rossi46
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Post by rossi46 on Feb 9, 2019 15:52:43 GMT
The fact that there's likely going to be a Grandia translation for the Saturn has cheered up this old gamer today. Thankyou and more power to you.
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Post by Anthaemia. on Feb 9, 2019 16:30:15 GMT
I'm absolutely stunned by the quality of this project - it really is great to know that one of the Saturn's best RPGs will no longer be hidden away behind a language barrier, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of coverage in online retro gaming circles for your efforts! This might seem like a strange request, but would you also consider tackling the Digital Museum disc, and do you know if the planned US version of the main game was used to help produce the eventual PS translation?
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Feb 9, 2019 19:52:23 GMT
So I did some more digging and I have at least found what the game uses to know which MDT file to load when you change areas. At offset 0x06029A00 there's a table that lists all the files on the CD, with a value for what sector it's at, and how many bytes it is. The game references this when it wants to load a new file. How it knows which file to get out of this list though I don't know yet. However, I have been able to play around and have the game load different areas for me by changing the values for one MDT file to be that of another. So by doing this I was able to go from the Port of Parm to New Parm and test out the magic shop screen: Unfortunately this screen got modified in the English PS1 version, so some of those translations either wont fit or don't make sense, so I've had to improvise a bit here. I also tested out the buy screen and found I missed a word in the trade screen: Finally, just for fun I took Sue on a date to the Pirate Island. The game went a bit bonkers, I can only imagine because characters that should be in the party weren't there, and characters that shouldn't be in the party were there. The game eventually crashed when invisible Feena tried to speak after Justin spoke on behalf of a mermaid: EDIT: I realized I forgot to post some battle screenshots: I'm absolutely stunned by the quality of this project - it really is great to know that one of the Saturn's best RPGs will no longer be hidden away behind a language barrier, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of coverage in online retro gaming circles for your efforts! This might seem like a strange request, but would you also consider tackling the Digital Museum disc, and do you know if the planned US version of the main game was used to help produce the eventual PS translation? I have been asked about Digital Museum but I don't own that one to be honest. I'd imagine if the file formats are similar the tools I've made should be applicable. However you do need to keep in mind that the only reason this is progressing so quickly is because the file formats are so similar between the PS1 and Saturn versions. So I've been able to literally just copy pasta the script from the PS1 version into the Saturn version with minimal issues. As a result I've been able to bypass the need to make a Kanji table, dump the script, translate, etc. With Digital Museum those things would need to be done as there is no existing English Translation to use.
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Post by Anthaemia. on Feb 9, 2019 21:26:14 GMT
Of course there's a world of difference between Grandia and the Digital Museum - I completely forgot the latter never received an English translation, official or otherwise (to my knowledge, at least)!
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mick_aka
Kickin' it lively!
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Post by mick_aka on Feb 10, 2019 20:38:04 GMT
This is incredible work man.
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Post by zyrobs on Feb 11, 2019 3:22:31 GMT
The work you do here could be used to extract the text from Digital Museum though, and then that one could be easier to translate.
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Post by xDerekRx on Feb 17, 2019 6:28:17 GMT
, and do you know if the planned US version of the main game was used to help produce the eventual PS translation? Anthaemia which US effort are you referring to. The most I was ever told was by Vic on the WD forums about how they were expecting to translate it with the help of Sega securing the rights fees. Frankly I think just about everyone assumed WD would have brought it over because of their relationship with GA. Vic always gets a lot of the same questions on his forum. People always ask why they did Albert Odyssey instead of Grandia and as he always puts it, it wasn't like behind door 1 was AO and behind door 2 was Grandia. The games were actually spread out more from each other. It seemed like GA knew what they had in Grandia and were holding it a bit ransom even despite WD having brought over their Lunar games.
