Howdy :)

[jonko0493]

It's super exciting to see a Chinese translation of this game underway! I always kind of knew our tools would not be sufficient for Chinese, but it's very rad to see that you still were able to use our work as a basis for your own. It looks like you've got everything under control, but I'd love to be able to lend aid in any way I can (I know far too much about this game now). Also, I think it would be really neat if we could at some point incorporate some of your hacks/font work and whatnot into Serial Loops so that people could make Chinese hacks of the game as well. :D

[Xzonn]

Sorry for the late reply. I am very grateful for the tools you have developed. In fact, I do not have a deep understanding of reverse engineering, and these tools have been very helpful to me. I have read your blogs and the source code of these tools, and I learned a lot from them.

There are many similar tasks for translating Japanese games into English and Chinese, such as importing/exporting texts, modifying images, etc. Thanks for these convenient tools, it is easy to do these operations. The biggest difference between translating into English and Chinese is probably in the handling of font. The original game only contained about 2200 characters, which is sufficient for translating into English, but still too few for translating into Chinese. For translation into Chinese, at least 3000 characters are required. I solved this problem by increasing memory allocation, but my solution mainly relied on guessing and trying, and I don't quite understand why it succeeded. (I wrote this process on my blog in Chinese.)

In addition, I am watching the video you uploaded on YouTube, and I think it is very helpful to me. I would like to ask if I could translate this video into Chinese and upload it to Bilibili (a Chinese video website)? I will keep the link to the original video and credit authors' name in the introduction. (Most Chinese people cannot access YouTube directly, so if I upload this video to Bilibili, there might be more people who can watch it.)

[jonko0493]

Hi! Thanks for replying!

I'm so glad you were able to learn things from my blogs and tools! Looking at what you've done, you're being humble when you talk of your skill in reverse-engineering: your accomplishments thus far are impressive and your coding skills are clearly very sharp. I'm particularly impressed with your IDA script that loads the overlays -- i'm going to be trying it out soon as it would be a great help to me! (I'd been loading them manually one at a time which was a bit of pain haha.)

I read your blog with the help of DeepL and really enjoyed it! It was really cool to see the work you did, and I was particularly happy that my change to log the debug console output ended up helping you.

I'm so glad you're enjoying the YouTube video! Absolutely feel free to translate and upload it as long as you leave credit (I made sure to CC license it for that reason 😁). If you don't mind, I'd also appreciate you sending me the subs you make so that I can add them as closed captions on the YouTube video as well for people who end up watching it there!

Speaking of the great firewall, it cuts both ways haha. I've been trying to join your QQ group, but it seems that it's very difficult to foreigners to make an account. Since Discord is also blocked in China, I was trying to brainstorm ways that might make it easier for us to collaborate going forward, and I thought maybe we could try something like a bridge between QQ, IRC/Telegram/something similar, and Discord? i.e. something like discord-irc or TediCross and tg-qq-irc-bridge. Of course, only if you're interested in doing that! Our discord has private channels so we would of course restrict participation to select staff members.

Finally, from what I've seen it seems like you're still pretty early in translation. That's great because it means I have time to try to improve the string exporter before you really get going -- we're stuck with what I wrote initially because it's already committed into our weblate. :P But I think I can make something much better now that will give your translators more context as to what's going on. If you'd like, we could even collaborate on it -- if we use some of the stuff I put in the lib for Serial Loops, we should be able to do a significantly better job at determining where to position things like choices and give translators a better idea of the control flow of the scripts.

Additionally, I'd be happy to provide the English scripts we have so far if you have English-speakers who would like to check against the Chinese translation. Such collaboration would be valuable for us as well as it's possible you might find errors in our translation as well!

Please let me know if this is of interest to you! Looking forward to working with you in the future!

[Xzonn]

I’m glad that my plugin has been helpful to you. In fact, I intended to add a dialog window to select which overlay file to load, but I have not yet figured out how to add a dialog to it, so the index of overlay file could only be manually modified for now.

As for the video on YouTube, I will translate it into Chinese later (thank you very much for uploading an English subtitle). Once I finish it, I will send you the Chinese .srt file so that you can upload it to YouTube.

As for the Great Firewall, I didn't expect that it would be difficult for foreigners to register on QQ ☹. But I can use Discord, and I have already joined the Discord server of Haroohie Translation Club, so I think we can communicate in real-time using Discord.

For the translation process, we have currently used machine translation to translate Japanese into Chinese, and there are several volunteers who understand Japanese to proofread the machine translation. I think this would be simpler than starting from zero (translate from Japanese without references directly). Of course, since there are relatively few volunteers who understand Japanese, if you could add Chinese to your translation process so that we can translate from English to Chinese, there should be more volunteers to join in this work. I’m looking forward to working with you!

Similar to you, I am currently using Weblate for translation (it is an open source, free software that I really enjoy). I made some modifications to the source code of Weblate to determine the length of the Chinese translation while translating, to ensure that it does not exceed the dialog area (the upper right corner of the following image). You could visit my website and register an account if you are interested, and I will manually add access permissions for you (I made this project private).

I also used GitHub Actions to automate the build process, and used SimSun.ttc (which comes with Microsoft Windows) to create the font for the game. I noticed that you used Azure and PowerShell scripts (if I remember correctly), and I think my build script should be easy to migrate into yours.

Finally, thank you again for the invitation and I’m looking forward to working with you!