Twilight Translations - Pull up a chair, then pass the beer and pretzels, goddammit!

August 7, 2009 - My, What Shiney Balls You Have, Grandmother

I've made some phenomenal progress over the last few weeks on Hyper Dimension, so much so that it's finally ready for editing. Last night I handed the scripts off to my editor to polish up, and so far I like the results. No screenshots, yet, until we finalize the script. Actually, don't expect any more screenshots until I'm ready to release. If all goes well, this should be ready for testing by month's end, but that depends on how fast the editor works and how much additional revision is needed once he's finished.

In the meantime, I have a few small things to finish up on the hacking front, but nothing that should delay the progress of the project. I'm gonna focus solely on HD until it's finished at this point, I think. So, don't be surprised if you don't see many updates between now and, say, Halloween. I'm fairly certain HD will be ready before then, but that's the release date I'm shooting for. I'll post a few "I'm not dead" updates along the way to keep you guys up to date, and feel free to join the forum and start some discussions.

July 24, 2009 - Fear of the Romh

I got the palette issue with the name graphics on the character select screen sorted out, but now it's caused a bug to crop up in the versus mode set up screen. I'll get it fixed. In the meantime enjoy some new screenshots:

Screenshots

July 23, 2009 - Hacking Lite: A Lager with Today's Hacker in Mind

Got the graphics that Gemini (of Persona: Innocent Sin fame) provided inserted tonight. That only took a couple of hours to do. I forgot how therapeutic hacking could be. Huh.

Screenshots

July 18, 2009 - I've Still Got It, Baby

Got the stats displaying correctly just now, so I thought I'd show them off.

July 17, 2009 - Long Time No See

So it's been a while since the last update. The truth is there hasn't been anything to update you guys on. Production around these parts has really petered out the past few months. I've spent the past few days working on Hyper Dimension again, so hopefully I'll have something worthwhile to show in a few weeks.

For now, I'm wrestling with fixing the Win/Lose/Draw screen in the Versus mode. Originally, a kanji was appended to each value. In the translation, I've removed the kanji and simply written out the words in the center of the screen. That works perfectly. The only problem I'm having now is getting the variables themselves (the numbers) to display correctly. With them disabled the screen below should give you a good idea of what the final product will look like. Please keep in mind this is far from final, as I haven't centered everything.

The good news is, I got the other bug that was giving me problems in the options menu fixed. (Someone made a typo, heh.) In other news, well, there is no other news to report. I'm gonna try to work on these projects at least a half hour each day until I get them finished. I need to prove to myself I can still see a project through to completion. Stay tuned.

February 15, 2009 - Bare Knuckle 3 - Released!

This was supposed to go out yesterday, but my connection was being retarded. Anyway, the patch is available on the project page. The patch description on the page hasn't been written yet. I'll get to that in a few days. For now, I just want to thank everyone who has helped in some way or another with this project. Thanks!

January 26, 2009 - It's Coming...

I've got maybe 3 things left to finish up on the game right now. Testing should begin tomorrow night at the latest. And no, you can't help.

January 14, 2009 - Beat'em Up Guy

Time for a brief update, since I've made some phenomenal progress this past week (at least compared to the past 6 months). The script for Hyper Dimension is currently being edited, which should be finished by the end of the week. I haven't worked much on the hacking side of things on HD this week because I've made progress on other projects, like Super Robot Wars Complete Box.

That's right. That game I started working on last year is finally seeing some progress being made. Thanks to Kingcom of The Romhacking Aerie I've finally figured out how the game stores its text. I hooked back up with Suzaku, who is now working diligently on the script for SRW2. I'll probably wait til he gets SRW2 finished before I dump the other two games.

In other robot related news, a fellow by the name of SteveMartin (who's helped Pennywise out with a few games) offered to translate Gundam F91's script for me. And he did it in 3 days! So, there's one more script I'm sitting on, which brings the count up to...3, I think: F91, Spider-man (which I haven't forgotten about), and Bare Knuckle 3. I'm proud to say that BK3 is finally seeing some appreciable progress. Since my editor has apparently bailed on me (haven't heard from him since November), I'm currently in the process of editing the script myself. Expect more out of this later in the month.

That's all for now kiddies. It looks like 2009 is shaping up to be a great year for both Twilight Translations and me! Stay tuned!

January 5, 2009 - I. Hate. Menus.

So both Christmas and the start of the New Year came and went with no updates (or patches). Sorry about that; I was busy. The good news is I haven't completely been sitting on my hands the past month! As you can see in the below screenshots, the various menus and random screens of text in Hyper Dimension are finally translated and sporting a sexy VWF like the Story Mode. You have no idea how hard it was to make the VWF work with those menus. That's the reason I didn't make the Halloween release: I underestimated just how coked up the programmers were when they made this game.

