[Game] Umineko no Naku Koro ni - Translation Project

[ghost_zero5]

Originally Posted by k//eternal

Apparently they exist and I just can't see them because I don't believe in advertisements

(read: because they're blocked)

loool. Maybe you should start a game if advertisments exist or not


Anyway, has the translation of Ep5 even begun yet because importing should take a while too, shouldn't it or is it available as buy for download version too somewhere?

[Mikachiru]

Originally Posted by ghost_zero5

loool. Maybe you should start a game if advertisments exist or not


Anyway, has the translation of Ep5 even begun yet because importing should take a while too, shouldn't it or is it available as buy for download version too somewhere?

You shouldn't rush. It's only been two days.

[Renall]

I was bored, so I extracted all the graphics from arc.nsa (about 800 MB as an .nsa, 3.5 GB extracted), converted them to PNG or JPG (PNG for most everything, JPG for backgrounds) with no quality loss, and slashed the footprint down to 418 MB.

Is there any way to "repack" all of this, and if I did, would the script file also need to be amended to reference the changed extension? Halving the size of the graphics file kinda proves how... uh... sloppy it is.

[Jan-Poo]

Yeah I fear so. the file names should be converted from ".bmp" to ".png". However it isn't an extremely difficult task since you could do a "substitute all".

However if you do so, you need to change all and any bmp to png.

Btw how did you conver all those files? I guess you have a program that can do that automatically...

[Christen]

Batch conversion. I can do that in one folder, but I don't know if there's a program that converts everything under a folder and its subfolders.

[k//eternal]

Originally Posted by ghost_zero5

loool. Maybe you should start a game if advertisments exist or not


Anyway, has the translation of Ep5 even begun yet because importing should take a while too, shouldn't it or is it available as buy for download version too somewhere?

No way, Google-Beatrice is too terrifying...

[Klashikari]

Originally Posted by Renall

I was bored, so I extracted all the graphics from arc.nsa (about 800 MB as an .nsa, 3.5 GB extracted), converted them to PNG or JPG (PNG for most everything, JPG for backgrounds) with no quality loss, and slashed the footprint down to 418 MB.

Is there any way to "repack" all of this, and if I did, would the script file also need to be amended to reference the changed extension? Halving the size of the graphics file kinda proves how... uh... sloppy it is.

We actually wanted to reduce the size of the arc.nsa like this, however, in the end, it isn't really that useful to reduce the size of non-text pictures.
Why is that? because our patches only introduce translated pictures and the rest are directly taken from the original arc.nsa. Therefore, past putting everything translated in Jpg, it won't lighten the size of the patch, to the contrary, it will increase it.

Also, providing a complete reduction of all pictures from the original arc.nsa doesn't suit our policies, since that means we would be also forced to provide an edited japanese script for it to be working.
As result, we are changing the content of the game by itself.

And we are still not really sure why Ryukishi suddenly converted all Jpg in BMP starting from Episode 4...

[Marion]

Something I noticed:

Spoiler for EP 5:

Excluding people who died in the game the other characters have the same 'dead full body' from EP 4 (when you go to TIPs and execute and what not). Will you be removing them or not?

[Klashikari]

Spoiler for ep5:

Aside of Krauss, Jessica, Hideyoshi, George, Genji, Rosa and Maria, the rest have their usual living state. I don't get your "dead full body" from ep4 mention, they remain normal no matter how I many times I use the tips functions

[Marion]

Originally Posted by Klashikari

Spoiler for ep5:

Aside of Krauss, Jessica, Hideyoshi, George, Genji, Rosa and Maria, the rest have their usual living state. I don't get your "dead full body" from ep4 mention, they remain normal no matter how I many times I use the tips functions

Spoiler for EP 5:

Really? Odd I looked at the arc.nsa files and when I went to the full body sprites for dead and alive states I found dead versions from EP 4 of those that didn't die this time. Weird xD

[k//eternal]

Probably just left in for laziness?

[Klashikari]

Ah, you meant the arc.nsa, not the tips function

well...
It is Ryukishi's nasty habit: he rarely starts from scratch but rather take the previous episode and overwrite only what's new and doesn't really take care of the rest.
Thus, there are a lot of dummy content in each new episode

As for our patch, we just needs to put pictures of what we need to translate, so there wasn't any tati e in any of our patches to begin with.

[Renall]

I do wonder why everything was converted to BMP. I can understand wanting to avoid JPG (although he left the endscrolls as JPGs, and ep5's is a JPG as well), although I made all the backgrounds JGPs and noticed absolutely no quality loss, but the portraits being BMP is baffling and wasteful to an extreme.

There is really no reason for there to be an 800-900 MB arc.nsa, but it's too cumbersome to fix it for a patch or whatever (I mean, you could do it by patching the arc.nsa and script, but you'd just wind up distributing a 400-500 MB file for that). It's really quite annoying. Umineko really doesn't need a larger install footprint than Half-Life 2.

EDIT: Plus, I'm not sure but distributing the arc.nsa and script file comes dangerously close to distributing the entire work. It wouldn't be a "click and play" situation, but you'd have the lion's share of the data available to you already.

[Klashikari]

If it was just a time consuming problem, that wouldn't be that an issue.
However, we would need to distribute an arc.nsa of the original game with everything in jpg as result. Therefore, we would be providing already half the game through illegal means, while our patch contain only very few pictures (the ones which need translation).

We will do something about our patches, but as our policies and situation go, we won't modify the original game one bit.
That said, we might mention this matter to Ryukishi, as we have tons things to ask him already, "thanks" to ep5.

[Ushiromiya Battler]

Are you guys still working on the overhaul of Episode 1? I certainly don't mean to pester anyone about it, I'm just curious because I told a friend to hold off on starting it since the Ep1 overhaul was coming soon. Just wanting to know if it's gonna go on backburner now that Ep5 is out and whatnot.

[ghost_zero5]

Originally Posted by Mikachiru

You shouldn't rush. It's only been two days.

That was why I said probably not and I only asked that question because of the "fun talk" (it being finished soon or something like this but definitely just talk for fun and not meant seriously) above. That's why I was curious to know if it even started yet

Originally Posted by Klashikari

We will do something about our patches, but as our policies and situation go, we won't modify the original game one bit.
That said, we might mention this matter to Ryukishi, as we have tons things to ask him already, "thanks" to ep5.

What about letting the patch when it is done copy the original arc.nsa and then extracting whatever you need and repack it or use a patch file that needs the original file and just changes certain parts of it - like e.g. the patch command in Linux does which however isn't very good to use here as these would be binary files.
However, the extract and repack option would probably be the best. Especially, considering the legal point of view.

[zorahk]

Uh what's wrong with the way the patches are done now? Works fine for me.

Also, BMP is a higher quality image than JPG. Plus if you compress further you will lower image quality. Ryukishi isn't the biggest compression freak but on the other hand that's probably a good thing. I'd let him do what he wants.

[Jan-Poo]

Actually I'm quite skeptical on the "no quality loss". In my experience the jpg format always gives terrible results for images with flat colors.

The backgrounds maybe can be done, but the characters "tati"?

[rogerpepitone]

Does .nsa support .png or .gif compression? Those are lossless.

[k//eternal]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Actually I'm quite skeptical on the "no quality loss". In my experience the jpg format always gives terrible results for images with flat colors.

The backgrounds maybe can be done, but the characters "tati"?

Depends what you use. Lately, Photoshop's default JPEG compression does a pretty good job (I can't remember if it was CS2 or CS3, but it got a nice upgrade somewhere along the line), and plugins like ProJPEG can be used to make it better.

MS Paint does a horrible job with JPEG, though.