....
Sorry for long absent. I'm mostly on gaming and watching anime :P
Just lurking on some game forum and seeing drama and drama of fan translation projects running on.
A background here.
PSP console is very dead/unpopular on western gaming industry dule fully cracked/having custom firmwares running on it and give way to pirate. While in Japan game releasing list is still running. It means many games have Japanese version only unless some company buys the license and translate it.
So coming in, since some of Japanese game dev have its western branch and the license will just on to that company. If they announce that they won't/not interest to release/translate that game in western, no chance for official western version. And a fan translation is created for another way in playing.
I don't actually know what is wrong for Re:Digitize team's programmers. Months back where the FFT0 team and their fans discussing about merging 2 discs files together to have a single file and reduce the duplicate text section to translate and how to play its in android tablet, one of DRD programmer just showed up in FFT0 thread and tried to point out it's impossible, too hard for FFT0 team to do and went blah blah of size, index and other stuff.
It turned out in arguement and the guy got his ass handed back to himself as the FFT0 team main programmer gave a proof of what he had done (a video showing the tablet he's playing). Then he posted OK, shut up and back off.
Now DRD team having problem about inserting translation text. For your interest, it's that they extracted text files (there are many files contain in game rom file) out. Translate them to English, then replacing files back and pack to rom file. The thing is if file size (characters in text file) is the same, nothing have to change on indexing file*.
The indexing file is just like index on book or like boot sector Windows or other OS will use when start up your computer, if it's corrupted or lost its data, your computer won't run at all.
FFT0 team programmer tried to help. Saying he create a new blank file then fill in the files that were replace/left original with a help of tools that calculate offset from file size. Some of comment is what I remember since it's deleted/hid from view by mod.
DRD: You suggest recreating a 500 MB filesize archive along with it's file descriptor?
How do you think that should work? Feel free to PM me.
FFT0: I prefer discussing here so everyone can see it. Yes, this is what I do for my projects, since I know size of file I'm replacing, re-indexing from start of file would be more easier than what you did. With some of computer science
.
DRD: No. You don't know what you're talking about. You don't even look at how mess these files are. Just blabbing like other programmers we met and they just can't doing a simple stuff we did. It's just waste of time
FFT0: You sir, just lost an opportunity to get you game fixed by an experienced computer science major, now good luck trying yourself, as you will need it.
DRD: No problem you're not the first experienced computer science major who offered to help and most likely would have failed as well.
There are so many of you, but if even one of you was capable of something, yeah that would be a nice change of pace.
@Everyone: Sorry for losing my temper but I'm sick of all those pseudo-experienced pros and programmers who didn't even look into the game and pretend to know exactly what our problem is.
Writing some pseudo-code that has absolutely nothing to do with our problem and pretending that we tackled things wrong without even LOOKING into the frickin game, that is someone on a high horse and
such people don't have the skill that this game requires.
FFT0: No offense at all, but you talk you should have checked my background as romhacker before making assumptions: while there are a lot of people like me, YOU are not one of them, so next time think before talking, because fixing this game is something that I can do, that you can't.
Still, thanks for showing me what kind of person you are, now I'm sure I don't wanna have anything to do with this project.
DRD: Oh I checked your background and saw what you can do.
You came around. A bit. Nothing special. Nothing some couple of chinese didn't do better than you.
No offense: But you can't do this.
And you have no idea what person I am and you have also no idea about this project.
You should also know if your so called experience is present, that no game uses the same structure and only because something worked on FF it doesn't mean it will work on Redigitize.
Yeah I do follow your project closely and I do know what you're capable of, so when I refuse your help I know exactly what I'm doing.
FFT0: Wow, this game must somehow NOT run on the PSP's MIPS, processor, so I can't understand what it does. Interesting, you obviously know what your doing lol.
DRD: We're not talking about the game mechanics and MIPS.
We're talking about file structures.
I assume you haven't looked into ARCV0.BIN otherwise maybe you wouldn't be so sure of yourself.
You have all the files in there. ARCVINFO.BIN stores the names, the offsets and filesizes.
You know what a LBA is. In this context the LBA = ARCVINFO.BIN.
You suggest that you extract the whole ARCV0.BIN. Ok let's assume this.
First of all you need ARCVINFO.BIN. We have about 5-6 different extractors lying around.
Hell even I wrote one. This is nothing difficult so far.
But then your fun starts. The text is in .pack files. in those .pack files you have .btx files.
So you have to edit the japanese text in the btx, reassamble a new pack (which will probably be bigger than the original)
and then? Reinsert everything back into ARCV0.BIN?
So you have all the extracted files lying there. So edited the pack.
You suggest next thing you do you take all this stuff and let the game rebuilt a new archive?
