ROM Hack [Translation] Dragon Quest VII

[GreenZeldaCap]

Would help if I knew Japanese. Good luck with this. Do you need help on the coding side?

 

[michelthemaster]

Go go with your Dragon Quest Monsters 3D Translation! Thank you guys so much for your work :-)

 

[Helmax]

Would help if I knew Japanese. Good luck with this. Do you need help on the coding side?

I could use help with font changes, and hacking the table used for naming characters (only supporting japanese characters right now)

 

[upfromtheskies]

That would be a great idea, if I hadn't already thought of that and tried it!
I have the full DW7 PSX script dumped, and yes its in english.

The problem is its formatted completely different, and nothing lines up.
For instance, the DIALOG portion of DQ73DS, the very first file, is the very first story scene, and they are in different formats in different folders.
Everything is just mixed together with DW7 scripts, and I have yet to take the time to figure it out.

There is a simple solution to this... dump the script from both the Japanese and English DQVII PSX games, place the scripts side by side, then search the Japanese PSX script for script from the Japanese 3DS game and it will match up with the English script.

 

[Helmax]

There is a simple solution to this... dump the script from both the Japanese and English DQVII PSX games, place the scripts side by side, then search the Japanese PSX script for script from the Japanese 3DS game and it will match up with the English script.

I looked into this briefly but I'm not accustomed to PSX script dumping.
Any one who knows how. Please feel free. I have the game and I can dump it to my PC

 

[davhuit]

That's essentially what I'm saying, but I need people willing to
put the man hours in outside of myself.
I built and will provide the tools, just need the workers.



UTF-8 for the most part.
Had to decrypt one of the file formats, but it was fairly simple.
People that worked on DQM:J2 for DS helped with that.

That would be a great idea, if I hadn't already thought of that and tried it!
I have the full DW7 PSX script dumped, and yes its in english.

The problem is its formatted completely different, and nothing lines up.
For instance, the DIALOG portion of DQ73DS, the very first file, is the very first story scene, and they are in different formats in different folders.
Everything is just mixed together with DW7 scripts, and I have yet to take the time to figure it out.

Additionally, there are new features and changes in this game that didnt exist in the other one, with extra dialog, new/missing characters.

Without the japanese script to somehow compare to, and that one doesnt like up with DW7 either, this idea ends up not being that great.
However we have it as a reference

Depend. I did it for Secret of Mana and managed to do it pretty fast. Extracted the retranslated french script of the iPhone version and pasted it back in the Snes rom.

But, to do that easily, you need :

- The Japanese script of the PlayStation version.
- The english script of the Playstation version (in the same format as the japanese one, so extracted with the same method).
- The japanese script of the 3DS version.

Then, it can be done manually (it's how I did for Secret of Mana) but if you are a programmer, you can also make a program just for that, which will compare the japanese and english script of the PlayStation version (to link the original dialogs and their translation), and which will then copy-paste those translations over the same dialogs on the 3DS script.

If you have a proof of concept with some texts reinserted, I'm okay to help.

And I might know someone which might have the english and japanese script of the PlayStation version (as I know someone who was working on a french translation of it). At least, I'm sure he have the english script dumped properly (and might be able to dump the japanese one, cost nothing to ask him), and I can read japanese so at least, I would be able to do some copy-paste the script manually, like I did with "Secret of Mana" (the most recent translation I did is here : http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2301/), under the nickname Hiei- (davhuit is the nickname of my brother, which is the one who originally signed here, though he never posted anything personally).

Though, of course, it would be faster by doing a tool to do it automatically, if we can get both PlayStation Script (Japanese and English one).

 

[Celice]

If you have a proof of concept with some texts reinserted, I'm okay to help. And I might know someone which might have the english and japanese script of the PlayStation version (as I know someone who was working on a french translation of it).

Do you know if the French translation is completed yet? If so, you/your friend should submit it to romhacking.net's translation archive

 

[davhuit]

Do you know if the French translation is completed yet? If so, you/your friend should submit it to romhacking.net's translation archive

It's not, yet. I think it was actually put in stand-by because of the 3DS version announcement (as the last games remakes have been translated in many languages, including french, DQ4-5-6-8-9 are available in french) and dunno if it got restarted or not, but if it was ready, I would know it.

 

[Manki]

Iv'e been looking into investing my time into translating this game as well. Feel free to P.M. me. Let's make great progress.

 

[Celice]

Iv'e been looking into investing my time into translating this game as well. Feel free to P.M. me. Let's make great progress.

The guys over at Woodus might also want your help, too

http://www.woodus.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=26943&page=13

 

[Nathan Drake]

The guys over at Woodus might also want your help, too

http://www.woodus.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=26943&page=13

The guy who made the topic here is from the team there, so you basically just told them that the people working on this project may also want that person working on this very same project. I'm not sure if the redundancy was intentional, or if you were simply trying to direct them towards where they would be more likely to get a faster response.

