Happy Holidays

Initially I was planning on making a post closer to Christmas, one that would have been longer, as I didn’t really have plans. But earlier today that changed- I’ll be flying home the 20th (and I probably won’t have decent internet access), so I’m gonna make a shorter post now. But, to be honest there isn’t that much to say- so let’s get it on.

Here’s a happy holidays image for you! Whatever you are celebrating right about now, this is for you.

Also, Soywiz linked me this earlier and I love it.
[EDIT: Just realized this trailer actually went online the same day as this post. Here's the source site. Gotta love the creativity.]

The seriousness of it is awesome, and I love the animation. I hope the movie is as serious as this trailer is portraying it to be- or it will be a personal let down. I haven’t watched the second season yet, but I’ve read about 7 of the novels- and this trailer makes the movie feel even more serious than the novels (with the anime being the least serious- though I imagine once they start getting into later stuff this will probably change). All in all, I’m looking forward to that movie- hope it’s as good as it seems it will be. Also, I don’t know what books the movie will cover or what exactly happens in each book (it’s been a while since I read them). But going by the scene with the gun looking thing- this will have my favorite scene from what I’ve read of the books so far. This is one of the more complex parts of the novels, and when Itsuki explained what exactly was going on (because that’s what he does) I had to reread it like 3 times to get a full grasp of all the time traveling and other stuff going on. I encourage discussing the novels, anime, movie in the comments. But try to keep it spoiler free~~

As for the translation, Tom is translation like he does. I was suppose to get translators from these guys- but this never happened. There still might be hope, but they know what I need from them (a username and pass, it’s really not that complicated. Hell the web interface is like 10 times easier than setting up an SVN) but they haven’t gotten back to me. But- I know who I can harass to try and move things along on that front- how much good it will do is another question. They are translating Air for the PC, so if you guys like that game you might want to check them out (I don’t play many VNs myself, they don’t hold my interest too well.) Not much else to say otherwise. I really am hyped for that movie though- but it will probably be a while before subbed version surfaces so I’m not too excited (here’s to hoping for a fast release to Blu-Ray!)- I tend to not get excited for anime, it’s slow like that (Black Lagoon 3, Shakugan no Shana 3, etc.).

Lastly, as for the Twitter. I admit I am glad that so many people dislike Twitter :3 (though I also admit it does have it’s own valid uses)
The poll does infact say I should make one…. I’m just… lazy- I don’t know if I want to make a Twitter >.<
But I should/probably will/kinda have to make one sometime soon anyways, so we'll see what happens. If/when I do I will add a widget to the side of the site that shows the latest Tweet, sooo~ yeah.
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Offtopic/IRL
School is actually interesting when you get to classes that involve what you wanna do for a living , might/hopefully get a job soon (have passed the first stage of acceptance for some company's hiring procedures or something like that, waiting for another email from them), all in all not much going on.

To all the people who have emailed me asking for help/advice/whatever, sorry if I don't respond/get back to you. I have a tenancy to be bad with emails. If you wanna get help you best bet is to IM me. But- I must say, I'm not your best bet for getting help. When it comes to emails I have a habit of not replying then forgetting, like an email Tom sent me- I forgot and then didn't respond for like a week~ I'm bad at that. But, I'd like to point out I'm probably not the best person to ask for help- I'm not all that knowledgeable :3
Lastly, that Pandora thingy, to anyone interested in that. I hopefully should be getting it in January. Look on the official blog or the unofficial blog. An almost final case has been made from the molds being made for mass production of the case. Tons of videos are coming from the devs. A case which should be completely fixed and will get the green-light for mass production hopefully will arrive from China to the devs in the next few days from this post. I personally know a lot of people who are interested in this thing and want my opinion on it, so I might do some kinda video when I get mine- but no promises. ‘Specially since I don’t have a camera or a camcorder.

