Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: Accomodating non-native speakers in English translation

« on: Today at 12:16:20 pm »

http://www.loekalization.com/urbanmyths.html, especially point 3 and below.

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General Discussion / Re: Accomodating non-native speakers in English translation

« on: Today at 04:19:18 am »

(German native here) No, dumbing down the English would serve no one. You would only do a disfavor both to the source material and to native and non-native English speakers alike; the former don't want to read elementary English and the latter will never improve.

I have to agree with KaioShin in that although my native language is German and I'm fluent in Japanese I'm rather doing Japanese-English translations (as a hacker, mind you, I'm quite the purist and leave translation to native speakers of the target language). Why? As he said, the audience is larger by far. Most of my fellow Germans that are interested in fan translations are fluent enough in English, even if it's not perfect.

What I think would serve the whole community a whole lot more is to provide tools and/or help to aid other ROM hackers in localizing a game into their native language. This actually goes a long way: Your tools need to support (ideally) Unicode, inserting non-ASCII glyphs, and so on - many things that programmers who are English speakers tend to overlook.

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Front Page News / Re: ROM Hacks: Super Mario World The Lost Episode 2 - Release

« on: May 20, 2013, 10:19:25 am »

bsnes/higan is free. It's very accurate and if it runs on higan, it'll most likely run on a real SNES.

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Gaming Discussion / Re: Only 16% of gamers hate grinding ?

« on: May 18, 2013, 05:14:58 am »

Equally the arena on resonance of fate might have been grinding done right though that might have more been because I really liked combat in that game and they occasionally tossed in a boss battle (of an old boss) and mixed up enemy placement from battle to battle.

I remember occasionally gaining a dozen levels per battle in the arena... that was pretty fun. Still, completing it was pretty tedious, if I recall correctly, because there were just so many battles.

5

Gaming Discussion / Re: Wii U vs Oyua

« on: May 18, 2013, 05:12:02 am »

First Ouya reviews have been devastating, the software side (firmware, but games as well) is pretty horrid apparently. And the Wii U still has no software library to make buying one worthwhile after over a year since release. I wouldn't pay for either of those two.

Sounds like a case of "That's what you get when you spend all your money for hardware and design but neglect everything else just as, if not even more important"... with today's hardware, you just need a good firmware.

This is Wii U. This was completely predictable.

Exactly why I think the Share button on the PS4 controllers is just outright stupid. I weep for gaming as we know (or rather: knew?) it.

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Gaming Discussion / Re: Only 16% of gamers hate grinding ?

« on: May 17, 2013, 09:36:51 am »

I've played too many games where status and/or sleep type spells miss all the time and instead of helping, it just wastes a turn, wastes MP, and brings you closer to death.

So true, and so frequent in JRPGs. Why have spells that are basically useless? Status effects and such have that slapped-on feel in many games, as if to say "we just implemented them because all RPGs have them". Furthermore, the majority of games use the same effects over and over again ("standard fare" like poison, sleep, and so on), despite the fact that you could get really creative with them. 7th Dragon 2020, for example, has a "Hacked" status effect that is the prerequisite to induce other, more powerful effects. In my opinion, they have a lot more potential than the standard elemental weaknesses most games feature.

What I also really liked was for example in Star Ocean 3: You could kill an enemy not only by reducing its HP to zero, but also by reducing its MP to zero (brain death?). Thus there were some special attacks and even some items that dealt MP damage.

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Script Help and Language Discussion / Re: quick question

« on: May 17, 2013, 03:50:28 am »

〜まい is both the negative volitional and negative prospective form. In that, it's basically the opposite of the 〜おう form. However, as a sentence ender, it's seldom used as volitional nowadays. That's why I'd say it's probably rather "(I strongly assume that) he/she/it/you/whatever won't say anything anymore" (usual subtext: "... that would oppose or criticise us/me"). But without context we'll never know ;)

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Gaming Discussion / Re: Only 16% of gamers hate grinding ?

« on: May 15, 2013, 03:56:41 pm »

I fail to see how you could NOT BOTHER having to repeat the same thing again and again.

I think you fail to see that different persons have individual tastes and interests. Not everybody's like you, dude. I'd wager that there are millions of people who think what you're doing every day is boring.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Rockman 2 hacks difficulty reduction hack?

« on: May 15, 2013, 06:56:04 am »

If you know the format of the enemies' data you could write a program that reads their HP values, halves them and writes them back. You would still need different patches for each hack, but as long as a hack didn't change the layout of said data the program itself would be universal.

