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Videogame Subtitles

 
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MediocreMan



Joined: 28 Oct 2005
Posts: 16

PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 9:37 pm    Post subject: Videogame Subtitles Reply with quote

WOAH I just got an Idea.

Many Translation Projects are having a hard time replacing the text inside a rom due to limitations/encryption etc.

With a special emulator, it would be possible to display subtitles
(If there was some kind of way to determine what text is being displayed at runtime)
Those could be plaintext files and would allow to be edited by "normal" people.

I know there would be a lot of work involved in this, I just want to know what you think about it.
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TheRedEye
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 9:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That sounds 10x more difficult than the traditional workarounds.
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kap
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 10:21 pm    Post subject: Re: Videogame Subtitles Reply with quote

MediocreMan wrote:
stuff


I had this exact same idea a few years ago, no kidding. For reasons I won't get into because I don't remember them at all, it isn't practical.
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Carnivol
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Joined: 21 Jun 2004
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 10:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's would most likely be VERY hard to create something like that and it basicly requires you to do most of the same work you have to do with a game while hacking it the other way around anyway...


As you still have to figure out where the hell the game reads it text from, so when it reads text from location X, you'll have to display replacement 'subtitles X' and when playing Audio from location Y audio dub or subtitle Y must be played and so on... Basicly just an extreme way out, and if it for some reason would turn out to be 'better' it'd still be worth the extra trouble with hacking so you can get it to run on real hardware ^^
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TheRedEye
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 10:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It would seem to me that you'd have to be emulating the system twice.
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MediocreMan



Joined: 28 Oct 2005
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 11:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm not talking about "replacing" just displaying english text at the bottom, which would solely require to know what text is being displayed at the moment. (I just cant imagine that beeing too difficult)

This brings the work of translation to a different non-technical level. Of course a proper Hack is better, but then again it sometimes just impossible to fit text in unless appending, which requires even deeper understanding of the games inner functions.
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Carnivol
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 11:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Padding space can be the cheap and easy way out when doing a translation/text-hack project.


You just pad how much space you want/need and add a pointer to where the original text used to be, saying that "Hey, fetch the stupid text from this spot instead"




As for this project, it'd be hard to do.
As you'd still have to do a full script dumb of the game and translate, and then you'd have to have the emulator (or whatever) recognize the points the text shows up at and insert your translation as a subtitle on-screen.

Ofcourse, there is a way to probably go outside of the scrip dumping, by using a babelfish tool to auto-translate the text found in memory, but differing text from garbage data would be hard and would require special treatment for each individual game.

Also, you'd run into amazing problems with games using shortcuts/pointers for each individual word.
Like, let's say "A1 = Wonderfull", while "A2 = Awesome". "01 = You" and "02 = him" and so on...


Last edited by Carnivol on Sun Oct 30, 2005 11:08 pm; edited 1 time in total
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TheRedEye
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 11:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MediocreMan wrote:
I'm not talking about "replacing" just displaying english text at the bottom, which would solely require to know what text is being displayed at the moment. (I just cant imagine that beeing too difficult)


And what I'm suggesting is that for something to automatically know when text is being displayed, that something would have to be emulating the game at the same time.
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kap
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 11:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Far as I can tell, the idea seems both reasonable and plausible from a non programmer's point of view because it'd be an analog change. "When this shows up on the screen, have that show up in the translation window".

The problem is, an emulator doesn't recognize x amount of text as text - all it sees is a bunch of code. It can't say "ok, I see a box of text up there, and it matches this entry in the translation file, so display this english text.. NOW!".

If you made a game without any text at all, just had graphical options everywhere, the game itself would operate exactly the same. To a human's point of view, it'd be different.. it'd be universal.

So, yeah. If you stop thinking about text as text and realize it's really just a bunch of tiles, you realize why it isn't so practical.

edit: What redeye said in his last post and what I'm saying here are pretty much exactly the same.

MediocreMan wrote:
I'm not talking about "replacing" just displaying english text at the bottom, which would solely require to know what text is being displayed at the moment. (I just cant imagine that beeing too difficult)


That's where you'd be wrong, though. It's much more difficult than you think.. teaching an emulator to recognize text isn't all that easy.

Now, if you want to talk to all those hackers who have fun and make profit defeating captchas, go for it.
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