stormwyrm

'Pope' is too loaded by Roman Catholicism to be suitable I think. 'Patriarch' seems less so, but it is also used by major Orthodox Christian leaders too. But then again, the highest initiates of the Mithraic mystery cults of ancient Rome were also called 'Pater', so perhaps it something to consider. 'Archon' was used more as a secular title, e.g. the highest magistrates in the ancient Greek city-states used it, and the Byzantine Archons were secular princes, not religious leaders. 'Hierophant' was the title used by the high priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries which the Mithraic cults superseded, but its use in the Tarot Major Arcana is a big point in its favour. So I take it that 領下 might well be rendered 'a subject/vassal of' then.

Well, given that 法王イムヌス looks like this: bearing a similar sort of three-pronged staff of office as with the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Hierophant card: and the religion he is head of in the game seems to be a sort of Mithraism (probably the religion that might have become dominant in the world if we did not have the various accidents of history that resulted in Christianity), I think 'Hierophant' should be good. But what is 領下? Further searching turns up a related word: 占領下 meaning occupied (by an army or military force), so it seems to have the meaning of a territory under, so __領下 might mean territory of __. Hence 法王領下 might mean the Hierophant's feudal territory (analogous to the Papal States of old perhaps), so 法王領下の未婚男子 might be 'unmarried men of the Hierophant's domain'?

Well, I've embarked on a project of translating the visual novel Arcana, and I'm probably making many mistakes, as I seem to know only enough Japanese to be dangerous. Anyhow, the passage of the prologue which gave me the most difficulty is this: 法王の姫・ハープ様の花婿を広く公募!このたび法王庁では、見目麗しいハープ姫の花婿を広く一般に公募する と発表した。応募資格は法王領下の未婚男子のみなお、応募者は厳正な審査の上、適格者のみが花婿候補として 迎えられる!詳しくは法王庁か、各地の法王庁連絡所まで! My tentative rendering of the passage (which is a road sign that the game's protagonist reads): 'An Appeal to the General Public for a Bridegroom for the Hierophant Princess Harp-sama! The Hierophant's Church is pleased to announce to the general public an appeal for a suitable bridegroom for the beautiful Princess Harp-sama. Applications are open to all unmarried male subjects of the Hierophant, all applications will be examined most strictly, and only the most qualified will be welcomed as candidate bridegrooms. For more details, please see the nearest Hierophant's information office.' Can anyone help me make a better translation? 法王 I know normally means 'Pope', but given that the game is set in a medieval fantasy world and the 'Arcana' of the title are the Tarot Arcana, I think I am justified in rendering it as 'Hierophant' as in the tarot card. So derived terms like 法王庁 (normally meaning the Vatican), might be Hierophant's Church. The second sentence has the term: 領下 which I can find in no dictionary I have as a word, and in the context it obviously can't be a Japanese name (the Hierophant's name in the game is Hymnus). Going from the kanji (which mean jurisdiction and under respectively), I infer that it might mean 'subject of', so 法王領下 might mean subjects of the Hierophant. Any suggestions for a more accurate rendering are welcome.

Thanks to these hints I managed to get the .BMP files converted properly to .PNGs with the help of this quick and dirty Ruby script: #!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'tempfile' name = ARGV[0] basename = File.basename(name, ".bmp") puts name File.open(ARGV[0]) do |fp| fp.seek(0x12) width = fp.read(4).unpack("v").first fp.seek(0x16) height = fp.read(4).unpack("v").first fp.seek(0x0a) offset = fp.read(4).unpack("v").first fp.seek(offset) puts "#{width}x#{height} offset #{offset}" data = fp.read(width*height*4) tf = Tempfile.new([ARGV[0], ".rgba"]) tf.write(data) tf.close system("/usr/bin/convert -size #{width}x#{height} -depth 8 -flip -recolor '0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0' #{tf.path} #{basename}.png") tf.unlink end The key portion is the ImageMagick convert call down near the bottom and that recolor matrix. It seems there's hardly any software out there that can handle BMP files with alpha channels correctly, so we have to do this kind of hack.

Hmm, the extractor produced .BMP files, and it might be that either the extractor failed to decode alpha channel information properly or the Gimp, which I used to convert the original .BMP into the .PNG that I uploaded, didn't read it correctly for some reason. It worked properly for all of the other graphics assets in the game though, except the character sprites, which is odd. Looks like it might be time to be digging into the extractor code... Thanks for the hint!

And so I found an extractor that worked with Ciel's Arcana, and had a look at the files inside. Most of the stuff is more or less straightforward, except that I noticed something strange about the character sprite images. All of them seem to be tinged somewhat blue. I take it that this is a special way of encoding alpha transparency without an explicit mask or alpha channel, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: For comparison, here's the same character as she appears in the game itself: Notice how her wings show alpha compositing effects. Is anyone familiar with this technique and can give me a hint as to how to extract the true colours of the image and the alpha channel from it?

I've been looking for extraction tools for the .arc files in older Ciel games like Arcana (2000), Mitama (2001), and After (2003). I ran across the excfarc tool from Asmodean's stuff. It seems to work for more recent Ciel games, like Sora no Iro (2004), but it seems they changed formats at around that time. Anyone have any leads on where I can get such extraction tools?