And I think that about raps it up- have a happy holidays you guys
–Zarradeth

(This post was longer than I thought it would be :3)

Gobble Gobble

I make turkey for you all.

Zarruhi… Updated! (a couple times- now with 125% more poll, images, and video)

Alright, now I’m rewriting the post, but I have plans for more updates to it with maybe another video and more images.
The original point of this post was because I was really tired at 2AM and had made up the name “Zarruhi” while talking to a friend online. I thought it had a nice ring, so I made a pointless post.
Thennnn, I decided to make this post into something, which is what he have here now.

First I’m gonna post up this link, I helped do image work on this, and helped the person working on it do some work retaining to PSP format files.
Soo, if you are interested, support this, if not, whatever– Kanon VN on the PSP

Now, before I get to images and videos and the such, here is a poll, I would like it if you guys voted on it, and if you want- make a comment (on this blog, not the poll website please)

I’m thinkin’ I should get a twitter, mainly for translation status… (I personally don’t use/like Twitter/facebook/myspace/etc. But I could see twitter being useful for small updates like this), what do you guys think? I could also use it to throw out anime recommendations, what I’m watching now, and little tidbits of random stuff…

I think a Twitter related to the project would help me stay on task more with it (me personally, that doesn’t effect translators), my personal choice is the second one

Now onto the images, here are some of the Poker Help images that have been translated and cleaned. I will be posting TDOS ones later, after I do them.

The stars in the background of the TDOS images make them really really super easy to clean xD.

Right click the images and pick “View Image” to see the whole thing- wordpress is clipping them off.
And here is a video of me cleaning part of the first one, I thought it came out pretty cool I wanna do another one for the first TDOS image, I wanna have it be the whole image cleaning.

Here is a youtube link if you prefer that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDSp2DY4RLQ

Again, youtube for those of you who prefer it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duu7NSY2TF8

I recommend going to the site to view it, since the video will be physically larger. Also, as it says in the description, all the work in this video ended up being pointless because I copy pasted from the second help image, it was an easier clean job and came out looking better, so I stole it for the first.

As you’ll see the TDOS images are much easier, lots more clone stamp tool, lots less redrawing.

Where in the World…

Incoming a lot of offtopic, but since it’s my topic I can’t be offtopic

Well, some of you guys may be wondering what has been going on lately- things seem to have quieted down…
Well, people have been busy . I went to that summer camp thing, and was much busier there than I (and other people to be honest) expected (but it was fun). I got home, then a couple days later moved to Arizona (from Michigan). So that was lots of fun, had to ship my computer via UPS– that wasn’t the nicest bill to pay . ‘Specially when you computer weighs 57 lbs (62 lbs with the box).

But, I’ve gotten to Arizona, everything is settled, for the most part. I’ve started classes out here (the reason I moved, actually I wrote 90% of this post in a class ) so that is taking away free time . I’m also still looking for a job. But this is nothing for you guys to worry about .

Now, as for the percent up there in the corner, that hasn’t been moving much. There are two reasons for that- one more important than the other.
1) The guy who has been doing most of the translation work is in Japan right now, and his internet connection is shaky.
2) The server that the web translator is on has been acting odd too- it hasn’t been updating the percentage complete (not in the web translator either).

Now, point 2 might be fixed by now, we had the problem before and Soywiz thought he fixed it, but it’s happening again so I dunno if that image is showing the correct percentage or not.

All that stuff aside… I dunno what else to say, once I get settled into my classes I should get some more time (I would be by now but I just found out yesterday that my schedule wasn’t what I thought it was, that was loads of fun ). And a job, that’s starting to get close to being a requirement at this point .

So basically all in all, things are moving (literally and in the meaning of the translation) some…. you just probably aren’t/haven’t been seeing it. And things are a little crazy right now with everyone being busy (oh yeah, Soywiz is gonna be going to be in Japan for about a month on vacation ).

