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Fred the Barber

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Blog Comments posted by Fred the Barber

    littleshogun

    Posted

    The big leap in Chrono Clock progress was certainly surprising. That kind of jump makes me think maybe they moved a full-time translator onto it (instead of someone working it as a side job). Perhaps, given its recent release, the Memory's Dogma translator? That'd be good news in my book. Regardless, the big progress number is a pleasant change; maybe they really will hit their target release date, or at least be close to it.

    And agreed, the Daitoshokan announcement out of nowhere is very exciting. Kudos to the team on their progress, and I'm looking forward to an eventual release.

    Darbury

    Posted

    Reviving this to point out another reason why you might want to keep the JP quotation marks: it turns out at least one VN engine is abominably stupid and keys off the JP quotation marks, rather than the presence of a speaker (or some other annotation, whatever, I don't care), to decide that a line is dialog and should be indented accordingly in the backlog display. Just ran across this in a KiriKiri game, so it may even be universal to KiriKiri. When I tried removing the outer JP quotation marks, the backlog immediately went from looking quite nice to looking like garbage.

    Was a pretty depressing experience, honestly, since now I have to go put them all back...

    Clephas

    Posted

    I can certainly relate to Kaguya's statement. In my last (and hopefully I mean that in both its main senses) MMORPG experience in SWTOR, I spent a ton of time as a main tank and usual raid leader of a not-great-but-not-terrible raiding guild. When everybody around is pulling their weight and you're getting through tough stuff together, it's an exhilarating experience. Even if someone makes a mistake, when you've got a good group, everyone is supportive, fully realizing that they make their own mistakes too. And then when you get through it all, the sweet feeling of a hard-won team victory is absolute joy.

    But I can also relate to the increased stress Clephas talks about, even in the same context. When someone consistently isn't pulling their weight (like that one guy who just can't get his act together; you know the one), it's a huge amount of stress for everyone involved: the poor leader who has to kick him out, everybody watching from the sidelines, and worst of all that poor guy himself who just wanted to play a game. And there are plenty of other similar stress-inducing situations, in that scenario and others, in that style of game and others.

    And you know, I can sympathize with that guy who just wants to play a game. As a general rule, I prefer my games easy rather than hard. I've never played Dark Souls, and I probably never will. Yes there's a thrill to overcoming big challenges, but if something is truly beyond me, or even just mostly beyond me or the amount of effort I'm willing to put into it, then it becomes mostly frustrating and unfun. I get that experience a lot, especially in multiplayer FPS games where I run with a group that is, frankly, not that good. We play the Trials of Osiris most weekends in Destiny, and even on our best weekends, we don't win all the way through the card (you need 9 wins and at most 3 losses to manage that; our best yet is 8 wins...). That means, every time single, the last game we play is a loss. It kind of sucks. I don't like losing, and sometimes we get mad at each other, or feel guilty over screwing something up. Not exactly my definition of fun.

    Fred the Barber

    Posted

    On 7/21/2016 at 4:41 PM, Rooke said:

    It's all good advice for both writing and editing. Not advice to follow always, but stuff to keep in mind. Fan-translations would benefit greatly from following these tips, especially the point about references to time, stronger verbs instead of adverbs, and cutting the fat.

    To put it another way: there are no rules, only guidelines. But some of the guidelines are pretty damn strong.

    Fred the Barber

    Posted

    4 hours ago, ittaku said:

    QA so far has only picked up that you misspelt realise.

    The struggle to use UK English was real. I corrected dozens of my own mistakes like that while editing, but I'm not surprised there were still many, many left. I was still occasionally spelling words using the UK spelling in other writing for weeks after handing the scripts back to you.

    littleshogun

    Posted

    Eh, I'm suspicious of that term in general, since it's a term in the Japanese language invented by and used only by English speakers; kind of suspect. The Class S term probably communicates the most accurate vibe for MariMite (though it wouldn't be applicable to Doki Doki Nurse Panic, since that tag is specifically about school).

    Aaaanyway, sorry for hijacking the comments section here.

    Fred the Barber

    Posted

    2 hours ago, babiker said:

    A small slip, but you didn't actually drop suddenly in your version. It's right there :P 

    Great pot tho. I've considered editing bad fantranslations for a while, and your simple and organized format is a good way to go about it. Looking forward for more to see more :D 

    And this, my friend, is why we have QC. :wahaha:

    Yeah, I must have decided to just reorganize it to put the words where I wanted them when I first edited it, and then when I was putting this blog post together my eyes skipped right past the word and I assumed I'd dropped it. Now I have to go decide which version I like better...

    littleshogun

    Posted

    Isn't "shoujo ai" another way of saying the same thing? My point is that such a tag implies that girl-on-girl action is the focus, whereas MariMite focuses much more on drama and emotion, and even on friendship, than it does on romance, let alone on sexuality (which is an exceptionally rare topic, pretty much only touched on briefly in season one, even more briefly hinted at in season two, and then never looked at again).

    Anyway, sorry, I'm a fan, and I guess you touched on something of a sore spot. MariMite is probably my favorite anime, and the way you're describing it kind of felt like it was cheapening it a little bit.

