Muv-Luv Photonmelodies and Photonflowers H-scene restoration

[EcchiOujisama]

This was posted on another site, but I thought I'd put it up here should different people see it.

Project:

Restoring the H-scenes to Muv-Luv Photonmelodies and Photonflowers because the company releasing them in English is made up of a bunch of pussyass feminized tiddyphobic soyboy assholes that think adults buying adult games with hot chicks shouldn't have sexual interest in said hot chicks.

Developer:

Age

Looking for:

Someone (or group of people) that can:

-Extract the removed scenes from the original Japanese games

-Provide them to me in some format for WYSIWG editing (if I knew how to extract, decrypt, etc. all of that crap I wouldn't be posting this). Big bonus points if there is a way for me to play voice lines corresponding to each line on the exported script. I process Japanese audio much faster than written Japanese and sometimes there is nuance in the voices lost in text (removed scenes contain more than just fucking).

-Make a patch that restores the translated H-scenes to Photonflowers and Photonmelodies where they are supposed to be in the story.

Employment Type:

Unpaid, but I will act as an IRL reference and provide a letter of recommendation upon completion of the project if you like.

Work commitment:

Whenever you have time, as this is a by fans for fans project.

Preferred method of contact:

You can PM me here, or my email address is the same username at yandex.com. If a group of people end up working on it we'll set up a group chat on Discord.

Additional comments:

Meiya best girl, but Yuuko-sensei is pretty great too.

[tahu157]

Have you met our lord and savior Garbro?

https://github.com/morkt/GARbro

Edited February 6, 2021 by tahu157

[EcchiOujisama]

Garbro doesn't really help with the data mess than is rUGP. The only Age game it even supports is the old translation of original Muv-Luv that used a much older version of the rUGP engine.

[Narko]

Where did you see those game have H scene?

[EcchiOujisama]

2 hours ago, Narko said:

Where did you see those game have H scene?

I've played the original Japanese games. H scenes were removed for console releases (because consoles) but could have been easily reinserted. Not every title has H-scenes, of course. When in doubt VNDB is your friend.

In the case of Altered Fable it would have been some Ctrl+C Ctrl+V action to use the (higher resolution) 20th Anniversary PC release instead of the old console port, but why bother putting any effort into making a quality product at this point? From poor translating to removed features to pretending that H-scenes are not part of the original games it's not like they have managed to put together a single decent release.  Using the Photon games was a garbage decision inandof itself as they leave out some of the better side content (like Ayu Mayu Alternative).

Having said that, I will give them credit for removing the awful mini-games from Altered Fable. When Cheat Engine barely helps you know it's bullshit.

[Narko]

I still don't understand, I checked Photonflower and Photonmelodies on vndb and didn't see any h scene:

https://vndb.org/v15238

https://vndb.org/v15239

Unless those aren't the orinals games?

[EcchiOujisama]

Those are not the original games. The original games are listed under "Relations  Original game" at those links.

[Narko]

The only related games with H scenes I saw are Muv Luv Supplement and Altered Fable, are those the games you were talking about? 

[WinterfuryZX]

13 hours ago, Narko said:

The only related games with H scenes I saw are Muv Luv Supplement and Altered Fable, are those the games you were talking about? 

Yes the had h-scenes originally, the other games did not.

[causality]

Japanese text extracted from Altered Fable.
https://gofile.io/d/CNuvmn
jap_ruo seems to be menu/error related stuff
You are better off translating it.

I can't extract photonmelodies with the ancient riox tool(Kind of expected but kek) or else I would have tried to patch jap AlteredFable myself.
If anyone can extract the english text I can try creating a 1:1 <Jap, Eng> Map.
The r*trd engine seems to be using VMWare images for some reason?
No plaintext either.
I asked the author of RioX for its source code but I don't really expect a reply from them.

EDIT: Sent you CG dump of altered fable to your email.

Edited February 13, 2021 by causality

[causality]

Some more progress.
I patched RioX with ghidra so that it is able to perform Heuristic scan on newer .rio file from photonmelodies.
Unfortunately it still can't extract the english text as it seems to be performing some encoding conversions.
Probably some japanese encoding to Unicode. The text in english version is already unicode encoded so it tries to decode unicode with some japanese encoding, which obviously fails for most of the strings(Just a guess. I don't know how its doing it exactly).