Things left to do: Add VWF support to the remaining strings of tournament mode text (really just hook the old code into the new code); Change the character name graphics in the menus and during fights; and translate the credits at the start up screen. I believe that's all that's left! I'm not making any promises when it'll be released, but it will be very soon.

Oh, and Bare Knuckle 3 is still being worked on. We're slow like that.

Screenshots

November 27, 2008 - Turkey Tree

I suck at meeting self-imposed deadlines. So let me make it up to you with this movie:

The script has been translated since early October and I'm slowly getting the last of the hacking finished up. All of the menus have proven to be a lot more difficult to VWF than I originally thought. It'll be worth it though.

October 3, 2008 - Trick or Treat

It's coming...

Screenshots

September 24, 2008 - Now Boarding at Gate 7

Since the blog really didn't drum up the interaction I was looking for, I thought I'd give a forum a shot. Besides, this will make beta testing easier to coordinate and carry out. So mosey on over to the board and use your EzBoard/Yuku account to sign up as a member and start posting!

September 8, 2008 - Brief Update

Things have been relatively quiet around here for the past month. My editor is still polishing the script for Bare Knuckle 3, but I'm not sure when he'll be finished. (Real life is pain sometimes, isn't it?) As for other things, I've been toying with another game off and on in my spare time for the past month or so. If all goes well I might have something substantial to show off later this month, maybe this week if I can do something meaningful on my day off tomorrow.

I'm hoping to have something ready for one of the upcoming holidays, i.e. Halloween and Thanksgiving. I'd really like to have something to release on Halloween since that would mark the two year anniversary since Twilight's last release, but I'm not making any promises just yet. Right now there are three games that could potentially be released this year: Spider-man: Lethal Foes, Bare Knuckle 3 and the secret project I mentioned earlier. Everything else on my plate isn't far enough along to be ready for testing by year's end much less release. Alas, I'll never finish everything I want to it seems.

August 8, 2008 - First Draft of Bare Knuckle 3

I got the first draft of the script back from my editor earlier in the week so I thought I'd insert it and see how it looks. Of course, that was after I spent an hour or two modifying Atlas to support little endian pointers. Anyway, less talk more pictures!

Screenshots

Keep in mind this is still a first draft and the text in the above screenshots isn't final. Hopefully I'll have another video up for you guys later this week.

June 27, 2008 - Late Anniversary Gift

So I forgot our anniversary. I'm sorry! There's not another site! I swear! In the meantime hopefully this will make up for my early onset senility:

May 30, 2008 - New Release...Sort Of

Ordinarily I wouldn't make an update about a patch release that I only contributed to, but this is a special case. Aeon Genesis released Live-A-Live 2.0 yesterday and you owe it to yourself and your children to check it out. We've spent over a year working on this and it was well worth, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Other than that, I don't really have much to report. I'm slowly making progress on a few things, but nothing particularly news worthy. Although, I would appreciate if some Japanese literate person would contact me about retranslating the Battle Mode dialogue for Bare Knuckle 3. I haven't heard from Anton in a while and I kind of need this redone and/or looked over.

I noticed the 3 year anniversary of the site is coming up in a few weeks today. I'm not sure if I'll be able to pull anything together in time for it. I suck at meeting deadlines.

May 17, 2008 - Old Project Made New Again

As I mentioned in my update yesterday I've been working on a new script dumper called Cartographer. I've been testing it by redumping old projects that I still need translators for, like Gundam F91, and I gotta say I'm really proud and impressed with the output. But I digress. The real reason I'm posting anything at all is because I'm looking for a translator to help me finish a project I started a few years ago: Dragonball Z II: Lord Freeza's Fury. The first, third and even the sidestory games have all been translated and it looks a bit stupid and annoying that there's a gap in the story. With your help, I hope to fix that.

So, if you're well versed in the squiggles from the far east, mosey on over to the project page where you can check out a brief sample of the 33KB script. If you're interested in translating it, let me know. I'd really like to get this game finished in the next year or so. The majority of the ASM code has been written for nearly 2 years now, so the only thing left is the translation.

One last thing. Only serious translators apply. I'm looking for someone with experience, not a first year student; if I wanted a first year student I could do it myself. Also, if you suffer from the delusion that owning a Japanese to English dictionary makes you a translator, do not waste my time. Thank you.

May 16, 2008 - Good Things Coming Round the Bend

Since it's been about 2 and half months or so since I last updated the main page I thought I'd take the opportunity to do that. The best way to do this is to tackle each project in turn, I guess.

First up is Bare Knuckle 3. All of the ASM code that is necessary for the translation has been written. There are few other ASM related things I want to look into doing before release, but nothing that will hinder the progress of the translation. I sent the translation to Anton to look over one final time before I hand it off to a script editor (thanks to all those who applied) to sexify. Once that's finished, testing can begin. No, don't ask if you can help.

