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[WIP - Full] Virgin's Protection Magic Translation (v 0.82 released 23/07/2017)


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habisain

habisain

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Looks like the threads been unlocked. Did something happen regarding the state of the TL?
Sort of. I requested the thread unlocked to post an update on the status (having had more than a few PMs about it), then real-life happened before I could post that update.

For now the update is "progress is still happening, there will be an update soon-ish", as well as a bit of an explanation on why things have taken so long. I'm just not quite able to post things quite yet.
 

Seikatsu

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O
Sort of. I requested the thread unlocked to post an update on the status (having had more than a few PMs about it), then real-life happened before I could post that update.

For now the update is "progress is still happening, there will be an update soon-ish", as well as a bit of an explanation on why things have taken so long. I'm just not quite able to post things quite yet.
The stiill existed by this point i thought the thread got deleted cos of so much nega

Amywaysthos its late happy new year n happy chinese new year?

I wonder if u will be able to finish this xD there's so many temptting games n LN(eng) bein release.this year xD hahahaha
 
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habisain

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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.
 

rizo

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Thanks for the update! I hope life is looking up for you now mate. I remember playing this a LONG time ago with the WIP translation and enjoyed it so much I went and bought the full game on Dlsite. I look forward to the future patch when the whole thing is complete, I know it might take a while but later is better than never.
 

Purplexus

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The wait will be worth it. Haven't been many good games from japan that i could read for a few years. Also, if i'm not reading this wrong, what your making should help to increase translations for other games and make everything easier when dealing with them in general.
 

TTsuyuki

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Are you still planning to work on Lilium Union after finishing VPM and JapeTrans?
 
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habisain

habisain

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The wait will be worth it. Haven't been many good games from japan that i could read for a few years. Also, if i'm not reading this wrong, what your making should help to increase translations for other games and make everything easier when dealing with them in general.
RPGMaker Trans is actually the foundation of the Translator++ program (or at least for some of its supported games). In fact, I need to send Dreamsavior an email soon because it seems he is again shirking his responsibilities under the GPLv3 and (indirectly, I'll grant) trying to profit from my work (Dreamsavior had previously told me he would stop doing this, and I foolishly did not check - your comment reminded me about it). It'll be interesting to see if JapeTrans can be more useful, because RPGMaker Trans never really took off.

Are you still planning to work on Lilium Union after finishing VPM and JapeTrans?
Off topic, but that's the plan at present.
 
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Sue Nami

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Dear god, what a saga :) How long did it take to write that post? You certainly appear to believe in keeping people informed.

Yes, it has been a long time... but the quality of the translation already released promises it will be worth it. Thank you so very much.

Not everyone feels the need to second-guess a translator's localization choices, although discussing them in the thread was a lot of fun. I hope adding all those options won't be a huge amount of work, but it seems you want to set up your tools so that such choices are easier with future translations.

Anyway, thank you for the slice of time you take off from your life to do this. Many of us really appreciate it.
 

zekemckillip

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FREEDOM! The thread is unlocked, sanity has been restored! Long live VPM Translation thread! Long live Habisain!

Ahem, what I mean is, thanks for the update, looking forward to seeing more progress!
 

Ahmuge

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I am glad and joyful to see that there is an update regarding the translation of my most favorite ERPG Game: Virgin's Protection Magic. Thank you very much. I am looking forward for the release.
 

Troufas

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I seriously thought you had given up on this, so it makes me happy to see I was wrong :)
Wishing you well!
 

elevown

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I'm very happy just to hear you are still working on all this stuff. It's done when it's done as far as I'm concerned, even tho I'm very much looking forward to vpm- no need to rush or justify how long you take to anyone - as you rightly state, you don't get paid for this! And thanks for all the work you have done thus far.
 

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I'm glad that this project is still ongoing! I played your translation quite a while ago and look forward to the day you complete it. You do good work!
 

orangestone

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How is the pandemic affecting you and the JapeTrans/patch progress habisain?
 
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habisain

habisain

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How is the pandemic affecting you and the JapeTrans/patch progress habisain?
That's a good question, and one which I don't necessarily have a complete answer to just yet. Most of the answer will be "the current outbreak of Covid-19 has not affected progress much", mostly because I'm primarily a computer science researcher and it turns out that thinking about things / logging into experimental servers is something you can totally do from home. Given that I'm a pretty strong introvert and don't go out much anyway, being in lockdown hasn't really changed things for me too much.

