Tuesday 15 March 2011

Next version features...

Just a heads up on what the next version will bring: an "Advice" field in the translation files, which should make a translators job somewhat easier - and incidentally bring the new patch file format up to feature parity with the old. It'll also be using the new filehosts.

Also, as you can no doubt see, I've managed to get the header with the download links to look about right.

And finally, even if it's somewhat late: Please consider donating to the Japanese Red Cross, or any other organisation trying to help with the disaster in Japan. They really need the help right now, because in addition to the massive natural disaster, Japan is quite an underinsured country, and of those who have insurance only about half had insurance against a tsunami. A lot of people have lost everything, and aren't going to be getting anything other than whatever kindness others show them.

22 comments:

  1. Hello,

    Just reporting a couple of points, after trying to get your great translation tool to work with ryonaRPG.

    I've noticed that after generating a patch, the file "RPG_RT_ITEMDATA.txt" is created with ANSI encoding, whereas all the other files seem to be encoded with UTF8-BOM. This file also seems to contain "NUL" characters, which you can see with Notepad++.

    Both of these, especially the latter, have been giving me issues, since I am not sure how to translate "NUL" characters. I can't seem to copy/paste them either. Finally, should I leave the file in ANSI encoding before re-injecting the patch, or transform into UTF8-BOM ?

    Any help would be appreciated.
    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Also, I realize it is not directly to your tool, but what do these tags (variables) stand for ?

    \N[]
    \S[]
    \v[6]
    $g

    I keep running into them quite often, and I can foresee some dire hyphening issues :)

    Thank you for your work, and help.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alright, here is some more info for you to chew on, if you wish (and had the time, of course).

    I am working with the latest version of ryonaRPG (obtained through their SVN : http://subversion.assembla.com/svn/ryona/RyonaRPG).

    I have extracted a "patch" thanks to the latest version of your tool at my disposal.

    Now, I am trying to re-inject some of the files that I completed with (mostly) machine translations.

    I get these errors (among others) :

    [URL=http://www.imagebam.com/image/85622a124026629][IMG]http://thumbnails30.imagebam.com/12403/85622a124026629.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

    [URL=http://www.imagebam.com/image/9192de124026634][IMG]http://thumbnails38.imagebam.com/12403/9192de124026634.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

    with the following files (among others) :

    https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1RZYIZVIH-6YzIwZjFhY2EtY2RiNi00MjUwLWE0ZWYtYTk4YjZmYWJhMWZi&hl=en&authkey=CImdwKoG

    There's something I must be doing wrong, but I simply can't figure it out.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Karmapowered

    Have you enabled UTF8-BOM mode? If not, do that (see RPGmaker Trans 1.81 release announcement). If you have and it still isn't working, try deleting the translated folder and retranslating the game. As to NUL symbols/ANSI encoding - both shouldn't even be possible, especially as I don't know what ANSI encoding is. Perhaps you mean ASCII? In any case, the file should be UTF-8, but it might not have the BOM; try forcing the encoding to UTF-8.

    As to those special symbols, please look up special symbols for RM2k.

    @JM

    I can't really tell what's going on from what you've posted; please run the translator in logging mode (enter D into the game selection menu, then select the game) and please post the log file.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Here is what I am doing, just so you can understand what's going on, and maybe try it out on your own :

    - Windows XP, Japanese locale (I doubt it matters, but hey)
    - rpgMakerTrans v1.81
    - ryonaRPG latest revision (547), as of today

    1/ I run the tool a first time to generate the ryonaRpg_patch folder, with its files

    2/ Immediately after that, I open the RPG_RT_ITEMDATA.txt file with notepad++

    3/ The file has a NUL char on line #21, which cannot be copied, and I also notice that the file has a (pure) ANSI encoding, contrary to all other files, which have a UTF without BOM encoding

    4/ Now let's take a file, RPG_RT_HERODATA.txt for example, just to make sure I am proceeding correctly.

    5/ I edit a section (# TEXT STRING -> # END STRING), remove the # UNTRANSLATED tag, and complete the part below # TRANSLATION with my translation.

    6/ I save the file, and launch the rpgMakerTrans tool again. I get an error, stopping the whole process at about 98%, like shown above.

    I will now run the same process in debug mode, as you requested.

    I really want this tool to work, as it seems to have such a great potential :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alright, here is the trace, as promised :

    - completed the auto-generated patch with just the two files in the archive linked above
    - launched the patching process with debug

    Here is what I've got :

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\cx_Freeze\initscripts\Console.py", line 27, in
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 5210, in
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 5176, in main
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 145, in processJobs
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 4611, in processArbitaryFile
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 72, in dumpBinary
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 4094, in toBinary
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 3862, in toBinary
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 3732, in toBinary
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 3780, in toBinary
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 3654, in toBinary
    File "rpgmaker_trans_v1.81.py", line 3625, in toShiftJIS
    UnicodeEncodeError: 'cp932' codec can't encode character u'\xe3' in position 24: illegal multibyte sequence

    Just something that seems weird to me, even if I doubt it is really related : my python is located at "C:\Program Files\Python26", not at "C:\Python26".

    ReplyDelete
  7. The Python location is irrelevant for a frozen executable, so ignore that. Also for reference, UNTRANSLATED tags can be left and the translator will remove them automatically.

    I'm not able to investigate things fully just yet (that'll have to wait until later today or tomorrow) but the crash seems to be because there's some data in a RyonaRPG file which it can't parse, not because of anything you've done. I have a suspicion it's the RPG_RT.LDB file. So perhaps it would be an idea to redownload RyonaRPG (or at least RPG_RT.LDB; delete it then revert the SVN repo) - it may be that one of your files is corrupt - which would also explain why there's a NUL in your Itemdata file.

