[Richard 23]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

So, uh.

How's that translation effort coming?

While I'm sure that for the asker of the question it's a very simple thing to ask. For the person answering it, there really is no simple answer. To be more accurate, the correct answer is the reply those annoying magical eight balls provide: "answer unclear, ask again later."

It's one of those questions like "how are you?" Most people say something like "I am well" even if it's not the full and honest accounting. Because the questioner doesn't really want to know the answer, or at least not the full accounting answer, and the respondent is usually too polite to go down the long list of things that aren't quite as they ought to be.

But you probably expect the courtesy of an answer to such an obvious and simple question.

It's going well. It's a staggeringly huge and seemingly endless task, one that isn't really all that obvious when holding down the control key to skip line after line of hand translated and edited and reedited sentences to get to the next route.

The truth is none of the people at #fluffy really have any more idea when it will be done than you do. Not the guy tling in the former Soviet Union, the native speaker somewhere on one of the crowded Japanese Islands, the guy in Finland who edits my edits won't even tell me the release schedule. The guy who edited a ton of the many images, I don't bump into him often enough to get his answer.

As for the UK guy, whose real name is applehq, he's keeping the release date to himself. I'm not sure why.

Probably the best way for you to get a feel for when any translation project of this size and scope would be to find a group that needs an editor and dive in. I bet you'd come out with new insight and a sense of doing something worthwhile.

Originally Posted by Komari

Dunno. You can ask fluffy on irc, but they seem to be rather arsehole-like as of late.

I sure hope you're projecting or jumping to conclusions here. Did you ask a question with no answer like "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Believe me, they've probably gotten your question so many times and still don't have the answer. Not having an answer can be a little frustrating. I'm sure on a bad day it could cause someone to get the idea they're letting people down or something.

Of what I know about the small group of people scattered across the globe, almost equidistant from one another, is that they all have one job or two or school or other projects or other nagging responsibilities that all conspire to keep them from working regular and steady hours on the project. Life gets in the way.

I've got a full time job, a volunteer job, editing when I can, hacking reallive when I can't, updating a slightly outdated disassembler and matching compiler, written in a language that I haven't used before, so I've been rewriting it on and off for weeks.

It takes a lot of time and there's always other annoyances vying for that time. My impression based on very little fact and probably overly optimistic is that maybe in a year or two there will be a patch file out there probably bundled up by applehq that people will occasionally download that approximates the experience a native Japanese got to have a lot sooner. And maybe people will like it. And it will be a quick and easy download, and pretty small considering how long it took to finally get released in a "final" (abandoned) state.

Originally Posted by izmosmolnar

As far as I know they hate that question almost as much as "why not ex?".

Hate is the wrong word, but I doubt you can actually crawl into other people's heads so it's easy to understand the confusion. I don't know what other games the #fluffy people have in their collection, but one they all have in common is Little Busters. They all got into the game one way or the other before EX even existed. And one is as good as the other in theory, both even better. But why extend the lead time by doing a changeover. LB is enough in itself and more than enough of it will be able to be applied from one to the other.

It's like asking after coin was tossed and came up tails, "why not heads?" Gee, I dunno why not. But I'm not really going to dwell on it because if I question everything, I won't have time to find any answers.

My question that I can't get anyone to answer is "why not Air?" They stopped talking to me at all after last time. I guess they don't like my avatar or something.

Originally Posted by Komari

I recommend keeping an eye on their TL page found here, and you can see there that they are advancing.

That's not a bad idea, but it's about as exciting as watching paint dry. Have you ever watched people editing text files? Wow, what a party. Count me in on that action.

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

What question? "Why aren't you working on the project you signed up to work on?"

Yikes. That's not exactly a good way to manipulate people into doing something you want. And it's wholly inaccurate. You wouldn't want to falsely accuse someone of slacking off on something they're currently working on as best they can while giving them the impression that you somehow think you're entitled to the result yesterday. That probably won't have the intended effect, so you might try to reword that if you think it will somehow help crack the whip.

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

...I can understand that real life can get in the way and stuff, but the last change on that page was a month ago... Ah, whatever.

That's applehq for you. He acts like he owns the place and would release a patch consisting of whatever was in the main svn directory at the time he felt like bundling it up. The other people working on the project usually found out about the patch when someone dropped by and asked about it.

As to why he hasn't made another one for no apparent reason, it's a complete mystery. Applehq is a maverick who walks his own path, even if there's no trail.

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

As long as they haven't completely given up on it...

I doubt they have. But if the project's been abandoned I wonder what I'm going to do with this rewrite of the reallive decompiler I'm still updating for LB and LB EX.... Maybe I can convert to a forum spammer or something....

While you're waiting for the paint to dry, I encourage you get involved in something that someone else is waiting for. Theres always stuff to do and people waiting for it to be done. Feed into the vicious circle and stir things up!

R23