ROM Hack Culdcept DS [open translation]

[mixinluv2u]

hey injected, glad to see you helping out! =)

are you removing or adding line breaks in the story script? do they look better afterwards?

 

[injected11]

EDIT2: Fixed it.
nice

i also see that you are also making much more then fixing that one error :yayds:

Yeah! I never realized how simple editing the wiki actually was. I've been making lots of minor tweeks to try and make everything seem more uniform, hopefully adding more to the cohesion of the game. When I'm using my DS, 90% of the time I'm playing Culdcept, so it's about time I gave back to this awesome project.

QUOTE(mixinluv2u @ Dec 4 2009, 11:37 AM)

hey injected, glad to see you helping out! =)

are you removing or adding line breaks in the story script? do they look better afterwards?

I try to avoid messing with line breaks in the story script, but I've added a few, don't recall removing any. Where I did add them, the game was trying to display my player name, but half my name would appear on the first line of text, half on the next, so I added breaks to make the full name appear on only the next line. I plan to start a new save file this weekend to check the story text for anything I may have broken.

EDIT: I think I'm finally done tweaking the card stats text, menus, and most of the pre-battle story text for "Round 2" (aka the 2nd storyline that appears on all stages after you've beat the game once). I plan on fixing line breaks and such in more parts of the story text soon. I hope you guys like the changes so far.

 

[mixinluv2u]

injected:

Thanks for correcting a bunch of my errors in the card text. =)

I did notice that quite a few of the "/" have been removed. Was that on purpose? Usually they appear when a card has multiple abilities and the slashes are there to separate them. Do you think the abilities might become jumbled and unclear on where one ends and the next begin for the players?

Also i thought "cannot be target of spells" sounded a bit more awkward than "cannot be targeted by spells." but that's just me. I would've preferred "cannot be THE target of spells" if you wanted to word that way, but then I don't know if you'll end up running into line length constraints. thoughts?


EDIT:
Changling - for this card, you can only target enemy Cepters. The original translation shortened it to "target enemy" but you changed it to "target Cepter," which implies that you can use this card on yourself. I think that has a little different meaning now.

 

[injected11]

injected:

Thanks for correcting a bunch of my errors in the card text. =)

I did notice that quite a few of the "/" have been removed. Was that on purpose? Usually they appear when a card has multiple abilities and the slashes are there to separate them. Do you think the abilities might become jumbled and unclear on where one ends and the next begin for the players?

Also i thought "cannot be target of spells" sounded a bit more awkward than "cannot be targeted by spells." but that's just me. I would've preferred "cannot be THE target of spells" if you wanted to word that way, but then I don't know if you'll end up running into line length constraints. thoughts?

There really weren't many errors! Lots of just moving words around. I only removed "/"s that were interfering with line breaks, and only took them out if I felt the abilities could still be easily distinguished from each other, usually by being on entirely separate lines of text. Were there any in particular that seemed unclear or confusing?

I changed "cannot be targeted by spells" to "cannot be target of spells" initially because shorter words made the line break changes easier. I don't really have strong feelings about either one. I can change them back to "cannot be targeted by spells" and start reworking the line breaks for those cards if you'd prefer.

I check back on this thread daily, so if anything else catches your eye, feel free to fire up the discussion. You're welcome to change anything I've done to the translation. I won't take any offense.

EDIT: Fixed up Changeling. "his or her" is a clear improvement over "their", which I used because many of them simply said "his", and one of my female friends (who helps me check changes) started jokingly claiming the game was sexist. Also changed the cards to "cannot be the target of spells". It fit perfectly in every case!

 

[theli]

why do you all replaced those ： symbols with slash as separator between abilities in cards?
that one ： (not : ) was used in original text

 

[mixinluv2u]

theli:
When I joined this translation, the colons (

were very confusing because they were used for 2 functions before.

