Hacking [PSP] La Pucelle Ragnarok Translation

[Shrunken Pixel]

Wasn't planning on joining a community over something like this, but your patch blew me away ChepChep

The speed at which you're getting through this is amazing, and I have faith it's only going to get faster now you have most of the process perfected. Thanks you you we stand a real good chance at playing this game in English so thank you!

Though it's not a priority and a small thing in the grand scheme of things, I was wondering why some of the font characters used in the menus and status screens appear to be consistently double-width while the rest of the font is single-width? Are characters from the wrong font being accidentally used in these cases, or is this a deliberate workaround for technical reasons (such as individual characters not being available in the slimmer font).

I've noticed the problem characters appear to be with all instances of Capital-A, Capital-V, Capital-Q, Small-Q, Small-X, Small-Y and (possibly) Space. It's possible there are others not listed here (not sure) but it's a shame that these don't look right as the rest of the font looks like it's been properly converted by NISA.

 

[Linka]

@ Shrunken Pixel

I believe it that at some point in the thread, those letters in particular are sorta problem spots, since he's probably using the default roman letters font that's in the game. I think he can't really get rid of the double-spacing without a lot of effort, either.

 

[ChepChep]

I also have an update to the LaPucelleToolPack.

Version 5 has some bug fixes to the compiling scripts since it caused broken scripts to be output. I also add a new textbox and button to count the number of chars so that it makes it easier to tell if a line will go outside a textbox in the game. (Any line with more than 24 chars)

www.tarranoth.com/LPR/LaPucelleToolpackV5.zip

Any questions please let me know.

 

[ChepChep]

Shrunken Pixel,

There is an issue with the single width font in LPR. They did not include certain ASCII characters in the font so for some I have to use double width. I would use all double width except for some files I have not figure out a way to add more spaces without breaking the game since I am limited in characters.

I know its not perfect but my goal is to try to get the game 95% translated so that anyone can fully play through the game in English. Later I may go back and try to fix these technical issues. Once the technical issues are solved, it mostly then becomes a find and replace in a hexedit / text editor.

 

[Shrunken Pixel]

Thanks for the explanation - as I said earlier it's hardly a priority. I'm just grateful to be able to have some way of enjoying this game, just being able to do that would be wonderful. Spending too much time trying to fix little bugs that are probably more trouble than they're worth just keeps the project from pushing forward.

Thanks for the updated toolkit

 

[ChepChep]

Not everything works in the toolkit but I have included the source so people can modify it for their own use.

 

[Shrunken Pixel]

I've decided to see if I can solve any of those problems. Might not get anywhere, but may as well try

It took a few goes, but I managed to get the new font that's included in with the toolkit to work properly in the game. This font has all the missing letters included. The only problem I can see so far is the spacing seems to be uneven. There must be a reason for that - my next task I think

I have noticed that this new font messes-up the in-game talk text just a little. Looking at that font within the editor it becomes clear why; it needs to be more accurately lined up to the grid. I can't seem to be able to convert PNG files exported from the toolkit that I have edited back into TXP files without the toolkit crashing, but this is clearly possible because someone made that new font in the toolkit.

 

[Cyan]

Hello,
Thank you for working on this translation

It's great to work and provide files with other users, but providing original or modified files are forbidden (they contains copyrighted data).
I will ask you to provide your files using patches instead of providing the already patched files. It's more work for you but it's better for us (for legal reason), and for users.

I'll also ask that you remove the 3 files on your server (instead of deleting each of your posts)
EBOOT.bin, START_JP.LZS, SCRIPTPACK.DAT


There are different methods you could use to provide the translation:
1- Provide a patch for the .ISO (easier for end user, and should be the final released method)
2- Provide one patch for each files (faster for you, or for other users working with you if you provide the current working file)


Method 1:
after patching and reconstructing your ISO, you create a PPF patch using PPF studio.
It will generate a file with only the differences between the original ISO and yours, the patch will contain only your work and your texts (no original data included).
The end user uses PPF-o-Matic to patch their original ISO and produce a translated one.
The advantage is that it's easier for the user : They don't need to unpack/replace/repack their ISO, and PPF has an automatic check to verify if the original ISO is the correct one (As there are two different ISO, users will know that they have the wrong or the good one before trying on their console).

Method 2:
You can do the same with PPF, but apply it on each modified files (it will produce 1 ppf per file). It might be faster for you as the files are smaller than the full ISO, but end users will still have to open/patch/replace/repack the game.

Method 3:
The "LaPucelleToolpack" could include a "generate/apply" patch function, instead of using PPF.
It will use your own format.

If I knew python, I would help. I think it would be great to have the tool fully automate the file selection : you select the extracted game folder, and each tab in the program display a different file's content.
You could add a individual or full save/patch feature.
But I understand it's a lot of work. It's just an idea. (Deufeufeu did that (not latest version) in his python editor when working on FFTactic translation. It even had a public server to retrieve/store translated string to allow multiple translators working at the same time, and integrated preview. he was a python teacher, maybe you could learn things)


Sorry to ask this change, but I hope you understand the reason.

 

[ChepChep]

Cyan,

I understand... I will try to figure out a way not be posting the files directly on GBATemp or links. I misunderstood the forum rules here since I see people doing this all the time.

I have broken the links from my server so that the posts here at GBATemp will no longer work for those three files.

-ChepChep

 

[Cyan]

Thank you.
I Wish you good luck on completing this projet

I'll try it on my PSP 2000 (5.33) and let you know if it works.