In other news, I've been working on a new script dumper that should finally put romjuice and other dumpers out of business. Cartographer (props to Gid for the name) allows the user to dump text in one of two ways (more will be added as needed): by address (like romjuice and most other dumpers) or by pointers. There's a lot of other things, too, but I'll save that for the release, which should happen in the next month or so.

Finally, there's Live-A-Live, but I think Gideon's latest update says it all.

So, stay tuned. The next few months should with any luck see a few things being released; some already announced, some not yet announced and some that have been announced but forgotten.

March 6, 2008 - This one time at ROMH camp...

I made more progress on a translation for a game called Bare Knuckle 3 and tested it on the actual hardware and it worked. Flawlessly. True story.

I'm slowly debugging all of the code still. There are 6 separate blocks of text: the Wood Oak screen you see when you first turn the game one; the 4 screens after that; Blaze's letter to Axel; the dialogue that occurs before and after stages; the green warning message that is displayed before Stage 1; and the various winning and losing messages for the Battle mode. Of those six, all except the letter and the warning message use the same read routine and this has been thoroughly tested. Blaze's letter and the warning message use the same read routine.

Actually, they all use the same routine; the code that initializes the various variables used is slightly different between the two. That's mostly because the first set of blocks all have a constant length for every line in the string; the line lenghts of the other two strings, however, vary from line-to-line. I'm currently fixing a small bug in the way these variable lengths are handled. I'm officially out on spring break for the next week, so I should be able to get a lot of work on this done.

I also took the liberty of updating the project page and I included a disclaimer concerning the screenshots posted. This bears repeating, like the Spider-man screenshots (I haven't forgotten about Spidey) I posted last year, the current set of screenshots for Bare Knuckle 3 are only to demonstrate the progress of the hacking side of things.

Once I get the bulk of the hacking squared away and do a few other tests, I'll begin looking for a capable person to edit this script. If you're interested, please send me an email or post a comment on the blog on the latest post. Keep in mind it'll be at least a week or two, if not more, before I'm ready for your help. The only thing I ask is for a demonstration of your ability. How do I do this, you might ask. Simple. Let me know you're interested and I'll send you a sample of the script to edit. If I like what I see, you're in; if not, thanks for playing. Please, if u type li3k ur r3tarded dat prolly meens u r, so dun axe, ne?

February 24, 2008 - Santa Claus is Coming to Town...

I can't find the words to express how happy I am right now, so I'll just let the pictures do the talking:

Screenshots

Their ain't no gettin' off this train we're on! Woo!

February 10, 2008 - Long Time Coming

As I'm sure you've noticed, it's been a while since the last update. Now, you might have gotten the idea that I'd fallen off the face of the Earth, but that would mean you haven't been checking the blog like you should be.

Friday night I fixed one of the last bugs plaguing SEKAS (at least for the time being) and that has renewed my interest in Bare Knuckle 3. I've updated BK3's project page, which you can view here.

I've made an immense amount of progress on this project since I started working on it again yesterday. The formatting for the intro and the letter that scrolls by if you let the game go into Demo/Attract mode has been figured out to the point that I can change it for the VWF. Work on the VWF was stalled by one of the aforementioed bugs in SEKAS and now progress can continue in that regard. However, I'm not jumping back into the VWF immediately. Rather, I'm taking my time to understand completely how the game's code works, so I don't waste time later fixing bugs brought about by my ignorance. I learned my lesson with Live-A-Live, which incidentally has also entered Beta Testing.

There ya have it. Things are finally picking up around here and more importantly, I'm having fun hacking once again. It just goes to show you really have to work on a game that you enjoy or else you're gonna hate every minute spent on it. Stay tuned folks, there's more good things to come!

November 4, 2007 - I've Become What I Hate Most

In the interest of allowing you the public to provide me with feedback, I've set up a blog. Scary, ain't it? I'm not sure how I'm going to use it exactly; will the main site (this) be updated for major news only and the blog serve as my developer's journal of sorts? I'm not sure. We'll see how things go. In the mean time feel free to say hi over at the blog.

November 2, 2007 - Good News

I finished fixing the last of the known bugs in Live-A-Live the other night, and unless any more are found along the way, my part in the project is done. Now we just wait for Gid and co. to edit and insert the script. In other news, I worked on SEKAS's documentation a little earlier this month. I'm in desperate need of more free time and sleep. Ugh.

October 9, 2007 - I'm Not Dead

Just a quick update to let you guys know that 1, I'm not dead and 2, college rocks. On the one hand I'm really, really enjoying my classes. While on the other hand, I don't have nearly enough time between class, studying and work for hacking at the moment. What little free time I have had the past few months has gone towards finishing up Live-A-Live for Gideon Zhi. There's still one small bug left that I'm hoping to fix tomorrow night. Once that's finished, I'm probably not going to be doing much hacking until Thanksgiving weekend. I'll keep you guys posted.

