyone else out there that has some experience and that might also be interested in working on a localized version of this game. If so, or if you might know anyone, I would love to hear from you!

 

[Pablitox]

Oh boy, I can't be hyped enough!

Well, as I said in the other thread, I kind of helped around in the Swordcraft Story translation, I don't really have the skills of a hacker though, but I could mostly get a hang of another user's tool to translate items and such.

I'm busy right now, but when I get some holidays, I will try to learn some hacking (even if it is just to rip the script and insert it back). No promises there, but I'll try (I saw a bit of GHANMI's post, I'll see what I can learn from there). Anyways, think of me as support right now (and a fan, lol).

Hope you get a good hacker though (It is important too).

Cheers!!

 

[Deleted User]

Oh boy, I can't be hyped enough!

Well, as I said in the other thread, I kind of helped around in the Swordcraft Story translation, I don't really have the skills of a hacker though, but I could mostly get a hang of another user's tool to translate items and such.

I'm busy right now, but when I get some holidays, I will try to learn some hacking (even if it is just to rip the script and insert it back). No promises there, but I'll try (I saw a bit of GHANMI's post, I'll see what I can learn from there). Anyways, think of me as support right now (and a fan, lol).

Hope you get a good hacker though (It is important too).

Cheers!!

Thanks for the support!
Any knowledge you have is easily more than I have. I remember looking into possibly trying it myself for the PS2 version, but then giving up when I quickly got in way over my head and had no idea what I was doing. I might try messing around with stuff using those tips in GHANMI's post as well, but I highly doubt anything will become of it. For someone like me with no experience in the matter, I think it would take a long, long time to do anything (if I'm even able to figure out things at all).
But yes, hopefully there's someone out there with some skills and knowledge who also may happen to like this game...
We can only hope.

 

[StorMyu]

I guess I could take a look, I like the Summon Night series too, but I can see the first problem here:
- The font.
probably nothing to deal with english in there so forgot any variable-width letters. It'll look horrible if you just change the text...

 

[Blazer]

Sounds great, wish I could be of help but it's not my forte nor do I have the time. Hopefully someone is able to help though, this is a great opportunity! Either way, thanks for taking the time out to post! =)

 

[Pablitox]

Sounds great, wish I could be of help but it's not my forte nor do I have the time. Hopefully someone is able to help though, this is a great opportunity! Either way, thanks for taking the time out to post! =)

'sides, Blazer's busy with Tears Crown, right?

 

[Deleted User]

I guess I could take a look, I like the Summon Night series too, but I can see the first problem here:
- The font.
probably nothing to deal with english in there so forgot any variable-width letters. It'll look horrible if you just change the text...

Really? That would make me super excited!!

I had indeed thought about the font, but I wasn't sure what was usually a good way to go about fixing it in games like this. Have other games had similar problems and found ways to get around the font issues?

Sounds great, wish I could be of help but it's not my forte nor do I have the time. Hopefully someone is able to help though, this is a great opportunity! Either way, thanks for taking the time out to post! =)

Thanks for the additional encouragement! I'm glad that at least some people would be interested.

 

[macaronron]

The game does contain an English alphabet. As well as some other symbols. However, if you change the protagonist's name from the default, they won't have a namebox during dialogue scenes.


Another issue will probably be image editing since all the tutorials are images and the gallery includes them as well as a bunch of images with background information.


On that same note, if you're not going to use official romanizations (and some of them should be thrown out because Lisher? Lushean? Flight-Plan, please), you'll have to do a bit more editing to the night conversations part of the gallery 'cause...


So bust out that photoshop and laugh outrageously at Glad's name because it's Glad.

 

[Deleted User]

The game does contain an English alphabet. As well as some other symbols. However, if you change the protagonist's name from the default, they won't have a namebox during dialogue scenes.

Another issue will probably be image editing since all the tutorials are images and the gallery includes them as well as a bunch of images with background information.

On that same note, if you're not going to use official romanizations (and some of them should be thrown out because Lisher? Lushean? Flight-Plan, please), you'll have to do a bit more editing to the night conversations part of the gallery 'cause...

So bust out that photoshop and laugh outrageously at Glad's name because it's Glad.

Ah! I'd forgotten that they give you the English alphabet for naming possibilities... I've never used it to do so, so I'm not sure how it looks in-game. I can check it out.
As for the images and such, I'd be up for translating/photoshopping them and trying to make them look good and fit right with the English text---I just wouldn't know how to extract them from the game...

