Sorry for my late reply and thank you as always for your help. I've read the pointer section in your guide and I'm somewhat familiar with the relative / offset stuff due to some basic Assembly experience.
With you help I think I've managed to progress quite a bit.
- I've successfully managed to write a program that extracts the text from all 1,642 text files
- It was surprisingly easy to find and understand how the pointers work in Nora
- It was also surprisingly easy to adjust these pointers
- (the hardest part was finding a hex editor that allowed me to append text, haha.)
So what I've done now is inserting the translated text for the opening dialogue which worked fine. I was also happy when I found out that the game uses a monospace font (36 ASCII characters or 18 Japanese characters per line) which makes it pretty simple to set line breaks (\n).
All in all I'm positively surprised how easy it is to work with Nora. The next step would be to write a text inserter which will be a bit harder than writing the extracter, but is definitely doable. I also need to rework the extracter which currently only blindly extracts the entire text without splitting it into messages as indicated by the pointers.
As for the Chocobo game, I'll have to look into the encoding again, I think, because many characters are not displayed correctly in UTF-8 or UTF-16LE.
If everything works as smoothly as it did up until now, I might really be able to seriously start working on Nora.
Hoi guys! I've learned quite a bit in the last couple of days, but now I'm at a point where I need some help. The .dat files in Noora to Toki no Koubou contain all the system text and menu text as well as all data entries (monsters, items, characters).
I've been able to deal with the normal menu text and some other stuff, but the monster and item names as well as their lexicon entries give me some trouble.
The structure of the files I've been successful with was mostly: [some stuff] [absolute pointers] [1700040018000400] [text] or [offset pointers] [text] with all pointers and all text being separated by one 0000.
Some of the other files seem to have a more complicated structure. I've found out that some of them contain the length of the text string they are pointing to, and some others are different still.
Right now I'm taking a look at the file containing all the monster names. As always, the entire text is at the end of the file, 50-somewhat string separated by two 00 bytes.
Now the thing is that I have actually found an area with relative pointers. Only 17, however, and they only point to the first 17 text strings. I think that the text might be separated into [Monster Family Names] or something and [Actual Monster Names]. That's what the names indicate, but I can't be absolutely sure.
So I obviously need to find the location of the other pointers. I've tried relative search, but to no avail. Maybe some more experienced hackers know more patterns and can help me with this.
It might be easier to list the relative pointers and search where they are in the files. There seem to be pointers around the part of the file before 0x1810.
Since your text starts at 0x1E94, you can search for the beginning of strings and find their relative addresses. Ex. a string ペイッコ is at 0x205E so the relative address (this address minuses 1E94) is 0x01CA. You'll find 01CA at 0x0B78 and 0x17F8. Both might be your pointers or maybe just one of them is. (You can check other addresses and try to figure out the patterns.)
(It's not the best way, though. There might be some codes related to string length, etc somewhere too, so you better make sure to check if the text is displayed properly in game.)
I lack the time to check things at this point. However I should have mentioned that for as annoying as they are relative pointers are still mathematically calculable -- they are probably still a set number of bytes apart so in whatever you are using (I do typically use a spreadsheet for first passes) then make a column counting up by however many bytes (or I suppose the address in some cases) and add that to the apparent pointer values. Do a search for all the locations of 00 or whatever they are using to indicate the end of a text section and use that as the basis for something. I also like to take those 00 (or whatever indicators are used), find the pointers are see how far out there are with each new pointer/round, also helps eliminate false positives from the search.
What I am also here to say is for dictionary/menu/bestiary type setups it is not unheard of to see both fixed length sections and parsed sections. I tend not to see them in the same section as proper pointers but if you are already dealing with combined types then it is not impossible, indeed resource use wise it is nothing outrageous at all and may even help with the parsing.
Hi there! I realize that this thread is a year old - I found it because I'm just learning about ROM hacking through my work with the English Ni No Kuni translation project. I'm a translator there, but I'm actually a dev during the day at work so I thought it would be fun to also learn about the ROM hacking that goes on behind the scenes when I'm not translating an obscene amount of text. lol.
Anyway, my point is if you're still thinking about translating Chocobo Tales 2 in the future, please let me know! We won't be done with Ni No Kuni for at least a few more months, but I'd love to work on Chocobo Tales 2 as my next translation project with more time spent learning about the rom hacking side of it, not solely just translation. Keep me posted on any progress you're making! Thanks for a very interesting thread!
Hi there! I realize that this thread is a year old - I found it because I'm just learning about ROM hacking through my work with the English Ni No Kuni translation project. I'm a translator there, but I'm actually a dev during the day at work so I thought it would be fun to also learn about the ROM hacking that goes on behind the scenes when I'm not translating an obscene amount of text. lol.
Anyway, my point is if you're still thinking about translating Chocobo Tales 2 in the future, please let me know! We won't be done with Ni No Kuni for at least a few more months, but I'd love to work on Chocobo Tales 2 as my next translation project with more time spent learning about the rom hacking side of it, not solely just translation. Keep me posted on any progress you're making! Thanks for a very interesting thread!
I know that this thread is what .. 3 years old now. I have been working on this game for a while but not actually translated anything yet. I have been finding all the information i need from the files etc. If you want I wouldn't mind some help if you're up to it?
I know that this thread is what .. 3 years old now. I have been working on this game for a while but not actually translated anything yet. I have been finding all the information i need from the files etc. If you want I wouldn't mind some help if you're up to it?
So, it turned out my "won't be done Ni No Kuni for a few months" was totally out to lunch. It is my first ROM project, so I had no idea how long testing and and editing for consistency would take. We're still working on the project, and I am starting to have other life things get in the way of working on these projects.
I can probably give you some tips on how we organized our project, if you'd like? Maybe we can start a PM chat.
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