Translations: Kaze No Densetsu Xanadu II (PCE-CD) - Announced!

[elmer]

We're trying hard to see if we can get a taller logo working in the game that looks more like the box-art, but in the meantime, here's the (probably final) revision of the current English logo artwork.

After a bit of hacking, it looks like a taller logo is possible, and is actually working in-game.

Here's the new logo that seems to be currently leading the pack of candidates ...

[Kallisto]

Wow! I was not aware of this project! Congrats on finishing it!

I always wondered if someone was going to mess with the Xanadu Series

[alexkun]

so any planned release date yet for this project ? will be looking forward to it!

[Kallisto]

I almost forgot about this project, yeah what's going on with it? Did you all hit a road-block?

[elmer]

Congrats on finishing it!

I almost forgot about this project, yeah what's going on with it? Did you all hit a road-block?

Errr ... you were a bit premature in using the phrase "finished".

The dub recording still needs to be done, there are still some graphic elements in Xanadu 2 that need to be replaced, and the whole thing still needs another polish pass (or two).

OTOH, I finished my first-ever English play-through of Xanadu 1 yesterday, and it's looking really good. 

If you didn't know, Xanadu 1 is a *huge* game ... as someone that's never played it before, it took me over 30 hrs to play through it all.

These things take time, please have patience.

BTW ... if you really want to follow the progress closer, both SamIAm and I do regular updates in the "development" section of the  PCEngineFX forum.

[alexkun]

Errr ... you were a bit premature in using the phrase "finished".

The dub recording still needs to be done, there are still some graphic elements in Xanadu 2 that need to be replaced, and the whole thing still needs another polish pass (or two).

OTOH, I finished my first-ever English play-through of Xanadu 1 yesterday, and it's looking really good. 

If you didn't know, Xanadu 1 is a *huge* game ... as someone that's never played it before, it took me over 30 hrs to play through it all.

These things take time, please have patience.

BTW ... if you really want to follow the progress closer, both SamIAm and I do regular updates in the "development" section of the  PCEngineFX forum.

-- excised under Rule 2 --

[elmer]

-- excised under Rule 2 --

I wondered if a moderator would catch that and comment kill it! 

[alexkun]

I wondered if a moderator would catch that and comment kill it! 

a collector never stops collecting

[elmer]

The dub recording still needs to be done, there are still some graphic elements in Xanadu 2 that need to be replaced, and the whole thing still needs another polish pass (or two).

OTOH, I finished my first-ever English play-through of Xanadu 1 yesterday, and it's looking really good. 

I've completed my first-ever English play-through of Xanadu 2 now, and so can say that both games are fully-playable in English.

Work is ongoing to replace the last of the text-in-graphic elements, and I'm happy to be able to say that the Xanadu 2 Opening cutscene has finally had the character names translated (which was a huge PITA).

Here's the result, together with the latest (and probably final) revision to the subtitle to say "The Last Dragon Slayer" ...

[Kallisto]

Sweet! By the way..will I need to play Xanadu 1 to understand this story?

[elmer]

Sweet! By the way..will I need to play Xanadu 1 to understand this story?

Xanadu 2's story is pretty self-contained, and there's no knowledge that you'll need from Xanadu 1 in order to play through and beat the game.

But you'll miss a lot of the character-interactions and the subtext.

IMHO, if you actually pay attention to game stories, and like a story that's been told well ... then I'd highly recommend playing Xanadu 1 first before you play Xanadu 2.

I believe that you'll just get a lot more out of Xanadu 2 if you do so.

Xanadu 1 has a reputation for being a difficult game ... but it's really not that way when it's all in English, you just have to pay attention to what people are saying, and you'll figure out what you need to do.

I believe that we're planning to release the Xanadu 1 translation with maps and with a walkthrough, so that anyone that gets stuck, or who doesn't find mapping "fun" will still be able to enjoy the incredible story and gameplay without getting frustrated.

As to which is actually the "better" game?

Well they're very different, and I fully expect that some people will like the 1st game more than the 2nd, and vice versa. It'll be interesting to see which people prefer which game, and why.

[Burnt Lasagna]

Whenever I see updates to this project, I always go back here,
https://youtu.be/fK6FtO0kSnY

[elmer]

Whenever I see updates to this project, I always go back here,
https://youtu.be/fK6FtO0kSnY

On behalf of my fellow Brits ... please accept my humble apology for the involvement of my countrymen in that audible atrocity. 

Not all of the music from the 1960s has stood the test-of-time.

October 09, 2016, 04:12:41 PM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Just another update.

The Backup RAM Save Slot selection and Pause Menu have both had their graphics hacked and palettes updated to make things a bit more English-friendly, and have new drop-shadows that match the drop-shadows that have been added to the dynamic text drawn by the new VWF code.






The audio compression tools for re-inserting the new ADPCM dub into Xanadu 1 have been written, and are being tested now, and the visual cutscenes in both Xanadu 1 and Xanadu 2 have been de-constructed to confirm that we'll be able to modify the lip-sync in both games to match (within reason) any changes in the new English dub.

As for the dub itself ... I'm personally hoping that we'll be ready to open up a casting-call sometime in the next few weeks. 

[schtolteheim]

Where it says ATT the bar across in the 'A' sits too low, it is inconsistant with the other 'buttons' besides it.
Same goes possibly for the MAX to the right of ARMS/ARMOR/SHIELD, though it's not really as bad.

[elmer]

Where it says ATT the bar across in the 'A' sits too low, it is inconsistant with the other 'buttons' besides it.
Same goes possibly for the MAX to the right of ARMS/ARMOR/SHIELD, though it's not really as bad.