And yes, I know this is taking a long time– please bear with me
I want this done too, but this game has a lot of text and we aren’t really an established team– soooooo, were trying our best

Oh yeah, I guess I feel like using a lot of smiley faces and parentheses today, just roll with it.
And I leave you with this

…and this…

…and this… (purely for the Haruhi clip ) (also, I’m not responsible for any anime spoilers in this video, you shouldn’t have watched it if it spoiled an anime for you)

^^ Oh how true, how true.

…this post looks like a big mess….. (*presses publish button anyways*)

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Offtopic

Well, I’m going to put all of those things into this post, but not in that exact order. And yes, this is a legitimate update, it has been a while. Not having an update in a long time doesn’t mean things haven’t been happening– because stuff has, so don’t worry about that. And now I’ll get to the stuff you want to be hearing, and I’m going to make this stuff fit into my title, so you’ll have to read it all before it all ties together and most of your questions should be answered.

The Bad
Well, the bad thing is that I’m going to be leaving for a summer camp soon and will be there about a month. I will be a counselor (like watching kids, not dealing with emotion problems) there, but I have been going since I was six years old. (For those of you curious, it’s a camp for hemophiliacs, and I fit that category– I have severe A and I take Xyntha for it). This is bad– for you guys- because obviously it’s a summer camp in the middle of nowhere, right? Well, it is, to answer my own question.

The Good
And with a quick follow up to that. For one good thing, the translators won’t be going with me, so they’ll be available. Also, I will have internet access, but more on that later. Also, since I will be running computers there (making sure they work, helping people, etc.), I will have my own computer with me. So basically, when I have time and some quiet I can fire up some music and work on image editing on the translation. I promise you I will work on those while I’m there. Also, if you didn’t know yet, there is a progress image on the left there if you haven’t noticed it yet. That image is generated by the site that holds the translation, so it is always up-to-date.

The Ugly
Alright guys, get ready for this one…. I will have internet, but I will truly be in close to the middle of nowhere. So what does that leave us with….? A slow dial up connection (I’ll run a speed test for you guys when I get things setup and arrive there for fun ), shared across at least 8 computers. So that’s probably about a decent 3 kb/s speed for each computer when they are being used. And when they aren’t all used… I wouldn’t count on anything more than, like, 10 kb/s. Yeah, that is pretty ugly. But I will probably be able to still answer comments and the such, it’ll just take a long time.

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The Offtopic
Well, here I’m going to say that I will hopefully be getting a Pandora in about a month or two. I already have it ordered, so I know I will get it, but it’s a matter of time. For those of you who know what it is and thinks it won’t happen, you are idiots, but I don’t really need to get into details on why. If you really wanna question why, I’ll give you more than enough reasons why. And for those of you curious, this will replace my PSP, that was my plan for it. That doesn’t mean I will lose interest in this translation though. At this point I could probably do the translation without a PSP anyways. But I think all the work I put into saving my PSP after spilling water on it (look at the last entries comments ), should speak for itself.

And on a side note, I hate how those smilies ruin the flow of the text, it looks like it puts line breaks in there. Ohh well, enjoy guys.




EDIT: Oh yeah, probably should have said this for all the people who didn’t look at the comments on the last article, the last two videos were april fools jokes (but they are real, both the Chrono Trigger and Rickroll and the dubbed voices was actually running on the PSP xD). Neither of those are really planned for release, and if they do get releases… they aren’t serious. So yes, the release will have Japanese audio and no, there won’t be a dubbed version. (The fake dubbed version is very “hacky” and prone to crashing anyways.)



EDIT EDIT: I lied, seems that the campground got wireless. Here is the promised speed test, at much better speeds than expected

The Coming Dawn

Sweet, got embeds working for Vimeo (there was a tag, I just never knew about it). Click the Vimeo button on the bottom right of the embedded videos to be taken to their page, from there you can watch the video from a player that is a bit larger, or you can watch them here if you don’t care. By the way, the first video has one example of “offensive” language, so wear headphones or don’t watch it, whatever you wanna do.

