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

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

So as things are looking like another delay, I'll post the reason why (in the interests of pre-emptively explaining why the translation won't be around despite my previous attempts at a timetable). All things considered, this was probably inevitable. Basically: after looking after ill family, I too became ill. Due to the fact that one of my ongoing medical abnormalities is slightly dodgy ears, what should have been "just" a severe cold-type bug also meant my balance was completely shot.

It turns out doing translations while the room is spinning is a bit beyond me. Again, could be worse (i.e. one of the family members I was looking after last time has severe asthma; colds are a major concern), but the next release is delayed again.

I will not be tempting fate again by posting a new timetable. I will endeavor to get the next version out fairly promptly, but setting a date does seem to jinx things.

I hope you can get well soon mate : )

 

[habisain]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Well, I'm doing better now. It was a nasty bug, that's for certain. Anyhow, a quick update: I've (essentially) finished all the translations for the H-scenes available up until the end of Act 4, which was my last major translation target for the next version.

A quick summary of what remains for me to do:
1) Fix my patch checking tools so that I can find any bits where my patch crashes the game. This is very much mandatory, because currently I know that my patch does crash the game in at least two places, mainly because I make quite a few typos, including in control sequences.
2) Have a look at the new v1.1.4 content, and look to get that translated as well.
3) Spell-checking; not as critical, but as I mentioned before, I make a lot of typos. And some places where I just use entirely the wrong word, but those are harder for me to find without people actually playing the game.

 

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Well, I'm doing better now. It was a nasty bug, that's for certain. Anyhow, a quick update: I've (essentially) finished all the translations for the H-scenes available up until the end of Act 4, which was my last major translation target for the next version.

A quick summary of what remains for me to do:
1) Fix my patch checking tools so that I can find any bits where my patch crashes the game. This is very much mandatory, because currently I know that my patch does crash the game in at least two places, mainly because I make quite a few typos, including in control sequences.
2) Have a look at the new v1.1.4 content, and look to get that translated as well.
3) Spell-checking; not as critical, but as I mentioned before, I make a lot of typos. And some places where I just use entirely the wrong word, but those are harder for me to find without people actually playing the game.

Thats good news, glad ur back to action.

 

[Krosh]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Quite the good news indeed. When it is time for the proofreading i stand at your disposal.

 

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

3) Spell-checking; not as critical, but as I mentioned before, I make a lot of typos. And some places where I just use entirely the wrong word, but those are harder for me to find without people actually playing the game.

BTW habisain we can report typos in here when we find them as we play the game, just give us a format like:

Chapter of the typo:

Place of the typo:

Whats the typo:

Do you think something like that will work for u?

 

[habisain]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Reporting typos can be done here, but I'm planning to use Discord or similar for that kind of stuff. It's all a bit up in the air at the moment. As to format - I can search the patch at will, so the easiest way of reporting is to just write down the sentence in which the typo occurs in, and I'll be able to find it easily (it you're specifically typo hunting, running the game with AGTH so you can copy/paste the text would probably be a good move).

Things are taking a little longer on the technical side - the work I'm doing is basically all tied in with a new version of the patch format which is taking shape, an sqllite database backend, and my long-delayed Robotrans tool. I've not really done database development before, and frankly, it's showing. That said, I think I've got the fundamental bits of it sorted out, and it'll make Robotrans able to do a lot more useful stuff - currently, while it can find spelling mistakes, it's ability to tell you where those spelling mistakes are is hit-or-miss.

 

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

On another topic, are u planning on complete the translation on Lilim Union in a future? i know a guy in hongfire said he´s doing some translation but he never post a link of the translation and i think u did a great job on chapter 1.

 

[habisain]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

My feelings on Lilium Union are a bit more complex, actually. The answer is I actually would like to complete that project, but when you get down to it:

1) The game is mechanically not very interesting - there's clothing destruction, but mechanically clothing destruction in Lilium Union just adds a secondary HP meter i.e. it's another way to lose fights. And while Laurel may have a Lewdness counter, practically speaking it's just a way to gate H-scenes; there's no other effect.
2) The Japanese writing is wooden, and characters have very little in the way of personality or development.
3) Some of the H-scenes actually do squick me quite a lot - I'm really not a fan of "all the way through", but that happens on quite a few occasions.