    Darbury

    Posted

    UCS-2 is a strict subset of UTF-16, so anything that works for UCS-2 will just work with a UTF-16 interface, as long as there aren't any 4-byte characters or wonky assumptions about the surrogate pair characters, which, really, I wouldn't put past anybody... programmers love taking shortcuts, as your MSB horror story so clearly indicates. I'm guilty of writing some C++ code that stashed a flag in the low bits of a pointer, so that I didn't have to allocate a separate context object just to hold one boolean flag and a pointer. It'll probably work forever, and if something surprising enough ever happens that makes it not work, well, it won't be my problem - I left that company a few months ago :sachi:

    Darbury

    Posted

    3 hours ago, tymmur said:

    On this topic of character byte size. Japan tend to stick to shift-jis/cp932 because they use two bytes for write kanji/kana. Utf-8 use 3 bytes, meaning a 50% increase in text size. That is most likely the major reason why VNs tend to require Japanese locale. Utf-16 however can write Japanese characters using just two bytes and I suspect as windows becomes more and more aimed at unicode that VNs will start using utf-16. That would really be a gift to translation efforts because it will remove the issue of "character not present in cp932".

    UCS-2 support, which I'm pretty certain has every character a VN would need, has been pretty well baked-in to Windows for an eternity, in software terms; I'd expect that Windows 2000 had everything you'd need to do a VN engine in UCS-2. Most likely, the reason they're sticking to the old multi-byte pages is that nobody wants to update old VN engines, because it's a waste of money and time to try to fix things that aren't broken. And even if/when someone builds a "new engine", they almost certainly pull over a ton of code from a previous one anyway, in all likelihood bringing that multi-byte dependency along with them.

    Darbury

    Posted

    Hmm. This is one where I have to disagree with you, Darbury. To me, consistency is paramount, even over the subtle additional shade of meaning you might get by carefully considering and ordering the ? and ! based on that.

    My preference is to pick one and go with it. I don't actually care which one, but my fingers do type ?! more naturally than !?, so in the absence of any better reason, I'd probably go with that one.

    But the best option might be the direction Rooke is going: avoid the issue entirely. Most VNs are filled with more punctuation than a balloon is air - they can benefit from a little puncture and subsequent depunctuation. Drop a bunch of bangs and replace them with periods (or with nothing, if they were previously part of an interrobang), and you can usually end up with something that's probably better overall anyway. Especially if, in doing so, you get to reduce all the ridiculous double-bangs down to single bangs.

    Darbury

    Posted

    15 hours ago, Rooke said:

    What I want to know is why Japanese quotation marks are still evident in VNs with ADV format. You know, the ones with the text box and the name of the person speaking. The quotation marks are replaced by the dialogue text box, Japanese quotations should only be used in NVL format.

    So, to be clear, you're suggesting that no quotation marks should be used in ADV format, right? I had been considering how to broach exactly that suggestion, inside actual dialogue text, for my current project which is an ADV, so a little explicit support in advance for that wouldn't go unappreciated.

    Clephas

    Posted

    I'm pretty sure I only have fun playing single-player, story-oriented games, but I do find myself on the addiction train with games quite frequently. I have friends with whom I regularly play competitive FPS games (currently, we're playing Destiny every weekend); we play it seriously and get mad, almost exclusively at ourselves rather than each other, but we're all mature enough to not get too worked up about it. We definitely have more fun when we're doing the less-competitive stuff, even if it is still grindy; the PvE gameplay in Destiny is a genuine pleasure, in a team environment, so I'm actually happy when we do that. Less so with competitive. The adrenaline rush is great and all, but the disappointment of losing really does suck.

    I miss the days when I played more JRPGs, but on the other hand, I don't see those friends very often, and one of them especially is a very good friend, and this is by far the easiest way to keep in contact with him.

    And, even when gameplay may look grindy or repetitive to some people, it can still be dazzlingly fun to the player. I never got tired of pushing buttons on a plastic toy guitar in Rock Band, and I was absolutely euphoric when I got really, really good at the surprisingly deep, responsive, and skill-rewarding combat system in Lightning Returns: FFXIII. Even Destiny has a lot of that same joy, and in a much better way than similarly-styled MMOs with RPG mechanics at their core rather than shooter mechanics, mostly because by making the interface much more difficult (shoot the dude rather than click the button), they also had to make the game so much more forgiving to mistakes. That left a lot of room for creativity to do your own thing, which keeps the game fresh and fun even though I've been playing it for hundreds of hours.

    But yeah, I've definitely been through the addiction, almost exclusively with MMOs where the social aspect serves to keep you in the game, though also with Disgaea games where it's the grindy nature of the game itself that somehow pulls you in. It's not pleasant, and you don't realize just how bad it is until you're finally truly clear and realize just how much time you have to do things that are actually fun.

    Clephas

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Clephas said:

    I'd be tempted to agree with you, if this were a chuunige.

    Yeah, Fuwa really does have a thing for chuunige, doesn't it? I'm definitely a nakige fan, but I probably end up playing more chuunige anyway just because it gets so much hype around here.

    Not that it matters in this case - even with a text hooker I'm still not ready for untranslated... and if I were, I'd be going for White Album 2 first anyway.

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