On Sun, 07 Jul 2002 18:16:03 +0200, Ivan Latorre wrote: >The hardest work has been the translation of the messages.
I know. I'm translating them from english to portuguese and sometimes I have to ask some friend to verify the translation. Since I'm translating and adding the texts to the game, I can also verify if the translations seems to be correct. Anyway, there are many problems that need to be corrected after the normal text translation. They are: - Correct the position of the texts, adding break line commands when needed (lots of places). - Reducing as much as possible the sentences, without modifying its meaning. If your sentences are bigger than the original ones (in bytes), you'll spend memory mapper pages to store the extra bytes needed. This way, each about 12Kb of extra texts will need a new mapper page, increasing the memory need (the other 4kb is used for message addressing purposes... this is not fixed, thought). My target is use only ONE extra memory mapper page. And it looks I'll be able to do it... fortunatelly, most translated texts fits on the place of the original message... thank God the game was made originaly with double byte characters. ((((^= >I don't think that I'll spend a lot of time translating the commands. Oh, you will. (^= At first place, they are not "in one place only". You'll have to repeat them several hundreds of times... And worst... In some menus you may translate them in the full meaning, because you can move some bytes from one command to another. But on some menus you can't, because there are no extra bytes to move. This way, to keep the game coherent , you'll have to translate the words always in a way they fit on the space and to be always the same on every place on the game. Also, some menus are not that flexible. I can talk about GAUDI menus. There is no space to allow full names as in the original version. I raised the maximum number of characters entered, but it was not possible to reise then as much as I needed. This is way the data is entered in double byte. There is no way to change this without breaking a lot of pieces in the game... (I had tried). So, the names entered on Gaudi had to be simplified. I choose to use only the name most used to the character (as "isabella" or "gibson", instead of "Jean Jacques Gibson" and "Isabella Velvet".) Some translations cannot have their size exceeded. This is valid for ALL texts that appear on GAUDI screen and VideoPhone, and also texts that are shown on MetalGear screen. This is a limit I could not break. The command I added to call texts on extra memory forces the text be placed on normal text place (bottom of screen) instead of the telephone/gaudi/metalgear screen. There are lots of other issues. Your translation will be of great help. I have no doubt of it. Anyway, several things will need to change on the texts so they can work with actual limitations. I had not made these limitations public simply because I really don't know all of them. Also, I expect to get rid of many of them. >And yes, I agree with you that translating the commands is quite boring... >specially when you cannot play the game and see the exact meaning of >every word (that's why I've bombarded Takamichi with lots of questions). When you have to make them fit on an space you do not even know, it's even worse. (^= >In my opinion, after have translated almost the entire game, Snatcher is the best >conversational game ever made for the MSX and one of best games of Konami >for MSX (I think that it only could be surpassed by Metal Gear 2 and SD Snatcher). I agree. But I can also (sadly) say it's the worst programming I had ever seen on a comercial game for MSX. Argh. This makes the translation programming a nightmare. []'s Daniel Caetano [EMAIL PROTECTED] ..."A necessidade de criatividade e' o que contribui para a mudanca. A criatividade mantem o criador vivo." (Frank Herbert) http://www.caetano.eng.br/ - This OS/2 system uptime is 1 days 01:50 hours. -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
