Battle Moon Wars English Patch v0.6

April 1st, 2008

 

Why do I feel like I need a drink?

IMPORTANT NOTE

Check here for the latest news on the patch:
http://blog.seiha.org/?p=963
Or the forum
http://bmw.seiha.org/

Alright, it’s not actually the blog’s birthday… and the domain’s birthday is the 24th, but April 1st is the day of the earliest remaining entry after I went on my mass-deletion rampage of old/nonsensical posts. I kind of like the idea of the blog sharing a birthday with Watanuki and Sakura though, so let’s run with it.

Here’s to you, Seiha.org. 1 year old, you silly dumping grounds for two other forums, backup files and assorted other things I like to play with. May you have plenty more to come. Now on to the fun stuff. It wasn’t really meant to be a secret, but somebody decided to poke at 4chan and annoy them with it, so it’s a bit less surprising to some I’m sure.

This is not an April Fool’s joke. I don’t mind them, but I consider the process of saying "XYZ… NOT!" To be a form of humor slightly below the whoopie cushion and maybe above bloodletting depending on the depth of the wound. Deceiving and then insulting your audience is a joke that I honestly consider crass at best.

  

After some poking around, I found out that the internal files for Battle Moon Wars are amazingly easy to open up and muss around with. Long story short, it was made by heavily using a freeware scripting engine that stores everything in basic, run of the mill XMLs. Like a fool, I thought "hey, time to put those interface design classes and SRW love to good use and I could have this thing churned out in a month. It’s not like I’ve got much to cover during the week for the Winter."

Ha.

  

Actually, things more or less went as planned except for a few significant details, mostly revolving around finding others to help out. I managed to churn through all the image files in a couple weeks and started translating the battle text. I finished most of that up, and realized that I probably should have kept a closer reign on the people I asked to help translate the story. Long story short there too… this has basically been a one man project for the last two and a half months. I will give a shout out to Matt for tracking down the original unpacking tools, RabidKimba and Selkirk for TLCing Act 1 and ViruX and RadicalR of NDT for doing some string insertion on the .exe that was outside of my abilities. ChaosTangent also deserves some props for trying, even if everything he tried ultimately ended up futile and I’ve bugged Spoonsubs quite a bit for minor editing and translating help. 

Otherwise, so far this has been a long and relatively lonely journey, teaching me the value of the people who translate everything else out there. Especially ones that do it quickly… and have an attention span longer than a week. I have also learned the value of good dialogue writing, because if Werk had their way, every other sentence would begin with an interjection.

Anyway, I’ve got a significant portion finished, so I thought that I may as well release a patch covering Act 1 and see if anybody else wants to help out on any of the translation fronts.

EDIT:

Visit http://bmw.seiha.org for the most recent patch updates. This one is out of date as of 5/1/08

http://bmw.seiha.org/bmw_english_patchV0_6.exe 
Just drop the patch in BMW’s directory, run it and voila.

LATE EDIT:
If you downloaded the patch on April 1st or 2nd, it mis-sets one variable in data1. Replace your data1 with this: http://bmw.seiha.org/data1.dat 
I replaced the patch on April 3rd with one that doesn’t do that.

Note that this patch requires you to have all three Acts installed and be completely up to date on the official patches or it’ll just think that you’re insane. It will probably also hang for a moment (unless you’ve got $Texas RAM) since it’s not particularly well optimized and it’s trying to edit a 500+ mb file. Just as an FYI. *shrug* The interfaces and whatnot get redone with each Act anyway. All the interfaces and battle stuff is pretty much completely finished, so you could easily play through it. You’d just be missing out on the story for anything past stage 6. You’ll still have to run it in AppLocale (or with Japanese settings enabled) at the moment or the game will get cranky, use the wrong subset of fonts and then produce a series of sort of strange textual corruptions. Nothing major, but the linebreaks are hardcoded, so there’ll be issues with them, plus the textboxes will be the wrong size for the text, which will mean sentences will sometimes end prematu

 

Everything but the story has been looked at in some form or another. Well, and the Config.exe. I forgot it existed until I started writing this post. Oopsies. There are only two options anyway, Full Screen/Windowed and Color Depth. I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out which is which without too many issues.