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Post by Anthaemia. on Feb 17, 2019 19:37:20 GMT
, and do you know if the planned US version of the main game was used to help produce the eventual PS translation? Anthaemia which US effort are you referring to. The most I was ever told was by Vic on the WD forums about how they were expecting to translate it with the help of Sega securing the rights fees. Frankly I think just about everyone assumed WD would have brought it over because of their relationship with GA. Vic always gets a lot of the same questions on his forum. People always ask why they did Albert Odyssey instead of Grandia and as he always puts it, it wasn't like behind door 1 was AO and behind door 2 was Grandia. The games were actually spread out more from each other. It seemed like GA knew what they had in Grandia and were holding it a bit ransom even despite WD having brought over their Lunar games. I've long since forgotten where I read this, but one of the Sega news sites I followed back in the late '90s once mentioned that an English version of Grandia was likely still on the cards for Saturn, as they specified how many pages of text were being translated for this project. Soon after, the same source elaborated on its previous story by claiming this information was now proving helpful to staff at Sony Computer Entertainment America, which secured the rights over Working Designs to publish the localised PlayStation edition.
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exodus
Saturn Gamer
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Post by exodus on Feb 19, 2019 3:13:11 GMT
yeah, digital museum never had any translation, and never came to any other platforms, so it'd have to be a wholly new project I reckon! It's pretty cool though... and cheap! its got new dungeons, save files for specific points in the main game, and lots of other weird things! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandia_(video_game)#Grandia:_Digital_Museum
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Feb 21, 2019 5:03:36 GMT
So I may have a work around for the issue of the PS1 version having more files due to a bigger script. I found out where the game determines what map to load next. It reads a value from a table in the MDT file, which is at the offset found at 0x30 in the MDT Header. That value tells it which map to load. However instead of updating every MDT file, I decided to take a stab at adding some code to the game, as it looks like this is what the PS1 version did as it's MDT files are unaltered at those offsets. For the time being I've added code that will check what file the game is loading. If it's loading any of the files that have clones for more script, it's going to check the scenario table which lives at 0x06021DC0. If the value is greater than or equal to the bare minimum for the overflow file, the code will change the file name to the new file. Otherwise it will continue loading as normal. So far I've tested this with success on the first new MDT file, 2001.MDT. This file should be used in Parm starting the day after you get back from the Sult Ruins. Using Debug mode to change the flags, I've able to confirm that this code works correctly, and so far no unexpected bugs have arisen from it. I have the code ready to go for the other files, I just need to find out what Scenario flags need set and what values they need set to and it should be good to go. Next, the remaining battle text that needs translated is not actually stored as text at all. It's actually graphics that need edited. However it looks like the data for those tiles is compressed. I've tracked the data down to MGDAT.BIN file in the BATLE directory, but I'm not experienced enough to really identify if it's a common compression format or not. This data encompasses the text for the icons in the circular battle menu, the text for the headers in the Items, Magic, and Skills windows, as well as the AI windows. However, I have done some work on translating the post battle screens which had their tile data stored uncompressed in the ENDW.DAT file: Some of the tiles I didn't touch yet though as I didn't feel skilled enough to make something that looked good, nor could I find a font I found acceptable. So if someone wants to take a shot at that feel free to do so. I was a bit limited in space though, hence why it says EXP Points Won instead of Earned. The way the tiles are stored I couldn't get the lower case e to turn out right as the game is hardcoded to read the tiles in a specific way, and I haven't had the time to look into modifying that. Finally, I've also looked at editing the text in the Map screen. This is also graphics instead of text, and it's stored in the AMAP#.ADD files in the FIELD directory. However I think I'll need a graphics artist to deal with this. This text is drawn as VDP1 scaled sprites. I tried using a 32x32 font I found from Pokemon Stadium on ROMHacking.net, but no matter what I tried it turned out looking like crap when VDP1 scaled it. It looked fine in the tile editor though. You can see how it looked here: I think though that once I get the other scenario flags sorted out, I should be close to at least having a beta version patch for Disc 1 ready for people to play test, as the remaining things while nice aren't something that would keep you from being able to play or something that would cause a crash.
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Post by darkman01 on Feb 21, 2019 10:42:55 GMT
This project seems to be coming along really well, thanks Trekkies for the hard work and dedication.
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Post by bultje112 on Feb 22, 2019 9:52:11 GMT
I'm so excited for this!
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originalname
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Post by originalname on Feb 25, 2019 2:35:04 GMT
Trekkies, I've been following your progress on SegaXtreme but don't have the privileges over there to comment on how much I've appreciated your efforts and how excited I am to see all the progress you've made. Keep up the great work, we're all rooting for you!
