Request

EDIT: It turns out that automatically patching an RPG_RT.EXE file will be impossible. Certain assets, notably the name character dialog, have to be translated, and this is well outside of what I think is possible for me to implement. There may be an alternative later on, but this will not be in any release for the forseeable future. Apologies.


So I haven't been completely idle this last month or so. And hence a request for those wanting to translate into foreign languages: I need RPG_RT.EXE files. Specifically, I need RPG_RT.EXE files from the locales which you want to translate into, so I can try to figure out how to automatically patch the locale of an RPG_RT.EXE file.


Technical details: an RPGMaker 2k is an old pre-UTF-8 program, so it can only display a single code page. Translating across code pages will require either replacing the RPG_RT.EXE file (legally difficult) or on the fly patching - and for on the fly patching, I'll need to know what to change.


Hence, if you can see this, want to translate RPGMaker 2k games to a different locale, and have an RPG_RT.EXE file that is from the correct locale, please send it to me!

Whoops...

I was browing a forum and found that v1.97 of RPGMaker Trans has a pretty major bug. It isn't a crashing bug (as some poeple have complained about here; until I get logs I'm assuming this is file name related), but rather it isn't translating item descriptions. I have no idea what is causing this as it only seems to affect the Windows build; it wasn't an issue when testing it on Linux.

Pending further investigation I've reinstated the older 1.95 version. If you're having trouble with item descriptions, please redownload it. Also if you have problems with an old download of 1.95 complaining about it being expired, you may also have to download this "newer" version of 1.95 which overrides the version check that causes the expired message.

Apologies for all this.

Incommunicado

Just a short update: normally I'm pretty responsive about answering questions etc. However, my smartphone has just died - and hence I'm not getting notifications of questions here at all quickly.

So if I'm late answering a question, it's not because I'm neglecting my userbase or abandoning the project, it's more likely that I just don't know there's a problem. I'll try and get responses within a reasonable time, but don't be surprised if it takes a few days.

RPGMaker Trans v1.97 Released

OK, so this release represents most of my work in the "speedy" line. It isn't all of my work, because I've only dropped the speedy patching engine into the old framework; there's other improvements I'm making in the framework which should make things faster, but they're not ready and I don't want to delay getting this new release out any more.

I also have an apology to the Korean team who wanted to use RPGMaker Trans: testing revealed another problem when changing the locale of the game, specifically that files named in Japanese can no longer be used - with this breaking most of my test games. Automatic file renaming cannot be handled by the current framework, so multi-locale support will have to wait until the next version. Sorry.

Changes

• Patching engine is much faster
• Now able to translate "Set Hero Class" commands
• Pseudo-bug: Events associated with Monster Parties have migrated to the Common Events file. This is due to problems with the current patch format and the new patching engine.

Next Version due by end of month (hopefully - though it seems I'm not good at timescales). Features will be:

• More speed!
• Support for trans-locale (i.e. Japanese to Korean) patching 
• Trying to detect if a game has been unpacked under the wrong locale

Also: on the file hosting situation, it seems that my previous file hosts are well... as far as my auto-upload script is concerned, dead. Defaulting to Mediafire for now,  but liable to change.

Double also: I've set up a donations button, as it was suggested a while back in the comments. As the disclaimer says, donations won't necessarily make me work any faster (i.e. they're old school donations, given charitably, with no expectation of return). This being said, sufficient donations may let me get some private hosting (if just for files and not a full website), which would be nice.

Dangit...

So I couldn't quite keep meet my target...

Basically, lack of time and a few problematic bugs stopped me. I'm finally at the stage where the parser/assembler works without issue, but it isn't yet integrated into the translator or GUI - and nor are the changes to these two parts finished yet either.

I'm very disappointed that I couldn't make it in time for an ironic April fools release though...

Well, new version within the week, I suspect.

So, about that dedicated website...

Well, I've been investigating stuff, and turns out things aren't perhaps as rosy as I thought.

Turns out things are more complex than my initial survey of hosting providers suggested. Long story short, to actually run a website I'd need about $10 a month all told. So, whilst I've very grateful that just over half the respondents to the little survey said they would be prepared to fork out some money to move RPGMaker Trans onto a dedicated site, the finances don't work out.

Damn, that's a shame. Oh well, maybe if I can get some other projects going I'll be able to work something out... but for now, a dedicated site will remain a pipe dream.

Target is for the new version of RPGMaker Trans, with speedy 2k support, to be out by the end of the month. Then I'll move onto either automatic machine translation or XP/VX support.

New Features and Announcing a New Toy

Well, after publishing my roadmap, and making some progress with it, I decided to essentially ignore it and do something else. So, here I'll document exactly what I did with the only time I had to work on RPGMaker Trans recently.

I made a Python binding onto Fujitsu's ATLAS software.

Now, anyone with two brain cells should be able to work out that this means I intend to bring automatic machine translation directly into RPGMaker Trans.

To be clear, I'm not sure when this feature will land. It still isn't on my Roadmap, although logically it shouldn't be that difficult to implement - at least in a primitive form. I'm looking to "do things right" though and enable the creation of some small scripting component which allows scripting around the types of things that ATLAS doesn't translate well. For example, for some games which "announce" character names, ATLAS will decide to merge the character name into the characters dialogue with bad consequences.

But this type of scriptable translation could also be useful for other games, for pretty much the same reason. Hence I'll also be working on a "Scriptable QuickATLAS" style program - name to be decided. There's probably quite a few uses for such a tool, like working around "triangle-ised" text from an AGTH hook (you'll know it if you've seen it), other hook based nonsense, or just generally improving ATLAS translations.

Again, no ETA on this.

Oh, and before I forget, the Python/ATLAS bindings will be released separately under a Public Domain license, once I do a little stress testing on them to make sure they don't fall apart under non-trivial workloads.

And finally, before anyone points it out: I am aware of Vkozyrev and his machine translator for RPGMaker Trans patches. I think, however, that using ATLAS has substantial benefits over his solution of online translators, partly because of speed but also because a lot of people use ATLAS, and hence a lot of people are accustomed to ATLAS-speak. Also, I tend to find that ATLAS with a good custom dictionary simply works better than the online translators. Finally, by integrating machine translation into RPGMaker Trans, Machine Translation becomes much more available (i.e. I'm pretty confident that not many people actually download Vkozyrevs machine translator, otherwise I think we'd be seeing a few more actual patches/pirated games based on it online rather than just the ones he maintains).