I am not that good at patching binaries so it will be hard to patch those encoding conversions but i will still try.
Luckily I did get the offsets from RioX that indicate where the text is stored. I am not sure how to use them though as I said before the text doesn't seem to be plaintext

photonmelodies11.rio: https://del.dog/inesettogr.txt
photonmelodies11.rio.003: https://del.dog/pungumobot.txt

The text scripts in photonmelodies11.rio are probably for all 3 games. If we assume the number of scripts to be the same as the Jap version I would expect ~100+ scripts for Altered Fable

"photonmelodies11.rio" seems to have altered fable data
"photonmelodies11.rio.002" seems to have bg, chara frames and menu items
"photonmelodies11.rio.003" also seems to have altered fable data
"photonmelodies11.rio.004" seems to be Alternative Chronicles

Better tools seem to be the need of the hour along with veteran fan translators who have worked with age vns.
Here's the patched RioX(Won't work with older games, I only patched it to be working with eng photonmelodies):  https://gofile.io/d/nLT4fF

virustotal: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2d0002d0e77111a7d311df3b2cce28cd124c89fc0da3e6b8aeace4af5530b166/detection

Edited February 14, 2021 by causality

[total_eclipse4]

This project still alive or no more hope for Muv Luv Photonmelodies and Muv Luv Photon Flowers patch?

[Black99]

4 hours ago, total_eclipse4 said:

This project still alive or no more hope for Muv Luv Photonmelodies and Muv Luv Photon Flowers patch?

Muv-Luv's engine is very hard to hack and looks like nobody is going to seriously work to restore the cut content. Also, Photonflowers doesn't have cut content. 

I agree that the best way to restore Altered Fables is porting the English text to the original release, specially the 20th Anniversary version that works in Windows 10 but hacking the engine is a hell. 

[total_eclipse4]

On 3/6/2021 at 10:39 AM, Black99 said:

Muv-Luv's engine is very hard to hack and looks like nobody is going to seriously work to restore the cut content. Also, Photonflowers doesn't have cut content. 

I agree that the best way to restore Altered Fables is porting the English text to the original release, specially the 20th Anniversary version that works in Windows 10 but hacking the engine is a hell. 

I think there a partial translation for the original game Muv Luv Altered Fable. https://alternativeprojects.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/muv-luv-altered-fable-patch-3-by-jutsuki-sen/ does that not mean someone already hacked it? IDK if that means anything here 

 

Edited March 7, 2021 by total_eclipse4

[total_eclipse4]

On 3/6/2021 at 10:39 AM, Black99 said:

Muv-Luv's engine is very hard to hack and looks like nobody is going to seriously work to restore the cut content. Also, Photonflowers doesn't have cut content. 

I agree that the best way to restore Altered Fables is porting the English text to the original release, specially the 20th Anniversary version that works in Windows 10 but hacking the engine is a hell. 

also scroll down in comments for link that works. for the patch

[causality]

17 hours ago, total_eclipse4 said:

I think there a partial translation for the original game Muv Luv Altered Fable. https://alternativeprojects.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/muv-luv-altered-fable-patch-3-by-jutsuki-sen/ does that not mean someone already hacked it? IDK if that means anything here 

 

I am having trouble extracting english script from photonmelodies, as I said from my previous post. I am trying to patch RioX but I am having trouble finding the encoding subroutine(It doesn't use MultiByteToWideChar :(() + I have entrances too so right now allocating much time to this project is not feasible for me.

[total_eclipse4]

I think there a partial translation for the original game Muv Luv Altered Fable. https://alternativeprojects.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/muv-luv-altered-fable-patch-3-by-jutsuki-sen/ does that not mean someone already hacked it? IDK if that means anything here 

 

 

 

so is this project dead or is there a chance of this still happening in the future?

Edited March 13, 2021 by total_eclipse4

[total_eclipse4]

On 3/8/2021 at 8:54 PM, causality said:

I am having trouble extracting english script from photonmelodies, as I said from my previous post. I am trying to patch RioX but I am having trouble finding the encoding subroutine(It doesn't use MultiByteToWideChar :(() + I have entrances too so right now allocating much time to this project is not feasible for me.

so is this project dead or is there still a chance of this happening in the future

 

[Black99]

9 hours ago, total_eclipse4 said:

so is this project dead or is there still a chance of this happening in the future

 

You can try transcribing. Open the Steam version and write line by line in the script of the original release 

[Hoshii]

19 minutes ago, Black99 said:

You can try transcribing. Open the Steam version and write line by line in the script of the original release 

too much work.

