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

[elmer]

I play-tested through the first part of Chapter 1 (not to be confused with the Prologue) this morning, and my guess about getting my bearings and doing less dumb stuff from one chapter to the next seems to be right so far. What I saw still needed some touching up, but on the whole, things were functioning at a higher level and needed less reworking.

Excellent! I'm glad that the toolchain seems to be working properly, and that you've not found anything missing (so far). 

The pretty screenshots are your responsibility, now! 

[_joshuaTurbo]

This is spectacular guys!  Completely floored.


+50 Turbo Karma to you both!

[MNKyDeth]

I have a question.

I bought both Xanadu 1 and 2 a month or two ago because I saw this translation project.

Today... I finally put the discs into my system for the first time ever. All I can say is, I have no idea what is going on in the intro's but I can already feel the story must be intense from the music and omg!! the intro to Xanadu 2 was like what? 30min? I have no idea but it was long and the music made me want to play this now but I am waiting. Waiting ever so patiently. Also, you guys need to figure out a paypal or something for donations and make it public for us, imo.

My question is, I know you guys are doing text, but is the voice being done as well?

[SamIAm]

I actually made a dub for Xanadu II already, back in 2011. I intend to make one for Xanadu I, as well.

Xanadu II has about 20 minutes of voice-acted scenes, while Xanadu I has nearly one hour. Xanadu I is also going to need a lot of actors. I'm not going to worry about all that for a few more months, though.

Thanks for your interest and encouragement. It's invigorating to see people talking about this.

Money is...something else. We'll talk about it another day. For now, don't worry, this project is in no danger of stagnating due to lack of monetary motivation.

[SamIAm]

I had a really good couple of days at my job where cancelled appointments and a low workload helped me get to 100% for Chapter 6. Now I just have to proofread.

Doing that will put me at approximately 64% complete for the whole game, not counting the play-test-editing phase and whatever else. My wife is having our first kid in June, so I'm gunning hard to get this as close to releasable as possible before the big day arrives.

I'm thinking April will probably be a good time to get started on the dub project(s).

[SamIAm]

Booyah. Chapter 6 is 100% proofread, Chapter 1 has had one complete playtest, and I'm midway through playing Chapter 7 in order to begin translating it.

That one's the fat chapter. When it's finished, I'll be 3/4 of the way done with this entire first draft phase.

Also, Chapter 1 definitely didn't need much reworking in the play-test phase. If the other chapters go similarly well, this shouldn't be too bad at all.

[Vimtoman]

Your rolling down hill SamIAm.

Well done keep it up.

[SamIAm]

Chapter 7 is at 35%.

My goal is to get it done by the end of the month.

In addition to having the most text, Chapter 7 has some of the roughest fetch-questing in the game. I remember it having me at my wit's end the first time I played Xanadu I three years ago. This time, with the help of a map I found on the Japanese internet, it was nowhere near as bad.

I'm hoping we can get maps of every chapter and release a guide on gamefaqs.com or something, because even if you don't want to use them at every turn, just being able to firmly grasp the general layout of each chapter-area makes a huge difference. Also, it prevents Chapter 3 from being a maddening chore.

I have maps for chapters 0-5 from a preview-guidebook I bought and scanned, and handmade maps for chapters 7, 10 and 11 are available online. I wonder if we can do anything to fill in the blanks?

Has anyone heard of a tool that helps assemple multiple screenshots into a single seamless image? With the debug mode, and with the way the main character turns into a ghost that can wander anywhere when he dies, we could actually make our own maps without too much trouble if we don't have to manually line up dozens and dozens of screenshots.

[Necromancer]

Has anyone heard of a tool that helps assemple multiple screenshots into a single seamless image?

Photoshop does a pretty good job of it, either using its built in panorama stitcher tool thing or doing it manually by nudging layers until the line up.

[seieienbu]

I've used gimp for that a few times but I did it with a very low-tech method of copy/paste and lining stuff up manually.

[SamIAm]

Photoshop does a pretty good job of it, either using its built in panorama stitcher tool thing or doing it manually by nudging layers until the line up.

"Stitching tool" sounds like just what I need. Googling that brings up a bunch of promising-looking stuff.

I don't really have time to burn on this now, but I might check later (or someone else could, wink wink nudge nudge). I'm a little afraid of tools that are too "smart" for their own good and wind up distorting things when there should be just a simple pixel-for-pixel overlap along the edges.

Although animating water tiles would be a pain. Damn, I didn't think about that...

[Gredler]

This is something I would do by hand until I find a pattern that can be recorded into an action and batch processed onto a selection of files, or use imagemagick.

Do you have access to photoshop? I can setup the action for you if you send me example files and tell me how you want them processed/end goal.

There are a lot of shareware options out there, as you said from your google searching. ( https://www.photostitcher.com/ is the first one I saw that stood out as a easy option)


Also, if you have windows 10 you can use in OS tools to make it happen,

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/photo-gallery-create-panoramas-fuse-photos

Excerpt of the pertinent info:

To create a panorama [ or fuse multiple images together]

Take a series of photos from a single vantage point so that each photo overlaps the one preceding it and import them into Photo Gallery.

Select the photos you're going to use, and on the Create tab, in the Tools group, click Panorama. Photo Gallery will align the photos and combine them into a new composition.

To crop a finished panorama, on the Edit tab, in the Adjustments group, click Crop"

I can look into gimp a bit and see if there's a easy script you can use, gimps scripting tools are pretty nice and the community has hobbled together a large repository of useful tools though I have little experience with gimp outside of using it to correct palettes for sprites

[SamIAm]

Thanks, Gredler. If you're interested in looking into this further yourself, I can provide you with a few screenshots. Right now, I'm too deep in the translation side to look into anything else. If you're busy, though, I'll still take the information you've provided and try some things myself later.

-------------------------

Chapter 7 is at about 65%.

Also, I'm almost done with the first play-test of Chapter 2.

There's been a few more bumps this time around. In particular, there was one scene that I had really goofed up. There are about five people in it, and I was assuming that one set of lines was being spoken by one character when it was really spoken by another. There are codes in the script to tell me who is speaking, but they change from script to script, and I don't always check every last one.

Extensive play-testing is very, very important.

[Gredler]

Thanks, Gredler. If you're interested in looking into this further yourself, I can provide you with a few screenshots.

Sure, that's super easy and I'm happy to help. I will PM you my email.


Pm sent

[SamIAm]

It's been a productive few days.

- I got Chapter 7 to 100% and started proofreading it. I expect to finish that within two days.

- I preview-played Chapter 8, so I'll be ready to go on that as soon as Chapter 7 is fully finished.

- I finished my first test-play-edit of Chapter 2 and started Chapter 3.

Because this game revolves around going back and forth to talk to people in order to trigger events, there are lots lines that only appear in very out-of-the-way places. The best example is when, say, you've rescued someone trapped inside a dungeon right before gaining access to the boss-area, but instead of going forward to fight, you go back to the town(s) and see how people react now that this guy is free.

It's going to actually be quite difficult to make sure I've seen every single line in the script actually display in the game. I'm doing the best I can right now, but there have been a few of times when the thought of doing something extremely time-consuming just to hunt up just a couple of obscure lines has been too much to bear.

Hopefully, the next time I do a full test-play, the lower number of problems in the text and the savestates I've been making to streamline the process will help me get at that stuff more easily.