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Post by darkstar on Jul 11, 2010 5:10:51 GMT -5
Hi!
I acquired this game while I was living in Japan last year. It was being thrown out in Akihabara (they were selling it new and still shrinkwrapped for 300yen) so I couldn't resist buying it, although I've never heard of the game before.
The title is 幻想三国誌 II (transliterated as GENSOSANGOKUSHI although GENSOUSANGOKUSHI would be more correct) and the box consists of a game disc, a demo disc, some postcards, an Ys Origin poster, two soundtrack CDs and a manual. All in all quite a lot of stuff for only 300yen :-D
However, there's almost no information on it available in english on the net. Especially there's no fan-translation project (my japanese is still not good enough yet to really "enjoy" the game)
So, does anyone know of that game? Any hardcore translators in here who'd like to start a translation project?
-Darkstar
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Post by cxt217 on Jul 11, 2010 20:30:48 GMT -5
I am actually interested in getting the two Gensosangokushi games Falcom offers. They certainly got my interest. But the timing and budget have not gotten into sync yet, sadly...
C.T.
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Post by Aveyn Knight on Jul 12, 2010 9:44:04 GMT -5
I finished playing it recently in Chinese, thought it was a great game.
This is actually one of the games that I'd consider translating, but I'm not really confident about dealing with the ancient-style dialogue (I've completed one translation, Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, but it was kind of average).
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Post by darkstar on Jul 12, 2010 13:07:35 GMT -5
Hm, I don't know if anyone ever tried it, but I *think* that, at least technically, translating the game shouldn't be that much of a challange.
There's a file called FS2Japan2.dat which seems to contain all the dialog and scripts in CP932-encoded text, and which can be extracted by falcnvrt.exe. For example:
6 Map=1 Role=12 Head=388 #あなたも文博先生を知っているのか?*あの人は今どこにいる?*早く教えてくれ!#
Some images that need to be translated can also be found in that file.
There's still some binary stuff left (JFS2Data.bin, JFS2Image.bin, and some more) that probably needs to be figured out though
-Darkstar
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 12, 2010 13:30:33 GMT -5
Ooh~! Sounds interesting
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 14, 2010 9:17:46 GMT -5
Thank you! I spent ages trying to find the correct sprite sheet using Falcnvrt, but I couldn't see it so I just made this little gif from some screenshots I took instead. Probably turned out better than it would have done the other way, and I stumbled across that beta Estelle sprite too so it wasn't a wasted effort Back on topic - I would really love to see an FS game with a fan translation, they deserve better than to be forgotten as just 300Yen store castoffs
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 14, 2010 11:27:46 GMT -5
Sorry, I wasn't thinking
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Post by SkyeWelse on Jul 14, 2010 11:36:51 GMT -5
I'd be down for helping along a translation project for the Gensosangokushi series with graphic editing and such. Though I'd prefer to start with the first game since that makes the most since chronologically speaking. : )
It's a pretty fun game though, I remember seeing screenshots of the original Chinese version way back in the day which reminded me of the battle system of the first two Genso Suikoden games. And oddly enough, the Genso Suikoden series put the "genso" or "fantasy" into the original story of the 108 Stars of Destiny/Water Margin/Bandits of the Marsh legend, while this series puts the "genso" in the Three Kingdoms Legend. So, while they aren't connected, they do resemble one another in many ways. That and the music is fantastic!
I would love to play these games in English!
