Gaming The Last Story - Translation Patch Project

[Debug]

Greetings Everyone..

Note : If you have nothing useful or informative to post, please do not post at all, i do not want to dig through thousands of posts to find the informative and useful replies and i really do not want to push away potential contributors because this becomes yet another troll infested, flame filled, argumentative and circular mess of useless rubish that barely has one post per page that pertains to the threads intent.


Firstly i really want to work on translating a couple of games this includes The Last Story.
I have been a programmer for my entire life and my entire career has pertained to that.
But I personally do not know any language other than British English, American English and Bad English.


I am aware lots of work had already been done on this and other games and is spread out all over the internet with no real organization.
There exists out there to my knowledge lots of useful data including but not limited to

partial text and voice translations.
images, screenshots and videos of translated text and subtitles.
tools for extracting files.
file format explanations.
translation tools.
tutorials for translating other games.
translated textures
leaked tools from game studios

What i need is a group of people willing to do and delegate work, spread out the work in a balanced and comfortable way
The i am talking about includes but is not limited to compiling the data mentioned above.

Also and just as important is

keeping a forum, post, topic or private website up to date.
maintaining communications between team members.
maintaining communications between with the end user community.
maintaining an online presence of our translations allowing the community to error check those translations and offer possible alternative translations.


I have plenty of skill when it comes to making tools, utilities and games
My last few jobs have been working at game studios as a senior game engine developer
Also i have reverse engineered a lot of games before

To give you a little insight into my abilities i worked on these and more

Ascent WoW server emulator
CellAO Anarchy online server emulator
Anarchy Online network packet sniffer and data overlay system
Mu Online razer packet hack tools
eve online server emulator

Additionally i worked on many commercial games at a bunch of studios and a couple of CG movie projects over the years
I will not list here for the time being but i am sure later we can expose my online resume and imdb pages

I have written code for the wii and modified many of the wii apps to add new features or modify existing ones i have custom builds of CFG and Sneek to name a couple

I can do any translation tool coding and any work decoding the file formats and making the patches even some grunt data entry work.

but i do not want to reinvent the wheel.
we need people to help
we need people who have already figured things out to come forward and give up any helpful information

the people we put together as the core team will basically be maintaining a community and communal effort to build this patch


The itself patch should and probably will be a binary patch applied to an ISO image ripped from the game dvd
We will definately no condone or otherwise approve of piracy
but i dislike riivolution and similar programs which can make things more unstable
theya lso add another layer of complexity
also using those programs is another thing end user side complicating installation
also making life for development harder if bugs or limitations exist in those programs



Once we get rolling i am willing to put on hold all my work
Even the main project a new wii backup disc image manager that was going to surpass wbfs backup manager
I will put all my spare time into this first project.

the code and tools will be open source hopefully allowing people to help improve code
maybe even to start other projects to translate other games and get a head start from our data and tools
unlike every other project so far where they hide tools and code and research so no one else can make a translation or use their data to maybe translate another game or heaven forbid a better patch!!!


Send me a personal message if you think you can be part of this
You must have the time to commit for the foreseeable future
If you will get bored in a few weeks or months or if personal life might impede you in any way you can still contribute as a community member
community members will be contributing in small ways dealing with core team members who manage the community and communal project data


Feel free to ask around and tell other people i am willing to try and do this and manage any and all code required i just need a project manager, a research team, a community relations team and some translators possibly a few more small roles exist but these are the main ones


Thanks for reading this messy programmer post, most of us coders lack simple skills such as punctuation and grammar because our brains are all used up remembering syntax and code for so many different programming languages



if you want to be part of this send me a personal message and we can get rolling



So i have some hosting ready and stuck it on my domain, now i just need people to maintain and administer it and people to populate it with data so we can get rolling!!!



The Last Story - Translation Patch - Collaboration ( Project Collaboration Tool )
http://laststory.debugmii.info



The Last Story - Translation Patch - Chat ( Project Live Chat Tool )
http://chat.laststory.debugmii.info



Thanks in advance everyone



Debug

 

[Webhazard]

You know that it will be released in europe?

 

[cooldreamxs]

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[cooldreamxs]

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[Tetram]

we need more people
we need to figure out the ISO file formats
we need to figure out the translation table file formats

I don't want to be rude at you, but it is very unlikely you find enough people speaking japanese and willing to translate a game that will soon be avalaible in five european languages.

It's a good idea though to translate it in other languages than the usual "multi 5", but i advice you to try again later, once the european version is avalaible (january or february 2012). Then I'm sure you'll find english speaking polish/greek/dutch (etc...) guys to help.

 

[cooldreamxs]

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[Debug]

this translation is mainly targeting ( US / English ) which will never be released

it is being done with multiple languages in mind

it allows for translation into any language at all it is just a matter of filling out an additional item in the translation tree for Spanish or German or Polish or Russian whatever you want

this is targeting more than one game as it is a real focus to build Wii Japanese Game Translation Tools than anything else

The editor so far is open ended allowing file formats to be added with a simple xml file that describes headers / compression / separate index files

You can also add compression formats with a DLL plugin to the editor which hopefully makes it fairly useful to work with any game

It will eventually let you extract the files from the ISO and put the files back when you are done either by command line use or similar of wiiscrubber not sure or writing code to do what wiiscrubber does

i have most of the tool planned out, i have the plugin system almost completely written as well

i have redesigned the editor several times and have ended up with a Tree view style editor that has the filename as the rootnode all the original strings as children of that and the children of each string is a translation unit for a specific language which allows several revisions of the translation allowing short hand versions, accurate versions, versions with slang, shorthand versions allow edits to games that do not use strlen or null terminated strings and fail when you try and edit string length longer or shorter than the original

Anyway back to re-installing windows and visual studio 2010 and the piles of service packs and additional software that comes next

 

[Tetram]

this translation is mainly targeting ( US / English ) which will never be released

Well, can't you play with the EU version ? I mean : if you can run hacked game on your wii, you should be able to make it region free, won't you ?