This is a kind of trifling suggestion, but if you don't have the space to write "(n) Exp. Points Received", why not just go with "(n) EXP Received"? It's a common enough abbreviation in RPGs that I'd think it should be fine. Not that "Won" is bad or anything, but I think it'd look more natural.
As for Grandia Digital Museum, if anyone can dump the Japanese script for that game (easier said than done, I know) I could translate it. I understand that it couldn't be implemented using the PlayStation code as we've seen on this project, but I think if and when Trekkies can release a translation of the full game it might attract enough interest that someone with the know-how could take the initiative to implement the translation into the code. I've been living in Japan for three years, have done J-E translation work professionally, I have plenty of friends over here who could double-check my work. Plus GDM is of a manageable size. I'd have to hand it off or hope someone else would pick up the programming side of things for me, but the translation itself is totally doable for me.
Trekkies, do you know the full-width Japanese character / half-width English character limit for Grandia's text boxes?
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Post by TrekkiesUnite118 on Feb 25, 2019 5:00:05 GMT
Trekkies, I've been following your progress on SegaXtreme but don't have the privileges over there to comment on how much I've appreciated your efforts and how excited I am to see all the progress you've made. Keep up the great work, we're all rooting for you! This is a kind of trifling suggestion, but if you don't have the space to write "(n) Exp. Points Received", why not just go with "(n) EXP Received"? It's a common enough abbreviation in RPGs that I'd think it should be fine. Not that "Won" is bad or anything, but I think it'd look more natural. As for Grandia Digital Museum, if anyone can dump the Japanese script for that game (easier said than done, I know) I could translate it. I understand that it couldn't be implemented using the PlayStation code as we've seen on this project, but I think if and when Trekkies can release a translation of the full game it might attract enough interest that someone with the know-how could take the initiative to implement the translation into the code. I've been living in Japan for three years, have done J-E translation work professionally, I have plenty of friends over here who could double-check my work. Plus GDM is of a manageable size. I'd have to hand it off or hope someone else would pick up the programming side of things for me, but the translation itself is totally doable for me. Trekkies, do you know the full-width Japanese character / half-width English character limit for Grandia's text boxes? To be honest I haven't really spent a lot of time playing with the BIN files for some of these to see if I can have a little more control over the tiles to fit better wording. But using EXP Received is one I did think of trying, I just wanted to try and keep things more in line with the English Script and what it uses in it's hints if possible. If Digital Museum uses the same file formats as the main game, then the tools I've made should be able to dump the script, someone would just need to put together a character table. I stopped working on that a while ago as it wasn't really needed. Though there is one floating around for the English PS1 version that appears to be compatible with the Saturn version, it just doesn't have the Japanese characters in it. As for the text box limits, I haven't actually done any testing as I haven't had to. Looking at gameplay though it looks to be about 24 8x16 characters per line, and 3 lines per box. So that would come out to 12 16x16 characters per line. One thing that would be nice though if you don't mind, some of the text graphics weren't translated in the PS1 version. They just got rid of them instead. I took a guess on some of them but a proper translation would be nice. These are mostly on the Win screens. For example the one I translated to LOOT! as a guess since it's in the box that shows all the items and gold you won, but it would be nice to know exactly what those things say.
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originalname
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Post by originalname on Feb 25, 2019 7:53:09 GMT
Hey, your instincts were right on the text you translated to "LOOT!". The text there reads 報酬, which is "Reward" in this case.
The orange text in both the second and third win screens read 戦闘結果, which is "Battle Results". In the second win screen the white text reads 習得技術 which means "Acquired Skills" (I'll have to cross-reference this with the English translation when I get home from work. You know how RPGs can have multiple words for the same concept: "skill", "craft", "technique", et cetera...). In the third win screen the white text reads 経験値 which means "Experience Points".
RE Digital Museum: Thanks for the info! I'll get started on translating what I find playing through it in the meantime and then once it's determined whether the file formats are the same and I can get my hands on a full script, I can fill in whatever gaps I may have missed. At the very least I can make an FAQ-style guide for the time being.
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