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

[SamIAm]

Maybe I missed it, but where do I sign up to try out for the voice acting?  I might actually have time (for a change) to do this, if there's any roles that I would work well with.

As elmer said, I am a little busy at the moment. 

With 58 parts and well over an hour of solid talking, I really need to get every single duck in line before I open the doors for people to audition and start recording. I'm expecting nothing less than a tornado of takes and emails for a good month or so.

Be strong, Sam, you can get through it! 

I suspect that when you recover from the disruption and stress, you'll look back on this visit with great fondness in future years. 

The day I look back on most fondly from my father's last visit is the day he left. 

Maybe it just needs a few more years. 

[ParanoiaDragon]

Ok, cool.  My schedule is starting to loosen up a bit, so I figured it would be a good time to audition, keep up the good work, ridiculously looking forward to this!

[elmer]

We've been quiet for a while now, so I thought that I'd let folks know that we're working on polishing up the script for the dub and trying to iron out any inconsistencies between the two games before SamIAm opens up the audition process.

As you can imagine ... it may prove difficult/impossible to ask people to do lots of changes/retakes after we've got their recordings, so it's super-important to try to massage things as-much-as-possible now.

The whole process has been a bit delayed because of my strange fascination with actually playing with the HuC codebase rather than getting on with the things that I'm supposed to be doing.  :oops:

But we're still moving forward! 

[varikares]

take all the time you need, better to get it perfect the first time around

I'm really looking forward to playing it when it comes out

[poponon]

   always happy to see an update , I check this thread almost every day 

[SamIAm]

  always happy to see an update , I check this thread almost every day 

Really? Shoot, I better update it more.

Recently, I've been a bit preoccupied with being barfed on by a tiny human. Lucky for him, he's also the cutest baby in the world. 

Elmer and I exchange PMs about the project basically every day. As we've both said, this dub-thing is going to be like a rocket launch. We have to be confident that everything is as finished as-can-be, fully in place, and that all other conditions look good.

The plus side is, once we do hit the big red button, it will be over quickly. Relatively speaking, anyway.

[spenoza]

Recently, I've been a bit preoccupied with being barfed on by a tiny human. Lucky for him, he's also the cutest baby in the world. 

This may call for a baby picture showdown, because I am pretty sure my baby human is the CUTEST EVAR!!!!1111!11one

[geise]

Recently, I've been a bit preoccupied with being barfed on by a tiny human. Lucky for him, he's also the cutest baby in the world. 

This may call for a baby picture showdown, because I am pretty sure my baby human is the CUTEST EVAR!!!!1111!11one

Sounds like baby pic showdown thread needs to start!

[NightWolve]

I now have a working insertion tool that quickly and easily gets all of the ADPCM clips into Xanadu 1, and was just able to listen to my test-dub running in the game via Mednafen.

The audio quality is distinctly better than the original!

Thanks to the high quality background music provided by the official soundtrack, and thanks to elmer and SOX, our converted tracks are squeaky-clean.

Whatever tool Falcom was using in 1993 was simply not up to this standard.

I've got web pages for casting and recording made up. I just need to make all final adjustments to the script, and tweak the mixing here and there.

Cool, I'll have to get a copy of that from you guys some time to re-encode the Ys IV dubs from their source waves if elmer has finalized it all.

[elmer]

Cool, I'll have to get a copy of that from you guys some time to re-encode the Ys IV dubs from their source waves if elmer has finalized it all.

I can send you the latest binary anytime ... but I'm going to need to strip out a lot of old cr*p from the source in order to release it as open-source on github, and that may take a while (it's not high on my list of priorities).

[Arjak]

Hey, how are things going with preparing the dub? Are we any closer to recording?

[dejan07]

I heard that Sam will be voicing all the characters including the female ones.

[elmer]

Hey, how are things going with preparing the dub? Are we any closer to recording?

We're definitely closer! 

I'll leave it for SamIAm to say how close we are ... I'm just amazed at the sheer amount of detail we've gone through in polishing up the scripts, and then in SamIAm making sure that the in-game text matches with the cutscenes.

What do you think Sam, I just counted nearly 60 versions of cutscene and intro files, and that doesn't include stuff that's been in emails!

I'm actually quite shocked at how much work SamIAm must have put into those files in the first place, before we even started this round of editing.

[mj9123456]

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to hearing more as it progresses.

[SamIAm]

We're definitely closer! 

I'll leave it for SamIAm to say how close we are ... I'm just amazed at the sheer amount of detail we've gone through in polishing up the scripts, and then in SamIAm making sure that the in-game text matches with the cutscenes.

What do you think Sam, I just counted nearly 60 versions of cutscene and intro files, and that doesn't include stuff that's been in emails!

I'm actually quite shocked at how much work SamIAm must have put into those files in the first place, before we even started this round of editing.

It's been a long journey.

I've said this before, but a big motivator for me in this project is that it's a chance to try doing something as well as I can do it. I don't want to make big claims about how good the dub-scripts are now, but I can say with confidence that they are much better than they were a few months ago, and I'm really glad that we took the time to do go through this editing stage.

Things have slowed down in the last few months, yes, but they have never stopped. In spite of how few updates this thread has seen, elmer and I have been PMing each other literally every day, and often at length. Deciding how we really want to say things in these cutscenes has forced us to decide how we want to say things throughout the entirety of both games, and the game-world is so huge that there is an incredible amount of minutia to deal with.

Do you remember when we publicly discussed what the main title should be (The Legend of Xanadu vs: Legend of the Wind - Xanadu) and what Xanadu 2's subtitle should be (The Last of Dragon Slayer vs. a bunch of other options), and how that dragged on for longer than anyone expected? It's been that x100.

The good news is, I think we're done. Elmer and I have both "signed-off" on the most recent versions of the scripts, and all we're doing now is tying up loose ends before we start inviting auditions. If things go well, we'll have a big roll-out within a week or so, so stay tuned if you're interested in participating.

Thanks to everyone for following along. It's always encouraging to see people talking about the project, even when they're just asking how it's going. We'll keep you posted.