天下制覇

Feh!

As I mentioned last week, I’m now done with the introductory events (just under a third total) of the game, and with everything still fundamentally broken with little sign of that changing, I’m not all that wild on continuing until it’s not. Well, more likely, I’ll just finish fixing some of the interface work on LWR I’ve been putting off, but that’s a weekend’s worth of work at most. So for this week’s parade of failure, I think I’ll just catalog the issues here and toss up some files on the extremely off chance anybody can make them not be a mess. 

So here’s the script files. Note that I know next to nothing about reversing or their format myself, I’m just repeating my own understanding. It’s a paired set of files, one contains all the text as simply a list of strings, the other contains the script instructions which refer to the text. One cannot be edited without updating the other. There is a very comprehensive debug mode still within the scripts and a lot of lines/commands for it at the start and end. There are also some special lines (appear blank) for playing movies and as continuations of the previous line. I mainly mention them because recompilation concerning those lines has been an issue (save and script corruption on them). Another important note is that the text file only has a single copy of each line, even if they’re used multiple times in different contexts, so a basic translation using it alone, or even just an extraction of all the strings from the text data, would be exceptionally error-prone, especially when trying to translation them because they’d be missing short common lines like はい after the first instance.

 

And on the subject of missing lines, this is less a technical issue and more of a translation organizational one, but the scripts are laid out mostly breadthwise. Every possible thing in chapter 1 comes before chapter 2 comes before chapter 3, etc etc, which will eventually make the route split a massive pain.  However, that’s only mostly. Any scene or scenelet that is called multiple times or in different ways, such as the standard “Stand, bow” at the end of class (certain choices cause persistent differences for many chapters), the sex scenes (callable from the gallery), and certain combat related quotes are instead at the back of the script. Similarly, there are side events involving some of the subcharacters that aren’t part of the main events. Those are about 17,000 lines into the script (after the chapter 1-7 portion) and take place at various points through chapters 2-7. 

Aaaand even if you got text recompilation functioning correctly, then comes text display. Firstly, the game expects to only be displaying double width characters, so that can lead to all manner of corrupted text (see the Kagura story video above) or simple display issues. I don’t know enough to say what’s breaking all the kerning, but it’s apparently a pain in the ass to deal with and/or figure out. There are multiple fonts as well, so any fix has to account for all of them. The game also uses both a standard ADV textual display as well as NVL, so multiple things need to be well-accounted for.

On top of all that, the interface/gameplay archives are in a different format from the ADV ones. Much simpler, thankfully, and I believe the existing tools unpackage them well, but unlike the script files, don’t support lazy patching, and I have no way to put them back together nor the knowledge to create something myself. I believe some of the images may be in an odd format needing more work (in both the ADV files and the interface), but it’s so far down the list of broken things that I haven’t looked closely. On the upside, the contents are astonishingly easy to manipulate otherwise. Even the camera for skills are just simple text files of commands.

And there’s also all the other translation issues needing some kind of answer (see videos above), from the more basic (subtitling the OP for each chapter) to more complex (next chapter preview voice overs), and there’s other things which probably need addressing in some way, like the odd CG transition with voice but no text. All the things that make the presentation fancy schmancy also provide a parade of localizing issues needing dealing with in one way or another.

Anyway, that’s where things stand. Duel Savior similarly stalled out for lack of scripts, although I only did about 5% there before moving onto Xross instead of ~30%, and that ended up getting put on hold for Eternal Lovers and Kamidori before I got back to it in a super ultra PS2 expanded form. Or maybe I’ll mess around with something else, although I can’t think of anything else I particularly like that is in a good state for being worked on either. I have been probing at recent games though, and some of them have hilarious script formats. Re;Lord’s store (most) hiragana as single width katakana for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, and Demonion 2’s built on a backbone on a gigantic collection of basic CSVs. If only the latter was less bad, but alas. Maybe Alruna (trial posted last night) or Martopia (trial supposedly this week) will wow me, but I’m not holding my breath there either.

Season preview will be up next Thursday.