[Game] Umineko no Naku Koro ni - Translation Project

[Bluemail]

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

Look at the cover of any volume (I have 4, 6, 8, Tsubasa). It'll say "07th Expansion presents - Sound novel -"

I think he is asking about Higanbana. I guess we'll see something to that effect when the cover is released about it too.

It's nice to have some screencaps at last. The character arts looks nice, I see the faces still retain somewhat same style as Umineko, and the eyes are more detailed. Everything has been given a dark wash, it'll probably boost the atmosphere. The background effect looks a bit sharper, though dark and contrasty. I think everything looks great so far, even though Higanbana herself looks a bit round-faced than usual, but not noticeably so. Looks like we're getting some really weird characters too. Oh almost forgot about facial expressions! Good news that there'll be lots of them too. I wonder if there'll be some freaky trollfaces mixed in as well.

Can't wait for new tracks either, as it was with every Umineko release. I hope dai, zts, xaki and co. are in this as well. It'll probably need some spooky tracks. They were a minority in Umineko's score, though still a fair amount. OP animation would be great, could the song be by Akiko Shikata again? Or the artists of Kiri no Pithos perhaps. I wonder when they're going to open new sections for Higanbana on the official site.

Is the orange/yellow-haired girl Marie? She has a different outfit and lighter hair. Well, can't think of who else it could be, and it wouldn't be cool to have two characters looking similar.

[Yirba]

Ryukishi07 has posted another update (547). I'm not really able to translate accurately, but it does seem that there will be an OP for Higanbana. The OP will be published soon. I look forward to hearing the song.

Originally Posted by Sonozaki Futagotachi

Hi Yirba,

ONScripter-EN doesn't currently play AVI files. Though we've planned to add support sometime (Japanese ONScripter seems to use libavi to play them, for Linux), we wouldn't be able to distribute codecs ourselves.

Uncle Mion

Thanks for your reply!

Ah, cool! I suppose it's not a huge problem for the user considering they can just access the AVI directly, but it'd be nice to have support for these videos.

By the way, Mion, am I right in thinking that the ONScripter-EN wiki is going to cater for three groups of people: those who want to read visual novels, those who want to create/translate visual novels, and those who want to develop variations of the ONScripter-EN engine itself? It would be great if there were details on all these aspects.

Also, it appears that the wiki can only be edited by administrators? I was trying to fix an typo (synatx), but couldn't find an edit button. Anyway, I'm willing to help out with the wiki if you wish, since there really is a lack of documentation related to ONScripter-EN, and I'd really like this to be improved.

One last thing, should we report issues directly into Redmine or stick to the current methods?

Anyway, thanks for all the hard work. Keep it up! (^_^)

[Sonozaki Futagotachi]

Hi Yirba,

We're still working out how we want to use the project site, and yeah, the documentation is pretty sparse ^^; It'd be cool to have some help, I'll talk with Roto about what we want to do for user permissions.

ONScripter-EN is definitely geared towards the three user types you mentioned: User, Scripter, Developer. It'll be good for us to organize the documentation with that in mind.

And yes, please do report issues in redmine if you can, especially since you've already registered

[cereal_killerxx]

Just curious, but how long is each arc in the umineko game? I'm guessing the first arc is one of the longest because of all the introductions. So far, I'm a few hours in and really digging the story. XD

[AlexiaCarcera]

Originally Posted by cereal_killerxx

a few hours in

Oh boy, the best part is soon!

And each arc, depending on how fast you can read, took me about 20~30 hours each.

I see people reading faster than me though, so it's more like 10~20 I guess? Episode 4 is the longest one :V Eps 6 and 7 felt short to me.

There should be a character/word count somewhere...

[Yirba]

Hi Mion!

I think that Users shouldn't have much trouble using ONScripter-EN since instructions are usually found with translations (plus it's all fairly intuitive anyway).

I haven't seen many Scripters creating original visual novels using ONScripter-EN, probably due to the lack of documentation. Example scripts and tutorials would definitely be useful.

As for Developers, I'm guessing most of the custom builds are to create versions of ONScripter-EN for other platforms. I suppose it would be useful to document the different components of ONScripter-EN. I'm not too familiar with the inner workings, so I wouldn't be able to contribute much to these aspects of the documentation.

Hopefully if there is more documentation, there will be more people developing visual novels. I'd love it if people without much programming knowledge are able to create their own visual novels.

