Patch is up (v1.01 incoming)

Talk about Kojima's hard sci-fi masterpiece.
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87th
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Kojima games owned: METALGEAR SERIES
MetalGear (MSX2) [European]
MetalGear (NES) [European]
MetalGear (Famicom) [Japanese]
MetalGear 2: Solid Snake (MSX2) [Japanese]
Snake's Revenge (NES) [European]
MetalGear Solid (PlayStation) [European]
MetalGear Solid: Premium Pack (PlayStation) [European]
MetalGear Solid: Integral (PlayStation) [Japanese]
MetalGear: Ghost Babel (Gameboy Color) [European]
MetalGear: Ghost Babel (Gameboy Color) [European]
MetalGear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty (PlayStation 2) [European]
MetalGear Solid 2: Substance (PlayStation 2) [Japanese]
MetalGear Solid 2: Substance + The Document of MGS2 (PlayStation 2) [European]
MetalGear Solid 2: Substance (Xbox) [European]
MetalGear Solid 2: Substance (PC) [European]
MetalGear AC!D (PSP) [European]
MetalGear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PlayStation 2) [European]
MetalGear Solid 3: Snake Eater - Premium Pack (PlayStation 2) [Japanese]
MetalGear AC!D2 (PSP) [European]
MetalGear Solid 3: Subsistence - 1st Edition (PlayStation 2) [Japanese]
MetalGear Solid 3: Subsistence - Promo copy (PlayStation 2) [European]
MetalGear Solid 3: Subsistence - 1st Edition (PlayStation 2) [European]
MetalGear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel (PSP) [European]
MetalGear Solid: Portable Ops (PSP) [American]
MetalGear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - Limited Edition (+ Bonus Disc, Soundtrack and 6" Old Snake Action Figure) [European]

SNATCHER SERIES
Snatcher (Mega CD) [European]
Snatcher (Saturn) [Japanese]

POLICENAUTS SERIES
Policenauts Pilot Disk (3DO) [Japanese]
Policenauts (3DO) [Japanese]
Policenauts (PlayStation) [Japanese]
Policenauts (Saturn) [Japanese]
Policenauts (Saturn) [Japanese]

ZONE OF THE ENDERS SERIES
Zone Of the Enders (PlayStation 2) [European]
Zone Of the Enders: The Second Runner - Special Edition (PlayStation 2) [European]

BOKTAI SERIES
boktai: The Sun Is In Your Hand! (Gameboy Advance) [European]
boktai 2: Solar Boy Django (Gameboy Advance) [European]

OTHER SERIES
Penguin Adventure (MSX) [European]
Kabushiki Baibai Trainer Kabutore (DS) [Japanese]

KOJIMA-RELATED GAMES
Konami Krazy Racers (Gameboy Advance) [European]
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) [American]
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by 87th »

Wait until you're playing on Level Die. That's fucking insane.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Wampiro »

[offtopic]Godhand is fucking awesome... one of the best beatemups I played.

Don´t feel ashamed to play in Easy Mode, actually it´s Clover´s joke:

Easy --> It means HARD
Normal --> INSANE
Hard --> Anal Rape
???? --> The Ps2 turns into a supernova and collapse

The fight with the two Tiger Joe + entire army, near the last levels, that´s HELL xD[/offtopic]
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Ghaleon »

My friend has been playing Godhand like a madman the last couple months and is completely in love with it. He actually beat it on hard mode. It took him 100-something tries to beat the first boss alone on hard.

I just picked it up -- will play soon (unless POLICENAUTS is out!)

haha, ign gave it a 3.0/10 or something -- that really shows you what game reviewers are looking for in this gaming era (i.e. not creativity or actual fun).
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by slowbeef »

Ghaleon wrote:haha, ign gave it a 3.0/10 or something -- that really shows you what game reviewers are looking for in this gaming era (i.e. not creativity or actual fun).
Yeah, I never gave God Hand a second look until I saw a Let's Play of it. It's highly addictive, and it's weird because it's not like unfairly difficult, even though it is very very difficult. I'd almost say it's not that God Hand is too hard - it's more like God Hand forces you to be very good.

