Nice to see that someone's working on porting the game's translation to the Wii version. I was planning to give this game a look and disappointed to hear that there's a slightly better version of it exclusive to Japan.
I do have some concerns about the technical side of things, though. Since you mentioned having to rewrite some lines to fit with the Japanese version's harsher space constraints, am I right to assume it's not feasible for you to do any significant reprogramming of the game? To what extent will the game's script have to be trimmed? If this ends up having a significantly dumbed down version of the original translation, then I don't think it can really be called superior to the Gamecube version. Also, are there any other things specific to the English Gamecube versions that you can't replicate?
I also noticed some slight font rendering issues in your video, particularly when it comes to the uppercase T. Is that an emulation bug or an issue with the patch?
Hi
@Rya687 ,
I have read your message, and would like to answer the questions you've brought up.
First, I'd like to emphasis the fact that I won't ever pretend my amateur translation is gonna make this version the "superior" one : the previous statement I made was all about the gameplay, which I believe suits the Wii pointer very much, and of course anyone is welcomed to differ.
About the necessity of shortening the dialogs and such, I confirm you'd need to be very much skilled (as in "having a degree" skilled) to expand the room left for the text, which I believe is only feasible if you know about modifying the pointers in a Wii game (meaning telling the software to look at another place than what it was meant to be to find the text, hence having potentially much space).
I don't know if some translators have relied on that (maybe the Fatal Frame IV translation team did, regarding the quality of the final product) : as for me I'm just a solo regular guy doing this on his free time, and that kind of knowledge is way beyond mine, meaning I'll have to deal with the space I'm left with.
That being said, I'm lucky enough Chibi-Robo is coded in uncompressed shift-jis, meaning western characters only take one hex value, when Japanese characters take two : that leaves me with double the size of Japanese text, which is more than I had with "Ikenie No Yoru" for example (coded in Big Endian).
If you're worried about the general quality of my work, you can try the previous patches I've released or (if you don't own the game or don't want to go through the trouble of patching them), you can watch the playthrough videos
@stranno did of almost all my projects here :
https://www.youtube.com/user/9esferas1
(Stranno, I realized I had never subscribed till now, contrary to my belief! I just fixed this!)
Finally, about your last two questions:
- I haven't found anything specific to the Game Cube I couldn't replicate so far, but it's still a bit early in the project, and I don't know the GC version that much. I can tell you however that some extra dialogs seem to be in the Wii version. Whether they appear in the final product of were just left unused remains to be determined.
- The "font rendering issue" is actually the font used by Dolphin (and the original hardware) as a "system font", but I'll have to check if the real Wii shows the uppercase T the same way.
That is actually the "most interesting" part I discovered with the Wii version, and what makes this translation (I believe) even more necessary.
Contrary to all the previous games I've translated, Chibi-Robo doesn't seem to rely on a game-specific font for its text (there's a "fnt" folder in the game, but it's empty).
That means if you boot the game on a non-Japanese console (at least on a French PAL one), you'll get gibberish instead of Japanese!
If you remember correctly, the same thing happened with message system ("Wiimote disconnected") in Earth Seeker, or when you tried to boot Ikenie No Yoru without having the savegame previously installed : the console just didn't know how to display Japanese, so unless you replaced it with western character, you couldn't understand what it said.
In that case, even being fluent in Japanese can't help you, as this screenshots taken from an old thread shows :
https://gbatemp.net/threads/npc-chibi-robo-translation.293818/
Dolphin handles it better, since it can display Japanese characters, and that's the "Dolphin font" you've seen on the video (which was taken with an emulator).
Anyway, that means I can't, contrary to my previous projects, alter the font to modify certain characters or "create" new ones (which came in handy sometimes to use only one hex value for combinations like "il", or even removed any need for an extra space after commas).
That has to be taken in consideration : on the other hand it should be easier for European people to translate my patch in other languages (like French or Spanish for example), since all the extra characters these languages use should already be there, whereas Japanese "ingame" fonts only have the minimum required to display English text.
I realize this message was fairly long : I hope you got all the answers you needed ; please feel free to follow this thread till the patch comes out.
Yours truly.