    And I will also state that theoretically, every file generated by RPGMaker Trans is UTF-8 = as in there's no way to write a file without it being UTF-8 encoded, so an ANSI encoded file is curious.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you very much for your continued support, I really appreciate it.

    The bad thing is that I thought of that, and double-checked if my ryonaRPG was up to date with the repository. Of course, if there is something amiss on the Devs side, there isn't much we can do here.

    I am still willing to give your suggestion a try, since I think I am, unlike you, close to the limits of my knowledge of rpgMaker games (and their structure).

    If there is anything more I can provide you with to pinpoint the bug, please don't hesitate.

    I would be happy to be able to contribute to the community of this game sooner or later, even with just a machine translation, or just enjoy the translated game for personal use, and if this happens, I am sure it will be for a big part thanks to your translation tool.

    ReplyDelete
  9. OK, well as things suddenly turned out a bit differently to what I had expected for today, I was able to check things out a bit. As of right now, I was able to run RPGMaker Trans without error, so I'm going to have to conclude that it's a file corruption problem on your end (either locally or through a corrupt SVN version; I didn't check the changelog so I wouldn't know where this happened). So if all else fails, try nuking the RyonaRPG directory and doing a fresh SVN checkout.

    With regard to translations and community contributions, I'll hopefully be setting some stuff up at the weekend that'll make things to coordinate etc.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Could you please make a quick test then with the two files that I linked a couple of post above, to see if you get the same error ?

    Just :

    1/ use trans tool on latest ryonaRPG game
    2/ copy the two files over to the generated patch (+replace)
    3/ use trans tool to generate translated game

    I can't get this to work with the files, and I would really like to know what is wrong so that I can fix it.

    Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  11. About the coordination, I am all for it. Please let us know how we can help.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Urgh. Let that be a lesson to me. Never try to do support when I've just woken up. I got the error the wrong way round.

    The problem isn't a corrupt RPG_RT.ldb or anything. Some of your translations contain characters which can't be encoded in cp932, which is the encoding of RPGMaker 2k. For instance line 356 of your Herodata file is "Kuno一". I'm pretty certain both ä and € aren't in cp932. (As an aside - the Herodata is already mostly translated in the current translation patch, so why redo it through a machine translation?)

    I'll also just warn you of one thing: On the roadmap is a "automatic insertion of machine translated scripts" tool. Unless you've got scripts, I'd recommend against putting too much time into what you're doing.

    ReplyDelete
  13. You are correct.

    Skimming again through my files, I realize the automatic translation left quite some many heretic signs behind, like the ones you pointed out, which I am pretty sure are the culprits here.

    Thank you very much :)

    Also, I won't spend much more time on it, as it just has been the exercice of a couple of hours or so : a frustrating one, but a learning experience I would say.

    For example, I wondered why you picked a format which I found suited to a translation by "hand", but not so much to a translation "en masse" (like XML would, for example). I wrote two quick vb scripts which allowed me to aggregate the content, and then use Google to translate it.

    That is when I realized that I would have an issue with the variables (\N[] and such) and limited text space. It always seems easier before actually trying it.

    Anyway, I really am looking forwards to the next version of your tool, as the current one already seems very capable and useful to me.

    Please have a nice day, Habisain.

    ReplyDelete
  14. and thank you again for your valuable assistance.

    ReplyDelete
  15. The reason the format is suitable for translation by hand is simply because AGTH+Atlas already exists, and in many cases would work better for "simple" machine translations. That said, I may be adding CSV file support in a later version, for people who can't get the automatic version to work properly - there's a good chance that what I'm working on will require a minimal amount of Python programming to work well.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Hi there ^^ I've been trying to use ur translation tool, but I fear I'm doing something wrong. I put the game folder into the translator's folder, but when I try to create a patch, the translator doesn't detect the game.

    It goes desktop/games/translator/ViolatedHeroine

    Did I misunderstand when it asks for the game to be in the same directory?

    ReplyDelete
  17. A directory is detected as having a game in it if there is an RPG_RT.LDB file (and doesn't have either RPGMKTRANSPATCH or RPGMKTRANSLATED files in it). My guess (and it's only a guess) is that you've inadvertently put the game in a subfolder - so the actual game is in desktop/games/translator/ViolatedHeroine/someOtherFolder - and so RPGMaker Trans can't find it; move it down a level and it'll work.

    If not... then I'll ask for some more info so I can try and figure things out.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Ok, I got it. It makes the patch as well as a new folder that says VH_Translated. I open the game from the Translated folder, but the game isn;t translated. Was there another step I needed?

    ReplyDelete
  19. To actually get a translation, you also need an actual patch. I posted the current one for VH in the thread on Hongfire, so if you start at the current page and go back you should find it pretty soon.

    There's steps in the readme, but the jist of it is that you should delete the VH_Patch folder and put VH_Patch.zip in the same directory as the translator.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Hi!
    I've just applied your last translation patch of RyonaRPG (posted by Ask in the hongfire thread), and I just wanted to know if it's working properly: at this point the only immediately obvious translations are those of menus, right?

    ReplyDelete
  21. If I remember right... Ask was me during April Fools (it changed all the user names).

    The only translations working with the patch at the moment are most of the menu things and also most of the arena, if I remember right. There's some other stuff as well, but it was confused by one of the big organisational updates they did and I haven't yet fixed it...

    ReplyDelete
  22. Menus and arena are what I got. Ok. Thanks for the answer and also for the work you put into this.

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.