FFT: Complete Main Info thread

[Heian]

Cheetah, got it!

Can I just start pasting English text over that Japanese?  Can I move or create things like {Delay 01}? And can I use more bytes than are in the original?

[melonhead]

The {Delay XX} tags change the speed of the text. The speed remains that way until the next time a {Delay XX} is seen.
For example:

Code Select Expand

{Delay 00}This text is fast{Delay 0F}This text is slower.{Delay 00}This is fast again
I think the story books use them for dramatic effect... so as a translator, feel free to move them around or add new ones to try to create the same drama in English.

The {0xF4} stops text display and shows that little finger icon. The player has to press the CIRCLE button to continue.
These should probably be left alone, but it's your call on how to use them

There's a maximum number of lines that can be displayed on screen at a time (I don't remember what it is). You can add or remove {Newline}s if you want, as long as each screen still fits.

There's other stuff like "{0xF55E}{0xF649}". I think these change the music or play a sound effect. They shouldn't be removed, but they can be moved around to the proper location in relation to the translated text.

If some text is surrounded by {Begin List} and {End List}, it will cause the lines contained within to be presented to the player as menu options. Don't remove them.

Feel free to use as many bytes as necessary (within reason). There's lots of free space in these files and we also have compression if we need it.

Basically the only limitations are the WIDTH of each line (so things don't print off the edge of the screen) and the NUMBER OF LINES displayed on each screen. There is no way that I know of to add new screens.

[Heian]

Ah, I almost misunderstood that!  I was thinking that {Delay XX} meant a delay of a certain length.  So it means "the delay between each character, until further notice, is XX"?  Should be fun to make use of.

I won't mess with any of the other   It might be useful -- going out on a limb here -- to have a table of widths (in pixels) for each character, so I can make sure that stuff fits on the same line.  (Or install the font itself on my computer and just type using that!)

This should be great.  I made the translations with no regard for the number of bytes, and had feared that I might have to cut lots of stufs out!

[TRC]

so how goes it guys?

[RAMee]

Will Marche and Balthier be included? Or is that a stretch?

[Dominic NY18]

so how goes it guys?

On my end, I've started working on the character bios again after a hiatus (got a summer job and all that jazz).

[TRC]

good work imo

[Cheetah]

Heian: Melonhead and I are almost done with a solution for you, I will post it later today.

Everyone else: Helped Needed

For like the past month Melonhead and I have been working on getting all the little graphics from Frame.bin working with the psp version of all of it, you can see lots of posts about what exactly that looks like. We are almost done with having it fully implemented except for one thing because we can't find where it is used in the actually game.

So how do you make "No Target" appear during battle. Please TEST and even better have a screen shot your ideas BEFORE posting. Though feel free to post what didn't work so that others aren't doing double work. Below is shots of what the actual text looks like and then it looks similar to "No MP" in battle. The "X" is from the psp version.

[TRC]

I didn't realize you guys were getting THAT detailed. o_o

[TRC]

I wish I had some kind of knowledge so I could help.

[Cheetah]

Heian: So here are a couple resources for you, though they are a bit cumbersome. The bottom line is that you can just try the best you can and the rest of the team will do lots of testing to get things working smoothly. But here are some rough guidelines. First is the list of font widths in pixels that you requested. Thank Melonhead for this one:

http://fftdev.istaken.org/font/font.html

So this will help you count how many pixels you are taking up with a given line of text is (note that space and other such stuff is at the end). Next is figuring out a good length of line. Using "0" as a measure you can look below to see what 32 "0"s looks like (sorry for the lack of a background pic but know that they are just full screen). So the margin on the left is a bit wider then the one on the right, I believe the margins on the right are always the same. 32 is probably a bit too long then, but 30 sounds just right as a rough guideline. So 30x6= 180 pixels.

Hopefully that helps and if you need me to run any more test or if you want to see what a few lines looks like you can just send me it and I can plug it in for you.

[Heian]

Thanks, Cheetah!  I had mistakenly thought that there was much more variation in the widths of the characters; the majority are 4 or 6 pixels wide.  It looks like the font makes use of multiple colors and antialiasing, meaning that it's probably impossible to dump it to a PC bitmap font. ^_^;  I think I'll just wing it and leave a little bit of space at the ends of the lines.  180 pixels is the maximum per line?