Annnnyway… Act 1 (stages 1-6) is 100% complete, though I’m sure a few parts could use minor changes. All the important battle and gameplay text for the entire game has been translated, though I haven’t really double checked Act 2 or 3’s battle quotes so some are probably a biiiit off and/or in need of editing or differently placed line breaks, especially the parts I did especially late at night when I was getting testy. Admittedly, some parts I did throw up my hands, declare stupid and did my own thing. For example, one of Saber’s quotes is about 9 syllables (IIRC, her IAC – "I’ll bet it all on this one attack!") that gets displayed for a third of a second. Let’s just make that not-stupid, eh, Werk? The Noble Phantasms are all their own breed of battle quote lunacy, somehow featuring shouted parentheticals.

   

Act 2’s (stages 7-21) story has been completely translated, but hasn’t been checked/edited/inserted at all (my TLC folks got lazy), and I’m only a couple of stages into Act 3 since I’ve been splitting my attention lately (blame Beat Blades Haruka, the spring season preview, and Otome Crisis). If you’re interested in helping out, I’d love to have another hand or fifteen. It’d certainly speed things up. All of Act 2 looks something like this:

 <msg side="LEFT" chara="RIN" face="HUUN">   
陽菜は、そういうのできないの?   
</msg> 
You’re sure Haruna can’t come along?   
<wait kind="INPUT" />   

<msg side="RIGHT" chara="TAKUMI" face="FUU">   
からっきし。\nこれでも生粋のお嬢様でいらっしゃるからな   
</msg> 
Absolutely. Let’s go before her majesty tries to follow.   
<wait kind="INPUT" />   

<msg side="LEFT" chara="HARUNA" face="UGU">   
お、おのれ。帰ってきたら目に物見せてくれる……   
</msg> 
Y-you jerk. When you get back, I’ll show you…   
<wait kind="INPUT" />

And Act 3 is… well… about 800kb of untranslated text (Act 1 and 2 combined are about 900kb). Not that excessive, but still daunting to me, especially since I’ll be busy next week with the glut of new shows… and frequent visitors will know that my Japanese occasionally veers off when the conversations get difficult to follow… and Type-Moon fanwork is the epitome of weird. I’d still have no problems releasing the arcs as they finish (every 6-7 stages is a story arc culminating with a boss fight, more or less), or hell… even individual stages. The data files where the text is stored are tiny (~1 mb) compared to the data files that are packed with all the sprite sheets, interfaces, music etc etc etc. The remaining story text is in the data5 and data7 files, and I’d have no problems publically releasing them as things finish since they’re freely available on Werk’s site anyway.

Anyway, if you’re interested in helping out, I chill out in NDT’s channel (#ndt on irc.ppirc.net) or you can just drop me a line via e-mail. Alternately, I set up a little forum at http://bmw.seiha.org where I’ve been dumping all my TL notes from time to time and other assorted thoughts that you can feel free to abuse as you see fit. With concentrated effort from multiple people, this thing could be done in a week or two. Or at least, a few stages could be finished a day, minus all the joy of editing and insertion.

  

And now, your moment of zen from one of the long nights I was up working on this and my sanity started to slip.

Again, the patch is sitting here. Enjoy.
http://bmw.seiha.org/bmw_english_patchV0_6.exe

Thank you, and I hope to post about this being finished in the near future.

Posted in Doujin | 62 Comments »

62 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • thenightsshadow says:

    Well well well.
    Glad to see that it’s coming along nicely.

  • sage says:

    but somebody decided to poke at 4chan and annoy them with it

    Fucking gnomes.

  • Aroduc says:

    I knew stealing their gold would bite me in the end.

  • totali says:

    Happy…… ANNIVERSARY!!!!111

  • Otaku Ichise says:

    Good job, never thought someone would translate this, im happy you got into it.

  • TempForHire says:

    If you need translating help, maybe you could contact mirror moon?

  • Calawain says:

    Looks good, I’ll give it a whirl, thanks for the effort =)

  • DarkRedSky says:

    KEEP GOING YOU CAN DO IT. I BELIEVE. Oh and great job.

  • new guy says:

    Hey! Great work!

  • aers says:

    Aroduc is my bishie.