Other sections of the dev corner… Is the 'Documents' section likely to be used at all? I'm not even sure what it's even for. As for the forums, I doubt there'd be much activity considering I can only see four registered members on the site, nor can I think of anything to discuss.

Anyway, it should be interesting to see how that section of the site will be used. I do hope people will be able to use ONScripter-EN better with more documentation.

cereal_killerxx: I'd say about 12~20 hours, though it does vary between episodes and it of course depends on your reading speed.

[rogerpepitone]

Sizes in bytes (English letters count as 1, Japanese characters count as 2)

Episode 1 -> 851994
Episode 2 -> 782882
Episode 3 -> 898057
Episode 4 -> 1085531
Episode 5 -> 852336
Episode 6 -> 833333
Episode 7 -> 763278
Episode 8 -> 467719
(Episode 8 only counts translated parts)

For scale, War and Peace is about 3.2 MB.

[Revelation]

Holy.... (if I'm not mistakened with my little computer calculator) that's 6,535,130 translated words. Is that more than like, the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series combined times five?

[GyroidFanatic]

Originally Posted by Golden Dream

Holy.... (if I'm not mistakened with my little computer calculator) that's 6,535,130 translated words. Is that more than like, the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series combined times five?

That's 6 million letters

[Mirri]

Originally Posted by Golden Dream

Holy.... (if I'm not mistakened with my little computer calculator) that's 6,535,130 translated words. Is that more than like, the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series combined times five?

IIRC The entire Harry Potter series is approximately 8.5 million words- I looked this up when I was checking the relative length of Fate/Stay Night (every single bad end and choice included) vs. Harry Potter - Fate/Stay Night is about 2 million words less, but this was counted with a script that may have gotten part of it wrong.

Umineko is quite long as well, I'm sure it's comparable- I don't have the patience to count by hand or the skill to create a script to count so I wouldn't be able to tell you the exact numbers.

On topic:

Thanks for the patch, Witch Hunt. It has brought me many, many hours of enjoyment and I intend to jump on the full Ep 8 patch as soon as it drops. I finally lost my patience the other day and downloaded the 50% patch, I now wish that I had waited hah.

Best of luck to all of you doing your things, you deserve it

[Acinem]

To Mion and Klashikari
I don't know if anyone has reported but in episode 7 tips. When you click on seven stakes of Purgatory there is change button. When you click it it shows their human form as servant and there is some untranslated text.

[UsagiTenpura]

Originally Posted by Mirri

IIRC The entire Harry Potter series is approximately 8.5 million words- I looked this up when I was checking the relative length of Fate/Stay Night (every single bad end and choice included) vs. Harry Potter - Fate/Stay Night is about 2 million words less, but this was counted with a script that may have gotten part of it wrong.

Umineko is quite long as well, I'm sure it's comparable- I don't have the patience to count by hand or the skill to create a script to count so I wouldn't be able to tell you the exact numbers.

On topic:

Thanks for the patch, Witch Hunt. It has brought me many, many hours of enjoyment and I intend to jump on the full Ep 8 patch as soon as it drops. I finally lost my patience the other day and downloaded the 50% patch, I now wish that I had waited hah.

Best of luck to all of you doing your things, you deserve it

A possibly very valid comparison that Chrono told me about, is I think with arc 7's translation, Umineko surpassed the bible in length.

[Yirba]

New introduction to Higanbana no Saku Yoru ni on 07th Expansion's website.

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

Sizes in bytes (English letters count as 1, Japanese characters count as 2)

Episode 1 -> 851994
Episode 2 -> 782882
Episode 3 -> 898057
Episode 4 -> 1085531
Episode 5 -> 852336
Episode 6 -> 833333
Episode 7 -> 763278
Episode 8 -> 467719
(Episode 8 only counts translated parts)

For scale, War and Peace is about 3.2 MB.

Where exactly do these numbers come from? If it's from the script file, then the scripting for the graphics, sound, etc. would also take up space. Or is this the size of just the outputted text?

[rogerpepitone]

Just the outputted text. (For every line that starts with a backquote (`), it counts the length of that line. Since Japanese text doesn't require a leading backquote, the untranslated part of Ep. 8 is not counted.)

[Oblivion]

Originally Posted by Acinem

To Mion and Klashikari
I don't know if anyone has reported but in episode 7 tips. When you click on seven stakes of Purgatory there is change button. When you click it it shows their human form as servant and there is some untranslated text.

