Hacking Legend of Heroes Translation

[zero_g_monkey]

How pissed off would people be if I created completely custom images for these information images? To be honest, I don't really like the way the boxes and stuff are laid out and I could adjust them according to the text instead of the text according to the box. I am gonna work on an example and see what everybody thinks.

 

[JamRules]

I would say its fair to assume your target audience wouldn't have seen the original so you can do as you wish

 

[zero_g_monkey]

Cool. That is what I am thinking. Right now I am trying to do some reading up on how bmp files are setup. How the information is stored and all that goodness. Sadly most things I come across are written in a way that is hard for myself to understand. But I have a pretty good idea how these are done. I am gonna find a way to maximize the use of colors to try and make something really good. It's funny, I have a ton of other things I should be doing with this and I keep getting sidetracked with something like this when I probably could work on while the main scripts are being translated. For the 5th time, I have started from scratch working on the eboot due to some stuff I feel I could do better. Blasted obsessive behaviors. Gotta get stuff just perfect. I honestly think that is why I prefer to manually insert stuff so that I know exactly what is going on where. FALCOM is notorious in the games that I have seen for throwing something completely random in the middle of stuff you think you have already figured out or they leave a bunch of absolutely useless files in the games - monsdb._dt being one of those from the text folder in this game.

 

[flame1234]

I was looking at Nayuta no Kiseki. In there they left some *.h "dot H" files that are not in the compressed files at all. My understanding of dot H is limited to, "something a program written in C would use." PSP programs are not written in C, they are written in MIPS assembly. It's just weird that they would put source files like that on the UMD.

 

[zero_g_monkey]

Oh yeah. Those coding files are all over the place in the game. I believe one of them actually has c files in there also. I'm not looking at them right this second but lots of leftovers in these games. Especially the references to Adol in Nayuta.





Good news. I believe I have the bmp mapped out. Figured out what is what, how the colors are setup and what code handles transparency. YAY!!!!

 

[zero_g_monkey]

The header is setup with a standard 54 byte header which you can find more info on here.

The color palette (CLUT) uses 4 byte colors 12 34 56 (FF or 00) <- 00 is the transparent color for the image.
They are index 8-bit files. Now to get to editing them the way I see fit, LOL!

 

[Cyberdrive]

I am having a problem with the quest file. The translators have done such a nice job that they have ballooned this 115kB file to 130kB. When I try to insert it using UMDgen it complains that it can't fit in the available space. It actually complains that it can't put the next file, t_record, where it's supposed to go. What do I do?
Even if the problem can't be solved, how do I figure out how much space I actually have to work with? I have 64 LBAs to work with (I think). How big is an LBA?
If I wanted to try to solve this problem, how would I go about it? How can I point the program to the moved t_record file?

In case this or similar problem arises again: use WQSG_UMD Tool r31 to relocate the file in question to an unused area of ISO.
Open your ISO in WQSG_UMD, find your file, right-click it and "Import File" to inject bigger version of the file in question in the first unused area of ISO that's large enough. If there is no such area, create it with "Expand ISO" adding some free space to the end of ISO and your file will be placed there.
In this particular case the first unused area (512 blocks of 2048 bytes each, 1MB total) is between \PSP_GAME\SYSDIR\OPNSSMP.BIN and EBOOT.BIN files, so WQSG_UMD will place the new file there, starting from LBA 753. EBOOT.BIN starts at LBA 1264, so anything that's less than ~850KB will fit in that area too.
Note that this doesn't rebuild the whole ISO, thus minimizing the size of a potential patch.

Edit: forgot the main thing I wanted to say.
Thank you guys, this thread is a gold mine. Keep up the good work!

Edit 2: space for file data on UMD (and ISO images in general) is allocated in 2048 byte blocks, so depending on the given file's size you can have up to 2047 unused bytes in its last block which will allow you to replace it with the file that is slightly bigger without the need to relocate it. If the ISO has padding files, you can place new files 'inside' them (and point already existing file system entries to these technically occupied but really unused LBA), although this is probably worth the effort only for big files in size-restricted ISOs (such as ones you're going to sign for OFW with fake_np).
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image

Edit 3: now that I look at data.lst file, it has a file entry for t_quest (at 0x33030) containing its file size and LBA; I'm pretty sure you already know this, so don't forget to fix both number (LBA is stored in 3 bytes).

 

[zero_g_monkey]

Top - COMPLETELY EDITED WITH PHOTOSHOP!!!! (pay no attention to that random white line in the top box )

Bottom - Original Version (Also edited by Photoshop but not by me )

So what do you think? Better or worse? Can you read the text?

 

[flame1234]

That looks great.
You use both light text on light background (with dark outline) and light text on dark background. It's idiosyncratic, but legible.
Your illustrative image looks better than theirs.

------------
Orbments (Orbments) -> Orbments
Japanese people need help with how to pronounce "orbments" while English speakers...you're not going to help them anyway by repeating the word.

