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.)

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

Status Update

Well, like it says– a status update

You can thank yo_man for this one, he was the one that made me consider doing it. According to him you guys like to stay updated and like to see new posts .

All the fun stuff aside. I’m proud to say that the project is making progress. I would also like to note that we still don’t have any Japanese -> English translators :’( . So as you can guess–(if you’ve been keeping up-to-date)–the translation is Spanish -> English. You guys can thank Nanami for doing the Spanish -> English work, while I look it over and fix it up. I would like to say that Nanami is making my job awfully easy, she has good English skills . You can also thank the Tales-Translations team for translating it from Japanese -> Spanish in the first place .

So to sum this random and painfully short post up… Things are finally moving along … and no, this doesn’t mean the patch will be done soon– visual novels have TOO much text . But it does mean that you can expect a patch… eventually .

Oh, and i just realized I havn’t linked to the post I made on Baka-tsuki asking for help, so here it is. Well, not much more to say about that…

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Hmm, what can I put for random off topic stuff here…? I know!

If any of you guys havn’t seen AMVHell before, go watch them now! They are hilarious– watch out thought, Hell 0 and /0 are 18+ only, srsly. Also, I’d like to give a shout out to the SekaiProject and wish them luck. I got my interest in the anime (School Days) from AMVHell /0, and would love to be able to play the visual novel in english. (Watch out the game is 18+ only. But the anime is just fine for those under 18)
I’d also like to note two things.
1) If you wanna watch the anime, don’t watch AMVHell /0 first, it’s scene is part of the ending.
2) I made a useful little batch script to simplify the somewhat painful task of getting Atlas and AGTH to work with the School Days game. Lemme know if you are interested and I’ll share . Too bad Atlas’s Engrish is hard to follow and sometimes wrong… :S

Now that this part of the entry is longer than the actual status update, I will stop here.

Later guys,
Zarradeth

Not directly related to the project, not even an update.

Why am I posting this if it isn’t about the project? Well, it’s sorta related, but don’t expect any new info about the project in this post. This is so I can introduce you guys to TUNA’s (our old translator) project. I figure he helped us so I would give his project some more exposure, even if it’s only a few people.

As you guys may know, TUNA disappeared and we never heard from him again sometime ago. No responses to emails, PMs, anything… Well, I actually got to the point of worrying, ’specially when I started looking for his last login time at Baka-tsuki. First thing I came across was his xfire profile, which stated that he hadn’t logged in for over 200 days, that worried me– a lot. Next, I found his profile on the SOS-Dan forums, and noticed that he was still very much active (to my relief, imagine if a friend of yours disappeared off the face of the earth for no reason ) and that in his signature for the SOS-Dan forum he had a link to his own project.

So I would like to take the chance here to introduce you to his project and wish him luck. Also, I’d like to thank him for…… abandoning us.

Honestly, I have no hard feelings over this, it would be cool if you were to acknowledge your existence for me. I don’t mind you stopping your work, but please say something next time, it’s not like we would have stoned you or something. Honestly Babazoz and I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

I’m very laid back, so I can’t even bring myself to write a straight forward angry post. It takes a good amount to upset me, I’m generally a laid back, nice person, who likes helping people. As some of the people who have emailed me for help know, (please refrain from doing that though) since I gladly help them if I can.

Glad to see you’re okay TUNA. Good luck with your project.

Little Status Update

Alright guys, nothing major here, just a little status update on how things are going.

As usual I don’t have translators, I’m askin’ around to try and find people. If you know anyone point them in my direction . Otherwise I think I’m gonna go to baka-tsuki and see if I can get help from there. If you have connections to some of the people at baka-tsuki you should put in a good word for me (this doesn’t mean starting a thread asking people to help me though ).

Putting that aside, I have been doing some work on the images that I already had translations for and just hadn’t been edited yet. Not much else to say progression wise.

The forums that were created for this project are hardly used anymore, and I don’t plan on updating them anymore, they were originally created so the translators could discuss whatever was needed. But since then we have lost our translators and we have merged with Tales-Translations– who has a perfectly good forum setup, so ours really aren’t needed at this point. You can still use them if you really want to though.

The guys over at Tales-Translations have posted a news item at their site which can be found here. They also made a video to show the progress made so far. The post is also in English (since we are translating the game to english too) if you wanna take a look at it.

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Now unrelated to the project, but still PSP related, I dug up some videos that some of you may remember and posted them on youtube. If anyone here has been around the PSP scene for a long time (pre-2.00 OFW time). Then there is no doubt you will know these videos .

It took me forever to find and it brought me back some memories, so I figured I would share

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiEE9KSbURI

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Enjoy,

And yes, I felt like using a lot of smilies today.

Merge with Tales Translations.

Aight guys– big news

The guys at http://www.tales-tra.com/ were able to hack the character limit, and most other things that need fixin’. After getting in contact we have decided it would be best to combine our efforts into translating this game.

What does this mean exactly?
1) The character limit isn’t a problem anymore.
2) I still need Japanese -> English Translators.
3) Eventually, we will need people to translate between Spanish and English.
4) The translations should finish faster (both English and Spanish).

Right now the Tales Translations team is working on their translation of Tales of the Abyss. So the Haruhi game isn’t their main concern at the moment, but they know what they are doing, they will start working on it when they finish their other project first.

Anyone that helps with the English translation for Haruhi will work as part of the Tales Translations team, there will be two somewhat independent teams in terms of Spanish and English translations, but the patch will be released under the name Tales Translations, and you will be considered members if you join in order to help the translation.

The plan is to get the game completely translated from Japanese into part English and part Spanish. Then translate the Spanish parts into English and vice versa. We figure it will be much easier to find people to translate between Spanish and English than English -> Japanese and Spanish -> Japanese translators.

But seriously guys, I still don’t have english translators. The Tales Translations team has a much more professional setup than just sending a script of the game up and back , so if that helps spike your interest a little contact me!

Contact details can be found in the previous post or in the sidebar (if you’re viewing the homepage ).

Also- I removed the requirement of having to register to view the forum, you still need to register to post. But you can view it without registering.