I've been going over my own translations again and am noticing all the kludges I inserted to get around the fact that you can't control the speed of the text.  In the chocobo racing scenario, you have three minutes to gather as much information as you can, and at one point someone asks you to pound his shoulders to relieve stiffness.  The original slows down the text there; I inserted line breaks.  Simple enough, but then later on, there's the white-haired gentleman who talks this slowly:

「{Delay 03} Well, that was {Delay 0F} ... {Delay 03} a long, {Delay 06} looooooong, {Delay 0F} ... {Delay 02} time ago.{Newline}
{Delay 14} {Delay 02}Was it when the war was still going on {Delay 0A} ? {Delay 02} I had enlisted and was an engineer {Newline}
 on a battle airship {Delay 28}.{Delay 02} And we had stopped off at this tiny village. {Newline}
 {Delay 03}And there what should I see but {Delay 0A} ... {Delay 04} a beautiful woman! {Newline}
{Delay 1E} {Delay 03} And then {Delay 0F} , {Delay 06}......................{Newline}
{Delay 0A} {Newline}

Since there was no way to insert delays to waste the player's valuable time, I expanded each thing he said so that it was as wordy and verbose as possible:

Dandy gentleman: "Now this was a loooooong time ago... quite a ways back indeed... let's see, was the war still going on? I think maybe it was. Yes, yes, of course, it was during the war. That's right. War's no fun, young man, let me tell you. Never know what's going to happen. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the war. So I enlisted and was an engineer on a battle airship. Nerve-wracking job, that. If you're going to join an airship crew, son, let me tell you... oh, yes, yes, the story! Of course. So we stopped off at this tiny hamlet. No more than a little village, this was, one-horse town as they say. Not that anyone rides horses in a technological land like our... oh sorry, sorry, on with the tale. So I visit this tiny village or hamlet as you might call it, and what before my wondering eyes should appear but the loveliest of ladies! The very pinnacle of...'

Hopefully it took just as long to read that text as it did to sit through all those pauses of his!

There are a few other places like this where I had to compensate for things.  But I should be able to fit everything into the existing space.  The Japanese characters are 10 pixels wide, more than double that of the typical lowercase English letter, and in translated text in general, the ratio of Japanese characters to English is less than two.  (1.8, maybe, vs. this game's 2.5.)

I'll try to put delays in where appropriate, and maybe the testers who have emulators can see if they fit well.  I think I'll have some time on my hands this week, so let me get started with the actual insertions.  Maybe we could get a Youtube video up with just the first part of some of this stuff, to really whet people's appetities.

[Cheetah]

...Heian you are amazing. Not only is this new version with the delays awesome, but how you originally interpreted the lengthy conversation was genius. I AM SO PUMPED FOR THIS! Is anyone else? This is so freaking cool.

So yeah 180 is about the max. A little longer at like 190 and it looks wierd, much longer than that and it crashes... But it crashes by page so finding the errors will be pretty straight forward during testing. Just keep doing what you are doing for now. After you get a chunk done for us to test we can see if we need to find a better method.

A preview will definitely be in order, actually being able to read the books will probably really hype this up. I personally am just blown away by how this project is coming together, great team effort. So yeah once you have a good chunk done just email it to me and I will get to testing and then hopefully doing a preview!

[LastingDawn]

Agreed! Fantastic work Heian! You are truly more then a credit to this project.

[Heian]

I just thought of one more reason why it might be better to keep the wordiness in rather than using many delays.

You just can't slow down the enunciation of English words and sentences letter-by-letter.  It has to be syllable-by-syllable, or word-by-word.

In Japanese, each character is almost always one full syllable or more.  By tweaking how fast each letter displays, you really can simulate slower or faster speech.  There are multi-syllable kanji, but for the most part it works.  A slowed-down "tsumi-buka-ki i-va-ri-i-su no ko-ra" is readable, but "s-i-n-f-u-l c-h-i-l-d-r-e-n o-f I-v-a-l-i-c-e" just isn't, because while the "sinful" part is OK, you can's separate the "ch" in "children", and the final "e" in "Ivalice" isn't sounded at all.  If it were a delay between a specific two characters rather than an indication of a constant delay between each following character, we could create something like "sin-ful chil-dren of I-va-lice", which would read well.