For the second heading, I would go:
Orbal Magic (Orbal Arts) -> Orbal Arts
This one is just personal preference. I feel the English name for the concept here is sufficient.

And then just grammar:
"EP (Energy Points) is required" -> "EP (Energy Points) are required"

 

[zero_g_monkey]

That looks great.

And then just grammar:
"EP (Energy Points) is required" -> "EP (Energy Points) are required"

I keep forgetting to edit that in my word document. Finally fixed it.

I didn't know if there was some significance to having the stuff in the parenthesis from your translation, but if you are cool with dropping them, I am more than definitely gonna do that. Especially since I don't think our fans are morons and can figure things out for themselves. LOL! Also, I hate repetition in things like this, almost as much as I hate abbreviations when unnecessarily used.


Most of these images are straight out of game files with some mods to make them look like their English counterparts. The originals were horrible looking and literally illegible when not viewed outside the game. Thankfully I created all this and used a bunch of layers so that it is easy to edit them. Looking into other color choices and various effects. I mostly wanted to test my theory about editing these with this shot. As with anything I am doing, nothing is final till it is released.

 

[zero_g_monkey]

Cleaned it up a little. Rewrote some text. Changed a few things around. Better?

For fun, I thought I would upload the PSD file for this. Maybe somebody else can come up with something cool also. Some of the stuff may not load up properly in your version because I have about a billion gradients and plugins on my install (and I am not gonna go through all of them trying to track them down - especially since I didn't create a few of them). I am using Photoshop CS6 (64-bit version - though I really don't think the 64 or 32 matters with PSD).

Enjoy. Feel free to share what you come up with. ALSO... the huge green part is transparent area. Pay no mind to it and just select the actual image and create a new one. If you don't know what I mean, then you probably should stay away from Photoshop, because it is the 2nd most confusing image editor I have ever used... GIMP is the first. I tried to label stuff with good information. Later.

 

[Diag]

looks like you have a lot of fun with this project good to see that you are still so motivated ^^

i like your first version better, but this looks nice too.. hard to say, both have their own appeal

 

[zero_g_monkey]

I liked the original version too, but after some tests I found it hard to read sadly. So I went with a more simplistic design.

I probably have to much fun. The others are probably screaming "HURRY UP WITH THOSE EDITS AND QC!!".

 

[Cinnamon]

Been silent for a while so I want something clear. How far is your translation going? Still need translator/TLCers or are you going full steam at the moment?

 

[zero_g_monkey]

We are actually running at full steam right now I believe. Just had so many discoveries about the game setup the past few weeks, we are a little disoriented like kids in a toy stuff with a 1,000,000 dollar shopping spree.

If you are looking for a project to work on related to the LOH series. I am gonna be posting the script dumps of the original 2 Dragon Slayer - LOH games this coming week. You are more than welcome to take a look at them. Thankfully they are nowhere near as big as the Zero stuff (Still pretty good size though). Chapter 1 is about 2500 lines in the spreadsheet of varies amounts of dialog. Well basically it is mostly formatting and stuff due to line breaks etc. Uhm... But yeah. I will wait to see what Flame and the others say. Who knows. I'm sleepy and heading to bed. Good night all.

 

[Diag]

which version of the dragon slayer games do you want to translate? the psx ports?

the first game exists already in english for Turbografx, but i don´t know if there are any changes or if the translation is bad.. if i remember right the psx version looks better ^^

or do you plan to retranslate them anyway?

don´t find any time at the moment to continue song of the ocean :/ but i would like to play the DS - Legend of Heroes games also someday, so a translation (especially of part 2 would be nice)

 

[zero_g_monkey]

It is the PSX version with I and II on it. The game should be a pretty quick translation compared others in the series. The main hurdle is just finding out how the text is stored. Had some new ideas on what to look into with it. That is what I am currently doing actually. Dumping the text is no real problem. All of it ends with a null. I wish there was more information about finding pointers and numbers you need to take into account for finding addresses. Typical FALCOM stuff, messy messy. I had actually considered that Turbogracfx stuff once before. But after playing it a little bit, I felt like it was one of those deals where back in the day companies would just slap some text on there and take a bunch of liberties with the actual story. I want to give it a proper translation.


Here is a sample of the full dump of chapter 1 LOH I (NOT EDITABLE)

 

[Cinnamon]

Interesting. Been replaying the Eiyuu Densetsu series lately, but never bothered to play the PSX versions. Should have a look at that. That script also looks quite simple compared to later games. Every games in the trilogy games are behemoths compared

 

[zero_g_monkey]

Does anybody know anything about PSX hacking? I am getting brain freeze from trying to work on LoH 1 and 2 PSX. I am trying to figure out if it is hard coded ASM pointers or what. It has completely fried my brain trying to figure it out.

 

[zero_g_monkey]

Updated the main page in the spoiler tag. Added a list of projects that is being worked on.