1. They were served as cause-and-effect = for example, "Upon Victory: ST+10" means that when a condition is met "upon victory" you get an effect of "ST+10"

2. Separators for multiple abilities = for example, "Attack First: Support: Upon Victory: ST+10" This is taken from the card Valkyria and you can see how confusing this gets. It's hard to read when this creature gets the ST+10 ability or if it's an ability that's always there like Attack First or Support.

I decided to keep the colons for cause-and-effect because that's how it was in Magic: The Gathering and that's what I am used to, and switch ability separators to slashes (which is also what culdceptcentral does for their database).

In the original Japanese text they actually used colons (

as ability separators, but used commas (,) as cause-and-effect. Even though their commas looked a little different than the English ones, maybe it's the font?

I do not object if other people felt like we should keep the use of colons and commas like the Japanese text, but we just need to have 2 different symbols for these 2 different functions.

Here's how it would look if we use colons and commas like the Japanese Text.

Attack First:
Support: Upon Victor,
ST+10 (100 max)

or

ST=30 Scroll
Attack when not
using item:
Battle End, On
successful enemy
hit,ST=20,MHP=30
(not sure how this will fit in the text box, injected might have a better idea since he just worked with this)

looking at the 2 different colons you showed, it looks like the smaller ones actually have extra spaces around it? that might work better as a separator, but I am still oppose to use regular colons for cause-and-effect since they look way too similar in game. I do not object if we want to switch back to those small colons used in Japanese text and commas for cause-and-effect though. As long as they are 2 different symbols I am good.

thoughts everyone?

injected:
glad you liked some of my suggestions. =) looking good!

 

[theli]

theli:
When I joined this translation, the colons (

were very confusing because they were used for 2 functions before.

those are different colons, they looked differently

i like comas more though

 

[injected11]

I agree with Mixinluv2u about the ":"s. Having 2 symbols that look similar can lead to confusion in some cases, and when I personally see the colons, I think, "this text is defining what the ability before it will have an effect on". Seeing it used to mark things as unrelated seems counter-intuitive to me. I'm all for staying in the same vein as the original as much as possible, but I think in this case we should take advantage of the fact that we CAN deviate from the original.

PS: New Manual images and splash screen look awesome!

EDIT: With both the last patch and the current one, whenever I use the "Drain Magic" spell, the game freezes as it hits the enemy Cepter. Is this happening for anyone else?

 

[Kamons]

I agree with Mixinluv2u about the ":"s. Having 2 symbols that look similar can lead to confusion in some cases, and when I personally see the colons, I think, "this text is defining what the ability before it will have an effect on". Seeing it used to mark things as unrelated seems counter-intuitive to me. I'm all for staying in the same vein as the original as much as possible, but I think in this case we should take advantage of the fact that we CAN deviate from the original.

PS: New Manual images and splash screen look awesome!

EDIT: With both the last patch and the current one, whenever I use the "Drain Magic" spell, the game freezes as it hits the enemy Cepter. Is this happening for anyone else?

Game froze for me when an enemy landed on a shrine, I think (it's not translated) the shrine drained me some, though. So I guess it's kinda the same

A fix would be awesome.

Great work so far!

Oh and is there a patch that has the WiFi cards translated? I know what they do, just would be nice to have them translated ingame, for consistency sake

 

[Swithin]

Hey guys.

I've been following this translation for some time, and seeing the recent spike in productivity has inspired me. Next week I have my final exams for this quarter, so I won't actually be able to do much yet (except distract myself,) but if you don't mind me poking around afterwards I'd like to take a crack at flavor text and general typographical clean-up. I can't translate any text from Japanese, but I have worked on editing translations in the past. If there aren't any active translators, I did a quick comparison of card-lists between Culdcept DS and Saga/PS2, and there are plenty of cards with English flavor text that I can import as placeholder content. There may be a character-limit issue, but I'll see what I can come up with.

Theli, I signed up for the wiki with my primary e-mail address, so if you have any questions or want my relevant history drop me a line.

Thanks for starting all this up! It's a great season for fantasy-themed puzzle and strategy games on the DS (Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is amazing, and PQ2 is on the way,) and I'll do what little I can to get Culdcept DS in English for everyone to enjoy (although I still hope Namco or Atlus pick this up for an official US release and take it mainstream.)

