[Deprecated] Story Patch Thread
AIDA's working on extracting the next patch file from the current data which gives me some time to post something. Normally about now I'm be freaking my shit out, trying to get a patch list working, copy and paste all of the other stuff back from old patches as I tried to figure out what the fuck all of this new random text was. But since I have free time I figured it would be a good idea to write a full disclosure of the process involved in making patches.
Dividing Game into Chapters
This is a feature that I spent the last two weeks trying to get. Here's the full text for the previous patch. In order to get each chapter into it's own patch, first all of the events have to be found in the game data. I used Maronji's videos for a guide for chapter 0-3 and there doesn't seem to be any pattern by chapter. They tend to be sorted by orange matter boards, blue matter boards, blue event tablets by character, ect. And Even with in those sections, the events don't seem to be in any kind or direct chronological order.
But basically a scene in the game:To get every scene in a patch, you pretty much have to play hide-and go fuck yourself looking up and down the data trying to get every scene and onl those specific scenes into one file like this one for chapter 0.Code:sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0010, "Oracle, that is, an enormous fleet capable of freely travelling between planets." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0020, "With its creation, it became possible to advance towards outer space, and a new history began." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0030, "And now, the range of our operations span across many galaxies." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0040, "On Oracle, a mercenary organization was formed to explore newly discovered planets." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0050, "These mercenaries, known as Arks, descend to new locations to investigate." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0060, "The Arks consist of three species that exist within Oracle." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0070, "Humans, with exceptional balance," sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0080, "Newmans, proficient at utilizing photons," sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0090, "And Casts with mechanical bodies." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0100, "These three races cooperating and supporting each other is the foundation of Arks." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0110, "... we have arrived." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0120, "The planet we will embark upon is Naberius." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0130, "There is no civilization and the native creatures are vicious. Do not let your guard down." sk_mv_010010\mv_010010.text, mv_010010, 0, mv_010010_0140, "May you fight bravely."
The problem is even getting a single matter board collected into one patch, there's still the matter of blue tablets and Matoi which is hard to track down what's when. Matoi's events especially seem to be triggered when you unlock something new, but when you talk to her is entirely independent of that. Also people don't even read the patch notes for a patch or two, so being able to communicate which patch contains what content, hosting that and making any changes to those patches on subsequent updates is a job in and of itself. Also there's the matter of hosting and maintaining those. With one large patch, it's a pretty large download size, but with enough people hosting it, the torrent doesn't take much time to download at all.
The other problem with this, is who ever managed it would need a copy of the patch tool, which really needs to be under lock and key. If someone wants to make a collection of what event is what text for what chapter and wants to start collecting that information for future possible releases, it maybe an option once Sega really stops messing with the content, but for now we're going to keep focusing on one large download, to be able to focus on just getting more content translated.
Revising
I was talking to Maronji on Skype who was going over the Matoi conversations in the script and asked some questions about why the lines were so terrible.
Matoi: "What I'm like when I talk to other people?"
Matoi: "Hm, let me try."
Matoi: "Um, okay."
Matoi: "Understood."
Matoi: "Is that so?"
Matoi: "I don't know how to put it, I just get nervous."
Matoi: "I don't know why. I guess I need more practice."
Matoi: "他の人と話す時？<br>どんな風になるのか、って？"
Matoi: "ううん、ええっと……<br>ちょっと、やってみる。"
Matoi: "……はい、そうですね。"
Matoi: "わかりました……"
Matoi: "はい、そうですか……<br>それでは、そのように……"
Matoi: "……なんでだろう、相づちばかり。<br>緊張してる、のかな。"
Matoi: "口調もなんだか丁寧になってるし<br>……ちょっと、不思議だね。"
This is really one of the conversations that gave me the most trouble. Anyone who reads a little Japanese can see that on its own it's pretty simple, and the translation is a more or less pretty direct. When I translate I try to get as close as possible to the original Japanese while trying to convey what's going on in natural enough English. In this conversation Matoi is asked what she sounds like when talking to other people, and then gives a demonstration of what she sounds like. The underlined Japanese word aituji is pretty much a word meaning “acknowledgements”. Like you want someone to shut up, and you just keep nodding while you say “yeah, uh huh,” with out really listening. Basically they're short phrases to just get by.
