PC-FX Zeroigar Translation Development Thread

[elmer]

The PC-FX Zeroigar translation programming is now nearly done, and it's time to see if there's anyone here that is willing to help us out with the art.

If there are any artists willing to help out, here's my list of things that I think we need ...

High Priority ...

1) The top 2 icons on the game screen ... 16x16 pixels, 1 color + shadow. They're basically "Level" and "Experience".
2) Bottom left icon on the game screen ... 16x16 pixels, unknown palette (at the moment). There are 8 versions of this representing the 8 levels of gun power.

You can see these in the screenshots, below.


Medium Priority ...

1) Title Screen ... I'm not 100% on switching this without also switching the other large Japanese title text on the various menu screens ... but it does make a huge immediate change to a player's first impression of the game.

There are already some potential candidates for this that were done a few years ago.

2) Other screen titles ... these are baked into the background tile sets on some screens, and done as overlays on others. That's going to make changing some of them rather hard ... and since a patchwork of translated/untranslated titles would be ugly, I suspect that it's better not to change any of them ... but I'm open to suggestions.


Low Priority ...

We're using 2 custom fonts, 6x13 for the speech, and 8x16 for the menus.

The 8x16 menu font could potentially be changed from a 2 colour font into a 16 color font (or 14 color + background + transparent).

The fonts that it replaces are in 16 colors on some screens, and in 2 colors on others, depending upon whether they're runtime generated from ROM fonts, baked into printable glyphs, or pre-arranged into complete phrases.

I'd need to do some serious palette hacking to get them into 16 colors on all of the different screens.

IMHO ... someone would have to come up with a pretty nice anti-aliased font for it to be worth switching ... but I'm open to trying if someone actually does (that I like enough).

[elmer]

Translation Details
=============

For anyone that's curious ...

The Zeroigar game CD is split into 51 separate programs on the disc, and getting this far has required finding, figuring out, and patching 38 of them.

Every single screen uses different 'C' code (and often different text storage methods) for displaying stuff on screen.

I'm going to guess that every screen was developed by a different programmer.

These methods (and maybe more) seem to have been used ...

[uldecimal][li]Shift-JIS text -> ROM font -> bitmapped text on the screen.[/li][li]Shift-JIS master-glyph-list string -> ROM font -> tiles -> strings stored as indexes into the "master" string.[/li][li]Shift-JIS master-glyph-list string -> ROM font -> tiles -> strings stored as screen maps.[/li][li]Predrawn glyph tiles -> strings stored as indexes into an unknown "master" string.[/li][li]Predrawn glyph tiles -> strings stored as indexes into the screen character set.[/li][li]Predrawn glyph tiles -> strings stored as screen maps.[/li][li]Predrawn phrases as bitmaped tiles -> strings stored as screen maps.[/li][li]Predrawn phrases completely baked into the background tile set.[/li][/ul]

[Black Tiger]

It'll be tough to do with English text, some sort of symbols may work better.

Here's a simple stuff I threw together quickly:

[elmer]

It'll be tough to do with English text, some sort of symbols may work better.

Here's a simple stuff I threw together quickly:

Thanks! 

Something simple like that was actually my first "programmer" thought ... which was when I knew that I was in trouble and needed to find an artist! 

Unfortunately, I think that they'd probably stick out like a sore thumb compared to the italic numbers that they're next to.

It might just be best to go for a large italic "L" and "E" in the same style as the numbers ... but perhaps someone with a better imagination than mine can come up with a better idea.

BTW ... the "Pow" by itself isn't going to work.

It's a power level for the guns (basically 1-8 guns firing), but the bar next to it is your armor level.

They're linked ... but not identical.

When you get hit, they both go down; but while it's easy to get a pickup to raise the gun power back up ... I'm not sure if I've ever seen a pickup that raises the armor level back up.

[esteban]

Translation Details
=============

For anyone that's curious ...