Yeah, I was wondering about that too. I hope they can translate it if they have time.

[Message]

Originally Posted by cereal_killerxx

It's the first one. It like interrupts the in installation or something.

I decided to just use the installer-free patch. It seems to work fine as far as I can see.

I know, but if it's ok with you I'd still like to try and find out how this could ever happen. It's so strange it's almost unbelievable... o_O

[Yirba]

I posted the introduction to Higanbana earlier, but my Japanese being as bad as it is, I had to rely on Google Translate to make sense of it. Of course, Google Translate didn't seem to understand it either. Ah well…

As a bit of fun, I tried 'improving' Google's translation. It's probably completely wrong, but at least it makes more sense than the machine translation.

[Madman6510]

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

Sizes in bytes (English letters count as 1, Japanese characters count as 2)

Episode 1 -> 851994
Episode 2 -> 782882
Episode 3 -> 898057
Episode 4 -> 1085531
Episode 5 -> 852336
Episode 6 -> 833333
Episode 7 -> 763278
Episode 8 -> 467719
(Episode 8 only counts translated parts)

For scale, War and Peace is about 3.2 MB.

For reference, approximate word count and page count.

Assuming that the "average" length of a word in the English language is 5 characters and that the book is printed on A5 paper, with .5 inch margins, and an average of 363 words per page.

Episode 1 -> ~170398.8 words, ~469.418 pages
Episode 2 -> ~156576.4 words, ~431.3399 pages
Episode 3 -> ~179611.4 words, ~494.7972 pages
Episode 4 -> ~217106.2 words, ~598.0887 pages
Episode 5 -> ~170467.2 words, ~469.6066 pages
Episode 6 -> ~166666.6 words, ~459.1366 pages
Episode 7 -> ~152655.6 words, ~420.5388 pages
Episode 8 -> ~93543.8 words, ~257.696 pages

That is ~1307026 words in total, and ~3600.62 pages in total. War and Peace is 560,000 words long, with 1424 pages (paperback edition).

Damn.

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by Yirba

I posted the introduction to Higanbana earlier, but my Japanese being as bad as it is, I had to rely on Google Translate to make sense of it. Of course, Google Translate didn't seem to understand it either. Ah well…

As a bit of fun, I tried 'improving' Google's translation. It's probably completely wrong, but at least it makes more sense than the machine translation.

Yeah, I see a couple characteristic Google Translate-isms in there. Guess I'll take crack at it.

Spoiler for Introduction to Higanbana:

Introduction to “Higanbana no Saku Yoru ni”

“They said the Sobbing Girl appeared!”
“They said they heard her sobbing!”

“*Sob sob* *Sob sob* You there, won’t you listen to my tale of sorrow?”

……*Giggle* Do you know this ghost story? Or perhaps your own school also has a story like this. Ah, but where are my manners? Welcome to our “school”. Please, make yourself at home.

…Or perhaps I should say, congratulations on being able to lose your humanity? I’m sure you won’t believe me, but this world doesn’t belong to humans alone. So, “congratulations”. For managing to reach this world.

No need to be afraid. We’ve always been here, in places just barely out of sight from your world. In classrooms, in hallways, in school infirmaries, in schoolyards…. However, you’re very fortunate to be able to see us up close like this.

*Giggle* ...Hmm. I suppose that means you have the resolve to stop being human. There was another girl, a friend of mine, who came to this side after saying she had that resolve. But what comes next is up to you.

Will you live? Die? Struggle against it? Scorn it…?

Come, let us depart. Take the dancing Spider Lily’s hand. Welcome to this cruel yet beautiful world, the world of the spider lilies….

[Roseweave]

Originally Posted by Yirba

This page shows some screenshots of Higanbana, showcasing the game's new art style. I love the way the characters are shaded!

It also appears that the first episode of Higanbana will be called 第一夜 (dai ichiya, The First Night) and the second episode will be called 第二夜 (dai ni-ya, The Second Night). A third episode has not been confirmed.

I'm confused, is Higanbana a "When they Cry" game? Now it's being made into a VN it'd almost suggest it is. Or is he taking a break from the WtC series? If it's just one VN, fine but otherwise it means we'll have to wait years to see Lambda/Bern again

It just seems silly making a "When They Cry" series with 2 loosely connected games with similar themes. If there was a third one, perhaps using some characters from both, it might make the series seem more solid as a "whole".