All that stuff aside, the script completion percent is at 15.39%, and steadily climbing!

Thanks and Enjoy!

A Challenger Appears!

Aight, maybe somebody out there can get this. I’m close but I’m not too well versed with my fonts.

Hopefully someone can pick out this font. What we have here is the translations for the titles for the “Extras” and stuff. As I’m going to show you in the following images, you can see that my font doesn’t match perfectly. If someone can get a better match or knows what font is used in the original images, it would be greatly appreciated. Or, if enough people think I should, I could also just redo the titles that were already in English with my font styling.

Here is the first image:

I know, my gradient is awesome, you don’t have to tell me. (It was originally transparent and I though that might be a little nicer on the eyes than pure white).

Here’s the next, I’ll explain them later:

This is the original font style that I want to try to copy… with a gradient… I’ll have the images straight outta the gim -> png converter below if you want to use them:

Originals (click for full size):

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Sweet! A bunch of unexciting images! With freakin’ amazing gradients!!!!!
Yeah, I know

Aight, now for the serious part.
The first image is comparing the untranslated titles for the “Extras” menus areas and my translated titles. As you can see in the images above, they don’t match the styling of the titles that were already in English, and I wanna match them . I thought maybe someone out there could get the font right ’cause that’s pretty much all I have wrong with it.

Here’s how to recreate the styling (in Photoshop CS3, cause that’s what I used):
Font: Arial
Size: 18px
Height: 90%
Style: Black
Smoothing: Sharp
Color: Black

Now take that and add a 2px white stroke to it via the Blending Options. Then convert that to a smart object and add another 2px black stroke.

It should look something like this:

If you want to make the style I used for the “SOS Extra” titles, do the same exactly thing, but keep the height at 100% and the font size should be 24px.

Now that you can recreate what I’ve done, you should try and do better than what I have (which shouldn’t be much more than just finding the right font ). As you can see from the second image, my font style almost perfectly overlaps the original “SO” from the Japanese titles (not a hard feat), but the font doesn’t match that of the other titles and I want it to xD. It will look better and more professional. That’s why I’m asking for your help. Or your opinion, if nobody can pick out the right font I can always just redo the already English titles with my own styled fonts.

Andddd…. that’s pretty much it. But, before you ask, I don’t think I have any sort of reward for this sooo, don’t get your hopes up on anything special xD. This way nobody will be upset if they know the font but don’t get anything

Oh yeah, an I’ll also have to redo the help menu’s title to match this styling because I didn’t realize until I started working on these that the “Controls” titles should also have the same styling :/ Though that will only take a couple seconds to fix.

Hoping the internet knows its fonts! xD,
–Zarradeth

Finally, another update! With a video :D

Alright, so here is another update, finally. This is a bit overdue, I admit, but there is more in this update than I had been planning. Originally I wanted to make a video, then I decided against it because of some of the bugs (which you will see in the video). Then I wanted to just do screenshots, well, when I sat down last night to start making the screenshots, I made a whole video. Annnndddd, that’s about that, you guys get a video.

Without further ado, here’s the video (I guess wordpress doesn’t allow me to embed the video)

Any questions you might have should be answered by the in-video captions/comments.

That aside, let’s see, what’s new. xD It’s been too long….
We have more translators. I’d also like to point out that, for the time being, unless I’ve already talked to you, I don’t want anymore translators. We need to get a little more organized with the current translators before we start accepting anymore new ones. Also, the game is now being translated into Russian too, I have a screenshot somewhere of the Russian Cyrillic working in-game, but I think that most of you will take my word for it.

Also, if you haven’t noticed yet, and haven’t been reading the comments on the articles, there is now an overview of the online translator that is being used for the translation. You can go take a look at that if you are interested. It’s under the “Pages” category (or I’ll just link it).

And, last but not least, the English script’s translation completion percent, according to the web translator, is now over 10%. So, there is a little insight on how complete the translation of the game’s script is.