Ok but where does this leave us? Still at the same fricking position. You STILL have your tool to recalculate the new offset for the bigger pack file(s) and the other
files. You still have to make sure all those numbers are being generated or entered into ARCVINFO.BIN.
Do you believe you can compltely reverse engineer a file of 500 MB in such a way that you can put it perfectly back together, not to speak of its corresponding LBA?
Do you realize how much time you'd have to spend on that?
I don't say it's impossible but only very few hackers would do that. Which is why we didn't.
And yeah I know you never been that stuck, but then again: You never had to hack Redigitize.
Have you ever considered that Redigitize might be a special case?
FFT0: Dude, you obviously didn't read my 2nd post in this thread, You don't have to repeat what I already read some posts ago. I obviously did check the files from Redigitize and if you think reassembling a file system is too difficult and only a few people can do it, is because you know too few programmers. I've done it dozens of time, not only for Type-0 and dissidia, I've even extracted and repacked entire file systems like this one but encrypted, like Valkyria Chronicles 2 and 3, Valkyrie Profile, and Star Ocean 1 and 2.
Heck, you should check out my Type-0 translation tools: they extract the entire package, recognize each file entry in the LBA (if you wanna call it like that) and those that I've coded support for (raw images, videos, text) are automatically decoded thanks to different program modules I code (to PNG, TXT, AVI, etc...). Then, after editing those common file types, my tools can recode them into the original format the game understands, updating every needed size reference, and repacks the main package updating the file system descriptor. tl;dr: the game can be fully extracted + decoded and coded + repacked with a double click. This is how I roll in all my projects. And yes, ASM plays an important role when one does not fully understand a data structure.
And btw, Type-0's files are way harder to figure out.
And this is what I explained in the post you didn't bother to read, but if you excuse me, I have to stop caring.
DRD: hen it appears you are so superior to the rest of us poor humanity that we shouldn't bother you with our little problems. lol
And you don't have to brag in front of me. If you really wanted to help you'd have come directly to me.
Otherwise there is no use to that. Writing some pseudo-code into the thread just to show you know a programming language?
Or what did you want to prove with that?
I told you I have seen enough programmers like you who said "i can do this I can do that".
Oh yeah whatever happened to those? After two weeks most of them left because they couldn't do it.
Nothing you wrote gave me the idea it would be different with you. It would just been a waste of time.
We have a programmer for this project who did brilliantly and who currently is unavaible.
But I'm sure once he's back he'll do a heck of a job. Which you maybe, possibly, could have done,
but since you're so super you wouldn't have because everyone knows you COULD do it. Right, right?
If you did look indeed into the ARCV0.BIN and this is so super easy then let me ask you one thing?
Where is your tool?
I'm sorry but I live in a world where the theoretical possibilites of a person mean nothing to me.
If something is easy and can be done I do it. I don't go around and tell people about it.
And feel free to do whatever you want. Like I said: I didn't want your help to begin with and nothing you wrote changed that.
FFT0: Exactly what I did
Something you didn't understand or you didn't bother to read. That doesn't mean it was wrong.
DRD: Not really. All you did was critizing how we handle things and providing some extraction of the archive which is not the thing we need.
I understood and read what you wrote. It's not wrong. It's just not what is needen. And you didn't understand what our problem is.
That is the crucial point here.
FFT0: Here, the output of my tool, that I'm not going to share to help on a project driven by such a condescendant person:
This the ARCVINFO.BIN file perfectly decoded, my tool can also reinsert bigger files back updating all necessary sizes + offset refferences. Tested adding random 5MB files to the data package (that the game never loads anyway), and new offset + sizes are calculated correctly so the game works.
DRD: Oh I wouldn't say so.
It's not like we're out of options.
Or that we are so desperate that we have to cling on every single programmer we can find...
It's rather the contrary.
This project is not dead and we are free to choose who we want to work with.
I rejected SkybladeCloud in public instead of PM because he choose to contact me through this thread.
His choice not mine. And my replies resulted due to his arrogant behaviour which was out of place if he really wanted to work with us.
May I remind you guys that 90% of the game is already translated. Do you honestly believe this close to the finish line we would give up?
May I remind you guys that few PSP Translations are this far.
How can you still doubt we're gonna bring this thing home?
...
My thought, as a programmer as well. Since 90% of my work is edit, fix, or add whatever stuff of someone's work on before me. It's only few times that i have to create everything from zero. For indexing, I take FFT0 programmer's side. It'll make your life easier if you take a little back and see there are more than one way you can take. Making index from zero will make you add and place address of file to right place and not have to worry about that you're overwriting another index place and you then have to recalculate offset all over again.
To make it simple, if you're translating a book to another language, will you just count each chapter page and make new index or you try to place all chapter page to the way original index does then add +/- x to the page on it?