Cheers,
Swithin

 

[injected11]

Game froze for me when an enemy landed on a shrine, I think (it's not translated) the shrine drained me some, though. So I guess it's kinda the same

Oh and is there a patch that has the WiFi cards translated? I know what they do, just would be nice to have them translated ingame, for consistency sake

Yesterday, I had the game freeze from what I'm guessing was the same Shrine effect, as well as it freezing when a character used the "Drain Magic" spell when Demo Play was running. I thought it might have been my cart at first, but it seems not to be.

The Wi-Fi cards actually ARE translated. The issue with those is that they are added to your game as part of your save file when downloaded. The patch doesn't affect save files, only the .nds file. You can check out the stats in the wiki, but I wouldn't count on seeing them in-game.

Swithin: Glad to see you want to help! Mixinluv2u has been working on translating flavor text, and I have been cleaning up typos and mistakes lately, but more eyes and fingers are always helpful. Welcome to the fold.

 

[theli]

[Yesterday, I had the game freeze from what I'm guessing was the same Shrine effect, as well as it freezing when a character used the "Drain Magic" spell when Demo Play was running. I thought it might have been my cart at first, but it seems not to be.

mhm...
i can't see how can shrine effect freeze game

... currently, that file (with shrine effect descriptions) is not touched at all
i'll see if i can figure out why that freeze happens

 

[injected11]

[Yesterday, I had the game freeze from what I'm guessing was the same Shrine effect, as well as it freezing when a character used the "Drain Magic" spell when Demo Play was running. I thought it might have been my cart at first, but it seems not to be.

mhm...
i can't see how can shrine effect freeze game

... currently, that file (with shrine effect descriptions) is not touched at all
i'll see if i can figure out why that freeze happens

It seems to happen any time a spell is cast to steal G from another player, be it Shrine or card. Thanks for looking into it.

 

[mixinluv2u]

Swithin:
welcome! =) I was working on flavor text, but feel free to help me out by comparing the same cards with their saga/ps2 counterparts. I know some of the actual card effects had minor tweaks done to them between versions, but flavor text should be okay even if they vary a little.

a little tip regarding character limit (and line breaks). The easiest way for me to make sure the text are displayed in a way that's easy to read, is to insert the paragraph of text first without line breaks at all. Patch the game with the new inserts, then check them in an emulator (or your DS). You can then edit the line breaks from there, or re-write it a little if the whole thing simply doesn't fit.

i had been busy lately, but can't wait to continue to edit the manual pages.

 

[injected11]

Would it be possible to rip the Wi-Fi set up menu images from an English game and swap them for the Japanese ones? or will that break things?

 

[theli]

Would it be possible to rip the Wi-Fi set up menu images from an English game and swap them for the Japanese ones? or will that break things?

that should be possible

 

[injected11]

Lately I've been tinkering with the "ChangeLand" command, trying to get it to display as 2 separate words while still fitting in the allotted space. I've managed to get it fixed again by reverting to the old entry, then making my changes, going from the game displaying "ChangeLand" to "Alter Land". In my opinion, "Alter Land" looks much cleaner in-game and retains the same meaning, but since it is a game mechanic, I thought I'd make sure nobody has any objections to the change. Accepting the change would mean other in-game aspects would need to be changed to reflect it, like Mixinluv2u's "Table of Contents" manual image. I don't mean to make more work for anyone, so if anyone objects to the change, I'll revert the entries back to "ChangeLand".

Thoughts?

 

[chexxor]

"Alter Land" sounds good to me. Would "Edit Land" be wrong? I haven't played the game that much, so I don't know.

 

[injected11]

"Alter Land" sounds good to me. Would "Edit Land" be wrong? I haven't played the game that much, so I don't know.

"Edit Land" could work too, "Alter" just came to mind and seemed closer to "Change", and I was looking to remove 1 character from the script.

 

[theli]

alter