DeJap Translations (original) (raw)

Everyone has been begging for an update, so here it is. I think it's funny how almost everyone kept asking "are you dead??". Did everyone miss the posts below saying we're not giving up and to stop asking us if we're dead? Doesn't anyone have faith in us to follow through? :P Thankfully some people do.

Statement

Whatever the case, sorry for any "inconvenience" that the lack of updates caused anyone. Part of the reasons for lack of updates was beyond our control. We haven't forgotten our obligation to the donators to finish this project or out promise to release a patch by the end of the year.

"When will you update or are you dead?"
"What's the status of SO?"
"When will you release the final version?"
"Why are the forums still down?"
"How do I patch an IPS?"
"How do I use the graphics packs?"
If you were one of those people who sent such an email then don't expect a reply, instead this post will answer your questions.

All the "thanks!" and "I know you're still working on SO even though you haven't updated so good luck however long it takes" emails, however, I will reply to eventually. Thanks for those emails, they help keep us going much more than the reminders of the lack of updates. In fact as far as I can remember, I only got 1 negative email from a dumbass who had his facts all wrong. I'm impressed that there weren't more.

So... what exactly happened to DeJap??
Why did we take so long to update? There isn't a simple answer, there were many reasons that prolonged our updates. Much of it had to do with server problems.

First of all, right after a certain dumbass hacked the forums and posted fake messages, coincidentally the server hosting the forums went offline. Most people thought that we took the forums offline because they were hacked but that was not the case, they went down on their own. The forums were offline for a while because of the server; once it was fixed _Demo_ worked on upgrading the php forum scripts which also kept the forums down for a while longer. The forums came back online several months ago but we didn't have the link updated so many people assumed the forums were still offline, although you could still get to it through the Zsnes site.

Secondly, shortly after the time that the forums came back online, the server hosting the DeJap site died and so browsing www.dejap.com gave an error. Many people just assumed the worst and rumors started flying around and lots of shit was said about us. I'm not sure exactly what the problem was but it took a long time to fix. When the page finally did come back online, we were planning to do an update. Tomato had updated the Bahamut Lagoon scripts and wanted to do another release. I wanted to wait until I could fix the remaining bugs in BL before doing the release. So, I spent another month working on BL (and other projects) before attempting to do another news update.

When we were ready to do an update, _Demo_ informed me that they were in the middle of doing a server switch over. The switch over should have only taken a week, but afterwards two things happened: 1) the nameserver for dejap.com wouldn't redirect to the new server's address, and 2) I couldn't access the ftp on the new server to update the pages. Something was not configured properly with the accounts and security permissions and as a result I wasn't able to log into the new server until a month later when the security was fixed.

That, combined with the fact that once again www.dejap.com return an error (because the nameserver refused to switch over) once again made people spread rumors like we're dead and gone, or we took the "money" and disappeared - untrue of course. A few months back, the site, ftp, server and url all returned to normal, then something else had to happen...

First there were 2 deaths in the family and I had to fly around the world for the funeral. Then when I got back, my computer literally exploded. These things combined put me off working on anything computer related for a while. Besides that, Tomato became extremely busy with his translation job at Funimation, but also couldn't log into the server (security/firewall reasons) so he too wasn't able to do any updates and we weren't able to get in contact with the host. Tomato is currently still busy with his job and is no longer available to work on free translation projects with DeJap...

So, the local nuclear plant was doing some testing and my computer happened to receive a huge spike that killed the surge protector, caused all the capacitors in the computer/PSU to explode, melted all the ICs on the hardware and fried all my hard drives. This was late at night so of course everything else was off or unplugged and survived the electrical shock. YES I did have back ups of everything this time, but I had no computer to put the back ups into.

Because of not having a computer and the recent funerals, it was time for me to take a vacation from 'the scene'. A month later, I got a new used computer - since I couldn't afford a new one - half way through September (then the M/B died and was forced to get a new one...) after which I was able to start working on Star Ocean again.

Anus P. began helping with Star Ocean in September but quit shortly after because of school work. Cidolfas (from the FFCompendium & RPGClassics) started helping in October with finishing off the script editing and managing testing. He has been begging for a site update ever since :). I was holding off until now, when we had some better screen shots to show off for Star Ocean.

