I didn't play them but do you think that among MM2:Realoaded, MM3 and MM:Season of Steel, MM3 is the best?

YAou can try asking here as well http://www.romhacking.net/forum/ .

 

I do recall someone taking a look at this before, nothing outrageous was found but I can not remember any specifics and a search is not getting me far.

Anyway I will have to look at the game itself - .pak is pretty generic as far as extensions go and could be anything. You do not need dev tools -- I dare say every translation you have ever seen for a console game probably did not have dev tools used in it.

Would you call yourself a translator and if so then I probably want to link http://gbatemp.net/threads/densetsus-translation-toolbox.311523/

 

Afraid my little netbook is the only thing set up to handle DS ROMs that I have with me at this point and hacking things on such a low res is no fun at all so I am going to struggle to do my usual full workup

Anyway in the base directory there are some NFTR fonts which is nice as that means you have the encoding. It could still be another font/setup is used in the game but as I also see FontColor.NCLR I would wager on it being the chosen font for the game. The game otherwise does seem to almost exclusively use the .pak extension. There is also a folder called script with sub directories having all sorts of things. I have not checked it yet but http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/utilities/download-nftredit-1-9-f29196.html is usually pretty nice for this sort of thing, crystaltile2's more limited abilities here worked so it should work in that.

I usually find in these situations a big file and a small file of the same type are good things to have. In this case I would also grab some non script related .pak files just in case something odd happens and I could figure something out with it.
I could already see in Cystaltile2 that the starting values would be different (it tries to detect things, including compression, based upon them and had all sorts of ones going on)
Big or small it looks like 8 bytes before it has ASCII what could be file or section names, even for the single file non script thing I grabbed.

No immediately obvious file size but the first value might well be some kind of file/section count.

Names appear to be of random lengths as well and no size value there (just 00 between them, maybe 0000 to end or it might just be alignment)

The later 4 bytes might well be a first file start location and that is usually at the end of the file name section so no idea where sizes might be hiding. Normally now I would try to find a known format (I mentioned NCLR and NFTR earlier so it is a good bet that they do use some somewhere in this .pak stuff) but none of my initial 5 random (3 script) samples had that, though I did see .txt in there. This is mainly to see if they had some kind of size value at the start of things. I watched a video though and there did not appear to be much 2d in the normal game (it looks 2d but that is classic texture overlay and the amount of .tex I was seeing would seem to indicate texture rather than classic 2d and with it many known formats), though the UI is probably 2d at some level. As I was not seeing much compression (the rom barely trims at all and is just under 64 megs but the 7z version is 36) I tried a normal strings search on the ROM to see what shakes loose and back trace that to a file but I am going to have to leave it there for now as it would take all day on this screen (I ran a min length of 4 search and was north of 60000 hits, most of which were noise, before I even got out of the first maybe 10th of the ROM). I did see BCA0 though which is associated with various DS 3d formats in the NSBMD family and a more directed strings search pointed me at the the one in the submenu folder. The first value did still point to the end of the name section but what should have been a normal graphics format was not there and it appeared somewhat later so I imagine that is where the size values are located. I have to run though so I will leave it there for now.
I should also note I grabbed the one from the xls npc file and saw a bunch of things saying MSG in there which does mean the script/translation might not be contained to the script directory.

 

Thanks for taking the time to do that. I'm afraid a lot of what you said is a little beyond me, as I'm not all too familiar with files commonly used in DS games, and I don't have much experience with romhacking in general.
In regards to your comments about 2D and 3D, the game uses a mix of the two, with the world/backgrounds being in 3D but all the character and monster sprites being in 2D, as well as the UI. The only exception is the tank status screen, which displays your tanks in 3D.
As to where the script is stored, it seems to be in multiple places. The xls folder in particular seems to have a number of things in it, like item data, but the main barrier here still seems to be manipulating the .pak files.

 

So what are prospects on this translation?

 

Here's what I can figure out of the pak format:

[Header]
0x00 - 2 bytes - File count
0x02 - 4 bytes - File table offset
0x06 - 2 bytes - Filename tree offset

0x08 - Filename strings

[Filename tree] array of nodes with the following format:
2 bytes - number of children
for each child:
2 bytes - offset of string
2 bytes - file table index if this is a leaf node (odd), otherwise offset in file table of first child (even)

[File table] array
2 bytes - file size
2 bytes - offset

Warning: Spoilers inside!

