Valkyria Chronicles 3 re-translation

[[Unknown]]

The recent announcement of Valkyria Chronicles 4 made me think of Valkyria Chronicles 3 again.

With a group of others, I've created a menu patch. It doesn't translate story, just UI - about 8% of the game's text overall:

Patch: https://goo.gl/uuZq8o
Screenshots: https://goo.gl/pY4Y4z

I'd actually started hacking this with others before even contributing to PPSSPP (and was quite excited the day I got the game working in PPSSPP, by the way - https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/pull/304.) But we put it on hold after another group made a patch.

That other patch went through Chinese and possibly Russian on its journey to English, though. It doesn't really have the feel of Valkyria Chronicles 1, to me, and there are some mistakes - even some stats are wrong.

Is anyone interested? What we really need is the most important person - someone who knows Japanese interested in translating to English. Or know anyone who might be interested?

Editing isn't a problem. And we have the strings all sorted out, tagged with who's speaking, the audio easily replayable, live preview of the font, etc. There's even a special build of PPSSPP that can apply translations on the fly for previewing.

PS: This was actually what originally interested me in contributing to PPSSPP - the game didn't run well in JPCSP at all.

Also, happy holidays.

-[Unknown]

[[Unknown]]

Yes, that's the one I mean. I've read conflicting reports about what languages it went through, but it definitely went through at least Chinese.

Well, my account on romhacking.net got deleted (not sure why? I think my posts were deleted too...), so I thought to post here first just see if there was interest.

I've posted there now too:
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=25500.0
(PS: SMF, which that forum runs, also has me in its credits section.)

-[Unknown]

[LunaMoo]

That old/abandoned patch had many problems, to list a few I experienced myself:
- awful patching process requiring use of JPCSP, forcing user to install java and whatever jpcsp version works with that version of java since the included one is very ancient, then manually changing provided batch files, it also creates very long path which can cause the whole process to fail misreably leaving user with broken game copy,
- text goes out of text boxes which in many cases makes it unreadable, completely missing or going out of the screen,
- removes at least one Ace(in the "dlc" port mission) which also means removing his special drop(Hilde-M machine gun) and achievements,
- messed up gameID(uses standard version ID for no reason), which affects anyone who uses cheat databases, texture replacement or other gameID specific features, this might be easy to correct, but since most people will not fix it for themselves, it also means sharing gameID stuff with others might be confusing.

I would defend the translation itself through as while it didn't followed official english translations of the previous games, those official translations didn't followed original language either, so it's really a matter of preference, like with many things coming from japan, fans are always divided between sub & dub editions. As for me I don't really care, it was enjoyable or at least would be if not all the technical issues I listed earlier.


I'll use the menu only patch as my preference because I already know the story well, but while I wish this project best, I think it might be hard to find translator that would re-translate everything that was already done.

Contacting this person might be worth a try.
He/she wanted to finish and fix the existing translation, even if that's not the goal of this brand new translation, it might not require all that much editing to correct old translation to match official english translations of the older games better and that person also got into it again due to VC4.


~
This kind of made me feel like doing something for this game as well, so I might release my font/icon replacement for it after fixing some letters sizes;p, it's not perfect since I'm not a graphic person and not complete either, but I'm moving to a larger city first thing in new year speeding up my life a bit and might not have much time to do any better;c.
   

Anyway good luck on this translation, it's already best choice gameplay wise ^ that ace on the screenshot is the one missing in the older translation btw.

A happy new year to everyone.

[Spike]

If you cant find a translator willing for the task, copypaste a sentence into Google Translate. Hold on, stop writing your angry reply. Just reconstruct the sentence so it sounds like a legit english

Since there are thousands and thousands of kanji characters, Google Translate wont recognize some (when theyre together in some cases) but if you seperate them, it will show the individual kanjis' meaning. Then, try picking the most fitting word to go with the sentence

This method is obviously going to take longer to do than someone who is fluent in Japanese reading and translating off the bat, but this is a legit way to do that not a lot of people know off

[[Unknown]]

Quote:Do you found a translator? Just asking as im curious.

Yes, and we're already getting story translated - which is very exciting. But still looking for some of the side content - there's a decent chunk of total text.

Quote:Hold on, stop writing your angry reply.

Haha. There can be a lot more subtle problems than even just getting the individual words translated right. You end up with significant meaning problems that way.

-[Unknown]

[Spike]

Thats why reconstructing the Google Translated sentence is required
Ive been doing that for fun (personal stuff/not for public translation)

[Padoverc]

Can you release a 32-bit version of the menu patcher? It is saying it's not compatible with my windows 7 machine.

[[Unknown]]

Extract the zip file with the patch into a folder, and then extra this zip (attached) on top of it into the same folder. It should overwrite the "xdelta3.exe" file.

Then you should be able to use it on a 32-bit OS.

-[Unknown]

[ilego]

I need help combining .ini files can u help me? Or can u do so yourself or at least look at mine because I have checked and I they don’t seem to be overriding the Same filename and I know they both work separately but I can’t figure out why the can’t together?

[[Unknown]]

I'm not sure what you're referring to - there's no ini files involved in this patch.

-[Unknown]

[ilego]

My apologies I meant how did u use that program to change the textures without an ini? Cause I would like to use some HD upscale textures but they use a different hash than another one I would like to use

[[Unknown]]

This patch modifies the ISO to change the original texture data - which is in many cases encoded as "GIM" images and compressed using "CRILAYLA". I extracted these images, modified them, and then recompressed them so they'd fit on the ISO in the same space.

This naturally changes the hashes, because they are different textures now.

This technique doesn't work as well for HD textures, because HD textures take a lot more space (for example, 1080p textures would take 16 times as much memory.) That breaks the game's logic, since it's not expecting the textures data it manages to be so large. That's why HD texture replacement is usually done outside the game code.

-[Unknown]

[ilego]

Ok thanks I just have to figure out how to put the textures, I sent u in a zip, on a modified iso