[total_eclipse4]

On 3/14/2021 at 9:07 AM, Black99 said:

You can try transcribing. Open the Steam version and write line by line in the script of the original release 

I don't really know what transcribing means but i assume you mean put the line from steam verison Muv Luv Photonmelodies and Muv Luv Photonflowers into Muv Luv Altered fable and Muv Luv Supplement. I don't know how.... plus won't someone still have to translate the h scenes 

[causality]

Hi I have hit a roadbloack while REing RioX as it was taking too much time with dynamic analysis so I have decided to instead try to work with alterdec (https://github.com/tsudoko/chinesize/tree/master/Rugp/alterdec). It will still probably take much time to make anything useful with it but REing RioX has helped me understand rugp better.
If anyone wants to continue REing RioX here's my ghidra project archive (Riox.exe.1 is my attempt to patch the binary)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/181fn1bb-7pfvlRmgpvLYF9m51zuYq3yM/view?usp=sharing

[causality]

Finally extracted semi-usable text scripts
I will filter it as much as I can and upload when they are usable by 29/30.
There's much work to do however this is a huge milestone!

[causality]

I wrote a quick and dirty filter script and extracted the text from the raw memdump

The text filter might have missed a few dialogues (The suspiciously small size leads me to believe so. One would expect it to be 2-3x times bigger than altered fable, there are multiple games in photonmelodies) so I am attaching raw dumps as well

I reuploaded Altered Fable text too

 

All of these are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_sPH11muc9LTZhx38mQVTpddecGV5vwp?usp=sharing

Dumps format info:

Text Scripts are stored encrypted in *.rio files. The encryption algo isn't really that complex.
These dumps are the result of decrypting rio files

Filtered Dump:
filter_rioN = photonmelodies.rio.00N (filter_rio0 = photonmelodieis.rio)
There are a few trash bytes at the start of file which I couldn't filter.
There's a `TEXT_S` header before each text script
The japanese translation of a text script is just above it
A few japanese text scripts contain `\x03` bytes for some reason. This is indicated by `{3}` (just like RioX)
A few scripts contain `\x00`, `\x01`. This is also indicated by `{0}`, `{1}`

Raw Dumps:
dump_rioN = photonmelodies.rio.00N (dump_rio0 = photonmelodieis.rio)

Dumped by hacking RioX's memory

Text Scripts are UTF-16LE encoded(Unlike filtered dumps which i converted to UTF-8)

There's not a concrete way to find where the text scripts start in the file but I have noticed a few patterns:
1. There are two 0 bytes just before the first text script (`\x00\x00`). Lets call this "Zero Header"
2. This Zero Header is always squeezed between two non zero bytes, with the right side being renderable unicode (i.e the start of the text script)
3. First text script is japanese

The text scripts follow these patterns:
1. The Text Scripts are separated by `\x01\x00`. The japanese translation of the text script is the text script before it.
2. The Text Scripts mostly contain renderable unicode only (not confirmed) (There are several exceptions refer to filtered dumps)

Original Altered Fable Dump:

Extracted with RioX
jap_rio1 = altfable.rio
jap_ruo1 = altfable.rio.ruo1 (mostly menu related stuff)

Each file name is the offset of the encrypted text script "chunk" in the corresponding rio file
i.e `jap_rio1/003F2880.txt` => altfable.rio+0x003F2880

Each text script is separated by a header of format `### suboffset ###`
Where suboffset is the offset from "text script chunk" in the corresponding rio file
i.e `jap_rio1/CHUNKOFF.txt` => altfable.rio+0xCHUNKOFF+0xSUBOFFSET

A few text scripts contain `\x00`, `\x01`, `\0x3` etc.. This is indicated by {n}

Text scripts end with {0}. This is useless for us and can be safely removed for searching purposes


A text script can be directly searched in "filtered text", since the text scripts in original dump are all japanese & photonmelodies use exactly the same text scripts for its japanese mode.

To create a translation map the following has to be done:
If filtered text is complete (which i suspect it isn't), we should be able to automatically search for the translation without any manual effort.

In case we choose to get the translation from the raw dump, the following can be done:
Replace {n} with `\x0n`
Go through each raw dump file, load it as string(encoding="utf-16le", "backslashreplace") and search for the corresponding translation.
This is a more guaranteed to work solution but annoying to implement. Again, no manual effort.
It is also intensive but can be parallelized easily.
------

PS: I have 0 experience with translating visual novels. I am just a programmer so please don't count on me to translate Altered fable.
Worst case scenario I will try to translate it but I am taking a bit of a break(1-1.5 week) from this project.
Reverse engineering for hours has been really exhausting for me as its more of a hobby for me.
I request other translators to please continue the work in the meantime
I *guess* the information I have provided is more than enough to translate altered fable within a matter of days.
If you need any help with parsing, generating, automation, etc I will be glad to help.
Translating is still a big task for me.

Edited April 30, 2021 by causality

[causality]

Reuploaded text scripts to gdrive.(https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_sPH11muc9LTZhx38mQVTpddecGV5vwp?usp=sharing)
text scripts Shouldn't be deleted again after this.

I have been busy with other stuff so I haven't been able to make progress on translation.