On the positive side, as with all of NewMoonLabel's games, it's a fairly neat setting, and it has robots in which is always a plus for me. So I may get back to it, but it's much more likely that after VPM I will focus on working on Robotrans + Crystal Story Awakening for a while. My work on Lilium Union isn't officially abandoned - but realistically, it is very nearly abandoned.

 

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

My feelings on Lilium Union are a bit more complex, actually. The answer is I actually would like to complete that project, but when you get down to it:

1) The game is mechanically not very interesting - there's clothing destruction, but mechanically clothing destruction in Lilium Union just adds a secondary HP meter i.e. it's another way to lose fights. And while Laurel may have a Lewdness counter, practically speaking it's just a way to gate H-scenes; there's no other effect.
2) The Japanese writing is wooden, and characters have very little in the way of personality or development.
3) Some of the H-scenes actually do squick me quite a lot - I'm really not a fan of "all the way through", but that happens on quite a few occasions.

On the positive side, as with all of NewMoonLabel's games, it's a fairly neat setting, and it has robots in which is always a plus for me. So I may get back to it, but it's much more likely that after VPM I will focus on working on Robotrans + Crystal Story Awakening for a while. My work on Lilium Union isn't officially abandoned - but realistically, it is very nearly abandoned.

Thank you for taking your time and answer my question.

 

[squark]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

I'm actually making progress through the vast portion of as-yet untranslated work thanks in no small part to he fact that the Google Trans app can work on images.
If you've got an android, I'd suggest at least trying it (though it did take me a few minutes to figure it out). It's actually pretty accurate

 

[iamnuff]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Good to know. Good ways to translate images are hard to find.

 

[criss]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

i have two questions
1. how many acts this game have
2. it is worth to play now with this partial
but still thanks for your hard work

 

[habisain]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

There are 5 acts total.

The current released translation covers the first 3, but not all H-scenes in those acts. The next release (which should be within the next few weeks) will cover the first 4 acts, and all H-scenes in those acts. The release (summer/autumn maybe?) after that will be a final 1.0 release, unless Searothonc adds stuff.

As to if it's worth playing now? If it were me, I'd probably wait until at least the next release. The end of Act 4 is a fairly good break point in the game, and as the next release has all available H-scenes, you'll be able to play a good chunk of the game without encountering any Japanese.

 

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

There are 5 acts total.

The current released translation covers the first 3, but not all H-scenes in those acts. The next release (which should be within the next few weeks) will cover the first 4 acts, and all H-scenes in those acts. The release (summer/autumn maybe?) after that will be a final 1.0 release, unless Searothonc adds stuff.

As to if it's worth playing now? If it were me, I'd probably wait until at least the next release. The end of Act 4 is a fairly good break point in the game, and as the next release has all available H-scenes, you'll be able to play a good chunk of the game without encountering any Japanese.

Any news to report or update on the progress?

 

[habisain]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Not as much progress as I'd like to report, honestly. That can be largely blamed on Persona 5, which for those who haven't played it, is an excellent hybrid of visual novel, JRPG, an Arsene Lupin novel, Psychonauts and Pokemon. It's also big. I'm nearly 50 hours in and I'm probably just over the halfway mark.

I can report that my newer tools are taking shape, which is good news. There's a lot of reworking in RPGMaker Trans going on which most people won't see beyond 'this works faster now', but I'll explain what's going on for those interested. As people know, using multiple cores makes things faster. RPGMaker Trans in it's current form uses Pythons Multiprocessing Managers to share the translation data between processes; unfortunately, this turns out to be one of the bottlenecks on Windows, which is why the Windows build of RPGMaker Trans is a lot slower than when I run it on Linux. In addition, the method I was using meant that it was hard to add a programmatic API to the translations data, which meant that work on the Robotrans utility was a real pain. Also, because the parser wasn't the best bit of code, I was struggling to get metadata on things in the patch, such as the location of spelling errors. And finally, the parser was fragile - bad inputs had a habit of crashing RPGMaker Trans, which is unfortunate.

For the sake of both performance and a decent API, I've been working on loading the translations into an actual database, specifically sqllite3, with a shiny new parser that's a lot better at handling bad inputs and getting metadata. I'm currently at a stage where I can read existing patches into the new database, but I'm not quite at writing the patches back out again. Once that gets sorted, I'll fix up Robotrans so that it can give me the problems in the patch, and maybe even fix a few (e.g. I've changed how I've been romanising some onomatopeias during the translation, which could be fairly easily automatically replaced).