  • Anonymous says:

    well since the first patch is out, it’ll be getting more attention, so you’ll either feel more pressure or get more help. Lets hope for the latter.

    Anyway, thanks for the great work.

  • Aroduc says:

    Worst case scenario, I just do some light TLC on my own, fill in the blank spot and go on my way. Somebody will actually have to TLC it to point out mistakes, and at that point, whether they mean to or not, they’ll be working for me and my diabolical plan will have come full circle.

    Or something like that. ^^;

  • Hemisphere says:

    Happy birthday to Tenka Seiha! Yay!

    …Is it time yet to bother you again with Otome Crisis and Beat Blades Haruka?

  • Ray says:

    The patch won’t work. It says Software not found. Is there any way to apply the patch?

  • FFenril says:

    Wow, played to it a bit, good job!
    Never thought there would be anyone kind enough to translate this… That’s just great ^^

    I look forward the next releases and hope you’ll be able to make it ^^
    (And hope you’ll find a way to make your patch work with the next versions of BMW, once Act4 will be out :o )

  • Calawain says:

    “The patch won’t work. It says Software not found. Is there any way to apply the patch?”

    The patch .exe file has to be in the game directory when you run it.

  • Raven says:

    I had that problem.

    Go to this page and download the latest update, the RAR should say third_patch071209b. Just copy the contents over what you already have in your BMW directory, and then run the English patch again and it should work.

  • Raven says:

    http://www.werk-zwei.jp/BMW/support.htm#patch

    Sorry this is the page, I forgot to copy it in the last post.

    Also, thanks for the English and keep up the good work.

  • Anon says:

    You’re the hero of my heart, y’know that, right?

  • MartianMage says:

    Great job on the translation but it seems that your patch is causing some bugs. Take a look at these 2 screenshots:

    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v472/Aoko/move26.jpg
    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v472/Aoko/doh.jpg

    Takumi’s move became 26 after I applied the patch. x__X

  • Aroduc says:

    Damn.

    Damn damn damn damn damn.

    I had set a few characters to basically god mode to test stuff and I swear that I had fixed all of those before I generated the patch. Guess I missed one. Thanks for letting me know. It’s easily fixed though since Move is just defined in the tiny data1. Replace it with this: http://bmw.seiha.org/data1.dat

  • Callous says:

    Hey, thanks for your hard work Aroduc!

  • Yohko86 says:

    Excellent job! I’m so excited about this! The only small gripe I have is how you translated some of the spirits (i.e. ‘Iron Wall’ into ‘Guard’, ‘Miracle’ into ‘Love’ and ‘Flash’ into ‘Alert’), although it could’ve been a space-limitation issue. Aside from that, great job. I can’t wait to see how you advance the project in the future!

  • Aroduc says:

    The spirit changes were done to match the pre-existing Western localizations of the SRW games.

  • Tristan LaRue says:

    Patch works fine, ‘cept that in my case all the character’s names (status screen, story dialogue) etc… are still in Japanese characters. Note that this is only battle characters – Mike the Cat still had his name displayed as ‘Mike’ but Haruna and Takumi had their names in Kanji.

    If you have a fix great – if not, no big.

  • Aroduc says:

    Assumably, data8 (where most of the PC names are stored) didn’t get edited for some reason. That means that the patch didn’t recognize your original data8. Unfortunately, I have no idea what happened, and it doesn’t help that there have been about 8 different iterations of the game that have come and gone so it could have been any number of things. Data8 is unfortunately 400+ MB and not freely available, so I can’t really help, but I’m sure the internet has the right one stashed around somewhere.

  • PTN says:

    Do we need to apply all 3 patches from Werk? Or just the third one?

  • Aroduc says:

    I suggest all three.

  • LexusLantis says:

    Thanks a lot for Your great work, congratulations.

    I’m playing the haruna’s route chapter 33, but i’ll gona replay the game to understand the story

  • Espydon says:

    Amazing work. Thanks a bunch for your efforts.

  • Persona says:

    Parts of Chapter 7 and 8 on Haruna’s route seem to be untranslated, there are random lines that are translated in between however.

    Nonetheless, very nice work.