In November, Bisqwit (who maintains the Finnish ToP translation) began rewriting the DeJap html web pages using PHP instead, making it much easier to do an update. A big problem and deterrent for doing an update and fixing the forum links in the past, was that EVERY html page on DeJap was hardcoded and was a cluttered mess to edit - it was just too much work to fix the whole site in one sitting so it would keep getting put off, which in turn meant no updates.

Converting the entire site to PHP took up much of our time (which could have been spent working on Star Ocean), but it allowed us to finally make this update. It will also allow us to do quick, easy and more frequent updates in the future, though there's still some more PHP work to be done...

And what's the point of all this?
The point is this: nothing is ever what it seems. I'm just asking people to think logically before jumping to conclusions and accusing us of quitting and letting everyone down and other nonsense.

Project Updates

Tales of Phantasia

Fixed some item names and tech names and will be fixing other stuff such as a better designed naming screen and allowing entry of 7 letter names, also some some script errors have been fixed. Thanks to Grinvader (I think) for suggesting corrections for several item names.

On a side note, I contacted Namco to ask if they would let us port and translate the new GBA version of ToP legitimately for a North American release. I was told a flat out "No." by their localization manager. Reason: head office didn't yet feel that ToP was suitable for English speaking audiences (i.e. they wouldn't make enough money from it); and then I was told even if they did want to translate it they would never let us do it. Heh... Stupid Namco.

Dragon Quest 6

A fellow contacted me offering to help with finishing off the DQ6 translation, currently he's agreed to finish up the last 10% or whatever is missing of NoPrgress' DQ6 script. Nothing's happened yet but hopefully DQ6 will finally be completed... unless the DQ curse says otherwise. :/

Dragon Quest 5

An update which fixes minor things including some names, will be released soon. If you have any DQ5 bug reports, now's the time to submit them.

Dragon Quest 3

This is my favorite of the series but also seems to be the hardest to find people willing to work on. Seiichi/Hojo (Front Mission) was helping to translate it but got busy and had to quit. I'm hoping we can team up with RPGOne since it would seem silly to have 2 groups working on the same game at the same time and not sharing information.

Bahamut Lagoon

Tomato fixed many item names a while ago which had been mistranslated. I was supposed to release a new patch but I still want to fix one bug first, allowing me to unify the copier and emulator specific patches. Unfortunately I wasn't able to fix the bug yet so the final revision of Bahamut won't be released for a while (until I can fix the problem).

I asked before but no one replied so I'm asking again: if anyone has real snes hardware programming/assembler experience and has a backup unit to test the game on and is willing to help with debugging Bahamut Lagoon, please e-mail me.

Far East of Eden Zero

DarkZero (from Star-Trans, a German translation group) has begun translating the text and is making decent progress. This game, however, considering all the work that needs to be done, may not be ready for a beta release until around 2005.

Samurai Showdown RPG

Some people have shown interest in wanting to help translate this game, though we might end up doing the PSX version instead since more people could actually play that one (though I don't know too much about PSX hacking). The NeoGeo version is still the easiest to hack and if anyone is familiar with Saturn hacking and wants to work on the Saturn version we could attempt that as well.

In fact, if there's anyone who's interested in helping with SSRPG and has knowledge of either 68000 ASM (Neo Geo) or PSX/Saturn hacking, please contact me.

Tactics Ogre

Earlier this year I was helping Lord Tech with Tactics Ogre. We took the script from the PSX English version and transposed it onto the Japanese SFC rom. That was supposed to be the extent of the hack and we were going to release it, but then remembered all the menus and such weren't in English so the game was still largely unplayable.:) Lord Tech did some ASM work on the menus but had to stop to work on more important things, as did I.

I know some of you must be thinking "WTF?! Why bother??" but this project is not completely stupid. Mainly I wanted to help with it just to shut up all those annoying people who keep e-mailing and begging for a Tactics Ogre translation and don't have the sense to play the PSX version :). The other reasons are because the SFC version does have some minor advantages over the PSX version: better music, no stupid load times, more story cut scenes, etc. Of course, retranslating the script would have been a complete waste of time. I don't know what Lord Tech plans to do with it for now (probably nothing..) but if it's still at the same stage when I'm done with the other projects, I'll attempt to finish Tactics Ogre off.

