Xanadu I and II - General Translation Project(s) Thread

[in99flames]

N-Gage, eh? You can Xanadu while you side-taco-talk! I find it interesting Falcom/whomever decided the platform had enough potential for a title in the series. How is it?

Wow. Im late at seeing this. Ha. Well honestly...its still sealed. I havent popped it in yet. Ill post when i actually play it. From what ive read its apparently one of the best on n-gage. And yes...i will taco talk! Haha well ots not active as a phone. Honestly its an impressive device when you think of the time frame it was released. My version is the first...and taco one. Not the QD(2nd version).

[elmer]

I am crying. The progress has been wonderful.

Well, here's a little bit more to get the "tears" flowing again! 




The Weapon Shops (Buy/Sell) are now working. 

They were the last major un-extracted parts of the main game in Xanadu 1.

Falcom put them together a bit differently from the rest of the main game, and it required some messing around to locate the scripts, and to deal with the item display code, which is unique to those sections.

From my POV, the major code hacking in Xanadu 1 is nearly complete (barring any bugs).

There's still the Boss sections and anything that's in the Cinematic sections to deal with ... but hopefully those are going to be minor ... we'll see.

Then there's some text that is pre-baked into tiles/sprites (like the Main Menu options) that will need to be replaced ... but that can wait for a while until I've looked at Xanadu 2 again.

There's still the actual translations to complete, and then a lot of testing/refinement ... but it's all looking good.   

[johnnykonami]

The progress you've made on this is amazing!  We're lucky to have you working so hard on it to the benefit of nearly everyone, and I think I speak for everybody when I say thanks for that!  Can't wait.

[seieienbu]

...it's so beautiful.

[esteban]

^ What he said.

[NightWolve]

Looking good!

[SamIAm]

The end of December was super busy for me at work, and New Year's involved visiting in-laws and getting sick (not that those two necessarily had anything to do with each other).

Anyway, I'm back on the case now. Elmer got me a whole bunch of weapon-shop and menu-related stuff to work on for both games, so I paused my progress on Chapter 5 of Xanadu I to get all of that done. While there is going to be some length adjustment to do down the line, we are at least good to go for testing purposes.

I almost got a little choked up working on the Xanadu II menu stuff. I've been waiting to do that for SO long. 

Back to work on Xanadu I!

[esteban]

God damn, the language barrier is crumbling, brick by brick.

[elmer]

God damn, the language barrier is crumbling, brick by brick.

Piece-by-piece! 

Hopefully, everyone here can see by now that it's going to get finished this time around ... it's just a matter of giving us the time to polish it all up to where we're satisfied that we've done the best job that we can do.

Anyway, I'm back on the case now. Elmer got me a whole bunch of weapon-shop and menu-related stuff to work on for both games, so I paused my progress on Chapter 5 of Xanadu I to get all of that done. While there is going to be some length adjustment to do down the line, we are at least good to go for testing purposes.

Thanks! 

It's been really great to get to work on those "missing" pieces and make sure that they're going in smoothly.

The Xanadu 1 script files have gone in with no trouble ... and I'll blog about the Xanadu 2 technical niggles in the other thread. 

Here are some more pretty pictures ... in particular, take notice of what the "bold & outlined" text is looking like now.

I'm not really loving how the overlap between the characters is looking ... but I can't eliminate it without switching from the current bi-width font to a proper variable-width font.

That's going to have to wait until sometime later (if there's enough memory for the extra code).

[Black Tiger]

I prefer this font, but that's just me...

[SamIAm]

I prefer the slimmer font, too, but we really ought to see how it looks running on real hardware through composite video.

That shouldn't be far off!

[jtucci31]

I agree too. The fatter font makes it look shadow-ey, I like slim letters. But whatever pans out works for me! I love seeing news in this thread, big or small!

[elmer]

I prefer the slimmer font, too.

In fact, I've changed the default in Xanadu 1 from the bold-and-outlined font to the normal (slim) font.

Remember ... it's just an option that you can change in the game's Pause Menu.

I suspect that Falcom didn't really love it either, since they completely removed that bold-and-outlined effect in Xanadu 2.

There's some temptation to just remove the option in Xanadu 1 ... but it feels a little bit like "cheating".

I don't really see it as my job to apply "fixes" (a.k.a. my personal preferences) to Falcom's game.

The only exception to that is going to be trying to implement a drop-shadow on the font in Xanadu 2 ... and that's because in-my-experience it is really important to have good contrast between the font and the background when displaying a single-pixel-width line on a CRT TV at 256-wide resolution.

[SamIAm]

Chapter 5 is now completely translated and proofread.

It's the biggest chapter I've done so far and the second biggest in the game. Only Chapter 7 is larger, and only by another 7% or so.

On to Chapter 6! That one's a little smaller. Actually, I think it's the third biggest in the game. 

Xanadu I is huge, you guys.

[deubeul]

You are, too.