Well, I was gonna have this entry be much longer, but when you use a nice video instead of screenshots things get much shorter than planned.

Hope you enjoy the video
-Zarradeth

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By the way, as a side note down here below the important stuff, I’ve fallin’ in love with Vimeo for uploading videos. I’m picky about my video quality so I can’t stand using YouTube if I care about the quality of the video. Vimeo is a very nice site, not as good as Stage6 was, but it’s very nice. I highly recommend it.

More Translators and a Web Interface

Alright, so I figured it was time (actually it’s probably over-due ) to do another update.

First thing is that we have another translator, and the best part is that they are doing Chinese to English, and since the Chinese translation is complete, we don’t have to worry about getting slowed down because scripts haven’t been translated yet. His name is antonie-kyon, so wish him luck . I’ve also been receiving more and more offers for help, which is a very good thing, the more people working on this the faster it will get done . Sorry about my slow responses to those offerings to help lately :S, that is all my fault, it’s not that I’m not interested in getting in touch with you, it’s just that I haven’t gotten back to your email/comments yet, I will…… eventually :S

Alright moving on from that we have more good news, Soywiz (the Tales-Translations Team hacker, he knows what he’s doing) is working on a web interface to work on the translation. All the work will be done in your web browser…… Well I’ll just link you guys to his post. He already explained it himself and I’m sure he can explain it better than me, after all, he’s making it xD (Linky link link). This will make things much easier that messing with SVN .

Hmmm, I don’t know what else to say, this update should probably be bigger than this :S Hmm, well I guess aside from what’s up there it’s the same-old-same-old. It’s moving, things are coming along. You can’t go wrong with that.

EDIT: Soywiz finished a usable version of the web interface like an hour or two after I posted this, it’s in the same thread that I linked to earlier if you are interested in what it looks like

What’s this?!? An Update!

Hmm, what to talk about? Well, I think I’ll start off by saying that SHNY is now also going to be translated into German! Templa is gonna be the man taking on this job, he’s gonna be doing English -> German. Templa is a good friend of mine and is skilled with both languages so I have complete confidence in his work. For the record he’s been following this project for about~~ well, ever since it started . He use to hang out in the IRC channel (when it still existed) all the time and now he’s decided he would like to undertake the task of translate the game into German. You should all wish Templa good luck.

Now that the big news is done with, I guess I’ll throw out the usual call for translators.

We’d like–
Japanese -> English
Japanese -> Spanish
etc, you probably know who you are, gimme a shout *points at contacts page*

As for how things are progressing… it’s moving. I can’t really give a percent or anything like that since the game has so much text. But I can promise that it isn’t dead (like it had been for a while there :S ). Nanami is doing an awesome job of translating Spanish -> English. I’d also like to make sure that the Tales-Translations team gets their credit for the translation work they are doing, Nanami wouldn’t have anything to translate if it wasn’t for them . There isn’t any hacking left to be done (to my knowledge). Andddd… well, pretty much translating the script is all the work that’s left to be done (which is the overwhelming majority of it :S) and some photoshop work on some images needs to be done.

I’d also like to make sure everyone remembers Babazoz since this project never would have even been started without him. I’d also like to point out TUNA, who got the project publicity and actually made Babazoz take it on as a project, and then translated for us for a while. And lastly I’m gonna have to thank Dark_Alex for hosting his own IRC network, ’cause without that me and Babazoz never would have met and never would have worked on this together.

Geez, I’ve had to much time on my hands to think about the past~~

So to sum this post up. SHNY will also be translated into German, and things are moving along for the Spanish and English translations as well.

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I didn’t have anything off-topic to post earlier so I’m gonna add this
http://www.mediafire.com/?4u30gjr50yz
These are some quotes that I pulled outta the old IRC chat logs between me and Babazoz. I though they were pretty good and that you guys might get a kick outta this.

Enjoy xD