Just lurking on some game forum and seeing drama and drama of fan translation projects running on.
A background here.
PSP console is very dead/unpopular on western gaming industry dule fully cracked/having custom firmwares running on it and give way to pirate. While in Japan game releasing list is still running. It means many games have Japanese version only unless some company buys the license and translate it.
So coming in, since some of Japanese game dev have its western branch and the license will just on to that company. If they announce that they won't/not interest to release/translate that game in western, no chance for official western version. And a fan translation is created for another way in playing.
I don't actually know what is wrong for Re:Digitize team's programmers. Months back where the FFT0 team and their fans discussing about merging 2 discs files together to have a single file and reduce the duplicate text section to translate and how to play its in android tablet, one of DRD programmer just showed up in FFT0 thread and tried to point out it's impossible, too hard for FFT0 team to do and went blah blah of size, index and other stuff.
It turned out in arguement and the guy got his ass handed back to himself as the FFT0 team main programmer gave a proof of what he had done (a video showing the tablet he's playing). Then he posted OK, shut up and back off.
Now DRD team having problem about inserting translation text. For your interest, it's that they extracted text files (there are many files contain in game rom file) out. Translate them to English, then replacing files back and pack to rom file. The thing is if file size (characters in text file) is the same, nothing have to change on indexing file*.
The indexing file is just like index on book or like boot sector Windows or other OS will use when start up your computer, if it's corrupted or lost its data, your computer won't run at all.
FFT0 team programmer tried to help. Saying he create a new blank file then fill in the files that were replace/left original with a help of tools that calculate offset from file size. Some of comment is what I remember since it's deleted/hid from view by mod.
DRD: You suggest recreating a 500 MB filesize archive along with it's file descriptor?
How do you think that should work? Feel free to PM me.
FFT0: I prefer discussing here so everyone can see it. Yes, this is what I do for my projects, since I know size of file I'm replacing, re-indexing from start of file would be more easier than what you did. With some of computer science
.
DRD: No. You don't know what you're talking about. You don't even look at how mess these files are. Just blabbing like other programmers we met and they just can't doing a simple stuff we did. It's just waste of time
FFT0: You sir, just lost an opportunity to get you game fixed by an experienced computer science major, now good luck trying yourself, as you will need it.
DRD: No problem you're not the first experienced computer science major who offered to help and most likely would have failed as well.
There are so many of you, but if even one of you was capable of something, yeah that would be a nice change of pace.
@Everyone: Sorry for losing my temper but I'm sick of all those pseudo-experienced pros and programmers who didn't even look into the game and pretend to know exactly what our problem is.
Writing some pseudo-code that has absolutely nothing to do with our problem and pretending that we tackled things wrong without even LOOKING into the frickin game, that is someone on a high horse and
such people don't have the skill that this game requires.
FFT0: No offense at all, but you talk you should have checked my background as romhacker before making assumptions: while there are a lot of people like me, YOU are not one of them, so next time think before talking, because fixing this game is something that I can do, that you can't.
Still, thanks for showing me what kind of person you are, now I'm sure I don't wanna have anything to do with this project.
DRD: Oh I checked your background and saw what you can do.
You came around. A bit. Nothing special. Nothing some couple of chinese didn't do better than you.
No offense: But you can't do this.
And you have no idea what person I am and you have also no idea about this project.
You should also know if your so called experience is present, that no game uses the same structure and only because something worked on FF it doesn't mean it will work on Redigitize.
Yeah I do follow your project closely and I do know what you're capable of, so when I refuse your help I know exactly what I'm doing.
FFT0: Wow, this game must somehow NOT run on the PSP's MIPS, processor, so I can't understand what it does. Interesting, you obviously know what your doing lol.
DRD: We're not talking about the game mechanics and MIPS.
We're talking about file structures.
I assume you haven't looked into ARCV0.BIN otherwise maybe you wouldn't be so sure of yourself.
You have all the files in there. ARCVINFO.BIN stores the names, the offsets and filesizes.
You know what a LBA is. In this context the LBA = ARCVINFO.BIN.
You suggest that you extract the whole ARCV0.BIN. Ok let's assume this.
First of all you need ARCVINFO.BIN. We have about 5-6 different extractors lying around.
Hell even I wrote one. This is nothing difficult so far.
But then your fun starts. The text is in .pack files. in those .pack files you have .btx files.
So you have to edit the japanese text in the btx, reassamble a new pack (which will probably be bigger than the original)
and then? Reinsert everything back into ARCV0.BIN?
So you have all the extracted files lying there. So edited the pack.
You suggest next thing you do you take all this stuff and let the game rebuilt a new archive?
