No need to ask whether the project is dead or not, I have sunk hundreds of hours in this and Jam probably as well— barring some life-changing experience we have absolutely no reason nor intention to drop it.
I can't speak for him, but I volunteered for this because I wanted to do it, and he most likely does as well.
Heck, even yesterday on a Saturday we were still communicating about this past midnight.
Anyway, work has started on the in-mission text now. That used to be an undecipherable mass of files that was 51 MB of nothing but plain text spread over 8000 files, but Jam did his magic and cut it down to a more manageable 1 MB by removing duplicates.
More importantly, he has managed to merge the 8000 files into an amount you can count on two hands. The former would've been an organizational nightmare (think a warehouse with 8000 paper boxes all with a little something in them) and it would've taken months just to sort them. Now I have a smaller amount of files with many entries in them which is much easier to work with.
This is still a lot of content though, the biggest file has around a quarter million words. For comparison, the same file for the original US version of PSP2 has 39K words. (Without Jam's wizardry the word count for these files would've been many millions.)
These are mostly single words and names without a context, so they take more time and effort to do than dialogues (where you can translate entire sentences at once and you also have a context) so this stuff takes time.
It's just Jam and I right now it seems, but both of us are working hard on this, so worry not.
If you want to help, there are several things that could be done:
-Help us set up an English wiki
I mentioned this before, but having a comprehensive English resource for this would be useful. You don't even need to know Japanese probably, you can already make a very good start just by copy pasting item data from the JP wiki which are mostly numbers. And there's the US PSP2 wiki where large chunks can be lifted from.
So if you have time and the motivation to do so and know how to build a wiki, feel free to give it a try.
I can supply you with romanization of names and terms we used if you need them.
-Buy the game
This would probably help in some way and to get future games from SEGA, and it's only like 5-10 bucks nowadays.
-Discuss and share
If you're a lurker or someone who hasn't posted yet, feel free to share your impressions or just talk about the game or the series. More activity is always good. I'm not saying you should mindlessly thank us, but if you have something to contribute, do it!
We're only human after all, and no one wants to work on something that very few people will peruse.
So the more activity we see, the more rewarding it is from our point of view.
And in the same note, if you can generate more activity and publicity for us, that would be appreciated too. For example, if you know a forum where people would probably be interested in this project, or you have your own blog or gaming-related news site, you're welcome to write something about us.
We don't have a lot of publicity outside of this site and the game is pretty old, so it's easy for this to fly under the radar, which would be a shame since this is a worthwhile game.
Of course that doesn't mean you should mindlessly spam other sites with this link though, that helps no one.
Or make your own media related to this game, such as gameplay videos, challenges or try to promote
online play with others in order to increase interest. These are just some ideas, there are many other possibilities you might think of.
I can't speak for him, but I volunteered for this because I wanted to do it, and he most likely does as well.
Heck, even yesterday on a Saturday we were still communicating about this past midnight.
Anyway, work has started on the in-mission text now. That used to be an undecipherable mass of files that was 51 MB of nothing but plain text spread over 8000 files, but Jam did his magic and cut it down to a more manageable 1 MB by removing duplicates.
More importantly, he has managed to merge the 8000 files into an amount you can count on two hands. The former would've been an organizational nightmare (think a warehouse with 8000 paper boxes all with a little something in them) and it would've taken months just to sort them. Now I have a smaller amount of files with many entries in them which is much easier to work with.
This is still a lot of content though, the biggest file has around a quarter million words. For comparison, the same file for the original US version of PSP2 has 39K words. (Without Jam's wizardry the word count for these files would've been many millions.)
These are mostly single words and names without a context, so they take more time and effort to do than dialogues (where you can translate entire sentences at once and you also have a context) so this stuff takes time.
It's just Jam and I right now it seems, but both of us are working hard on this, so worry not.
If you want to help, there are several things that could be done:
-Help us set up an English wiki
I mentioned this before, but having a comprehensive English resource for this would be useful. You don't even need to know Japanese probably, you can already make a very good start just by copy pasting item data from the JP wiki which are mostly numbers. And there's the US PSP2 wiki where large chunks can be lifted from.
So if you have time and the motivation to do so and know how to build a wiki, feel free to give it a try.
I can supply you with romanization of names and terms we used if you need them.
-Buy the game
This would probably help in some way and to get future games from SEGA, and it's only like 5-10 bucks nowadays.
-Discuss and share
If you're a lurker or someone who hasn't posted yet, feel free to share your impressions or just talk about the game or the series. More activity is always good. I'm not saying you should mindlessly thank us, but if you have something to contribute, do it!
We're only human after all, and no one wants to work on something that very few people will peruse.
So the more activity we see, the more rewarding it is from our point of view.
And in the same note, if you can generate more activity and publicity for us, that would be appreciated too. For example, if you know a forum where people would probably be interested in this project, or you have your own blog or gaming-related news site, you're welcome to write something about us.
We don't have a lot of publicity outside of this site and the game is pretty old, so it's easy for this to fly under the radar, which would be a shame since this is a worthwhile game.
Of course that doesn't mean you should mindlessly spam other sites with this link though, that helps no one.
Or make your own media related to this game, such as gameplay videos, challenges or try to promote
online play with others in order to increase interest. These are just some ideas, there are many other possibilities you might think of.