There's also other features I'll be adding to Robotrans as well (to take it further down the path of a machine assisted translation tool - such as a feature to automatically transliterate onomatopeias so translators don't have to translate so many moans, which is basically the number one complaint of H-game translators including myself), but those are probably best left for discussion elsewhere.

 

[Stiltzkinator]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

I can report that my newer tools are taking shape, which is good news.

Personally, always happy to hear about news on this front. There's a lot of games that people enjoy and hopefully better translation tools will encourage more people to spend some time creating patches. The time investment of trying to pin everything down is a big reason why I'm not able to get things out very quickly (let's face it, it's practically never at this point), but seeing this tool improve gives me hope that I can get back into it.

Thanks for sharing your progress.

 

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Not as much progress as I'd like to report, honestly. That can be largely blamed on Persona 5, which for those who haven't played it, is an excellent hybrid of visual novel, JRPG, an Arsene Lupin novel, Psychonauts and Pokemon. It's also big. I'm nearly 50 hours in and I'm probably just over the halfway mark.

I can report that my newer tools are taking shape, which is good news. There's a lot of reworking in RPGMaker Trans going on which most people won't see beyond 'this works faster now', but I'll explain what's going on for those interested. As people know, using multiple cores makes things faster. RPGMaker Trans in it's current form uses Pythons Multiprocessing Managers to share the translation data between processes; unfortunately, this turns out to be one of the bottlenecks on Windows, which is why the Windows build of RPGMaker Trans is a lot slower than when I run it on Linux. In addition, the method I was using meant that it was hard to add a programmatic API to the translations data, which meant that work on the Robotrans utility was a real pain. Also, because the parser wasn't the best bit of code, I was struggling to get metadata on things in the patch, such as the location of spelling errors. And finally, the parser was fragile - bad inputs had a habit of crashing RPGMaker Trans, which is unfortunate.

For the sake of both performance and a decent API, I've been working on loading the translations into an actual database, specifically sqllite3, with a shiny new parser that's a lot better at handling bad inputs and getting metadata. I'm currently at a stage where I can read existing patches into the new database, but I'm not quite at writing the patches back out again. Once that gets sorted, I'll fix up Robotrans so that it can give me the problems in the patch, and maybe even fix a few (e.g. I've changed how I've been romanising some onomatopeias during the translation, which could be fairly easily automatically replaced).

There's also other features I'll be adding to Robotrans as well (to take it further down the path of a machine assisted translation tool - such as a feature to automatically transliterate onomatopeias so translators don't have to translate so many moans, which is basically the number one complaint of H-game translators including myself), but those are probably best left for discussion elsewhere.

Nothing to blame you cause i also played persona 5 and took me around 80 hours to complete, a great game btw, same goes for persona 3 and 4.

Good to hear that ur making some progress, even if its a little its better than nothing

I will keep checking the thread for any new news.

 

[habisain]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Not sure if encouraging me to play the other Persona games is a good move for getting this project finished, really. Although I have played Persona 3, but definitely have mixed feelings on it, in both the RPG component of the gameplay and the story. For a game that was so celebratory of life in general, the ending which left multiple characters in despair didn't sit that well with me. But you know, maybe that's just me looking at it from my weird little perspective.

I should mention that I am also doing bits and pieces of translation as well when I'm not working on the tools, to keep my translation skills moderately sharp. Apparently I've translated 78% of the game so far; I'm not planning on waiting until I've done some arbitrary target though, so once I've gotten the mandatory editing pass done a new version will be released.

 

[bumpywolf]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Not sure if encouraging me to play the other Persona games is a good move for getting this project finished, really. Although I have played Persona 3, but definitely have mixed feelings on it, in both the RPG component of the gameplay and the story. For a game that was so celebratory of life in general, the ending which left multiple characters in despair didn't sit that well with me. But you know, maybe that's just me looking at it from my weird little perspective.

I should mention that I am also doing bits and pieces of translation as well when I'm not working on the tools, to keep my translation skills moderately sharp. Apparently I've translated 78% of the game so far; I'm not planning on waiting until I've done some arbitrary target though, so once I've gotten the mandatory editing pass done a new version will be released.

Im encouraging the others to play and try the Persona games not you , I thought that you already played all the persona games. And that 78% sounds sweet

 

[Gfurst]

Re: Virgin's Protection Magic Translation

Hey @Habisain, so you fell for the Persona trap, just found out about the game recently, I might try that game later on as well, anyway, great news on the tool, really seems like you're making important progress. Cheers!