Hehe, I like you. At least your honest. Motivation and it's sources certainly differs from person to person, but that's no excuse for altering the potential quality of a project.


DaMarsMan:

Perhaps you are not communicating your intentions the best way. I think you may be misunderstood. No translators have stepped forward, so you want to stick any old thing in there so you can get a working patch demonstrating your work. Is that what you are really trying to say?

That's an entirely different scenario than saying you're not waiting for a translator, copying somebody else's script and trying to mish mash the additional script in later and call it a done project. That's the part everybody is criticizing.

Have some patience. First off, your DQ5 help add here doesn't have a webpage listed. Second, if you go to Kojiro Translations, the DQ5 project linki(in the flash intro) is busted. It's also busted and shows virtually nothing on the project page you can get to from the Projects section. There's been no news since July 2006 on the site. Not to mention you have to wait for that nearly illegible annoying flash intro text to finish EVERY single time. But that's unrelated.

So anybody who goes to that page has NO IDEA you even need a translator for the project or even that you're working on it!

The ONLY people who even know are people who frequent this message board.

It will help your chances at a translator to reach a larger audience than just the handful of people who are on this board.

I just don't get you people who complain about not having translators and within 5 seconds, I can determine you're not doing a multitude of things that you could be doing to help your cause.

<going mildly offtopic, sorry>

8x8 vwf on the SNES is incredibly tough. Not technically, it's easy to hack up the game to blit in your 8x8 vwf tiles and get them onscreen. But very tough to get the 400 different 8x8 text printing routines all using your new vwf routine, and managing all of those tiledata + tilemap transformations across multiple different screens that mix and match things up, and getting it all working fast and without nasty side effects like the tilemap drawing before tiledata, thus showing gibberish tiles, etc.

While it's possible to add 8x8 vwf in most games that don't store tiledata for other BGs immediately after the 256-tile 8x8 set (Dragon Quest 5 does this, making the 8x8 vwf virtually impossible), it's incredibly difficult in all but a few specialized games (such as Der Langrisser and Bahamut Lagoon, which lacked the kind of cross-menu scenarios* you can run into with eg Dai Kaijuu Monogatari, WOZZ, etc).

* example: you have 8x8 vwf for your four character names in one spot, more 8x8 vwf for your text menu on the left, another sub-window pop up on top of that menu on the left, more for your status screen text labels on the right, another routine for the 8x8 helper character names at the bottom right, and then the user switches to the tactics screen which also uses 12x12 vwf so that takes even more tiles up. You have to be sure that you have enough tiles for everything onscreen without overwriting anything existing, yet you can't rely on globally persistent state variables since you're hooking a game rather than creating it yourself, so you have to carefully plan where you want tiles, when you need to flash update VRAM to clear out tiles before a tilemap is written, when too many of these vblank waits will kill the game's responsiveness speed, etc etc.

It really isn't worth the trouble, and even if you're the best coder around, you can't account for 100% of all edge cases, and you'll end up with a buggy/glitchy translation patch that runs the game and menus significantly slower. There's a reason not even professional companies with access to the source code dared to try and add 8x8 vwf to the games.

Nightcrawler's only viable option for WOZZ was probably hacking out two-items-per-line stuff to one-item-per-line stuff. Even this fails in many cases, such as equipment screens and shops where there's already only one item per line, but is at least a start.
And two line 8x8 ALWAYS looks like shit, no matter how you do it. It's hideous.

I agree with DaMarsMan decision, it will help keep the project in motion. Who doesn't hate getting their hopes up, just to be disappointed by another dead project  . I just hate hearing that "real life" got in the way, I suppose that means prior to that the individual was not experiencing "real life".

A retranslation shouldn't be necessary at all, if a good editor looks over the work. In fact, I think the editor is more vital to a professional/quality work, than a the translator or writer. Writers have been known to change styles of writing in the middle of a book (EX: Mark Twain). "Good" translators tend to error on the side of accuracy, rather than readability. An editor can be unbiased and simply focus on the flow and unity of a work, rather than its content.

Yeah...you can't provide proper translations with 8 limit length. That's my point. I'm frustrated that most of the people I respect in the community disagree with my decision. Is Dejap's translation really that bad? I started this thread as an update to what's going on about the project. Then I get all these objections to how I'm doing things. You're going to start locking threads created by your own staff members? I don't see what's the big deal.

I guess my point is that at least he's doing something instead of letting the project sit. He said he's tried to enlist help at various forums, with no luck. Sure, patience is a virtue, but maybe some people don't have enough of it to put up a webpage and wait for a good, dedicated translator to come along.

Anyway, I stand by my original statement that DaMarsMan is not getting the support he should be. You're certainly entitled to your opinion about what he should do, but I think it's kinda wrong for everyone to be this negative with him and then threaten to close his thread when he gets frustrated with everyone being that way.

I'll say it once more, since no one has taken my example to heart:

Thanks, DaMarsMan. Much love and appreciation.

P.S. Is it so hard to say something similar to the above statement before you criticize?

I think it will be relatively popular even if he just copies Dejap's work. For one example, wasn't Gideon Zhi's initial Rudra patch just a retranslation of a French translation? Quite a hit for quality going through not one but two language barriers. Most everyone still enjoyed it, as anyone who knew Japanese to criticize anything wouldn't be playing the English version anyway. And for all I know, the end result may very well have been of impeccable quality anyway.

I'm not trying to say the quality would be appalling by copying an existing script, just simply lower than translating it all with one translator. And I obviously really care about this particular game, and was disappointed with the end-result SFC translations, so I see this as sort of a `last-shot' for a quality English translation. I know that whenever I half-implement something, I rarely ever go back and correct it later. DaMarsMan, you're certain you will be retranslating it all later on, even if you lose interest when you get all but that part finished? It would just be nice if we could hold community standards above that of some of the crap given to us by "professional" companies. And once again for the record, I just provided my two cents; you're obviously free to do whatever you want.

W I L L _ S Q U A R E - E N I X _ E V E R _ R E L E A S E _ V C _ G A M E S ?

I would kill for a paying job of translating old console games for the VC... What does this have to do with DQ5?