The Zeroigar game CD is split into 51 separate programs on the disc, and getting this far has required finding, figuring out, and patching 38 of them.

Every single screen uses different 'C' code (and often different text storage methods) for displaying stuff on screen.

I'm going to guess that every screen was developed by a different programmer.

These methods (and maybe more) seem to have been used ...

[uldecimal][li]Shift-JIS text -> ROM font -> bitmapped text on the screen.[/li][li]Shift-JIS master-glyph-list string -> ROM font -> tiles -> strings stored as indexes into the "master" string.[/li][li]Shift-JIS master-glyph-list string -> ROM font -> tiles -> strings stored as screen maps.[/li][li]Predrawn glyph tiles -> strings stored as indexes into an unknown "master" string.[/li][li]Predrawn glyph tiles -> strings stored as indexes into the screen character set.[/li][li]Predrawn glyph tiles -> strings stored as screen maps.[/li][li]Predrawn phrases as bitmaped tiles -> strings stored as screen maps.[/li][li]Predrawn phrases completely baked into the background tile set.[/li][/ul]

I find this pretty darn interesting.

Clearly, to get the game finished, some tasks were split across several people...what is surprising, to me, is that they did not recycle/reuse the same code/routines when possible. They were "re-inventing the wheel"...simultaneously developing different techniques for achieving similar goals/results...which seems counter-productive.

Anyway, tell me if I am mistaken/over-reaching.

[SamIAm]

Thanks, BlackTiger! Those Lvl and Exp Icons are the very kind of thing I had in mind.

High Priority ...

1) The top 2 icons on the game screen ... 16x16 pixels, 1 color + shadow. They're basically "Level" and "Experience".
2) Bottom left icon on the game screen ... 16x16 pixels, unknown palette (at the moment). There are 8 versions of this representing the 8 levels of gun power.

It might just be best to go for a large italic "L" and "E" in the same style as the numbers ... but perhaps someone with a better imagination than mine can come up with a better idea.

I'd really like to have Lvl and Exp in there just because it seems to fly over so many people's heads that there is a level-up system in the game in the first place. I mean, if it looks god-awful, then that's one thing, but if it looks only a little weird, I say go with it. It's worth it to get these factors hammered in.

1) Title Screen ... I'm not 100% on switching this without also switching the other large Japanese title text on the various menu screens ... but it does make a huge immediate change to a player's first impression of the game.

There are already some potential candidates for this that were done a few years ago.

2) Other screen titles ... these are baked into the background tile sets on some screens, and done as overlays on others. That's going to make changing some of them rather hard ... and since a patchwork of translated/untranslated titles would be ugly, I suspect that it's better not to change any of them ... but I'm open to suggestions.

I'd be for swapping out any Japanese with English as long as we can get decent art in there.



We had some good candidates here (scroll down for more) and here.

Arkhan hosts a nice scan of the background here for would-be photoshoppers.



AFAIK the title on the title screen and the background are one image. This text, however, is all in a separate layer from the background.

The big red letters, which are 190x46 total or 44x48 individually (elmer will have to say whether they are one image or four separate images), say "select your favorite machine". I'd be fine with reducing this to SHIP SELECT or whatever you think fits nicely...although please run any original ideas by me first.

The white letters say literally "ship one" "ship two" and "ship three". In the translation, I have this as "Type-1" "Type-2" and "Type-3", which I think works better. The letters are 16x16 individually, or 16x48 if you put them all together. Again, elmer will have to tell you about how the tiles work. I think we'll be able to make most anything work, though.

The red character is the same "Lvl" that you see in the main game.



Finally, there's this, from the Trial Mode. Don't worry about the stuff in the lower half, because that's elmer's final hacking task. The big red letters simply say "Trial Mode", but it seems that like the title screen, they are baked into the image.

While we don't have as clean a version of the background as exists in the scan from Arkhan, we do have this, from an FMV:



Make of it what you will. I suppose the best thing to do would be to use this to redraw little pieces that the "Trial Mode" letters cover up.