  • Jose_allen says:

    HI! how the hell i transfor rin to Kaleido ruby i skip the instruccionnn

    helllllppp

  • Zweiterversuch says:

    Hallo,
    for Jose:
    when you are going to choose the characters for the battle.
    (also when they are on those blue squares) if you click Rin or Arc there should appear following options:
    Out- Status- Change.
    if you click change they should transform.
    Note I am not sure if they have to be equipped with caleido stick to do so but you can try it out.

    For the wonderful people who translated BMW
    THANK YOU!!!!
    I finaly understand what that all is about…
    THANK YOU!!!
    but there is just a little problem. After the 22 stage (behold our combined power. Against SHIKI and ROA)
    any of the following texts are translated.
    Have I done something wrong or is should that be untrasnlated?

    Herzlichen Grüßen
    ZWTRVSCH

  • Zweiterversuch says:

    I meant,
    the english is all gone after the twenty-second stage.

  • Jose_allen says:

    Tks help bro

  • Jose_allen says:

    BTW no translation yet to the 3act???

  • Zengar says:

    Can’t you guys wait goddammit? Yes, the patch is almost completed for act 2 as for now.So all stages from stage 22 onwards are not translated. Just wait and it’ll come out in a week or two.

  • Vatina says:

    Thank you very much :D I’m really grateful for you doing all this ^^

  • EchoMateria says:

    Well done and thanks for helping on the fight “me versus all the kanji that I have to memorize”.

    PS. So far they are winning…

  • Travis says:

    Hey,

    Thanks so much for this. I can’t say for sure how hard it must be to go through translating text, but I bet it’s just as tedious as it is hard… But, even if it is, it means a lot to people like us, who can’t read the language or prefer a localized version. So even if it is a pain in the ass, we’re rooting for you, and thanks a lot for everything.

    That being said, I seem to be a bit of an idiot. I install BM1, it installs to a ‘Battle moon warsfoaisejfoai1’ directory, with some characters in between. I install the patch, and the bm1 icon dissappears, and it doesn’t work anymore, and these are definately the latest patches from Werk’s site. The same thing happens with BM2, and access acts denied when I try to copy BM2 onto BM1, even if I fiddle with read/write permissions. BM3 installs fine, to Program Files/Werk/BMW, and seems to patch all right, but again, when I copy it over BM1+2(or rather, the few dat files from BM1 + 2 that transferred), the icons for .exe and config blank out, and nothing works. Also a weird note, when I try moving the english patch into the BMW directory, it blanks out and acts as if the file isn’t found.

    My only idea of what might be going on is that I have no C:/ Drive, only an E:/ Drive, due to an unfortunate accident. Is that what’s messing things up, most likely? And if no one has a good idea, don’t worry… I’ll fiddle with it until it works. =) Thanks again, anyhow!

    Travis.

  • Travis says:

    Never mind! After fiddling with those funky .dat files, I managed to get it recognizing the my folder layout. Sorry for the long-ass post, but I’m super excited to be playing, and so far, everything looks awesome! Woohoo!

    If anyone else has the problem though, it’s pretty simple, and I’ll be glad to help out. =)

  • Raziel says:

    Oh man i give up=/ just extract the whole thing and then the game, when i go to the first battle i press L and the game crash ToT i feel really frustated -.-

  • Aroduc says:

    Don’t press L. It’s trying to load an in-battle save which you don’t have if it’s freshly installed.

  • Lobsterman says:

    Wow, I love you for doing this. But…I can’t get the patch to work, it says Failed to read setup engine.

  • tsuru says:

    I haven’t tried playing BMW in awhile so correct me if I’m wrong:

    Are we not supposed to see character’s portrait while they’re talking most of the time? It seems like it comes and goes. I’m guessing it’s not supposed to be like that because I’d have no idea who’s talking because of the lack of portrait. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t like this before patching the English patch but I could be wrong.

  • tsuru says:

    Actually, I don’t even see the portrait the battle status page, either, lol. And now that I think about it, I don’t see the portraits during the battle.

    I’ll try reinstalling it.

  • Zweiterversuch says:

    Did I miss something important?

  • Aroduc says:

    Check http://bmw.seiha.org for most up to date stuff.

  • sasuke says:

    like where can you get these games can you get them in the usa?

  • silverhawk says:

    is the first game the only one with english or am i miss informed?