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Deleted-371971
Guest
Can't you guys change the property of the text window size?Yep, this is a common trend with Japanese games, they like to do their line breaks manually, which is a crappy way of doing it in Japanese, but when you convert it to English, it turns outright hellish. There is a limited number of text windows and space, and that space is measured to fit the Japanese text. When you change it to English, which takes a lot more letters to spell something, suddenly you have much less space to work with.
Take a saying that comes up in this game for example: 一石二鳥, which means "killing two birds with one stone." In Japanese it's exactly four characters, in English it's thirty two including spaces. It's not always this extreme, but in general, this restriction is a huge killer for Japanese games that are translated to English.
Because not only is Japanese much more flexible with nuance, so many things are lost in a translation to English (take honorifics or politeness levels), with the space restriction on top of that, sometimes when you're playing a US version of a JP game, you're missing like half the content of the dialogue, since there was simply no space to put it.
So while Japanese elitists can be obnoxious, there actually is some truth in it (but usually they are elitists for the wrong reason.)
Luckily, PSP2i is relatively generous with its space for story text windows, so with some well thought out phrasing and some smuggling (transferring sentences from one window to another linked one), almost nothing was lost in the story dialog.
At first I was hoping that Jam could find a way to add more space, but apparently it's not that easy (or everyone would be doing it).
And the fun doesn't stop there: In Japanese, all the characters are generally the same size. So when you have a four character word, it takes up four characters every time, so you know how many characters per line you have to work with.
When you change it to alphabet, or specifically, to the PSP font, not all letters are the same width. IIIII is much more narrow than WWWWW, for example. That's why even if you adhere to a set character limit per line, sometimes it overshoots, as in the example picture above.
This issue without word wrapping is really common I feel, the official US version of vanilla PSP2 has it too, just look at where the line breaks are in text windows, they are completely irregular.
You can see it in some bigger games too, take Suikoden V for example (Googled images):
Which is almost certainly because of the same issue.
It's kind of an interesting subject, that's why I wanted to write a bit about it. You'd think that this is a really archaic system, but it still shows up in modern games too.
But in games like these, the translation is actually a relatively small part of the actual work (assuming you understand the source and target language well), the biggest challenge is to wrestle and pin down the limited space, and make it submit to you.
As Weyu mentioned he asked me to enlarge the chat windows quite a while back, just finished it today, didn't come out too bad.
Here's a comparison between the original and the new wider windows,
the text is just for test purposes of course.
I also had to expand the chat log to match.
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Deleted-371971
Guest
EXCELLENT!!Looks like a true game dev work or a professional game hacker,you sir sure are good on what you do I would love to test this right now!XD Anyway im looking forward to this project as its looking very good!!As Weyu mentioned he asked me to enlarge the chat windows quite a while back, just finished it today, didn't come out too bad.
Here's a comparison between the original and the new wider windows,
the text is just for test purposes of course.
I also had to expand the chat log to match.
Now you know why... JamRules.
*ba dum tss*And I ask myself, what is hardest to learn: Hacking or Japanese? (Thinking about the second one.)
Would have been done a lot sooner if I was
Now you know why... JamRules.
And I ask myself, what is hardest to learn: Hacking or Japanese? (Thinking about the second one.)
If we're comparing learning how to rom-hack for specific circumstances (e.g. English translation for psp) then learning Japanese is going to take much longer, worth doing though.
Also knowing Japanese obviously helps when trying to figure out how to hack things otherwise you might get a bit lost. I've been working on building my Japanese for much longer than I've been romhacking
(still a beginner at both)
Last edited by JamRules,
I suppose so...maybe the new anime Phantasy Star Online 2: The Animation will get us official US servers or a new game if the series is really popular like other animes that are based off MMOs.
Maaan, this anime had so many possibilities... But this will "feature an original story".
But yeah, let's hope this will attract new players. (And then, more games/localizations.)
Just started learning Japanese! (Since I failed miserably in hacking.)
We should be ready for the 2020 Olympics.
I don't know, personally I don't think that'l happen. From what I've seen, the anime has almost nothing to do with the show, just a bunch of generic high school students playing Pso2. As much as I dislike SAO, it at least had a premise with people dying and all, but I don't see how the game will have anything to do with the actual conflict. I wanted an anime about the Arks and how Falz is fuckin shit up again and darkers invading planets, but no, we get a cash grab by sega riding off the coat tails of sword art and log horizon. Heck, I'll probably dislike even more than sword art since the anime's a slap in the face to fans of the actual goddamn franchise. I almost don't want it to be popular because of all this, I mean, for all it's short comings, sao at least tried, y'know? Pso2: The Animation will probably end up another generic anime in an already saturated market.
/rant
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Deleted-371971
Guest
I actually just added that, I thought I already did but hadn't.
But yeah, the release date question has been asked/mentioned many times before.
No release date has been decided yet, if one does get decided there'll be an update post.
There's still a lot to do so don't expect it to be soon.
Also it's very hard to estimate how long it will take as new issues always seem to arise,
at this stage I really have no idea when it will be ready
Last edited by JamRules,
He does it all the time. He'll post about an issue then edit it and be like "Nope, fixed it" before anyone can reply.
If any of you were hoping to use the online multiplayer aspect of this game, unfortunately Sega just closed the servers for them permanantly so you're going to have to use xlink kai or something from now on.