Ok but where does this leave us? Still at the same fricking position. You STILL have your tool to recalculate the new offset for the bigger pack file(s) and the other
files. You still have to make sure all those numbers are being generated or entered into ARCVINFO.BIN.
Do you believe you can compltely reverse engineer a file of 500 MB in such a way that you can put it perfectly back together, not to speak of its corresponding LBA?
Do you realize how much time you'd have to spend on that?
I don't say it's impossible but only very few hackers would do that. Which is why we didn't.
And yeah I know you never been that stuck, but then again: You never had to hack Redigitize.
Have you ever considered that Redigitize might be a special case?
FFT0: Dude, you obviously didn't read my 2nd post in this thread, You don't have to repeat what I already read some posts ago. I obviously did check the files from Redigitize and if you think reassembling a file system is too difficult and only a few people can do it, is because you know too few programmers. I've done it dozens of time, not only for Type-0 and dissidia, I've even extracted and repacked entire file systems like this one but encrypted, like Valkyria Chronicles 2 and 3, Valkyrie Profile, and Star Ocean 1 and 2.
Heck, you should check out my Type-0 translation tools: they extract the entire package, recognize each file entry in the LBA (if you wanna call it like that) and those that I've coded support for (raw images, videos, text) are automatically decoded thanks to different program modules I code (to PNG, TXT, AVI, etc...). Then, after editing those common file types, my tools can recode them into the original format the game understands, updating every needed size reference, and repacks the main package updating the file system descriptor. tl;dr: the game can be fully extracted + decoded and coded + repacked with a double click. This is how I roll in all my projects. And yes, ASM plays an important role when one does not fully understand a data structure.
And btw, Type-0's files are way harder to figure out.
And this is what I explained in the post you didn't bother to read, but if you excuse me, I have to stop caring.
DRD: hen it appears you are so superior to the rest of us poor humanity that we shouldn't bother you with our little problems. lol
And you don't have to brag in front of me. If you really wanted to help you'd have come directly to me.
Otherwise there is no use to that. Writing some pseudo-code into the thread just to show you know a programming language?
Or what did you want to prove with that?
I told you I have seen enough programmers like you who said "i can do this I can do that".
Oh yeah whatever happened to those? After two weeks most of them left because they couldn't do it.
Nothing you wrote gave me the idea it would be different with you. It would just been a waste of time.
We have a programmer for this project who did brilliantly and who currently is unavaible.
But I'm sure once he's back he'll do a heck of a job. Which you maybe, possibly, could have done,
but since you're so super you wouldn't have because everyone knows you COULD do it. Right, right?
If you did look indeed into the ARCV0.BIN and this is so super easy then let me ask you one thing?
Where is your tool?
I'm sorry but I live in a world where the theoretical possibilites of a person mean nothing to me.
If something is easy and can be done I do it. I don't go around and tell people about it.
And feel free to do whatever you want. Like I said: I didn't want your help to begin with and nothing you wrote changed that.
FFT0: Exactly what I did
Something you didn't understand or you didn't bother to read. That doesn't mean it was wrong.
DRD: Not really. All you did was critizing how we handle things and providing some extraction of the archive which is not the thing we need.
I understood and read what you wrote. It's not wrong. It's just not what is needen. And you didn't understand what our problem is.
That is the crucial point here.
FFT0: Here, the output of my tool, that I'm not going to share to help on a project driven by such a condescendant person:
This the ARCVINFO.BIN file perfectly decoded, my tool can also reinsert bigger files back updating all necessary sizes + offset refferences. Tested adding random 5MB files to the data package (that the game never loads anyway), and new offset + sizes are calculated correctly so the game works.
DRD: Oh I wouldn't say so.
It's not like we're out of options.
Or that we are so desperate that we have to cling on every single programmer we can find...
It's rather the contrary.
This project is not dead and we are free to choose who we want to work with.
I rejected SkybladeCloud in public instead of PM because he choose to contact me through this thread.
His choice not mine. And my replies resulted due to his arrogant behaviour which was out of place if he really wanted to work with us.
May I remind you guys that 90% of the game is already translated. Do you honestly believe this close to the finish line we would give up?
May I remind you guys that few PSP Translations are this far.
How can you still doubt we're gonna bring this thing home?
...
My thought, as a programmer as well. Since 90% of my work is edit, fix, or add whatever stuff of someone's work on before me. It's only few times that i have to create everything from zero. For indexing, I take FFT0 programmer's side. It'll make your life easier if you take a little back and see there are more than one way you can take. Making index from zero will make you add and place address of file to right place and not have to worry about that you're overwriting another index place and you then have to recalculate offset all over again.
To make it simple, if you're translating a book to another language, will you just count each chapter page and make new index or you try to place all chapter page to the way original index does then add +/- x to the page on it?