There is a slight question mark about whether or not Covid-19 already caused me problems however. While I did not go into complete details in my previous post, as the diagnostic criteria for Covid-19 have been refined, I'm realising that my second bout of illness which took me out for three weeks matches those symptoms pretty much perfectly (i.e. dry cough, fever, shortness of breath, loss of senses of taste and smell, etc). There is still an oddity on the timeline though, as this bout of illness was in late December/early January, raising the question of how the hell could I have contracted it. It's certainly not impossible (Covid-19 was extant in November, and I was exposed to people who had travelled to Wuhan in December), but it still seems unlikely. I await the availability of antibody tests so science can figure this out properly.

Anyway, I'll do a quick progress report: I've been sticking all of the bits of JapeTrans together and bug finding/fixing. For those who know the technology, in addition to testing I've been using MyPy (on strict mode) to find lots and lots of bugs. Some of these would have been found regardless, but a lot of these were subtle bugs that would be difficult to find otherwise, and I'm pretty sure they would have caused it to blow up for someone. I'm not necessarily confident JapeTrans won't crash for people at this point, as it has a huge user facing surface which definitely lets users do things that will necessarily crash it (users can always crash a state machine they control), but if it does crash it should do so in an intelligible way. Or at least, intelligible for me - I'm skipping the bit where I make the error experience pleasant for users for the first release, at least.

I think all of the features I need for VPM are present and correct at this point. I've yet to write the JapeTrans config which would let me do this though, so we'll see how that goes. JapeTrans configs are... kind-of involved as this stage (another bit I'm skipping for the first release is a nicer way of specifying the configuration). I also need to do some tests on RPGMaker VXAce itself to see exactly how Font.outline works. I'm hoping it's a plain wrapper around SDL's font outline, as that'll let me get rid of my always-slightly-wonky graphical text in the name display. So on a technical side there's still a little way to go, but it's now very nearly there, and soon I'll be able to start on the much more fun side of editing and finishing up the patch.

One other thing that's worth mentioning: I may release JapeTrans under another name. This is just due to the Habisain name not being something I'd want to link to on a CV, and JapeTrans becoming a CV-worthy project. So don't be surprised if that happens.

And thanks to all the people who left a message of support. They're always appreciated, even if I'm tardy with clicking like buttons.

Slightly random aside: Does anyone here know any good user interface kits for Python? I had originally planned to use Qt (via PySide2), but there seems to be some question marks around if using Qt for open source is a good idea at the moment. I'm tempted to give Kivy a go, but it doesn't appear to have integration with accessibility features which is a big demerit in my book.
 

Renestrae

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Seems like good news!
(if you had gotten corona that early, that'd be wild tho)
Oh and this caught my eye:
One other thing that's worth mentioning: I may release JapeTrans under another name. This is just due to the Habisain name not being something I'd want to link to on a CV, and JapeTrans becoming a CV-worthy project. So don't be surprised if that happens.
If you release under your real name and then Habisain "found this cool app which does exactly what I needed so I'll just use that instead of JapeTrans *wink* *wink*", it would still potentially be traceable (both ways) right? Unless you don't really care and just don't want the obvious connection on your CV, that's fine ofc. But if you've thought of a way to have an untraceable connection between your real ID and your porn ID I'd be interested in that
 
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habisain

habisain

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If you release under your real name and then Habisain "found this cool app which does exactly what I needed so I'll just use that instead of JapeTrans *wink* *wink*", it would still potentially be traceable (both ways) right? Unless you don't really care and just don't want the obvious connection on your CV, that's fine ofc. But if you've thought of a way to have an untraceable connection between your real ID and your porn ID I'd be interested in that
The name JapeTrans isn't going to change, just the name I use when publishing it. This isn't a 100% guarantee of severing the link, but that's fine. The most likely scenario is that someone looking at my CV sees it and clicks a link to verify that the project exists, because they've got multiple CVs to consider and a deadline. Even if they do search for it, they're not going to click on a link to somewhere like ULMF because they're at work and really shouldn't visit a porn site (imagine the justification the recruiter would give to their boss for turning me down. They'd probably get as far as "Well, I was searching around for info and I ended up browsing a porn site..." before being shown the door). The other alternative is that the person is already familiar with my work, in which case no amount of renaming/obfuscation is going to hide the link. But hey, at least in this scenario they'd know I can write pretty well.
 

Tentalover

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it's been something something long years...
wait, I thought this game was fully translated until the ending... huh.

anyway, doing translation for free is a hard work, especially if you're doing it for free. Keep going my fellow tentacle lover!
 
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