I guess I should say something about Policenauts to make this more relevant...

...Um...

...Policenauts features less little people than God Hand and for that I am sorry.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by LazyDave »

So I posted this on the emulation thread but haven't heard anything.

Is it normal to not see the konami logo or attract videos when running Policenauts on PSP? Will the translation patch fix this or am I making the EBOOT wrong?
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Artemio »

LazyDave wrote:So I posted this on the emulation thread but haven't heard anything.

Is it normal to not see the konami logo or attract videos when running Policenauts on PSP? Will the translation patch fix this or am I making the EBOOT wrong?

You probably have a bad rip of the ISO, with an improper STR file. Rip the game again.
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LazyDave
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by LazyDave »

Artemio wrote:
LazyDave wrote:So I posted this on the emulation thread but haven't heard anything.

Is it normal to not see the konami logo or attract videos when running Policenauts on PSP? Will the translation patch fix this or am I making the EBOOT wrong?

You probably have a bad rip of the ISO, with an improper STR file. Rip the game again.
The iso works fine (intro, logo) on ePSX. I've been using Autopopsstaion to rip it. Any recommendation (settings, program)?
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Kojima_Devotee »

Ghaleon wrote:haha, ign gave it a 3.0/10 or something -- that really shows you what game reviewers are looking for in this gaming era (i.e. not creativity or actual fun).
If I may revert the discussion back off-topic, I just have to say that I love to hate IGN. After all, interoffice matters can affect a game's rating more than the quality of the title itself.

All right, ok - I digress. How are the minor bugs and graphical changes coming along, Slowbeef?
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Snatcher42 »

Snatcher42 wrote:Speaking of pSX, I think I was able to get perfect FMV sound sync by, ironically, unchecking the sync sound option. So the question is: what does that do exactly, and is there any ePSXe plugin that will let us do the same thing?
Bumping this, think it kinda got overlooked. Anyone care to follow up on it?
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by slowbeef »

Snatcher42 wrote: Bumping this, think it kinda got overlooked. Anyone care to follow up on it?
I'll take a look at it, because I'm interested to know too.

A funny story from the world of ROM modding.

Recently, Marc asked me to change "Auto-Save" into "Autosave", a simple one-character fix. I asked if he was sure about that since "Autosave" felt wrong to me for some reason. We went back and forth and Artemio gave the tie-breaking vote: "Autosave". Hrmmm.

Unfortunately, this meant multiple fixes for me.

The first problem is that the string "Auto-Save" is hard-coded in both the Main Menu binary and the Interpreter binary. While a good 96% (roughly) of the text is extracted into translation files and re-inserted as part of our patching process, editing things in the binary is a bit trickier. The pointers to strings in binaries are appended after the strings themselves, and they point to an absolute address of where the string will be in memory when the game is running. This is more or less not a huge deal because it's statically loaded (all the same location), but since it's doing funky memory stuff, I like to test it somewhat rigorously.

"Slowbeef," you say. "You're removing a character. That shouldn't affect the pointers at all." Well, you're right. So we're okay there.

Ah, but "Auto-Save" appears elsewhere. When you start the game, if you already have a savegame on file, it asks "Auto-Save file will be deleted. Are you sure you wish to continue?" No big deal, since it's just plaintext right?

Except it's not.

It's a graphic.

I have no idea why.

Konami makes a full-screen background graphic for the sentences "Auto-Save file will be deleted. Are you sure you wish to continue?" (note: I'm writng this from memory, I don't remember the exact wording) So to change "Auto-Save" to "Autosave" I have to open up our graphic of it in GIMP or Paint.NET, change the graphic, run our program to convert to Policenauts' format (which I call PAK since it's in a PAK file), re-inject into the patch, build, and test again.

Oh, but we're not done friends.