Following that, she says that for some reason they get too polite. I'm sure that everyone's heard about this by now, that in Japan you can say what you like with your friends, but have to use the polite form for talking to certain people in certain situations. It also happens at interviews or when you're talking to someone you don't know, for some reason you just start talking politely as possible since you don' know who you're talking to. It's also kind of insincere, because you can talk closely with your friends, but talk politely to strangers. Being too polite is can also be away of distancing yourself from others. So that's the entirety of the what Matoi's saying here. While I can understand that and explain it, it's not something that I can just write literally and expect people to know everything behind what she's saying in a self explained game. So for revising something like this isn't something you can just change the words she's saying to work in English, to a large degree it's sitting down and getting the concepts express while refining how the characters themselves interact with the player.
Editing
I thanks everyone whose been posting editing problems in this thread, and humbling apologize that I haven't been making the appropriate changes to the actual patch. Generally I'll do a search and change a few, but then I'll lose the file I'm working on for some reason, or I'll be rushing to get a patch out because Sega seems to randomly change shit every other week. So it's a small change, but it's just a matter of when it get's done. For line breaks all we see is text and rather than randomly sprinkle line breaks in the script which will likely make things worse, we let the client handle the auto-wrap and let people send in reports. The thing about reports is they only come after a patch has been releases, at which time I'm focusing on trying to get more content translated and mostly I'm just not thinking about what needs to be fixed from before. Also with line breaks, it's not really a matter of just putting in a break, because while it fixes it occasionally, often it seems to leave an off white space to the right and ruins flow of the conversation. So to really make the game look nice it really take someone logging in, checking the lines or reports in the client speech bubble and then re-working that line and the lines around it to fit the content so it works better.
Downloads & Website
I've been sorry about the content of the website. I do javascript programming, but I really hate the concepts of websites, where the content of the page is a 1024px div and you have links going to various parts of the site, having to reload the whole page even though the header and footer parts are the same and you're really only loading one paragraph. So I decided to screw the normal concepts and decided to make the site look like the game menu which looked pretty cool, but I kind of messed up with parts getting cutoff or the font being too small. I took that to the next step which is the site right now. I forcefully programed it all in specific percentages so no matter the resolution (unless you really squash the window size), it should appear identical in ratios for all resolutions, and then the menu is changed via javascript.
I really wanted someone to work on the site and maintain the homepage for people to view and update, but for the most part I think it's okay now that I've finally found something that worked. Random side note, but at this point I'm not to inclined to humor random advice on you should do x with the site. General things like that are easier said than done, or I know about it and I'm just too lazy to fix it. If someone would like to take over the site, I can give you an account with ftp access to the site to build a test home page and then change it over once okay'ed.
The site also has a wiki, which I don't know what to really use for. For working on the script, working in notepad++ seems like the best way to go. I have it set up so that I can give multiple people access to the same file, or AIDA can copy and paste a section into a new file and allow that person to access and edit it while giving AIDA access to it at any time. Basically doing it this way cuts down on sending people different files and each time someone send you something, it overlaps with a previous file and things like that. So that seems to be easier than giving certain people access to the wiki and having them work on it there. Though, practically it's not too different. Mostly I'm just not sure how to develop the wiki on the site, or if there's any need for it. So if anyone has any input for what to do with it, I'm open to suggestions on that.
Timing & Releases
This is kind of the wonky part as the main patch is mostly character names or side quest information that doesn't vary too much from patch to patch, but I get the feeling Agrajag is shaking his fist at me going “you don't even know!”. For the story though, one thing that's been hard to stay on top of is new content. The side chapter came out, and even though I had the text, the character names aren't written and I have to do my best going entirely off of text, or wait until someone either makes or a finds a youtube of the event in question so I can double check the scene, what the characters are doing and provide an accurate translation. Beyond that for someone to revise that and edit it, it takes at least about two weeks once we've gotten everything rounded out ready to release Sega randomly throws out more content fucking all the shit up we just did. So it's really hard to try and time the patches with what Sega is doing, and I still don't know how to respond to this, because I rarely ever log in, and when I do it's just to hunt for change in the lobby. So it might be it's better to re-patch the content that we have up to that point and provide any new content up to two weeks later or something like that. Otherwise the only way would be to withhold the new patch until new content was finished, and no one would be able to play the story. So it's still kind of a wonky area, for new content just try and read the patch notes and we'll try and communicate what we're working on and when it will be ready.
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Feel free to re-upload the file anywhere once you have it. I'll try to find better hosting options for future releases.
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