Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 3 (絶体絶命都市３)

[LunaMoo]

Small bump with a wall of text since I don't have any more fitting place where I could post it;p.

As possibly some others(althrough sadly this game isn't that popular here) I was waiting for fan made translation of this game, but unlike others I was impatient and just took whatever was released and inserted all the text to my game copy, in fact I did it around this time. But later kind of forgot about it.;p

Just now I was browing GBAtemp and saw this game fan translation thread again and to my disappointment they got stuck and are confused by some things:
"insert the translation back into the game. With the tools we had at the time any attempt to do so would break the game" - I used those tools and while not free of problems which I'll describe below, they work well enough,
"script can't be used directly (because of embedded screen commands)" - wrong, script doesn't mean just "text", commands are also important to be re-inserted, the game uses those for example to display names instead of hardcoding them or to start a newline, if those "screen commands" were missing, the translation would be useless or at least far more bothersome to inject.



Ok>.>, well then, that's not enough to make me register on that forum and I don't have time to get involved into such projects or guide anyone by hand how to do things anyway, but I like the game enough that I can share at least how to insert text into this game for anyone wanting to help in that existing translation project or just gave up on it and take things in their own hands as it's pretty easy game to mod, chances are the only reason nobody did the fan translation yet is because everyone saw existing project promising a lot for a long time of doing nothing... .


Anyway to list potential problems that will easily cause crashes:
- using "Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 3 Tools v0.1.161013 alpha" used for editing game's script files will messup pointers if injected line is shorter than original, so you always have to use same or longer(fill with spaces for example) strings for your replacement when using this software,
- that tool I believe might also allow longer strings, where game is limited to 128 characters per dialogue box,
- if you're lazy and want to avoid pkg files editing and just edit loose script files like me you might want to remove all PKG files from archive folder except: CONFIG.PKG, MOVIE02_BUS_CRASH.PKG, MP_LOBBY.PKG, MP_SYSTEM.PKG, TITLE.PKG, TITLE_SYSTEM.PKG as those include files that can't be found as loose files, you could also make the game read loose files by default, but I didn't bothered,
- after creating your perfect translated iso that avoids all above problems, the game should crash, don't panic, you just messed up everything so that's expected behaviour, so now you have to find and update "HEADER.BIN" file with all your changes, just look at file system of unmodified iso and unmodified HEADER.BIN, then look at modified iso file system and update your HEADER.BIN accordingly, it's pretty easy as the file stores location and size of each file without any tricks. This part can be made easier by expanding iso and placing files you will be changing at the end giving them enough space to allow further edits as then you'll be able to reuse existing filesystem for most files and reduce the amount of editing to header.bin file to just your edited files(still changing both address and size, but if you give it enough space, all future corrections could be limited to size). You could also write some software to update it based on iso filesystem automatically.

Note that you will NOT avoid expanding or rebuilding the iso and editing this header.bin file by just exporting/importing file system unless all your new files will be exactly same size, which can't happen as english script takes up much more space and by trying to do so, you will basically break all script files and mess up your game in horrible way;p.
I suspect that was biggest problem for the translation team that started this project as I see no mention of HEADER.BIN anywhere by them which makes it clear they were messing up the filesystem one way or another. It wasn't exactly hard thing to find, but I have 0 experience with files and as such I wasn't biased into looking at wrong things, instead simply debugged the crash.




That would be it for the text insertion ~ hopefully didn't forgot about anything as I don't look at the game now and support my memory only with notes I made relatively long time ago. Ofc the whole project had other problems, that would need to be dealt with properly.

"All your base are belong to us." aka the translation itself, if all was made was that openly posted script dumps with translation - well, it's pretty poor inglish, messes up genders and among other things is also very literal, also it had whole section of the game untranslated - the hospital part, overall the experience suffers from it quite a lot I mean I had possibly more fun playing it in english than in japanese, but that's because I laughted from cringy translation in places that often should be quite emotional/sad, I don't recommend anyone using that translation for their first playthrough, but ok at least the translator made much more actual work than the rest of the team did.

It might also need a lot of micro patching to game itself and some text to fit in most boxes nicely, I recall just shrinking it a bit on my copy, but that was very sloppy and squishes japanese characters in few untranslated strings like the hai/iie confirmation box;p.

Dealing with PKG files should be better than using loose files and potentially allow to translate a bunch of more things, those PKG's don't seem to be neither compressed nor encrypted, might use checksum at most and maybe not even that, so it probably wouldn't be a problem for anyone who has some experience or at least patience for dealing with files, that's definitely not me as all my insering work was limited to using some copypasta macros and excel editing to do everything, but I only cared about the script and items(names/descriptions).



Anyway good luck to anyone working on it, either with a team or by themselves. It's definitely not a work for one evening, but even when trying to make everything right it should never take long years as with the existing project.:|



I don't plan to make any patches from the sloppy work I made for myself, I also have no right to release any tools or content used, but for reference links for stuff I used while injecting the text for myself:
- "Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 3 Tools v0.1.161013 alpha",
- incomplete(missing MAP1401.BIN), literal/ingrish translation.

Those threads might also contain information about other things like images, which I really didn't cared about since PPSSPP has texture replacement.




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On a completely different note, more related to PPSSPP problem with this game(easily avoided by cheat I posted here earlier), Sony's official PSP emulators suffer from same problem as can be seen here. Somewhat it feels less bad of a problem now.^^