I'm sorry to tell you that a english translation is a nonsense. Other games need english translations. For this one, it's a waste of time.

I thought cooldreamsx was talking about the real project (translation in polish or so)...

By the way, good luck with your project. I wish you'll learn a lot of things you'll be able to use later in other translation projects

 

[Hells Malice]

TLS is already being translated into English.
It's a wii game so you can easily import or download it and play it on any Wii that could also use a translation patch.
Only downside: all british voice actors (lol, I kid..sort of. *looks at Xenoblade*).

Translate Tales of the World RM3 or Family Project (PSP).
Those two things are in dire need of a translation.

 

[Debug]

Eactly i play xenoblade i live in the states but was born and raised in the UK so it is weird and they changed all the character names and some place names and some of the phrases so i am saying we could even do a FAN translation of xenoblade with American English Text and Voice as well as one in Russian and Polish and Czech, the tool set and open nature of the project is here to help everyone translate everything, the next games we will work on are maybe pandoras tower and earth seeker and use the data from the posts about those with these tools and some new file type plugins and away we go

anyway i digress

1) we are translating to several languages i am not sure why Tetram thought we were not doing several languages like polish that is one of the languages i explicitly mentioned in the previous post the tool does several things it shows you the original text then has child nodes that can be added one for each target language and inside each target language there are 3 or more translations for each string in each language

i) machine translation, an automatic translation done by the the tool so we can have something to work with until real translations are done
ii) pure translation, for fan boys and purists this is the true translation with no alterations to make it contextually sensible in the target language
iii) smart or logical or context sensitive translation, for the casual every day gamer, some names and places are renamed and the translation is modified to make it grammatically, locally, contextually and logically correct
iv) custom translation, is the same as above but will probably include some dialect or area specific slang that is otherwise not fully known as standard outside of the locale

2) the TOOLS are important they allow us to quickly translate other games too and in fact we will be working on more than one game at once when we get to a certain stage in the process where we are waiting on translation not coding we will begin working on other games what do people want translated anyway?

3) we are hoping we can get an itial machine translated patch turn around really fast i already have some of the unicode text files extracted and decompressed from the game archives which consist of 3 files for each archive there is a PFS a PKH and a PK you need all 3 to get the files extracted and decompressed now i am finishing the tool with those .u16 files i have extracted also i have .texture and .d2b files so far and am trying to figure those out as well but i have the core important text localization unicode files figures out and working in the tool

to reiterate

I UNDERSTAND.... they are making a European version of this game which will release some time in 2012 but it is still not 100% project have been axed numerous times when they are weeks away from release so don't count on it or sell your soul for a copy just yet, the fact that it will be released in Europe does not give us an american or Polish or Russian version and this project will.

 

[cooldreamxs]

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[cooldreamxs]

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[PsyBlade]

reply to removed part of post

 

[Debug]

The aim actually will be to make a patch for the EU and the JP versions allowing you to patch either to your native locale

I am not sure what he means about not paying import fees i think that is a mistake i do not condone piracy and do not want people to use this patch on pirated material

The benefits of this patch when it is complete and even before it is complete are numerous hopefully you can slow down and think for a second and see these.

1) an open source tool set that can be modified to be usable on any other game
2) a tool set non programmers can expand with simple .XML file format descriptions
3) a tool set programmers can expand with .DLL file format processor plugins
4) a translation of The Last Story into American English
5) a translation of The Last Story into any locale we can find translators for
6) an automatic base line translation into any locale using tool built in google api machine translation
7) a purist or fan translation means names and places are not renamed for different locales
8) tools will produce intermediate XML files that can be shared allowing groups to share translations
9) easy to add a new locale, translate it and with a simple click the patch is built

I am sure the benefits outweigh the simple argument of the are making a British English translation and a couple of other European translations already

 

[cooldreamxs]

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[Debug]

Well now we have the ISO's pac files extracted the contents are being reverse engineered

The content files file extensions seem to be pretty much useless at determining what is inside a file since a group of files with the same extension and very similar names that maybe differ by a single numeric character in the file name part have totally different contents

in a group of files your likely to have

a plain text file which contains things like scripts, materials, shaders etc
a couple of files with the chnkdata wii text header
an xml file which contains varied meta data
a couple of files with the chnkdata wii modl header
a file with the @EFF magic


the EFF file we have partially reverse engineered the general file structure has been determined, and almost all of the header has been figured out, we are down to determining the content of the arrays of data in each block now

the first array data type has been partially decoded out of maybe 4 possible types in this file


Anyone who enjoys playing with calculators, notepads, post it notes, hex editors, binary comparison tools and binary diff tools, unicode and ascii string dumpers and strucutre overlay tools and wants to help reverse engineer some of these file formats the help would be appreciated the more people we have the faster it gets done and right now i have done everything so far

wrote the tools to parse and extract the pk,pfs,pkh files which also automatically extracts u8 and ARJ archives it finds as an extracted file from the pk, designed the localization editing tool and most of that is done also just waiting on data

 

[Thanos266]

Keep up the good work.

 

[cooldreamxs]

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[Thanos266]

Cant wait to see it

 

[doombringer]

WE can definitely do this !

Thanks for the effort!