Zill O'll infinite plus english translation

[Mugi]

As im now more or less finished with the graphics overhaul I figured it's time to give some eyecandy to the community here too
Tons of little things were fixed allover the place but Instead of pointing everything out i'll just drop a few comparison shots.

hope y'all like it.

vanilla <----> Patched.

[Tom]

You might consider changing the "Passive" skill graphic to the letter P.

The Japanese says "Auto" skill, and labels the skill with the A T symbol (probably meaning AuTo).

Since "Auto" has been changed to Passive, it follows that the letter of the icon should also be changed.

[Mugi]

those I havent touched yet, they, along with the status effect labels (poison etc.) are still on the table.

[KaioShin]

Beautiful 

[lexluthermiester]

This is looking really good. Like the font you've chosen.

[ObiKKa]

Beautiful 

This is looking really good. Like the font you've chosen.

Yeah, agreed. I noticed both sets of fonts and they're much more beautiful. Sure, yeah, those character portraits are enhanced much better with a nicer contrast in their backgrounds.

[Mugi]

I'm really pleased with the fonts myself, although I cant really take credit of the general font itself, since I simply replicated Tahoma for that purpose (it's more or less pixel identical)
And the graphical texts I simply remade only because a small amount of them were written in japanese and I wanted all of them to have unified look, so the english ones like the "quest completed" here had to be redone too.

It's starting to really look nice overall.
I'm currently working over the status effect icons, and various little tidbits I missed or wasn't happy with so far but in general I'd say it's about 95% done as far as graphics goes. My personal favourite as far as the graphics goes is by far the "upgrades" I imported from the ps2 version though.... so many cups of coffee and packs of smokes went into making this happen. (curse the miserable soul who packed the files on the ps2 version.)

We also had a little conversation about an idea I came up while being bored out of my mind that we might even redo the main logo for the game too, to give it a similar look than the official english release of Trinity, souls of zill o'll had. Trinity being the only official english release of the franchise ever, we played around with the idea of having our little english patch follow in the footsteps of the official prequel.

here's my initial concept of it, though nothing has been set in stone and at this point, it's still not even decided whether or not we will be doing this change at all. Nonetheless, hearing opinions of things never hurts anyone.

[DSwizzy145]

I'm really pleased with the fonts myself, although I cant really take credit of the general font itself, since I simply replicated Tahoma for that purpose (it's more or less pixel identical)
And the graphical texts I simply remade only because a small amount of them were written in japanese and I wanted all of them to have unified look, so the english ones like the "quest completed" here had to be redone too.

It's starting to really look nice overall.
I'm currently working over the status effect icons, and various little tidbits I missed or wasn't happy with so far but in general I'd say it's about 95% done as far as graphics goes. My personal favourite as far as the graphics goes is by far the "upgrades" I imported from the ps2 version though.... so many cups of coffee and packs of smokes went into making this happen. (curse the miserable soul who packed the files on the ps2 version.)

We also had a little conversation about an idea I came up while being bored out of my mind that we might even redo the main logo for the game too, to give it a similar look than the official english release of Trinity, souls of zill o'll had. Trinity being the only official english release of the franchise ever, we played around with the idea of having our little english patch follow in the footsteps of the official prequel.

here's my initial concept of it, though nothing has been set in stone and at this point, it's still not even decided whether or not we will be doing this change at all. Nonetheless, hearing opinions of things never hurts anyone.

Just leave it the way it is because you never know some people might be highly disappointed with the change honestly

[Tom]

I really liked Mugi's new title screen much better than "Zill O'll Infinite Plus," which sounds kind of odd. It sounds quite Japanese-Englishy, like "Zill O'll Hyper Brave Edition Infinity Alpha."

The only change I wanted was for the title to be:

      Infinity
Souls of Zill O'll

instead of just

Infinity
   Zill O'll

[Mugi]

Just leave it the way it is because you never know some people might be highly disappointed with the change honestly

To be honest with you Im not really sure if I like it or not yet either, but it does have it's both sides. On the other hand, it would align the english translation nicely with the official release of trinity and give the patch some look of it's own, but on the other hand, I'm kinda stuck on the whole "lets keep it as it is" thing, which I know from experience, a lot of people tend to like more...

it's a really small change as far as the actual game data goes though, so whichever way it goes, it's not like it would be hard to revert it in any case. This patch already has components that will be patched in as optional changes, such as the ps1 mode soundtrack and UI, so nothing prevents us from adding an option to reroll the logo back to it's default state.