I was definitely planning on changing the "official" romanizations. I've always thought they were atrocious. X'D (even when the name is obviously from English originally, they still screw it up, AHAHA)

 

[JamRules]

The problem isn't there is no English but as StorMyu said the (very probable) lack of variable-width font so it'll likely not look so great.

Character limits also look like they will be quite harsh, especially in battle

 

[Deleted User]

The problem isn't there is no English but as StorMyu said the (very probable) lack of variable-width font so it'll likely not look so great.

Character limits also look like they will be quite harsh, especially in battle

I can imagine it's different for every game, but how have some teams in the past dealt with this issue? It seems like one which would be present in every game in one way, shape, or another. ---> as an addendum, would, for instance, making a new font be possible?

 

[Pablitox]

I can imagine it's different for every game, but how have some teams in the past dealt with this issue? It seems like one which would be present in every game in one way, shape, or another. ---> as an addendum, would, for instance, making a new font be possible?

Well for the swordcarft story 3 we had the same problem, the english script is double the size of the jap one, what our hacker did was make a routine so that every char had 1 byte size so that the script would get a big lighter, but a VWF was also needed. That one requires some skills, I don't know if it is that hard to do in PSP comparing to the GB but I think it is posible

 

[JamRules]

I can imagine it's different for every game, but how have some teams in the past dealt with this issue? It seems like one which would be present in every game in one way, shape, or another. ---> as an addendum, would, for instance, making a new font be possible?

Depends how the font is rendered but an asm hacker that knows mips should be able to adjust the spacing between each letter,
currently it is likely that this space is always the same and set within the program but a skilled hacker could add a routine to set it different per letter.

 

[GHANMI]

If the text shows as 16-px Fixed Width Font, it's somewhat problematic because:
* Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ　ｌｅｔｔｅｒｓ　ｌｏｏｋ　ｒｅａｌｌｙ　ｈｉｄｅｏｕｓ　ｗｉｔｈ　ｔｈｅ　Ｓｈｉｆｔ－ＪＩＳ　ｌａｔｉｎ　ｓｅｔ　ｆｏｎｔ
* Not as much letters will fit per line, which will be a problem for text intensive games (like this one).

currently it is likely that this space is always the same and set within the program but a skilled hacker could add a routine to set it different per letter.

Or no need to implement a variable-width font, and just change the fixed width from 12/16 something pixels to 8.
Nice looking monospaced fonts (8 pixels) exist (the Metroid Fusion font, for example).
From what I see Sol Trigger and Disaster Report 3 already look good with 8-px FWF.

But then you'd need to modify the font display routines, and the routines that read text from the iso so that they accept 1-bit ascii text in addition to the default 2-bit Shift-JIS format (something like if the byte <80 read it as single byte, else read it as double byte) because of PSP Ram limitations.

Of course, like Pablitox said, you could do something else (like in the current iteration of the SN Hajimari no Ishi translation -though I think they are going the VWF way?- and Itadaki Street PSP).
That is, using most of the 3300 or so kanjis to host every possible combo of two lower case English letters, lower case+punctuation/space, upper case+lower case. But then you'd need to impose arbitrary rules such as not using all caps letters and avoiding certain combinations.
It's for when you can edit the text and font, but can't modify the programming.

Anyways no matter how you do, always keep a copy of the translated text as a document readable by Microsoft Word/Open Office just in case you need to switch between both methods.

 

[Deleted User]

I had some help from omarrrio (ie. he did everything and I just waited hopefully) in looking into the actual ISO itself, and it looks like the ASCII characters are not in the default font-->if you retype something in English, you just get gobbly-gook. So even though there ARE English characters available, they're not in the normal character set it seems. The English char-set would need to be added to the font bitmap no matter what, though this no doubt would have been inevitable to fix character spacing anyway. Haven't had any luck in trying to extract any of the text/script either. :\

 

[zero_g_monkey]

There is one plus side to the font... It looks like it is loading as single tile instead of blocks of them. Shouldn't be to hard to trace down the routine for it. But from looking at the files in the game, it looks like they are encrypted or compressed. I never really can tell the difference between those things. It all looks like garbage to me. Good luck with this. I am gonna keep poking around the first 2 games on PSX.

