I spent quite a bit of time reading up on documentation for various text inserter tools and trying a bunch out, but it just wasn’t working. I re-read an answer I got to a forum post and realized I didn’t fully understand the guys response to me. He basically told me the tools available probably weren’t going to work in this case, and recommended I use a spread sheet or something.
Funny thing is, I’ve been trying to use a spread sheet for a good while now. Calculating the pointer location isn’t a problem, but getting the correct pointer value is a real pain using a spread sheet. I put in a lot more work here and I think I have it working now. At least, it worked for the few strings I tested in the Gorin story.
At one point, I had this game pretty much fully translated. But, it was done without using pointers, so I was very limited by strength length. It made some of the lines very awkward, but there wasn't really a way around it. Until I figured out how the pointers work. With that, a whole new world of possibilities has opened up.
First, the game is somewhat generous with extra characters (almost every line ends with a space before the line feed character, so I get one free character on almost every line). In addition, they were somewhat lazy with the way they did the pointers.
Second, they just stored repeated dialog in the text a second time rather than reusing a pointer for existing dialog. If I put in the work to update the pointers to reuse existing strings instead of entering duplicates, the space for entering text becomes wide open. Most of these duplicates appear up to three times, and there are multiple instances of this in each story.
Basically, I'm no longer limited by the character count in a specific line of dialog. I can translate this thing pretty much however I want. But due to this, I pretty much need to just start over on the translating. I decided at one point that I should have 2 columns in my spreadsheet for an accurate translation and then a shortened one that met the constraints, so I have a bit of a head start. Unfortunately, I think I only did this with the Gorin story though,
There are 4 schools total, and one has 4 playable characters story wise instead of three, so it almost acts another school. The endings are also stored in separate files, so I haven't started that work yet. I'll try include a progress chart for the remaining work and my very optimistic schedule from now. Translation is the big chunk of work being done right now, and according to Jira, I'm about 5% done. That's kind of depressing since I thought I was basically finished not that long ago. But just looking at the translation I have now versus what it was, this is so much better and definitely the right thing to do.
Progress
| Process | Progress |
|---|---|
| Translation | 5% |
| Proof reading | 0% |
| Insertion | 5% |
| Testing | 0% |
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