Hey elmer, do you think it would be easy to swap these backgrounds with any old image, or are palettes going to complicate things?

Low Priority ...

We're using 2 custom fonts, 6x13 for the speech, and 8x16 for the menus.

The 8x16 menu font could potentially be changed from a 2 colour font into a 16 color font (or 14 color + background + transparent).

The fonts that it replaces are in 16 colors on some screens, and in 2 colors on others, depending upon whether they're runtime generated from ROM fonts, baked into printable glyphs, or pre-arranged into complete phrases.

I'd need to do some serious palette hacking to get them into 16 colors on all of the different screens.

IMHO ... someone would have to come up with a pretty nice anti-aliased font for it to be worth switching ... but I'm open to trying if someone actually does (that I like enough).

That's cool. I do think the current font looks pretty good, though.

[Black Tiger]

This is the only other way I can think of to pull them off within 16 pixels.

[esteban]

This is the only other way I can think of to pull them off within 16 pixels.

I definitely prefer this design over Round 1!

[elmer]

I find this pretty darn interesting.

Clearly, to get the game finished, some tasks were split across several people...what is surprising, to me, is that they did not recycle/reuse the same code/routines when possible. They were "re-inventing the wheel"...simultaneously developing different techniques for achieving similar goals/results...which seems counter-productive.

Anyway, tell me if I am mistaken/over-reaching.

As far as I can tell, you're neither mistaken, nor over-reaching ... but if I ever get passed my annoyance at the pointless duplication of effort in finding/patching all the different occurences ... I can see good reasons for at least some of the variations.

The game basically boots a small (<32KB) "master control" program, and then does all the real work in the separate "overlay" programs that it loads one at a time as needed.

The only communication between the 2 systems is by a small set of variables (player level, score, weapons, etc).

So, once you've decided to follow that program architecture (rather than having a single program and just loading data-only overlays) ... then you've already thrown away most of the opportunities for binary code reuse.

FYI ... 'C' compilers in the early-to-mid 90's didn't have easy ways to write statically-linked program overlays (afaik, they didn't appear until the PS2 generation) ... so completely separate programs made some sort of sense.

It does look like there is at least some reuse of source code ... but there's not a lot of it done as shared-per-overlay routines, most of it seems to be cut-n-pasted into the source file(s) that make up each screen, either as a subroutine, or inline into the huge functions that make up a single screen.

You only have to look at the different styles of the various menu screens to see that they were done by different people ... there is very little consistency across the front end.

If you look at each screen as a separate mini-project, then each of them uses a perfectly resonable choice for drawing the background & text ... even given the same set of company-wide-utility-tools that they probably had available.

Since each section is a different overlay program, they didn't have to be efficient ... and so they weren't.

Now ... in a Western project of that time period, you'd probably only have 1 programmer and 1 artist doing all the front end and HUD work ... and so you'd generally get a lot more re-use and consistency.

[SamIAm]

The forum just ate a big post I typed up just because I went to bed in the middle of it.   

I think the LV and XP are all right, but tell me if you agree with me on this: I think almost everyone who sees Lvl and Exp is going to think "level" and "experience" no matter what, but LV and XP are going to have a somewhat lower success ratio. Remember, this is a shooter, and people aren't expecting a level-up system. I'd like to see if Lvl and Exp are workable first.

Anyway, I left out a couple of things before.



This is essentially the Game Over/Continue screen. If you see it in the game, you'll notice that the Yes and No fade back and forth with the Japanese in the background. I don't think that needs to be changed, and I also think that this means you can superimpose new English text over the other stuff just using the opposite color - white over red and red over white. It beats trying to clean the Japanese out of the image.