-Thomas
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Post by darkstar on Jul 14, 2010 12:02:23 GMT -5
For Darkstar's benefit: FS = Fantasia Sango = Gensosangokushi. Yeah, figured as much already, as the executable is also called FS2.EXE I would try and help translating, too, but I have absolutely zero experience with translations. I do know my way around hacking file formats and such (check rewiki.regengedanken.de although it's not very active lately) Hacking japanese software is especially tough because text can be encoded in various ways (CP932, SJIS, EUC-JP) and in the case of FS2 much of the text is still in chinese (like comments in the script files and such) which uses different codepages (and which I can't read at all) Unicode is really a blessing well, long story short, I would try and help in any way I can, I just fear that I can't do very much... -Darkstar
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Post by Nalacakes on Jul 14, 2010 13:27:01 GMT -5
I've never played any of the games, but I own the first two in Japanese, the first of which I inherited from my brother and the second of which I bought on a whim because I loved Falcom's Japanese take on the theme song in the trailer. I also recently bought the first, second and fourth in Chinese after being inspired by the gorgeous screenshots Kimimi posted here a long while back. My Chinese is still pretty nonexistent, but I'm studying it at university, and I kinda figured that if if my experiences with Japanese were anything to go by, import games could be a pretty nice study aid! That is, if I ever actually play them, anyway~ <_<
Anyway, it's really cool that you're thinking about translating it. I'd volunteer my help, but I couldn't really help with anything besides Japanese translation and I'm not...entirely convinced I could be of any more help there than some of my much more knowledgeable co-posters. ^^
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 20, 2010 2:18:41 GMT -5
I've been thinking about this... while it's not ideal, it might be worth looking through the files just for item names/map names/journal entries and translating those. Sort of a "Here's enough to get you through for now" sort of thing. Naturally in an ideal world we'd all have bags of time and it'd be a beautifully coordinated project that resulted in a perfect complete translation, but it might be more practical to prioritise getting the game playable for English users and not bothering with endless lines of minor NPC dialogue (at first).
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 20, 2010 8:52:51 GMT -5
I've been having a poke through the files and found that they're rather handily split up just the way I want them and with Mad Edit all the text is easily viewable and editable... so the only problem now is how the heck do I shove this stuff back into the game and see if it'll work? Falcnvrt only works one way, and as this is a Userjoy game I'm assuming the work done on the Ys6/OiF/Xanadu Next translations will be no help :/
*is stumped*
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Post by darkstar on Jul 20, 2010 18:25:10 GMT -5
I've just looked into the format of the DAT files and after fiddling around with it for some time I have a theory about how they work. I knew I had seen that file structure somewhere before It seems that the DAT files are probably just hacked ZIP files with the "PK" magic replaced by 0x03 0x05 (in every file and directory header) I need to test out this theory tomorrow (it's really time for me to get some sleep), maybe they added some custom compression or something, but if not then it would be trivial to unpack/repack the *.dat files... -Darkstar
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Post by darkstar on Jul 20, 2010 19:00:26 GMT -5
Okay I couldn't really sleep until I solved this one. So I did. Here are 2 tools: cornelia.regengedanken.de/~mdrueing/files/fs2_convert.zip(source code included for those interested) Use it like this: dat2zip FS2Japan2.dat foo.zip Then you can open the foo.zip file (change the name if you want to...) with WinZip or anything else. Modify some files, re-pack everything, then run zip2dat foo.zip FS2Japan2.dat (of course make a backup copy of your FS2Japan2.dat file before!!) Then try it in game. Maybe it will work maybe not. I hope it will, though. It *should* work on every .DAT file (except FS2.DAT which is really an EXE) in the FS2 directory. Oh and the program is *stupid* (it just changes the signature bytes) so there's a slight chance that the resulting ZIP file will be nonworking (technically, if the 0x04030503 signature appears anywhere in the compressed stream, because it will silently be changed to 0x04034b50. same goes for the other two ZIP signatures. Chances should be low though) Please give it a try. I'll definitely go to sleep now... -Darkstar
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 20, 2010 19:15:24 GMT -5
Brilliant! I'll have a fiddle around and see if I can get something working
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 20, 2010 21:42:38 GMT -5
It did fine turning the .dat into a useable .zip file but after I altered a few simple bits (just the main characters name) and rezipped/re .dat'd and tried to load the game again it crashed
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Post by darkstar on Jul 21, 2010 1:24:04 GMT -5
Try using different compression levels. Probably the game just supports one or two compression types. Maybe try with lowest compression. I'll take a closer look at it tonight.
-Darkstar
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 21, 2010 2:44:14 GMT -5
Alright then I'll give that a try and let you know
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 21, 2010 4:43:10 GMT -5
Got it working! Used ALZip with no compression and set the language to SHIFT-JIS Will do a few screenshots later
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Post by Kimimi on Jul 21, 2010 7:49:39 GMT -5
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