 

[macaronron]

On a non-hacking note, I'd actually like to see Fair's name kept as Fair because it becomes a really cute pun once you get near the end of the game. It probably wasn't intentional, but it is a cute one. You know what I mean.

EDIT: Actually, both Fair and Ray's names might be spelled that way deliberately. In the very least, fans have noticed something: フェアとライの名前を足すとフェアリー。微妙すぎるネタバレである。Though I personally always misremember Ray's name as 'Rai' 'cause of the dad.

As for the PSX Summon Nights: Gotta be legit, the DS versions are better games. Sure, no voices and no gallery and no opening, but convenient skip + auto, you can save on the battle prep screen, summon encyclopedia, party skills, brave clears, and, specific to SN1, Gazel's new attack type means playing as Aya is easier. In the beginning, when summonite's at a premium, having someone who can attack at a diagonal is a godsend. Hayato can tank, and both Touya and Natsumi can attack at diagonals, but Aya is squishy so having someone who can hit Banossa on the counterattack is really useful for getting through the first couple of chapters (though Gazel is on the squishier side too and can probably take only one or two hits anyway). Though I could have done without the adaptation of the 気に入り system.

I can't say how tight everything is locked up, but it should be possible to get everything out and back in. Agarest Marriage was also made by Felistella, and that's been hacked enough for a patch. And, of course, all the Chinese patches. Though I'm going to guess that a rip of just the text will probably leave you without any indication of who's talking, but that shouldn't be too big a problem since everyone talks pretty distinctly; even without names, you should be able to tell who's speaking, and there are a bunch of playthroughs on NND for when you can't.

Though I'm probably preaching to the choir since you probably have to deal with that kinda stuff all the time at work. Orphaned lines.

 

[GHANMI]

There is one plus side to the font... It looks like it is loading as single tile instead of blocks of them. Shouldn't be to hard to trace down the routine for it. But from looking at the files in the game, it looks like they are encrypted or compressed. I never really can tell the difference between those things. It all looks like garbage to me. Good luck with this. I am gonna keep poking around the first 2 games on PSX.

The DS ports might be easier, plus they have bonus content. (but no voice acting?)
I took a quick peek and the font is stored as 12x12 4bpp 2bit NTFR file, with all what's required for a localization there (much like the PSP version of Far East of Eden IV, oddly enough - SN DS even has one font with European characters!). I couldn't find the text (probably compressed, maybe in the overlay folders however unlikely it may be - or I haven't been looking hard enough)
However I did a name swap and found out the game is localization ready. (btw The name can indeed be 12 ascii English letters)
The graphics are extremely easy to modify. You could produce a menu patch covering at least the battle menus with it.

Proof:

Spoiler

 

[Pablitox]

The DS ports might be easier, plus they have bonus content. (but no voice acting?)
I took a quick peek and the font is stored as 12x12 4bpp 2bit NTFR file, with all what's required for a localization there (much like the PSP version of Far East of Eden IV, oddly enough - SN DS even has one font with European characters!). I couldn't find the text (probably compressed, maybe in the overlay folders however unlikely it may be - or I haven't been looking hard enough)
However I did a name swap and found out the game is localization ready. (btw The name can indeed be 12 ascii English letters)
The graphics are extremely easy to modify. You could produce a menu patch covering at least the battle menus with it.

Proof:

Spoiler

View attachment 12167View attachment 12168View attachment 12169View attachment 12170View attachment 12171

If we go by that, Darthnemesis was working on it, and had some tools done, there was a script dumper if I recall correctly, and it had a google sheet with all he script there. The inserter was left to do, but I think they gave up because no translators.

Darthnemesis sent me:

Is there not a script inserter for SN3 yet? Send me the details of what is known about the script/pointers and I can look at it when I get a chance.

As for SN1/2, I'm not looking to manage people, but anyone is free to use the inserter if they want to start a project:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/ndjjnjnoxi3/SummonTrans_0.2_src.zip
Here's what little of the script has been translated:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmBm7_MLS0sxcHFZbXk5VGJrX1JHY1VEYlB1T0hESEE&usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmBm7_MLS0sxdEtnSWV0Q2hLVnBxYVFEa0J0RXlyV2c&usp=sharing​

 

[Eity]

Do you plan to translate PS2 or PSP version? I asking, since I recently played in PSP version (with ISO), and the game freezes in one place on both real PSP and emulator, and not only for me (look at http://forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=3264 ). So... if you plan to translate it, this problem also needs to be solved...