The red characters 無念 make a word that appears often in games, but doesn't translate well to English, if you're curious. It comes from Buddhism originally, and those of you who can read the individual characters will understand its old meaning: a state of mind free from attachments and desire. But the meaning has changed a lot over the years, and now it's kind of a stoic way to express regret or chagrin. It's almost like "What a pity" or "How embarrassing". In the context of the game, I think a big "Defeated" would have the same impact. "A sad end..." would work. "A fall from grace" would be a stretch. "Game Over" would be a reasonable compromise. Whatever fits. I suspect "Game Over" would cover the Japanese nicely. Or, you could take a liberty with "Shot Down".

Below that, the white text says literally (and much more simply) "Can you still fight?". I think that will work fine. If it's too long, "Continue?" would work.

The other ships in Normal Mode and Sakuraigar have their own Game Over screens, but whatever you make for this can be copy/pasted onto those. Just make sure you save a separate layer.

Please forgive the big image.


1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 appears as 一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八, in that order. That's really the only thing that needs doing. It looks like including the white border, these are 16x16 blocks.

Is there anything else I'm forgetting? I think that that's all of it.

[elmer]

IMHO ... someone would have to come up with a pretty nice anti-aliased font for it to be worth switching ... but I'm open to trying if someone actually does (that I like enough).

That's cool. I do think the current font looks pretty good, though.

Thanks! It's about as good as I can do in a 1-bpp font with a 1-bpp dynamically-generated drop-shadow.

But to my eye ... it looks very 4th-generation ... clean and simple, with nice square pixel edges.

IMHO ... the 5th generation machines were when developers started routinely anti-aliasing the menu system fonts.

You can see that the Zeroigar developers tried to do that on some screens ... like on the Main Menu ... but didn't try at all on others ... like the end-of-level "repair" screen.

Even when they did do it ... it looks like the font is anti-aliased against a black or grey backgound, rather than being anti-aliased against the image that it's really on, which leaves it looking like it has a messy halo.

This is a limitation of the PC-FX hardware which doesn't offer either per-pixel or paletted alpha on the sprite/background layers.

That is one of the big advantages of using a frame-buffer system like the PlayStation where the final image is composited at draw-time rather than display-time.

Anyway ... that's probably way-too-much-information for most people's interest!

[NightWolve]

Anyway ... that's probably way-too-much-information for most people's interest!

Not at all, it's cool to see more fan translators that really know what they're doing on the level of say folks like Bonkuts, EsperKnight, etc.

[elmer]

I'd really like to have Lvl and Exp in there just because it seems to fly over so many people's heads that there is a level-up system in the game in the first place. I mean, if it looks god-awful, then that's one thing, but if it looks only a little weird, I say go with it. It's worth it to get these factors hammered in.

I think the LV and XP are all right, but tell me if you agree with me on this: I think almost everyone who sees Lvl and Exp is going to think "level" and "experience" no matter what, but LV and XP are going to have a somewhat lower success ratio. Remember, this is a shooter, and people aren't expecting a level-up system. I'd like to see if Lvl and Exp are workable first.

Yes, boss! 

You're right, understanding that is vital to getting how to play the game ...

So ... seriously ... if you really want that hammered in , and if we can't come up with something "artistically-beautiful" ... then I can just use the 8x16 menu font to write in "Lvl" and "Exp".

It will mean moving the numbers over by a few characters, but it's possible. It'll probably only be another 175 patches to put in (2 icons and 2 numbers at screen setup, 1 number during screen update - all times 35 levels).

Heck ... if I'm going that far, we can make them 32x16 graphics and do them as thick italics to match the numbers ... or just switch the numbers to the menu font.

AFAIK the title on the title screen and the background are one image. This text, however, is all in a separate layer from the background.

I think that I may have originally told you that, but I was wrong. The guys that did this particular screen did it as 2 layers, foreground and background, but each layer is a complete tileset/tilemap. So the big red letters are not pre-composited into the background ... but neither are they easily editable in-place. It would mean converting the foreground layer into a bitmap, changing it, and then reconverting it to a tilemap (using the same number of tiles).