Disclaimer: I have no experience at all with MM2/RM2, so it might be that this approach is not feasible.

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Script Help and Language Discussion / Re: A few Deep Dungeon 3 lines

« on: May 15, 2013, 02:58:34 am »

There's probably a typo in the description of the Death spell: 死におとしいれる, which might be rendered as "..., putting the enemy on the brink of death."

門外不出 emphasizes that the spell is only passed down within this school/rank of monks, and not ever to outsiders. Not sure if there's a fluent translation that reflects this, but there's that.

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Personal Projects / Re: Castlevania II (Simon's Quest) - Finnish & English re-translations

« on: May 14, 2013, 04:57:50 pm »

Too much information, like the Bahamut Lagoon translation title screen, which I always thought looked bad.

Wow, that looks horrendous! It would look better if there was at least some structure to it. As it is it just looks slapped on...

12

Gaming Discussion / Re: Only 16% of gamers hate grinding ?

« on: May 14, 2013, 08:21:40 am »

Sometimes you just don't want to do anything even remotely demanding, but still want to achieve a feeling of accomplishment (level-ups, items, ...). That's why I sometimes like to grind, anyway. When I spend my whole morning and afternoon thinking about more or less complex stuff I just don't want to use my brain anymore in the evening.

Also, as justin3009 mentioned, it needs to have the correct "dose". If you have to grind for hours upon hours just to gain one measly level it's just boring (a lot of MMORPGs fall into this category, or early JRPGs...)

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Help with smb1 hack

« on: May 13, 2013, 06:00:51 am »

Could you give my more information about this 'idk',where do i find it how do i use it...

"idk" is the abbreviation of "I don't know", it's not the name of anything.

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Programming / Re: labyrinth loader im having trouble with

« on: May 09, 2013, 04:14:31 pm »

That won't work at all. You need to think about a) what arguments getline(...) takes and b) what it returns (hint: it's not what you want).

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Programming / Re: labyrinth loader im having trouble with

« on: May 09, 2013, 02:53:10 pm »

Also, I COULD have used else if but in some compilers it's either elseif or its else if and I didn't feel like switching it if I did it wrong.

What are you talking about? If it's C/C++ it's always "else (if)". There's no keyword elseif in the language. And even if you were unsure it's just a matter of trying to compile it, the compiler will tell you if it's wrong. Considering the scale of your programs that's a matter of ten seconds, if that. Also: Syntax highlighting.

Also, about your problem regarding the input of 2-D data, I don't think you're doing it wrong per se. What exactly is the problem? If you want to read line by line from a text file, you can use std::getline to read the next line into an std::string and iterate over its characters.

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Gaming Discussion / Re: Your personal gaming Holy Grails, what are they?

« on: May 07, 2013, 11:26:37 am »

I played a whole lot of X3 as well as a child, but I guess I was always borrowing it...

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Gaming Discussion / Re: Your personal gaming Holy Grails, what are they?

« on: May 07, 2013, 05:55:18 am »

It's not that I value them that much, but I still have Mega Max X, X2 and 7, all complete from when I was a child. Not sure why but those seem to sell quite well on eBay and the like.

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Gaming Discussion / Re: PSP games still coming

« on: May 07, 2013, 05:52:16 am »

I have both systems as well and I can fully understand that everybody has his or her favorite (mine is the PSP, actually). I just can't understand why you would wish that a console/handheld should die although there are still good games coming out for it (at least in Japan; last month there was 7th Dragon 2020-II, which I quite like; this month there is Summon Night 5, which I guess will at least please fans). It's not that it will affect you negatively in any way...

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Gaming Discussion / Re: PC vs Console gaming.

« on: May 07, 2013, 05:45:29 am »

Most "modern" systems have user-developed SDKs available (e.g. PS2, PSP, NDS). Making your console/handheld play unlicensed content is usually quite easy and won't cost you much. If you ask me, the reason why it's not very popular is not that you yourself can't develop or play your own game, it's probably because you can not distribute, let alone sell your product without having to fear legal consequences. Who the hell goes through months or years of making his own game just for himself?

Well, that's my comment on your post InfamousKnight, but actually I don't see what your intention really was. What can I decide for myself?

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Site Talk / Re: PSP and Wii Valid Screenshot Resolutions

« on: May 07, 2013, 05:33:34 am »

As far as I know the PSP only supports outputting at 480x272 (it's the native resolution of the built-in screen, so I doubt there would be any incentive to use another resolution even if it was possible).