Example - Mini\TANK\tex\pack_data.pak:
116 files
Offset/length info starts at 0x041E
Filename info starts at 0x015A
File #1 starts at 0x7BE and is 0xA0 bytes
File #2 starts at 0x85E and is 0xA0 bytes
etc.

Parsed filenames:
BALLISTIC.TEX
BULLET1.TEX
BULLET2.TEX
CLIFF.TEX
CLOUD_01.TEX
CLOUD_02.TEX
CC1.TEX
CC2.TEX
CC3.TEX
CC4.TEX
CURSOR_1.TEX
EF_01_01.TEX
EF_02_01.TEX
EF_02_02.TEX
EF_02_03.TEX
EF_03_01.TEX
EF_03_02.TEX
EN_01_01.TEX
EN_01_02.TEX
EN_01_03.TEX
etc.

Filename tree:

0900
1500 0003 B
3C00 2803 C
7200 9003 E
A300 9C05 F
F200 0406 GR
F500 7700 HOUSE
FF00 7900 MOUNTAIN
1201 1806 P
5001 E007 T

0200
0800 0100 ALLISTIC.TEX
2300 1403 ULLET

0200
1700 0300 1.TEXT
1D00 0500 2.TEXT

0300
3A00 4403 L
3E00 6C03 C
5100 1500 URSOR_1.TEX

0200
2C00 0700 IFF.TEX
3400 5803 OUD_0

0200
1700 0900 1.TEX
1D00 0B00 2.TEX

0400
1700 0D00 1.TEX
1D00 0F00 2.TEX
4500 1100 3.TEX
4B00 1300 4.TEX

0200
6E00 A403 F_0
8200 F003 N

0300
5D00 1700 1_01.TEX
6600 C003 2_0
6A00 DC03 3_0

0300
1700 1900 1.TEX
1D00 1B00 2.TEX
4500 1D00 3.TEX

0200
1700 1F00 1.TEX
1D00 2100 2.TEX

0200
8000 0404 0
8700 BC04 _

0500
7400 3004 1_0
6600 4C04 2_0
6A00 6804 3_0
7800 8404 4_0
7C00 A004 5_0

0300
1700 2300 1.TEX
1D00 2500 2.TEX
4500 2700 3.TEX
etc.

Parsing the filenames is way over-complicated, but since all the offset and length info for the files themselves is in a separate table after that, the filename tree doesn't need to be modified at all to reinsert the files. You could even just ignore it and number off the files in order. The font uses Unicode encoding, so identifying which files contain text would be straightforward enough.

 

The weird filename format was an interesting challenge so I went ahead and wrote an inserter for it:

Download Metal3Trans v1.3

It only supports item names so far, but figure out how other files are formatted and I'll add more of them to it.

EDIT: Updated to support more files.

 

Yes, sadly, as it doesn't seem possible for me to extract the raw text. If someone else were to offer to handle all of that side of things, perhaps, but for now, no.

 

Hi fiends I was surprised when i found this topic . Im a big fan of the metalmax saga and always think , why nobody translating these games. I have some expperience in text translation but not much.In past years I make some progress with this game and i like to share it. I found the game scripts in the data\xls\pack_data.pak ,data\xls\npc\pack_data.pak and data\xls\data\pack_data.pak and almost all the graphics are inside of data\Menu\pack_data.pak until today Im not able to extract it from the .pak compression but i worked on the compressed file .pak and do some things. Last days I tested the tool release here by darthnemesis and it works perfectly thanks to darthnemesis finally a could decompress all these evil .pak files. Now a work with the trans of the ITEMLIST.NAM with some progress that only countaings the items names is easy not the same thing with the story script and found the pointers in the files SETUMEI_ITEM.SET , SETUMEI_SUBABILITY.SET and SETUMEI_TOKUGI.SET in xls folder. Please darthN continue updating the tool to work with the other files please count with my help for everything you need ok. I'm not a japanese translator if everyone want to colaborate with the project mail me and I send you the scripts files to translate. All I want is to see this great game translated. I put this captures screens of my advance.

— Posts automatically merged - Please don't double post! —

These are the screens of my advance.

 

Could release some alpha patch with what you translated? By the way way my antivirus program says that your file contains a virus and deletes it. Is that a false positive?