 

[Celice]

The guy who made the topic here is from the team there, so you basically just told them that the people working on this project may also want that person working on this very same project. I'm not sure if the redundancy was intentional, or if you were simply trying to direct them towards where they would be more likely to get a faster response.

Ah, I didn't know they were part of the same team. The Woodus guys have their stuff altogether, including already inserted text, whereas the guy who started this thread seems like this was his first project by some of his responses

 

[Nathan Drake]

Ah, I didn't know they were part of the same team. The Woodus guys have their stuff altogether, including already inserted text, whereas the guy who started this thread seems like this was his first project by some of his responses

lol yeah, it was all kind of ambiguous at first, but somewhere on the first page, the OP did say that they were a part of the Dragon's Den team and that it's what they were trying to recruit help for.

 

[wbsddgg]

Z6n4, on 12 May 2015 - 10:54 PM, said:

​

It lines up 100%.
I sent you a PM, please contact me via the email i provided so we can get this sorted out.
This will be key to finishing up the DQ73DS project quickly!! ← good news for us​

 

[Helmax]

Good news!
I've completed my first final version of the software to map the old psx japanese script, to the old psx english script, and port it over to the new 3DS script.

There are a few problems where things did not entirely line up, so I implemented something called Levenshteins match formula, which helped us isolate even more occurances (different japanese characters for words like ocean, cliff, sea, etc.)

Ultimately, it looks like we wound up with a 70-80% dialog match.

We will be using everything in our tool set (1 fluent japanese speaker, 1 partial japanese speaker, a Bing/Google translate API tool, a compiled PDF script of the original DW7 game, various tools we've built) to proof read, and finish as much as possible, and format it.

We still are falling short in some areas, like menu formatting, font formatting etc (usual translation project stuff), but just got one of our guys back on our team who specializes in this.

If it is announced at E3, this project will have taught me a lot.
If not, well.... we have a great jump on this!

 

[upfromtheskies]

That is great news, you're going to make a lot of DQ fans very very happy. As for an E3 announcement, I find it highly unlikely since Square-Enix has expressed they have no interest in making an English version.

 

[Nathan Drake]

Yeah, I wouldn't worry about an official localization undermining your time investment. If a localization hasn't been announced by now, it's not happening. I mean, even IV, V, and VI barely made the cut back on the DS. It seems like at this point, they just don't care to localize much DQ. To my knowledge, Dragon Quest Heroes will be the first localized Dragon Quest game since the DS entries/remakes which had VI finally localized in 2011, two long years after DQV. I wouldn't expect much else except maybe where the PS4 is involved.

 

[Celice]

Yeah, I wouldn't worry about an official localization undermining your time investment. If a localization hasn't been announced by now, it's not happening. I mean, even IV, V, and VI barely made the cut back on the DS. It seems like at this point, they just don't care to localize much DQ. To my knowledge, Dragon Quest Heroes will be the first localized Dragon Quest game since the DS entries/remakes which had VI finally localized in 2011, two long years after DQV. I wouldn't expect much else except maybe where the PS4 is involved.

I'm not so sure we can say the DS ports "barely made the cut" when DQIV had a major English script left on-cart for the Japanese release, one which you could enable with a basic action replay code or by swapping a folder around in the game files. I forget if other EU languages were on the cart too.

 

[Nathan Drake]

I'm not so sure we can say the DS ports "barely made the cut" when DQIV had a major English script left on-cart for the Japanese release, one which you could enable with a basic action replay code or by swapping a folder around in the game files. I forget if other EU languages were on the cart too.

There was a long road between the release of IV and the release of VI, and iirc, they took their dear sweet time actually announcing that VI was leaving Japan. For at least a little while it had been starting to feel like VI was going to miss the Western world once more, which wouldn't have been that surprising depending on how SE felt about the performance of IV and V on the DS.

 

[Romsstar]

@Helmax: What usually would help you get more people aboard is to see any proof of concept.
You say you are a developer and have already translated something with a tool you've written.
My suggestion would be: Post screenshots of that. If people see that you're not just talk, that would help a lot.
I perfectly understand that you don't want to expose all the information there since things are probably still in the works, but one or two screenshots would really go a long way and help your cause.
While I'd love to hop aboard, there's just no time, given that I have currently 3 projects to work on...
But by advice is: Show at least a little bit of what has been accomplished already, it really helps in building a crew.
Also: If that person claims to be a translator, make sure to test them with something where google translator can't help them.
It's increasingly frustrating to work with people who use google translator and then lie about it. Eventually, just make sure not to let everyone who claims to have skills hop aboard unless they've proven what they're capable of doing.

Also: Making a real translator proof/edit automated translations is essentially the same as making the person translate the whole thing all over again. It's a thankless job and frankly it's less work for translators to work from a Raw then a googletranslated piece of shit.