OK, proper progress update time. Two versions of this update: First is the tl;dr:
1) Lots of things went wrong for me in 2019, none of them being an issue on their own, but when combined resulted in issues
2) JapeTrans is now in fairly good shape, with most of the issues of RPGMaker Trans identified and fixed, and cool things especially for people with some degree of dyslexia (which statistically, is going to include some of the people here!)
3) VPM Patch is probably in a more-or-less neutral position, with quite a few things sorted out, and quite a few things added to the list of things to do.
Now for anyone who wants to bother with the details, the long version follows:
1) Problems over the last year
The main reason why things have been slow is a death by a thousand cuts, essentially. I've been very busy at work (moreso than when I started this project), dealing with employment uncertainty (standard for early/mid stage researchers in the UK, unfortunately), desktop computer issues (which are still unresolved), laptop issues (which will be resolved only when I get a new laptop in a month or so), injury (hypermobility related joint problems) and illness (two bouts of flu/flu-like illnesses). There was also the fact that the previous arguments here did sap my motivation somewhat; I'm not getting paid for this stuff, and so people saying thanks is basically the only external positive I see. It turns out people harassing me is pretty disastrous for motivation. Now, I'm not going to bother exactly how each of these issues impacted progress; it seems like it'd be too difficult to figure out. However, as far as the VPM translation project goes, it's been a pretty horrible year, due to circumstances mostly out of my control.
2) RPGMaker Trans / JapeTrans
I have been able to get a decent amount of progress on JapeTrans recently, at least. All the major components in the backend are now "done", in the sense that they all work. I'm still glueing them together, and what I've got is able to process a game and apply a translation to it, which is handy. It'll still be a bit more to get absolutely everything working (i.e. the term "a game" is not quite the same as "this game", and JapeTrans is not at a state where it can fully patch VPM yet), but the end is at least in sight.
JapeTrans is getting to be a bit of a monster, to be honest. It'll be interesting to see what people do with it when it's out; there's quite a few neat things it can do outside of translation. One handy thing for up to 15% of people will be an option on the VPM patch to use the OpenDyslexic font. Indeed, the second JapeTrans project will be a universal patch to convert any game in a supported engine to use OpenDyslexic. It's perhaps a slightly unexpected thing for translation software, but hopefully useful in the more general field of "making games more comprehensible for people" (This idea was partly inspired by the game Overland - I've not played it, but read about what they did which and it seems like a worthwhile thing).
Another relevant thing is that if people remember, a lot of people had issues with RPGMaker Trans being slow. I'm fairly certain I know the issues that cause this; there was a previously identified issue with some antiviruses (and in light of recent news stories, about how some free antiviruses logged every single packet sent for marketing purposes, the vast amount of packets generated by RPGMaker Trans's Python and Ruby sides communicating could certainly cause performance issues), I've also identified another issue: If the game had been unpacked by an unpacker that unpacked the files as lower case, then it can cause RPGMaker Trans to go down a very slow path due to a whole bunch of minor problems intersecting in the worst way possible... And various observations indicate that due to the way one of the earlier versions of VPM was packed into it's RGSS3a file, this might've happened even if you just used RPGMaker Trans on the game (later versions of VPM fixed this, I believe). JapeTrans should eliminate all of these issues (much less interprocess communication, specific guard against the file case issue, slow-path has been substantially optimised).
The only slight issue at the moment is that JapeTrans currently has a hard requirement for filesystems that support metadata. This isn't a big problem really - everyone likely to use JapeTrans will have a compatible NTFS drive because that's an install requirement of Windows - but it is something I'd like to fix. It probably won't be fixed before I release JapeTrans though, because it turns out storing metadata is tricky when the filesystem doesn't support it. (NB: File metadata is used here for storing info on how the game has been patched, and how to update the game should the patch/game change - makes things faster for translators and doesn't result in the entire game getting duplicated during patching.) Other than this, while there are certainly going to be rough edges on the initial version of JapeTrans (like some fairly incomprehensible config files), it's all looking pretty good.
3) VPM Patch
The bit that people will probably be interested in; I've made a fair amount of progress on the patch. I've also identified many more things that need fixing, so I'm unwilling to try and work out my progress; the new issues I have to fix mean that any measure of progress will look like I've gone backwards. Fortunately, a lot of the things that need fixing should be automatically fixable once I implement a few JapeTrans bits and bobs (Regex matchers and the likes), so I'm not too worried.
Now, as people following this thread may remember (as in, it's been a long time), I've got some fairly strong opinions about localisation. Not everyone is a fan of all of these, so the good news for people who don't agree with my localisation opinions is that there will be a number of things that are configurable (in addition to the aforementioned option for using OpenDyslexic). Hence there'll certainly be an option for localised vs. transliterated onomatopoeia's and related stuff. There might also be another option for Felengel's nickname being localised (i.e. Sooty vs Kuro), but there's a technical issue on that one that makes it a little difficult and I'm not going to waste time on that if it turns out to be difficult. Finally there might also be another option for honorifics; this one is a little tricky from an editting perspective so there might be caveats to it (i.e. I need to check where localised honorifics have changed sentence structure), and it's also the most labor intensive so it might not make it in the end.
Ending remarks:
That was quite a bit longer than I thought it'd be, but hopefully anyone interested in the project is up-to-date on its status now. Because there are still issues outside of my control hampering my ability to work on the project I'm not sure when the next update will be, but that's just how things are. I'm still committed to the project - there's no question that it's going to be finished, but the matter of "when" isn't fixed.
And one request: Please, keep any discussion civil. I'll obviously answer questions within reason, but I'd rather this thread didn't get locked again. That's pretty bad for motivation too, it turns out.