Hahaha ... good point! I've been looking at the Pause Menu for so long that I'd just gotten used to the inconsistency.

The original Japanese graphics for that screen have the crossbar on the 'A' visually-too-low on 3 buttons, and 1-pixel higher on 2 others. I guess that it's OK to fix the inconsistency in the favor of readability.

Thanks for pointing this out! 

[Kallisto]

Is there any real update with this game?

[elmer]

Is there any real update with this game?

Sorry, I didn't see you message.

Yeah, real-life has slowed things down in the last couple of months, and since the in-game stuff is basically finished, there have been no new pretty-pictures to show that would have been worth bumping the thread for.

From my programming side of things ... hacking all the cutscenes so that we can fix the lip-sync when we need to has been time-well-spent, but it's not like there's anything to actually *show* for it, yet.

A crazy amount of work has been done to nitpick the dub scripts for consistency and content, to try to make them *sound* natural in English, and to make sure that those scripts flow well to/from the in-game story.

There has also been a ton of detailed work done in preparing everything so that we're on-the-ball when we actually call for volunteers with voice-talent and (hopefully) start receiving submissions.

I *think* that call will go out in the next couple of weeks, but then, I said that last October, too.

AFAIK, we're just finishing off the last details of things like the script formatting, and making sure that the website for the dub is active and looks nice to those folks that aren't rabid-gamers, but who might still be persuaded to contribute their voice.

[elmer]

I posted this a few months ago on the translation's blog thread at PCEngineFX, but I figure that some folks here might be interested in this technique, too. So ...


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As I said a few days ago, the Weapon Shop and Status Bar have been a real PITA to do a graphics cleanup pass on.

It's finally done, and I thought that it might be good to explain the technique used, since it's not one that's been commonly seen since the 4th-generation development days, and someone might want to use it in another translation, or a homebrew game.

Here are the original Japanese Status Bar and the Weapon Shop's Gems Box ...






If you look carefully, you'll see that the background of each of the boxes is actually made up of a repeating 8x16 texture ...






The regular English text that is displayed in the Message Boxes is drawn by first decompressing a copy of the blank Message Box graphic, and then copying that to VRAM before finally drawing the text pixels on top of that clean background.

That's fine for the Message Boxes, where the game itself is stopped, but it's too slow a process for the numbers that are displayed on the Status Bar.

For the Status Bar, where the numbers change on a constant basis as you kill the monsters, Falcom are using a different technique.

What they're doing is to store a copy of that 8x16 background texture permanently in memory, and then just figure out what part of the texture corresponds to the pixels underneath the digit that they want to display.

Here is something to show how that actually works in practice, with the numbers that are displayed on different lines for the top and bottom of the Status Bar, and the middle of the Current Gems Box.




Then, as Falcom are writing the digit, line-by-line, into the box sprite, they can use that texture data to replace the pixels that were overwritten by the previous digit that was displayed in that location.

That's a pretty fast way of updating the numbers that are displayed on the Status Bar and Weapon Shop, and it's very efficient in terms of the memory used.


****************************


But ... it's a bit of a PITA when it comes to trying to add a drop-shadow to the numbers in order to make them pop off the background and be easier to read, and more consistent with the other shadowed text that's in the game now.

I couldn't just draw a separate drop-shadow, the way that I'm doing on the Message Boxes, because that would be too slow, and effect the game's frame rate.

There isn't enough free memory to store pre-drawn copies of each digit, in each location, with a real drop shadow baked into the texure.

What I've done is to dredge up a really old technique that's not perfect, but it gives the illusion that there's a drop-shadow on the digit, but without causing any runtime overhead, and with only minimal extra memory usage.

For this to work, you just keep a 2nd copy of the background texture, and then use the original "clean" version if you're displaying a "space" character, but use the new background texture whenever you're writing a digit.

The new background texture has a drop-shadow baked into it that works well-enough to look good for each and every different digit that can be drawn at each of the 3 different positions in the texture.

Creating the new texture is a bit of an "art", and requires a lot of compromise between what a real drop-shadow should look like, and what is good-enough to create the right impression without making the entire box too dark for numbers like "1" and "7" that contain lots of blank space in them.

Here's what that looks like, with the original texture on the left, and then the new shadow texture next to it, together with a before-and-after for the 3 different lines that the numbers are displayed on ...




It definitely darkens the outline of the digits, but you'll probably think that it looks pretty horrible.

That's because you're seeing the whole 8x16 texture at once.

In reality, the game code only writes the 7 lines of each digit that are displayed, and leaves the rest of the texture untouched. That's what makes this technique work ... you only use the new drop-shadow background texture on the lines that it is needed on.

Here's my test example of how it actually looks in practice, with the new fake-shadowed text on top, and the original non-shadowed text on the bottom.




The effect is pretty subtle, but it does manage to look like there is a drop-shadow on the numbers, and it definitely lifts them visually off the background and makes them more readable, at least IMHO. It's not pixel-perfect, but it's good-enough to fool the eye.


So, after all of that messing around, and after modifying the boxes themselves to add a drop-shadow to the icons and the "GEMS", this is the final result (with the high-contrast palette) ...






If you can't immediately see difference between those and the Japanese originals ... then that's the point. The idea is to add just-enough change to help the text pop out more, but without screwing up the look of Falcom's game.  :wink:

[chrisw80]

Really looking forward to this. Nice work!

[elmer]

Really looking forward to this. Nice work!

Thanks!

*********************


The last of the graphics changes have been made to the games, and that's the Level Name screens that appear for a few seconds at the start of each level in LoX2.


Falcom's original screens ...






Translation screens ...






Since there's not really anything else to say about the translation itself, I think that we'll be starting a new thread in the Personal Projects section when it comes to the dub.