I got a few of his games/projects mixed up. What is required? What's left?
He's got the compression fully done - he can decompress the Japanese script and recompress my English script and have it display. He's also got the script fully extracted (and I've got it fully translated and edited).
What remains is primarily the print routine. As it stands, the routine displays big fat 16x16 FWF tiles, and it doesn't handle line wraps and overflows properly. Esperknight has been saying for a while that he wanted to make his own VWF routine, but one that he made for a different game didn't work.
Additionally, there is the menu, but it *should* be very simple. All of the icons are already in English. There is only a small text box at the bottom of the menu that prints using what appears to be the exact same routine that is used for the dialogue text. We have none of the menu text dumped and no English printing in the menu yet.
Finally, I think Esperknight said he needed to merge an old dump with a new dump, but I'm foggy on those details.
I am 100% sure he would be psyched to get an email from you, especially about the VWF stuff. Actually, I ought to email him now.
VWF print routines themselves are easy, but it's the complexity of the routine that's hard to work in (requires more free space and more processing time). Why not do a 6x12 (see my Dracula X 'intro' translation print routine) or 8x16 font routine mean time, then if there's time do the VWF later. Honestly, no one really cares except for the hackers and translators (about VWF). Hell, even couple of TGCD games use 12x12 fonts - and no one in the PCE/TG community has ever bitched about/made fun of it but me (one of the Exile games IIRC). Some US games cheat and realtime scale the 16x16 font into 8x16 (Valis 3).
Once I get situated with school and place to live, I'll work on this to get a working print routine (might not be VWF though - depends on the time needed for it).
This I promise. I REALLY want to play this game translated.
This is what happened with shubibiman's work with DotB. I did the new print routine. It's finished. There's one problem though, there isn't any more free space to add specific automated support for certain things in text. I.e. you need to manually do certain things in the script (you had to do a manual 'box' clear and no longer use the 'box' wrap auto function. I.e. the script chars need to be measured and a special control code placed for this. That's it. Everything is done for the game otherwise. This is basically the hold up). Since all I handled was the print routine, I could never get Dave to understand what and why he had to do on his side. Plus, our schedules were never in sync and it made it a real pain to try and work this out. If I had access to the script and tools, I could have finished the game already (years ago). That's part of the problem when work with a team VS do almost all the work yourself. I almost went back and did a 6x12 FWF for the game, to be done with this issue. But I got soo sick of working on it.
I know what you feel. I feel exactly the same with my translation of Dead of the Brain, which I've completed 5 years ago now ;(
Made you should talk to Dave and have some else take over the translation. Like NightWolve?
I did the new print routine for Cosmic Fantasy I (it was my first duel font routine - shows both SJIS and small roman font - perfect for translate as you go). The game is even upgraded to SCD too (great for script expansion). I think I might just make the patch public, since nothing has seem to come of it, and hope someone steps up to handle the script part.
