i know, i know. we've been through this song and dance a fucktillion times by now. and just like clockwork, here i am again after another year mostly comprised of unrelated ramblings and dead air, flogging a dead horse of an anniversary to make promises about a patch that is Totally Coming Soon People™: promises which, frankly, must be sounding pretty bloody hollow to most people by now. it's something i feel incredibly guilty about - that my slowness is constantly screwing over so many other people who have better things to do - but things are looking up

( Your rampant buffoonery will be the downfall of our house - or is that your intent?! )

(mirrored on tumblr)

Awright, here we are, 730 days later. i think we can all agree that it's a downright damning reflection of the glacial pace at which i work that technically speaking, what i'm here to write is more or less exactly what i wrote this time last year. The circumstances are still basically identical; i'm the sole reason for the holdup, life keeps getting in the way, but i'm Working On It And Will Finish The Damn Thing i Swear.

Don’t worry, though. This time, i actually have something resembling progress to share. It's pretty good, too, if i do say so myself.

( bloody disgrace )

i've had this thing sitting in my drafts since february, and i'm only getting back to it within 12 goddamn hours of part 5's release. i'm a self-parody at this point, i swear

obligatory major spoiler warning! if you're worried about being hit with spoilers, i strongly recommend closing this window, sitting down and watching the thing. go on, do it. it's pretty good.

( Read more... )

i'm going to be completely upfront. this is the first time i've been this genuinely excited for the future of fire emblem in a very, very long time. the gaiden remake looks absolutely phenomenal and i'm so glad that the mobile game seems to be fully embracing the series' history. granted, there's a good chance i'm setting myself up for one hell of a fall here, just like i did with fe13 back in the day, but for once i don't care. it's nice to not be a living pile of salt for once

anyway, i'm here to talk about the reason i woke up this morning to a fuckton of people showing me things and asking questions on twitter (or at least, what passes as a fuckton for me)



i've often spoken of my preference to defer to the localisations when it comes to the names of characters, and that if a future localised fire emblem work included characters from jugdral, i would come back to incorporate them into my translations. well, it's happened. the character voting section of fire emblem heroes' site has given us the complete playable casts of genealogy and thracia, as well as a couple of randoms like sandima

here's the plan. i intend to go with whatever the app says, but i'm going to wait until the app is out and datamined before i do anything at all, just to be safe. official english sites for fire emblem have a habit of being a bit confused and error prone with the finer details (e.g. the fe13 site had a hard time remembering that celica and cecilia are not the same character), and it's entirely possible that any of the choices exhibited on this website will be inconsistent with what the app actually goes with. in addition there are cases where the site's listings are inconsistent with what pre-existing localisations already call a character (e.g. marduk instead of murdock, nimue instead of niime, lachesis instead of raquesis, osian instead of orsin), so my preference is to wait and see if any of this changes. my current theory is that all the obvious, significant shifts away from the form of the original name (e.g. astolfo, erinys, gwendolyn, delthea) exhibit clear thought and premeditation, such that they can be safely assumed to be final and unchanging, but that anything else is still a crapshoot at this point. hell, in the few days that the poll's been up, they've already edited some of the listed names! (e.g. the johabros have been changed from "luchar and lucharba" with an l to "iuchar" and "iucharba" with an i)

if it turns out the app does not include any of these characters at launch, however, my plan is to disregard the website until the characters actually show up in the app itself, if ever. i might take inspiration from it if it offers genuine improvements over my current ideas, but i won't treat it as hard and fast English Canon™ or anything. for what it's worth, i was already seriously considering renaming faval to "febail", so i guess this gives me an excuse

as for my opinions, reactions and potential explanations for specific characters? those are all over my twitter and tumblr right now, if you're really curious, but the last thing i want to do is ramble about them at length, because god knows my opinions will change over time. i wasn't partial to fe13's contributions to the characters at first, but obviously my opinion has changed since then

in conclusion,

at the moment i'm unspeakably busy with uni and haven't had the time to keep up with fe4 patch stuff at all - for the past few weeks, if it's not been assessment, it's been uni poetry events, and if it hasn't been that it's been causing domestic disasters. even so, this is something i've been slowly chipping away at for a few months now and i figure, it's basically complete, why not just post it? if there's something wrong with it, then i can always edit it later

