Hey,
Future Diary/
Mirai Nikki fans, we’re back with another update on the game
Future Diary - the 13th Diary Owner’s translation!
TL;DR There’s a couple programming issues that need to be fixed. If you are familiar with C or MIPS feel free to help!
If you remember a while back, there was an Alpha Version we released. In this was the prologue and the main menus translated. I gathered some user feedback and some of our teams’ feedback on it. As a result, there are a total of 9 issues/situations that need programming to be resolved. After these are done, unless there is some major issue in the future, programming will be practically unnecessary for the games’ translation.
Keep in mind, anything we show here is tentative and may not be in the actual translation.
Anyways, here are some of the big issues that will be fixed in the next release.
The Font
The game was obviously made for Japanese and Japanese only.
Side note: There are a couple parts where English-only text is shown. For example, because Takao Hiyama (3rd) is an English teacher, English-only lines are written. However, there are few lines like this and they’re written in a way not helpful for our translation. In fact, they’ll need to be modified because they won’t look like the rest of the translation.
So when we overwrote the game’s text to include English lines, it did not look nice. In fact, it was one of our biggest complaints from users.
Of course, it suffices. It looks irritating to read, but you can still read. However, with a little moving around, we found the game contained a font for “debugging.” Upon switching the font to the debug font, we found a much better solution.
Side note: The switch in font allows more letters to be in a dialog box than the original font. So this change helps more than just readability.
With this, the readability is saved! Except now the font has halved in size and some characters aren’t presented correctly.
In conclusion, we’ll be spending some time resolving the issues with the font. Don’t worry, it is one of the easiest issues to resolve because we already know (for the most part) how it works.
Dialogue Boxes’ Character Limit
In the game, each character speaks in either a “miniature” or “full-sized” dialogue box. For the sake of clarity, I’ll only be talking about the “full-sized” dialogue boxes.
The dialogue boxes have enough space to contain 80 half-width characters. Which works fine in Japanese. However, in English, certain characters have a much longer translation than the Japanese character/phrase. For example, 雪輝 is 4 half-width characters, but it’s translation, Yukiteru, is 8 half-width characters.
So the fix is simple, add in more dialogue boxes! One small problem, the game did not want anybody to mess with their text, and adding in more dialogue is even more difficult. In fact, it requires the file to be rewritten
manually.
Side note: Each text file, or script file as well call them, has 5 separate files, a “director” to another “director” file, a second “director” which describes how functions work in the script file, a list of data points, a list of text points, and the dialogue + data itself. Therefore, the sheer number of content makes it difficult to fully understand these text files.
In conclusion, it’s not impossible, but adding in extra text boxes takes a while, mostly because a program will need to be written to make “new” files.
The PLACE Command’s Character Limit
In the text files, there is a command/function called PLACE followed by a location (duh). When the player runs over this function, it causes the game to “display” your current location.
For some reason however, the character limit on the text is different depending on where it is.
In conclusion, it’s fairly easy to fix, once we find out how it works.
Conclusion
Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with all of these intricate details about Future Diary’s code because - while I find it interesting - this was simply to show what we’re working on. Additionally, the other 6 issues are much more in-depth and require lengthier explanations.
If anyone would like to help out with programming and has experience in either C or MIPS, feel free to contact me (Sermeno14)!
Again, once all 9 of these issues are resolved we will
never have to do any major programming (with the exception of bug fixes). From then, we’ll be releasing new parts to the translation, every week (or as often as we can).
Thank you all for all of your continued support!
Sincerely,
The New Future Diary Alliance
Desi - Lead Translator
JackPyez - English Editor; Image Editor
Sermeno14 - Lead Programmer; PR; Translator Checker
]
Bunjolio's mother that he's swearing]