how do you translate RPgmaker games?

[golwas]

I've been trying to translate an rpgmaker game but I can't figure out how to actually change the game's text. I tried modifying the Rvdata but it's mostly unreadable and if I change any lines I recognize it crashes the game.

To anyone translating rpgmaker games, if you could explain your process I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

 

[habisain]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

There's essentially two practical methods for RPGMaker Games. The first is to use the appropriate version of RPGMaker; quite a lot of people have a copy as XP and VX Ace were included in Humble Bundles. Personally I'm not a fan of this method because I feel that the RPGMaker editor is pretty awful to work with, although your mileage may vary.

The second option is to use RPGMaker Trans (other tools exist as well, but I'm not aware that any are actively supported at present). This will generate a patch which you can fill in with translations, and then applying the patch back through RPGMaker Trans will insert those translations into the game. More info can be found on the RPGMaker Trans site linked to in my sig. Full disclosure: this is my preferred method for translating games (as it's portable between versions of a game), and I'm also the primary developer of it.

 

[1baka]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

i have a question regarding RPGMaker Trans.
after creating the patch, you get lots of *.txt files that you can edit.
but i wonder if theres any tools that can read those *.txt files and sort it out in a gui to make it easier to translate?

the *.txt files are easy to understand, so its not that it would be difficult to create such tool. yesterday i wanted to look into a rpg game, translate a few lines. so i started a project, read the *.txt file and put all japanese lines in a list-box. but then i thought, maybe someone already did it. so my question is if we know of such tool?

 

[habisain]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

There are a couple of GUIs for the old v2 format, but nothing for v3 to my knowledge. I'm generally too busy making RPGMaker Trans itself to do one myself (I've considered trying to make some sort of webapp for it, but I don't seem to have the time).

 

[1baka]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

habisain, i dont think you should focus on this. better you continue with the projects you are doing or the translations or anything else you wish.

i will not promise anything, but i will look into it if i can do a tiny tool. if it will make the translation faster its always better then nothing.

 

[habisain]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

Oh, I never said I was going to focus on it. I do have a whole bunch of unreleased odd utilities that I've been trying to wrap up into some kind of coherent whole though (currently looking at automatic rule-based translation; still needs work, but it is handy for translating every treasure chest in a game, and could be used for other neat things). So it's feasible that at some point I'll find time for one of my programming projects and implement some kind of webapp translation interface (so that a user can easily take advantage of useful translation extensions, in particular Rikaichan/kun), and wrap it into my misc utilities project.

 

[Yugifan3]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

For me i use the RPG Maker editor.
Unpack it, put a project file in same folder and start it up.
From there, i translate the tabs.
I start with Term,s then States, then ovre to Actors , Classes and then Skills.
Then i translate Items, Weapons and Armors.
Finally i finish up with Enemies and then boot up the game.
Once ingame i open up the menu and save, then i translate w/e custom UI needs to be translated. Then i play the game a bit until i get into Combat.
There i translate the next UI stuff that needs to be translated.
Then is just matter of playing for a bit and translate stuff that could be worth translating. Like Choices , or Shop UI, or maybe some other custom stuff.

 

[Libellule]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

[...]

personally, there was a time where i have started a tools like that for Habisain's RPGMaker Trans txt, but i abandoned it pretty fast, because i have find a tools that i like for that, so no need to remake the whell

and with habitude i use him realy a lot now , take a look at PowerGREP 4, you can easily works on rpgmakertrans TXT with it, just with some custom regex, you can make things like search untranslated block, jump from one to another, make automated change in every files etc... that a prety powerfull tools

 

[Gfurst]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

The second option is to use RPGMaker Trans

I really wish more people would use the tool for translating projects, its immensely easier to find text needed of translation and its generally safe for new versions of the game.

 

[1baka]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

the idea is to use RPGMaker Trans and then have a tool that will help with the translation as much possible.
so, the tool will do the heavy editing while you can focus on the translation only. a build-in dictionary/database will record all translations you do. the more you translate the more it have. later it will help to translate all those annoying words that almost all games have. why translate the same thing twice?

if i decide to start this project i will first do the things above. later i will see if i will add a build-in machine translator too.

 

[squark]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

You really should. I actually favour RPGMaker Trans. The reason I did one of my partials as a binary instead of a Trans patch (still kind of WIP, working on RC2) is because some of the information was contained in a section typically overlooked by RPGMaker Trans -- the "Notes" section in the enemies.rvdata* file is overlooked in current builds. Generally, nothing important is there, but in this one case it's an entire bestiary they stuck there.

Right now, I find Notepad++ more than sufficient to open the .txt files and edit them. A built-in dictionary would be useful, but I'm getting a little proficient at translating Mactrans garbage into english. (IMTranslator is my Engrish tool)

About the assisted grouping translations, at present, RMTrans makes it super simple. Translate it once and it's done for the rest of the game (grouped context entries).

 

[habisain]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

the idea is to use RPGMaker Trans and then have a tool that will help with the translation as much possible.
so, the tool will do the heavy editing while you can focus on the translation only. a build-in dictionary/database will record all translations you do. the more you translate the more it have. later it will help to translate all those annoying words that almost all games have. why translate the same thing twice?

if i decide to start this project i will first do the things above. later i will see if i will add a build-in machine translator too.