[Tom]

Originally, I was in the "leave it as it is" camp, and didn't even consider changing the title screen, but once I saw your work, I was instantly converted to the idea.

I like giving people the option to choose between the two title screens, since you're going to give them the option to choose between PS1 and PSP style soundtracks.

[ExL]

New title looks better, though I agree on "Souls of Zill O'll" point and I think the line should look like in Trinity's title, bit more height and glow. It's my personal preference, I would be satisfied with way you made it too as it's better than "as is" to me
Also while I'm at it, I liked "Quest Completed" of original more, it was standing out more with deeper orange and  black line behind. Can it be compromised with new font, but deeper orange and black line? Or at least only deeper orange?

Really loving all the progress in the thread, it progresses very well and my nitpicks are minor compared to overall awesomeness. Even 2 different soundtracks to play with greatly increasing replayability
Thanks to you both, Mugi and Tom, for bringing top quality translation with modifications making game even better than it was! (I bet that even half of it wouldn't achieved with official localisation if it was made)

[Mugi]

New title looks better, though I agree on "Souls of Zill O'll" point and I think the line should look like in Trinity's title, bit more height and glow. It's my personal preference, I would be satisfied with way you made it too as it's better than "as is" to me
Also while I'm at it, I liked "Quest Completed" of original more, it was standing out more with deeper orange and  black line behind. Can it be compromised with new font, but deeper orange and black line? Or at least only deeper orange?

Really loving all the progress in the thread, it progresses very well and my nitpicks are minor compared to overall awesomeness. Even 2 different soundtracks to play with greatly increasing replayability
Thanks to you both, Mugi and Tom, for bringing top quality translation with modifications making game even better than it was! (I bet that even half of it wouldn't achieved with official localisation if it was made)

the new logo is simply a first draft, it's no more than a thing I quickly put together with a random font that was a "bit like there" to see if it would work at all or not. For starters, the "infinity" text is a bit too large, it's blurred to shits, and the font is nowhere near like the trinity one, i'll be redoing it atleast 74 times before im happy with it assuming we do go that way. Same goes with the "souls of" i simply left it out since i wanted the game's original name to be there, but adding that back there is no big deal

for the quest completed, I was considering of making it closer in colors and with the black line as the original was, the thing is, that this is the only one with a black line, so instead I simply made it more in-line with the rest of the texts. (okay, technically the battemode messages had a line too but they are using a special highlight color mode on their rendering which makes dark colors transparent so that doesnt really show up much in the original, the new ones dont have it anymore.)

Im sure if there was an official localization of this, it would be great too, but what comes to things we've been doing here, some of them are simply not something an official psp release (on UMD) could have.
The graphics are the prime example of this, I've now pumped up practically all UI graphics from 16-128 color to 256 color, and while this is completely in spec with the game engine (it supports even direct color so i could do that) the fact is that the psp itself cannot handle it anymore (i blame gim library, it sucks.)  The fact that this patch is only being played from the memory stick and that we have access to things like overclocking the psp (set the cpu to 333mhz from vsh menu) allow a lot of little things to be done to the game that would simply drag an UMD version's performance down to gutter.

and before people ask about the overclocking, no, i did not intentionally make the game lag, it lags enough as it is, so using maxed cpu speed is highly recommended unless you want to enjoy random 10fps in battles even on the japanese vanilla game.

[ExL]

Well, it doesn't look draft-like, it looks pretty official already But tweak as much as you want, sure, as I stated it's better than game had so direction is right, I'm sure it'll be even better when you'll be satisfied with result

"Quest complete"probably can live without black line, but I'd deepen orange, it'll give more volume and make it stand out more.