In the PSX English version, isn't there a scene where they say "little money", slowed down heavily after each letter?  That just looks bizarre, though in Japanese it isn't as bad.

On the other hand, place them strategically and you can get a really nice effect.  At the end of the chocobo racing novel, Tango has won his bets and is being mobbed by a cheering crowd, chanting his name.  Something like "Tan {Delay 0F} - {Delay 00} go! {Delay 0F}  {Delay 00} Tan {Delay 0F} - {Delay 00} go!" should get the chant just right.

(Aside: I really loved this story.  The first time I played it, I couldn't figure out the winner of the last race, and got the bad ending.  I really felt like I let poor Tango down!  It was a big thrill to finally get it right and see him through to the very happy ending.)

So you can insert delays after commas and clauses and things, and in between separated syllables, but letter-by-letter slowdown will just look and sound silly.  I think I'm going to insert delays only when it doesn't make things sound silly.

BTW, with the airship novel, has anyone noticed anything about the rune-like characters that appear on some of the title screens?  I'm thinking I might have another surprise for you.  

[Dominic NY18]

Yeah, the scene at the beginning of the game in the military academy. "Little money" appears very slowly. It makes for a notable meme, but it's bizarre otherwise. Your approach sounds good to me.

As an aside, I'm really loving the newest TacText. The width indicator is making editing a lot easier, since I now know how wide each line of text can be before falling off of the page and causing errors. Less trial & error needs to be done now. Also, I can now keep track of what I've done inside the program So kudos to Melonhead  for that.

[Cheetah]

We are aware of the crazy symbol English text. Zodiac was trying to decipher it a while back till I pointed him in the direction of your font. Though we haven't figured out how you figured out all the symbols?

I see your point about the delays not really working. In English if you want to speak slowly and draw out a syllable "iiiiit endsssss up looookinggg a bbbbit like thiiisssss". Which would looking fucking horrible. I encourage you to experiment with whatever style you think will be best Heian. If you want to see test I can do a quick record of some stuff.

Though if you do end up using your lengthy story version, shouldn't there be no references to horses and chocobos only?

[Heian]

Cheetah, that's a good catch about the "one-horse town" stuff -- even in a country where sophisticated people take airships, the idioms should still be about chocobos, and not horses!  How did I figure out all the symbols?  Well, the airship novel gives you quite a few, and then I started looking at the main world map, where there are many more.  Throw in the giant sigil with the names of the Lucavi on it (it's in the background of the data screen, and in many other places), and most of the alphabet gets filled up.  I never did spot a Q or an X, so I had to just make stuff up for those. ^_^;

Once the airship novel is released, I'm betting that quite a few people are also going to pick up on the alphabet for the first time, and we'll be seeing "MIND BLOWN!" posts in various corners of the internet!

Back to text delays -- has anyone played FF6/3 recently?  Thinking back, I seem to recall Strago being asked if he knows anything about Espers, and he says something like, "Haven't heard of them.  Honestly... can't say... I have.," with the delays inserted in tune with the rhythm of English speech.  That works much better than the l-i-t-t-l-e m-o-n-e-y nonsense.

I'm starting to think that the Oeilvert story might be best for a preview.  Cheetah, you've already showed people the first part of Tango's tale in the Nanai book in Japanese, and you hacked the airship story to put some preview text in there, but Oeilvert, which is very creepy in the beginning, hasn't been shown yet.  I'm going to start pasting text into there so that we can get a preview that's a few minutes long.  Can I just send you a portion of the file you e-mailed me, only with English in place of the Japanese?

[Heian]

Update: Here's the Thamasa scene in FF3; skip to about 3:30 to get to the point where Strago pauses his speech right on time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGtrZgB95jE

On the GBA, it's "not... one... thing!"; about 3:25 here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q25SgnApjs

[LastingDawn]

Ah, you're referring to the Ivalician script? Zodiac pretty much cracked that some time ago, the names are pretty interesting, especially the mention of the Palamecian Empire, that caught me quite off guard, being a fan of FF2 and all.