Edit:
If you want, I can give you access to the first post of the thread, you could maintain it with latest news.
It's how we usually do on this forum, instead of reading all the pages, users check the first post to see progress.

You can post all the pictures, and a translation % for each files/chapters.

Edit2 : Done.
I've made a proper (temporary) first post with project status.
you can now edit it too.

 

[Shrunken Pixel]

It's not just a matter of having links or not. The files themselves shouldn't be available at all. To keep completely legal only the PPF should be available anywhere online, folks who own the game will already have the requisite files and all that's needed is the patch - and anyone who wants to poke around with the modified files could easily patch their ISO and then extract those files with UMDGen.

The UMDGen itself can be used to apply PPF patches, and doing so is much simpler and reliable then replacing three files from two different places in the directory structure, especially as UMDGen doesn't always overwrite files correctly - I've sometimes had to delete all three original files off the ISO before copying the new files across otherwise the patches don't always take.

It also means that people would only have to download one file with each update instead of three, and you'd only have to upload one file, so it's much easier and straightforward for everyone

 

[ChepChep]

Shrunken Pixel,

I am looking into what method makes the most sense. I agree I prefer one patch to apply in UMDGen. I am going to try to generate it today. Last time I tried this it did generate a 200 MB file which I do not want to be hosting that large of a patch.

Also I have been playing around some with the toolkit to convert png to txp. Something still is not right in the code. I have pretty much decided to wait to play with it until I am done translating the story. If you get anywhere with it please let me know.

 

[Cyan]

if the patch is this big, maybe the files are moved, not in the same order in the lba table.
Do you always rebuilt lba/file structure ?

edit:
That's why deufeufeu used his own patching method for NDS games (extract the game, patch file, recreate the ROM), it made smaller and more legal patches, because it didn't contained moved copyright parts.

 

[Shrunken Pixel]

Your toolkit is amazing ChepChep - I've successfully used it to extract the archives from Disgaea 2 Dark Hero Days, the font TXP files and scripts are all completely readable by the toolkit. The only difference is in the FNT file itself so it needs to be remapped but that shouldn't be too much work. I'm having a go at it at the moment and if it's successful I'll let you know as this would bypass the need to edit the TXP file completely.

EDIT: I've successfully made a start on this:

The only incompatibility visible here is likely caused by the D2DHD font glyphs being a different positions in the grid, corresponding to different glyph-widths stored elsewhere. It's likely there's a file that controls the width of each glyph, so some glyphs are being considered by the game as double-width when they should be single and vice-versa. If I can identify how the game determines glyph-width, that would also solve the problem of wide single-spaces.

 

[Linka]

I'd recommend that while it is cool to have constant updates whenever you make progress, ChepChep, probably would be best to wait until you get more chapters done before you sort out a different distribution method. In fact, might be better to try to get all of the translation work done for the main story before it. While it might take a while, it'd probably cover more ground.

I just have to wonder how people're gonna handle the extra chapters? I think I remember that someone had started a video translation of it, but I don't know if they actually got anywhere.

Edit: Oh, hey, found the stuff. Here's the first video, and you can find the other chapters on their account. Seems to be a partial translation through YouTube's closed captioning, but it might be doable to at least understand the gist of the chapters.

 

[Shrunken Pixel]

At the moment Chep's handling the translation wonderfully, I merely decided to assist by having a look and seeing if I can improve or tweak certain things that aren't worth diverting his attention towards right now, and the updates are there so people can see the visual difference and compare/contrast between how things look. If I'm going off in the wrong direction then it's vital people provide feedback - if I can fix the width problem, do people prefer to use the D2DHD font or do you think the original font is nicer?

For all intents and purposes I shan't be releasing anything until I get things fairly finalized in the area I'm working, and until everything's tested - having multiple contributors in a project such as this can complicate things if new files are pushed out too often, and I don't want to put files out that could break Chep's hard work and introduce bugs, so you should consider us working on independent projects that may be merged at some point later down the line.

If anyone's assisting Chep in translating the games files, those people need to formally announce what files they're working on otherwise we could have multiple contributors replicating each-other's work and that wastes time.

 

[Linka]

Shrunken Pixel

I personally prefer LPR's font better. DHD's font looks sorta... strange and squished at the moment, but even other than that, I don't really like the sorta sharp feel of the text. LRP's is softer, a little smaller, but also feels cleaner.

 

[Shrunken Pixel]

Thanks for the feedback Linka

I wasn't really sure, I'm used to both. The larger issue is that due to various difficulties the chat-text in the recent update uses the double-width secondary font that's hardly ever used in the games themselves. Most NIS games that are officially released in English use a much narrower font than the rather uniform-shaped font that's being used here so it's sort of a trade-off. I haven't abandoned the idea of using the original font with missing character included, but that involves difficulties of it's own.

 

[ChepChep]

My original idea was to try to use the font from Disgaea or Disgaea 2 but I never got around to trying to rip it out of the ISO and then try to insert it into LPR. I can see in the text of Disgaea 2 that they used the two byte length Shift-JIS format but used single width chars in the game.

 

[ChepChep]

Shrunken Pixel,

It is really just me working on the hacking and translation. I have had some help from others but I pretty much control all the code source, translation and decisions right now since I have done 95% of the work.

I would prefer the font from LPR. I will include anything you work on as long as it does not break anything I am working on. That has been my issue with the toolkit so far is that I cannot figure out how to insert the txp file into the game without breaking it on the PSP. It works fine in the emulator after "fixing" the font.