"Auto-Save" also appears when you go to your Memory Card Manager in your Playstation (with no CD inserted). Sony encodes that text in two-byte straight Shift-JIS, which you can read about on Wikipedia if you care. Policenauts sorta respects one-byte Shift-JIS, so if you put in plain ASCII, it will be printed in English, all variable-width formatted and nice and pleasing to the eye. (Actually, it flips the plain ASCII, so it's 100h - (ASCII value in hex) for the in-game text, but straight ASCII for the rest.)

Sony, on the other-hand says "No, don't do that. I want two-byte Shift-JIS only. I won't respect ASCII. I will respect full-width Latin characters in the 0x8300 range, though, if you want English." Note that this is true of all American/European Playstation games and consoles as well. So I have to change that there too and it's a little messy, but hey.

Ah, but we're not done. Policenauts gives you two Auto-Save... sorry, Autosave, files. In your memory card manager it will now say:

POLICENAUTS Autosave File 1
POLICENAUTS Autosave File 2

But if you look in the binaries, you'll only see "POLICENAUTS Autosave File 1"

Where does #2 come from?

If we had source code, we'd look at it and say, "Oh that's stupid. Konami put the string in a static array and after printed in the buffer, it goes back and says 'change the 27th character to the appropriate save number".

Since we don't have source code, we look at it and say "Oh that's stupid. Konami put the string in a static array and after printed in the buffer, it goes back and says 'change the 27th character to the appropriate save number. The thing is I'm guessing that because there's some memory location hard-coded in the actual instructions."

That means there's no pointer - I have to go into the assembly and change it there. Since we're removing a character, I have to run the game again, break on memory read, see the offending instruction and change appropriately. It's especially hand-wringing because changes to assembly really have to be rigorously tested - although to be fair, changing a hard-coded number isn't terribly harder. It's just much, much harder than it should be.

"Slowbeef," you say. "Why not just automate that?" Because it's the only thing in the entire fucking game like it, that's why!

So that's a change we had to make and why it took a lot longer than it should have, even though it's one freaking character. A lack of a hyphen and an upper-case to lower-case.

And this is all predicated on the fact that I can't think of anywhere else Auto-Save occurs in the game text. (Why not just search on "Auto-Save" in the ROM to be sure? Because again, there's multiple ways it's encoded - straight ASCII in the binaries, two-byte Shift-JIS for Sony, reverse ASCII for the in-game files, and proprietary image data for that one damn part.)

That's kinda what we're doing on the backend - talking about changes we want to make, how they'll be propogated throughout, doing them, and testing testing testing.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by qwerty »

Slowbeef, that last post was great.. And this is only a fraction of the overall work.. I wonder what the final text is going to be like.. Can't wait. Thanks man!
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Sseklebeast »

:mrgreen:

New member to this board and just want to say that I'm real excited about the translation!
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by shidoni »

@slowbeef... Thank you for the minute entertainment the sensation of my eyes glazing over has given me.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by akor1108 »

F*ck Marc, why'd you have to make Slowbeef do something so ridiculous and seemingly unnecessary? I say if Auto-Save is in at least 3 different forms and you have to go through a bunch of shizzle just to change it to Autosave (which is more correct though) I think that this one extremely teensy little issue could have been looked over and forgotten due to the pure reason that it's so exceedingly difficult to change. Also, Slowbeef said himself he didn't feel right about changing the thing! Being a computer programming wiz, his gut feeling was correct!

At least this is superproof that this game is so loved and tenderly cared for that the guys on the project will go through any detail and won't stop till it's obsessively perfect! Thanks for this insight Slowbeef.