what happened is, over the years i've accrued waaaaaay too much material about various old translations of fe4, and for a while i've been kicking around the idea of piecing it all together into something resembling a history of the game in english. part of this was inspired by a smash bros practice meet i attended a few months ago, where i was chatting with a guy there about fire emblem. in a fit of ego i happened to bring up my work on fe4, and he remarked that he was surprised that i'd done another, since he thought there were already a lot of translation patches for fe4. i'd already been thinking about this on and off for a while now, but his point really got me thinking. it goes without saying that our little team here was far from the first to take a stab at translating fe4, but just how far from the first were we, anyway?

something tells me that most people aren't as ridiculously obsessive about this stuff as i am, but what the hell. those who don't learn from history etc etc

here, have some good news: dds has basically finished identifying and inserting script blocks, so all dialogue is in and (mostly) functional. that's right, after fifteen years of fan translators coming and going, fire emblem: genealogy of the holy war finally has a (mostly) working english epilogue





does this mean we're done? fuck, no! a lot of things still need doing, including but not limited to:

• fixing issues with the text engine in menus
• proofreading
• finishing the title screen, specifically the subtitle plate
• cleaning up text alignments
• proofreading
• dealing with major bugs
• proofreading
• did i say proofreading already? because holy shit, proofreading

in a development which will surprise literally nobody, my end of this particular bargain is probably what's going to slow us all down. i've got to balance getting this done with university work, which is currently in the middle of slowly gnawing my leg off. i'm hoping i'll be able to make good use in an upcoming lull in university proceedings, and i might be able to slowly chip away at the script in what little spare time i have, but i'm regrettably booked solid for the next two weeks

so, er, yeah. that is the state of project naga. the end is in sight

oh, and if you want slightly more frequent updates and tidbits, i now have a twitter. i might say interesting translation things there sometimes? who knows! it might just end up being a lot of bitter griping

okay, laptop hell is finally over. i'm back

it's been a long while since i've said anything about progress on the project here, and thankfully it looks like i've got a lot to say. in my absence, DDS and AzimuthFE have been doing a fantastic job with the technical side of the project and everything is looking really good. here, have some screenshots that they've been posting over on romhacking.net:





christ, it wasn't all that long ago that i was still using photoshopped mockup examples to plug/test the script. boy, do times change!

it's starting to look pretty embarrassing that i'm still waaaaaaaaaaay behind on script proofing. my plan was to dedicate at least the last month of the holidays to doing it, but then the laptop chose to go pthhbhthbhpthhhthtbbbthb so that went out the window. thankfully i'm pretty used to the Uni Vs Translation balancing act by now, so i suppose that's the plan going forward. all this technical progress goes to show that i really ought to clean up my act and make the script slightly less shit

 yes i know i just said i'd be gone for a bit due to internet problems but fuck you i'm really not in the mood for this

anyway laptop keyboard and trackpad not responding at all. writing this from my wii u. have to take it in for repairs. won't be around for translation stuff for a bit. am not happy at all about this. hopefully resolved soon

okay so it's still pretty early as far as the hacking side of the project goes, but there's been one development which i thought i'd seek opinions about. DDS is currently spending a bit of time looking at implementing the translation's font which, big surprise, i chose to pilfer from earthbound.  he conducted a couple of tests to compare outline schemes for the font and weigh the pros and cons of each, and those tests look like this:



left: a 3-colour version where the outlines are shaded with 2 colours, like vanilla fe4's japanese font
right: a 2-colour version where the outlines are a single flat colour

now, while i've got my opinions on each, i'm obviously very biased on the subject so i figure i'd see if i could sample some other opinions on the matter. to that end: which of these two do you prefer? which outline scheme do you feel looks nicer? do you have any legibility or accessiblity concerns about either one? i'm all ears

(also, for the record, i am extremely excited about my work being at least partially in patch form for the first time! you should've seen my reaction to the first test he sent)