Aux fans francophones de Sakura Wars:
Merci pour votre soutien depuis l'annonce de la traduction en anglais de Sakura Wars 3. Les outils que nous sommes en train de développer pour le patch sont disponibles au public. Une fois le patch anglais réalisé, nous souhaitons soutenir la création d'une traduction en français. Merci de votre patience.
I am The Opponent, one of the lead programmers for this translation project. We have begun work on a translation of Sakura Wars 3, and we require assistance from the larger Dreamcast hacking community to overcome some fundamental roadblocks.
The project is known as the Taisho Romanization. See this post for our current personnel listing.
This project was made possible with assistance from ateam, without whom we would not have had a stable workflow for debugging and testing.
Translation progress is preliminary, but we've made enough progress in text insertion and documenting data formats to produce a proof of concept. I am documenting the data formats used by this game and publishing scripts for working with them on GitHub.
We've succeeded in doing the following:
- Decompressing the primary script format and inserting text. The script files are PRS-compressed but have additional wrapping that contains a header with compressed and uncompressed file sizes.
- Changing text character width and increasing the amount of text per line, with the information from this thread.
- Creating custom fonts. We are exploring the possibility of creating an alternate version of the patch using OpenDyslexic for the primary font.
- Replacing textures for system menus.
- Decoupling lip movement for voiced lines from the text, so the lip movements can be preserved after changing the text.
- The text engine properly centers LIPS text even after changing horizontal text offset, but it forces strange line breaking behavior on strings longer than 18 characters. This occurs after text is loaded to memory but before it is drawn to screen. In Double LIPS dialogs, when the choices change over after half of the time limit elapses, the text can be seen to be drawn correctly until the text animation ends, at which point the line breaking occurs and disrupts the strings. The limit of 18 characters has no link to the character limit for the text box, and will need to be changed or disabled for correct LIPS choice display. Because of this issue, the proof of concept video does not show translated LIPS strings. This issue was solved on May 24, 2022.
- The graphics for the battle stage interface are not stored in any obvious fashion. It is possible that they are compressed, but most of the files that are likely to contain them are not in any format that current Dreamcast tools are able to process. This issue was solved on June 1, 2022.