Pushing good ol' PSP to the limits without adding new lags? That's awesome feat! And those graphics indeed looks way better

[Mugi]

it's not really about adding or not adding the lag.

the game does have it's share of slowdowns by default but mostly they're caused by dumping multiple 3d things on the screen at once, I noticed that battles with 4 members and 4 enemies tend to mostly suffer from that. Nonetheless, I do spin the game on actual hardware everytime I make changes to ensure that it still runs atleast at it's original performance rate, and i did give it a spin on the devkit's performance analyzer once too, just for shits'n giggles. Changing the graphics from 16 to 256 colors isn't much of a change as far as the game dealing with it goes, sans the fact that the filesizes (especially on small images like 12x12 pixel icons) gets large really fast due to the palette eating tons of space. Going from indexed to direct color would propably introduce a nice lag though (again, the gim library is awful.)

same thing appeared with the ps1 soundtrack, which i originally re-encoded to 128kbps against the original 64kbps, but it became practically unplayable slow on real hardware so i gave up on that and just left it at 64kbps at the end.

i think in general the devs were just being overly careful with the files trying to shave off as much as they could at the cost of little visual candy (like the character portraits that were encoded to 128 colors by default.)

at the end of the day i'll do some optimizing with it once i know for a fact that im done with the graphics, since making things like 32-color gim files is completely possible regardless of the fact that sony's official tools for making them only support 16, 256 or direct color. I just added an extra step to trim the files back to any palette size i want. The gim library itself supports this just fine, it's just the conversion tool that doesn't.

for those working on psp stuff and interested of this extra little optimization, practically you make your image 32 colors, then you make it to 256 colors, order your palette so that the first 32 entries of the palette are used, and then convert it to 256 color gim, and then change the palette entry count from the gim header and delete the end of the palette which should all be 0x00000000 (or which ever your tool of choice uses as not used color) The gim library games use supports this 100% and honestly i have no idea why the conversion tool itself doesnt. I've been planning on making my own for that purpose because messing with the hex editor is a little annoying.

All in all it's not a big deal but my inner perfectionist always shrugs when i see an image that has 0x100 worth of data and 0x400 worth of palette in it -.- not want!


as far as the "quest complete" i might just give it a little glowy outline like the original has just to add some mass into it, but dunno... we'll see, Im still in progress of playing with the final look of the graphics anyway.

edit: here's a tiny bit more orange one with a glow around it like the original (sorry, still no line )



edit2: slightly stronger glow (transprency nicely eats palette entries )

[ExL]

Yeah, it's understandable why they've being playing it safe. Though 4vs4 slowness indicates that they were trying to compensate elsewhere, rather than lowering polygons as it's usually done in PSP ports of PS2 games. Well, glad there is overclocking now

Both "Quest complete" looks fine, stands out enough. I'm leaning towards 1st one, with more subtle glow

[Mugi]

They were cutting corners REALLY hard on some textures, the model textures have been reduced to 128 color and 128x128 from their original 512x512 256 color they were on ps2. Cant say much from the models but they still look relatively detailed so maybe they went for higher polycount at the cost of textures. Battle effects are mostly just textures as far as i know so it seems atleast that most of the slowness comes from the actual character and enemy models themselves (maybe landscapes too, not really sure.) Either way, im hardly an expert with 3d so it's a bit hard to acccurately judge it.

the overclocking solves most of the bad lags but not all, all in all it's a really nice performance boost compared to the stock, and I tried to atleast keep it at that (battle mode graphics were kept to their bare minimums instead of blindly upgrading everything.)

oh well, figured i'll get this logo thing out of the way too and after failing to find a font that properly matches the TRINITY font, i just drew one myself.... hardly perfect but much closer than my initial draft.

[Tom]

That's perfect!

[Mugi]

i'ts getting a bit spammy now but whatever

final form (i hope.) Better "T" and better alignment (now actually in the middle of the screen.) minor size adjustment for the text, shape and clarity improvements on the main text.
this one is cheating as i implemented it as direct color (2000 colors) instead of 256 Seems to work fine.

[Tom]

The font in the second to final version looks better, in my opinion. Especially the bottom of the T. In the second to last, it was flat like the original, but in the final version, it almost looks curved.

But maybe there's some other subtle detail that I'm missing out on.