August 17, 2007 - I'm a Dirty, Filthy Liar

A third update in the same month?! Unbelievable, I know, but I'm bored at the moment and thought I'd let you folks know where things stand with SEKAS. Currently I'm writing the ReadMe and Manual. What's the difference? Well, the ReadMe contains very general information: what SEKAS is, how to run the program, a page long reflection of the project (really more for my benefit than yours). While the Manual contains the specifics on how the program works: syntax, features, example code, etc. So once this is released you'll want to skim through the ReadMe for general information, then move onto the Manual for the good stuff.

The current plan is: finish up the aforementioned documents, continue testing, and fixing bugs as I find them. So far I've only found one bug and that wasn't really a bug, per se, as it was a simple typo. Go figure. Also, I've got a rough outline of the VWF for Bare Knuckle 3 drawn up already. Finally, I'm considering releasing an Alpha version of SEKAS to other coders to toy with and provide me valuable feedback on the program. Alternatively, I could set up some sort of online bug reporting system and release to the public. Not sure what I'll do just yet.

There ya have it. Classes begin next Wednesday for me, so this weekend will probably be the last time I have to work on my projects for a while. Even if much progress isn't being made over the next few months, I will try to check in at least once a month and inform you guys of any developments or that simply I'm not dead. Who knows, BK3 might just make a Christmas release afterall.

August 12, 2007 - Two Updates in the Same Week?! Sacrebleu!

Okay, so I lied about the previous update being the last one for a while. In my defense I honestly thought it would be, but over the past few days I've put a couple more hours into SEKAS and things are really coming together. So much so that I felt like showing it off a little with a screenshot.

It probably doesn't mean much to the casual viewer, but it does show off SEKAS's ability to support labels as a part of the PC based displacement addressing modes. Which is an absolute must for those two, because they're essentially useless without label support. With that out of the way, the only thing left that I can think of that needs to be implemented and tested is macro support. That really shouldn't be too difficult, but I'm taking a break from programming now to spend the afternoon in Mid-World. Adios.

August 9, 2007 - NotDead(PC) or (NotDead,PC)

Yes, I'm still alive. I spent the last hour and a half adding support for the alternative operand syntax and labels to the PC displacement addressing modes. There's still a few kinks to work out, but both styles are being correctly parsed now. All I need to do is add support in each individual code generating function, then test some more.

In other news, if you've been watching the Screenshots thread over at Romhacking.net, you'll notice that I haven't exactly been inactive the past month. Painfully slow, but not inactive. Live-A-Live is just about there. Name expansion is in and working for the most part. I need to rearrange the naming screen for the Chinese Monk to allow for his full name (martial arts name, technically) to fit on screen.

Also, everything prior to the Two Year Anniversary has been moved to a separate page. Hope that helps you guys with crappy connections.

That's probably it for this month. Classes start the 22nd and I'm pretty sure most of my time is going to be spent with my nose in a book. Woo! College!

June 22, 2007 - Two Year Anniversary Special

If you people have been following along since we started (or scrolled to the bottom of this page), you know that today, June 22nd, marks the two year anniversary of Twilight Translations. That's two years that we've been putting out translations. I would like to take this time to publicly thank each and every person who either contributed to one of our projects or enjoyed the end results: Thank you. Without you guys this whole translation thing would suck.

Now, on to the present situation. As some of you may know (and judging by the amount of referrals I've gotten lately, most of you reading this do know) that I've been helping out the man himself, Mr. Gideon Zhi over at Aeon Genesis with a very special game that is near and dear to both him and me: Live-A-Live.

I'm not quite sure exactly how much I'm at liberty to say about this, but the hacking is top-notch. I started working on the ASM mods (VWFs out the whazoo among other things) in late April or early May and I'm finally just about finished. There's a few minor things I need to finish up; however, there's nothing major left to do. In the meantime I suggest checking out the above pages and ogling the pretty pictures. And for the record, Live-A-Live is not the secret project I've been dropping hints about since January.

In other news, June hasn't really been a good month for me romhacking-wise. I've had very little freetime to invest in accomplishing any of the things I wanted to. Unfortunately that means SEKAS is still missing a few features (though I did get a chance to add some of the code for them) and it still needs more debugging. Once LAL is finished (and I manage to pull myself away from Ace Combat 5...), my romhacking time will be devoted solely to finishing SEKAS and getting Bare Knuckle 3 wrapped up. I really want this ready by no later than Christmas at the latest. Thanksgiving or even Halloween is what I'm really shooting for, but as we saw last year, I suck at meeting deadlines.

So there you have it. Two years in and we're still going strong. Provided everything goes according to plan Spider-Man Lethal Foes and Bare Knuckle 3 should be out by the end of the year. Hopefully. Stay tuned.