After thinking about this screen a bit more ... I can just draw the font text into the existing tileset and modify the screen before it is displayed to get the "Type-1" and "Lvl" ... and basically treat it somewhat like the other screens, but modify it in RAM instead of in VRAM.

BTW ... this is one of the 2 front end screens that I can think of that puts "foreground" text into a King background (new PC-FX chip) instead of a VDC background (old PCE chip).

Finally, there's this, from the Trial Mode. Don't worry about the stuff in the lower half, because that's elmer's final hacking task.

Hahaha ... well, it's the last one for functional English menus, anyway! 

The big red letters simply say "Trial Mode", but it seems that like the title screen, they are baked into the image.

Yep, this time they're baked into a King background. The menu is in a VDC background as normal.

This is essentially the Game Over/Continue screen. If you see it in the game, you'll notice that the Yes and No fade back and forth with the Japanese in the background. I don't think that needs to be changed, and I also think that this means you can superimpose new English text over the other stuff just using the opposite color - white over red and red over white.

Just like the "Ship Select" screen, this one uses a foreground layer and a background layer that are both in King background memory.

Even though it's a pre-converted tileset/tilemap, there's enough space in there that I can replace the "Continue?" with any reasonable English phrase using a method similar to the "Ship/Pilot Select" screen.

There's one more screen that we've missed talking about ... the "Trial Mode" result screen (screenshot below) ... that's all in a VDC background ... and the big Japanese text is done as 2 128x64 bitmaps which would be relatively easy to change.

But, purely in my own opinion, and this applies to all of the screens ... once the menu itself is in understandable English, I really don't care if the menu's title is in English or Japanese.

It's always easy to work out what is going on ... and the Japanese kanji are often beautiful to look at.

Those kanji often express complex ideas that it takes a lot of roman characters to express in the English language ... I think that we'll have a hard time coming up with replacement graphics on a lot of these screens that looks as nice in the same memory footprint.

It's the memory that going to be the biggest problem ... I don't have anywhere near enough space in the area that I'm using for the current patches to store new graphics.
Anything would have to fit into the same space as the current graphics.

[EDIT]
Wow ... lots of typos to fix in that one!

[elmer]

Now that the in-game icons have been modified in Zeroigar, I thought that some people might be interested in what that seemingly-simple task actually required.

For anyone not familiar with Zeroigar ... the task is swapping out the original Japanese in-game 16x16 icons with new 24x16 "Lvl" and "Exp" icons, and new understandable 16x16 "Gun Power" icons.

As I've posted before, the game CD actually contains 35 different versions of the game program, 1 for each game-mode and difficulty setting.

For every single one of those versions, that means ...
[uldecimal][li]Modifying where the top of the "Lvl" icon is drawn.[/li][li]Modifying where the bottom of the "Lvl" icon is drawn.[/li][li]Modifying where the "Lvl" number is drawn.[/li][li]Modifying where the top of the "Exp" icon is drawn.[/li][li]Modifying where the bottom of the "Exp" icon is drawn.[/li][li]Modifying where the "Exp" number is drawn.[/li][li]Modifying where the "Exp" number is drawn when it is updated.[/li][li]Modifying where the "Exp" number is drawn when you pick up a bonus.[/li][li]Adding new graphics for the "Lvl" icon.[/li][li]Adding new graphics for the "Exp" icon.[/li][li]Adding new graphics for the gun power icons.[/li][/ul]Actually drawing the new bigger 24x16 "Lvl" and "Exp" icons instead of the old 16x16 icons is accomplished with one small new piece of code ... but to get it in there and working requires modifying the 35 different versions of the game with a total of 487 different patches in 347 different locations.

Don't forget ... all those locations had to be found and the code analysed in the first place before they could be patched.

So ... if you ever wonder why translations take so long, and sometimes get stalled or abandoned after an initial spurt of activity ... here's one example of how something that seems "simple", often isn't.

[esteban]

Damn.