Good luck, don't stop. save your stuff! And goodbye again. I'm off.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Anubis »

Akor, Was that really necessary? Yea it made have taken a little longer, but overall we get a more perfect and complete package. Don't complain.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Piratero »

akor1108 wrote:F*ck Marc, why'd you have to make Slowbeef do something so ridiculous and seemingly unnecessary? I say if Auto-Save is in at least 3 different forms and you have to go through a bunch of shizzle just to change it to Autosave (which is more correct though) I think that this one extremely teensy little issue could have been looked over and forgotten due to the pure reason that it's so exceedingly difficult to change. Also, Slowbeef said himself he didn't feel right about changing the thing! Being a computer programming wiz, his gut feeling was correct!

At least this is superproof that this game is so loved and tenderly cared for that the guys on the project will go through any detail and won't stop till it's obsessively perfect! Thanks for this insight Slowbeef.

Good luck, don't stop. save your stuff! And goodbye again. I'm off.
Uh, stop posting such nonsense, please.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by NASAchusetts »

I'll agree with Akor on this one. Doesn't really seem that necessary of a change at all. Kind of like opening a huge can of worms.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Zhuk »

Hey Guys,

Major props to the team for all their dedication and hard work. I have been lurking in this thread daily and enjoyed Slowbeef's progress reports immensely, furthermore I have been updating NeoGAF's Policenauts translation project thread from time to time and I will make a hype thread when you guys finally release the patch as I hope it will spread the word out about the amazing work you guys do here.

In regards to the Auto-Save hyphen change, I feel I share Akor's sentiments in that it seems a little cruel to Slowbeef to do all that work for something that pointless, but in the end I the fact that it is their project and they can do what they like with it.

Kindest Regards,
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by slowbeef »

Well, for the record it's not like "This is the only thing holding us back from releasing" - there's other shit to do in tandem on both Marc and Artemio's sides so it's not like this put off release or something.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Artemio »

That's just the way things need to be done to give a quality product, it is not like we make the decisions and Slowbeef obeys. Slowbeef was giving you guys insight on what has just happened internally, but this kind of thing happens all the time. When something like this comes up, Marc asks our opinion without giving his, we expose our arguments and a consensus is reached. Anyway, I don't need to defend our position or decisions, neither do we need you guys to "take sides" when there are no internal sides. I understand you are passionate about what goes on internally, but if such attention to detail isn't paid then we wouldn't be able to deliver the product we want to deliver.

Decisions are made based on quality and giving the best experience we can, if it is beyond our capabilities we simply won't do it.

Also, it is not like we are holding the game for release. We simply have to finish it, it will be released when it is finished, not before.
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The Spoony Hou
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by The Spoony Hou »

I don't care about the change, but Slowbeef needed more work anyways.
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Piratero
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Piratero »

Thank you for the explaination, slowbeef. Very interesting how SONY has weird standards.

It's a lot of work, but it looks like you already know how to tackle the problem.

Let this be also a blog for slowbeef. Any technical rants would be greatly appreciated.
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by X_Lupin »

Yes, every little thing to "localize" it comes together to make a greater difference.

Almost all English games use the word "autosave" as compound. Although I think Auto-Save would flow better, it's just less "localized."
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by XenoMorph »

Man, it's like they intentionally made it extremely difficult for ROM-Hackers to even THINK about translating this game and fixing all typos/other typing eccentrities.

Naturally, the only logical explanation is that someone at Konami went 10 years into the future, saw what you were doing with their beloved game and quickly made it back to the past in his DeLorean to create a translating hell that now threatens to destroy the mental integrity of everyone herein.

Naturally.
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Piratero
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Re: Current Status (4/26/09): 1 Bug Till Beta

Post by Piratero »

XenoMorph wrote:Man, it's like they intentionally made it extremely difficult for ROM-Hackers to even THINK about translating this game and fixing all typos/other typing eccentrities.

Naturally, the only logical explanation is that someone at Konami went 10 years into the future, saw what you were doing with their beloved game and quickly made it back to the past in his DeLorean to create a translating hell that now threatens to destroy the mental integrity of everyone herein.

Naturally.
Not really. If they were to purposely encrypt the files and such, then yes. They're not going to try to cater to ROM hackers. That'll only make their life a lot more difficult.
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