Star Ocean

What can I say... I've been working on the reprogramming almost full time, day and night for the past 2 months. I had grossly underestimated the work involved in hacking this game. As a result, I've been sacrificing everything (food, sleep, work, money, free time, friends, entertainment, even sex - not a lie!) to keep working on Star Ocean. I'm not about to break the release date..! Hopefully you'll appreciate the effort more once the patch has been released.

Despite the amount of time I've put into the game, there's still lots of hacking left to do, most of it cosmetic work to pretty this game up and to redesign various menu interfaces. Originally I thought that all the hacking was done months ago, but after more testing I found that the patch didn't hold together. There wasn't enough room to fit in all of the replacement text and graphics, then even more untranslated text was found.

I've had to throw out all of the previous hacks for Star Ocean and virtually start from scratch again, which was an awful lot of work and really was not fun. Now, I've implemented 5 new forms of text and graphics compression (which didn't originally exist in the game) and I've been rewriting hacks to allow for multilingual support for later - contrary to what you might think, not everyone is waiting to play Star Ocean in just English.

The game is starting to shape up as it should, though there are still many issues left to address. One of them is the use of a variable width font for the 8x8 item names and menus. Because of the way this game is written absolutely nothing is ever easy to change, including the stuff that really should be, so an 8x8 VWF is definitely going to take the most amount of time to implement. Basically, if something looks like it should take only 30 minutes to hack, it ends up taking 5 hours or more and this is just for really minor stuff.

So, the 8x8 VWF is on my list of things to do, but it is last. This means that most likely the patch that gets released this year won't have menus and items using a VWF, instead I'll release an update early next year to support this. It's not required but it will make a big difference in the game. Not having the VWFs makes it look just like ToP's menu system, which wasn't that bad.

Currently, the patch supports translated dialogue, menus, items, spells, techs, skills, monsters, item descriptions, spell/tech descriptions, battle messages, treasure chests messages, coliseum messages, re-nameable characters and whatever else was missing from the last beta patch. What's not completely done yet (apart from a lot of hacking/reprogramming work) is script editing. Editing relating to all forms of text, not just dialogue.

At this time I would like to invite people who donated towards Star Oceanto contact us if interested in actually helping with beta testing. Cidolfas has been going over the patch and dialogue edits and believes it's ready for beta testing.

Please

DO NOT APPLY if you do not have the time to TEST(and not PLAY!!) because we don't have much time left before the end of the year, so we do not want to lose time by waiting on someone who's too busy with other duties to help test efficiently!

We need to have several testers run through various parts of the game with all the different combinations and permutations of character parties, so we'll be assigning who gets to pick which characters (i.e. you will not be playing the game the way you want to play it).

So if anyone who was a donator is still interested and can actually afford the time to help: please contact me using your email you used to make the donation or else specify the name that the donation was made with so we can verify you, also

please specify how much of your time you would be able to offer to help with the testing.

In case a few hundred people apply (like what happened with DQ5), we will have to choose people at random so it's nothing personal if you don't hear a reply. I'm expecting this might overflow my mailbox, so

please send all emails regarding beta testing to Cidolfas(cidolfas@rpgclassics.com). If you get a returned/undeliverable e-mail error, try again the next day or try me instead.

Note to everyone who emailed us asking if they can do voice acting: your e-mails aren't being ignored, they're being saved until next year for when we have time to work on the dubbing project again.

And finally, here's what everyone was waiting for, proof of progress for Star Ocean: browse the Star Ocean project page and scroll through the available screen shots; Javascript is required. A big thanks to SirYoink for helping with creating the screenshots.

PS: Again, for the people who can't seem to read:

check the FORUMS for HELP with GRAPHICS PACKS and IPS PATCHES. Do NOT E-MAIL us asking how to use them, we will not be able to reply. Thanks.

- We're not "back" because we were never "gone" ;).