Well, I'll state the following on this: I am aiming for a summer release of both RPGMaker Trans v5 and my odd tools collection. Inside the odd tools collection is patch combining (i.e. a less messy way of taking a patch from one game to another; this can be done presently, but it is messy) and patch annotation (i.e. add comments to the patch which contain the machine translation). So if you do decide to make a GUI editor, it may be best to place most emphasis on the GUI and worry about those extra features later because it's likely I'll be releasing stuff that does those anyway.

You really should. I actually favour RPGMaker Trans. The reason I did one of my partials as a binary instead of a Trans patch (still kind of WIP, working on RC2) is because some of the information was contained in a section typically overlooked by RPGMaker Trans -- the "Notes" section in the enemies.rvdata* file is overlooked in current builds. Generally, nothing important is there, but in this one case it's an entire bestiary they stuck there.

Yep, that's a known issue. It should be fixed with v5, which will allow specification of what should be put in the patch.

 

[candyfloss]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

For me i use the RPG Maker editor.
Unpack it, put a project file in same folder and start it up.
From there, i translate the tabs.
I start with Term,s then States, then ovre to Actors , Classes and then Skills.
Then i translate Items, Weapons and Armors.
Finally i finish up with Enemies and then boot up the game.
Once ingame i open up the menu and save, then i translate w/e custom UI needs to be translated. Then i play the game a bit until i get into Combat.
There i translate the next UI stuff that needs to be translated.
Then is just matter of playing for a bit and translate stuff that could be worth translating. Like Choices , or Shop UI, or maybe some other custom stuff.

I'm using RPG Maker editor too. Hi-five~

Oh well. I just use this method cause it's the method my translating sensei yariel taught me to when I asked him.

 

[Gfurst]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

I really don't get the fuss about these extra tools needed for rpgm trans,
The way I see its pretty solid to work with, it extracts the supposed translatable lines and gives you a blank line to input your translation in,
and it evens allows merging of repeated lines in different files (which I think is done automatically)

The way I see it all you need is some tool like translator aggregator, something that translates directly from the clipboard, a couple different machine translators,
and from that assistance and your knowledge of the language, come up with the best corresponding translated sentence...
its not like same word always gives the same sense to sentence, it depends on context

 

[habisain]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

I don't think there's any fuss about extra tools being needed for RPGMaker Trans. However, I do think there's a case for extra tools being useful. The editing stuff in a text editor thing does work, but it isn't perfect. Personally, I would actually prefer some kind of webapp based editor because then I can easily use Rikaichan as a translation assistant.

And case in point about extra tools being useful: I'm soon going to release the project which I've been trialing my "Robotrans" utility on. Supplying a relatively small corpus of terms and rules, and my previous patches, I managed to translate about 40% of the strings in the game automatically (mostly highly formulaic item/weapon/armor/spell descriptions, but also stuff like treasure chest dialogues). No matter how you look at it, that's a substantial amount of work saved.

 

[Gfurst]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

No matter how you look at it, that's a substantial amount of work saved.

it sure is, seems impressive
by the way, more or less on the subject, the utility is described as cross-platform, how can I use it on linux? (didn't find any instructions)
or hasn't it been attempted before?

 

[1baka]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

Gfurst and i dont get why you need to get upset about it at all.
if you are comfortable with what you have, then you dont need any tools, good for you. you dont need to spend time writing that rant to begin with and instead use that time to translate or whatever you are doing.

im quite excited of the tools you are doing habisain. if we can have 40% translated automatically that would make things very easy, especially the partial translations! that would make my project almost useless, as thats the main reason i wanted to make it, as i found all those small/repetitive words annoying.

 

[Yugifan3]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

Ah! habisain is putting me out of work! Quick! Someone do something!

 

[habisain]

Re: how do you translate RPgmaker games?

it sure is, seems impressive
by the way, more or less on the subject, the utility is described as cross-platform, how can I use it on linux? (didn't find any instructions)
or hasn't it been attempted before?

I use it on Linux regularly. It's my main platform. As to how to use it, at the moment it's grab the source for the default branch, make a VirtualEnv with Python 3.4 (shortly to be problematic with Ubuntu), install the requirements file through pip, and run it.

Linux packaging is one of the things on my todo list. I suppose in the meantime what I should do is add some instructions on how to get it working on Linux, and probably an official source archive rather than downloading the entire Mercurial repo.

im quite excited of the tools you are doing habisain. if we can have 40% translated automatically that would make things very easy, especially the partial translations! that would make my project almost useless, as thats the main reason i wanted to make it, as i found all those small/repetitive words annoying.

Well, that 40% is basically stuff which is either very formulaic (e.g. "Fire Attack +40, Burning" assembled from knowing translations of "Fire Attack" and "Burning"), default strings in RPGMaker games (like menus, copied across from my other translation patches), or what you might call "partially repeated" strings (e.g. "Received X" from treasure chests, where X is some item). Also I was working on a demo, so this would not be 40% of a full game. So basically, there'd still be a decent chunk of work to make partials using this, especially considering that most games don't have such formulaic item descriptions, and you have to actually make the rules to apply. But it's certainly a time saver, and most importantly it's taking care of bits of the game which are particularly boring to translate.