Lupin III translation released
Sorry for those waiting for the art tutorial, but it’s still coming!
I’ve been on vacation the past week with my good friend Arhkma, which has been an absolute treat. Here are a few pictures of my time there, and some relaxing music accompanies them. We went to Anna Marie Island for a few days, which was amazing! The scenery was beautiful, and the food was overall great. The place was hotter than I’m used to, but we got through it all. The house was kinda awkward, as there were a lot of stairs to climb, with separate small homes to the main one. The alarm system sucked as well, it was always enabled, and you had to press a “Bypass” button to not sound the alarm. The alarm didn’t call the cops or anything; it was just a loud buzzer and really annoying.
The street situation was weird since many homes were built on the main roads, which made traffic kinda a pain to go through, along with, generally speaking, having smaller roads, making things a lot tighter to get around.
I’m very thankful for Arhkma for inviting me, it was the first vacation I’ve had since Battle at the Border in Az, and it was just so much fun, and words can not describe how thankful I’ve been for being invited. We got a few recording sessions, finished “River City Girls,” and started the second game. It was a very fun beat ‘em up, great music, and fun gameplay, even if it was a bit stiff with combos, and exploring felt boring after getting close to the game. Keep an eye out on Arhkma’s YouTube for this release, along with many more to come with us!
Did you make a post to flex?
No! I actually have some great news as well. The other reason I haven’t worked on my art tutorial yet is because I’ve been working on my project. Some people may remember me posting about it a while ago on the blog/hearing me talk about it, but after nearly 2 years (like a year and 3 months), the 1.0 is finally released!
If you’re interested, please check it out here. https://github.com/DOL-Translations/lupin-III
There’s still some more work to be done, but it’ll mostly be out of my hands at that point, and as of now, I’m planning on making a Cutting Room Floor page about some stuff hidden inside of the game itself.
Some insight/timeline
Since it’s my blog, I’ve added some personal insight to the project overall. Lots of reading ahead.
When the project started, the tools were absolutely awful. It could have taken an afternoon to even finish half a scene, and the lack of any compiler errors just made the whole process worse. When we got a handful of translators, they were going through the spreadsheet like it was nothing, but I could barely get halfway through chapter 1 after months - it was honestly miserable, and it felt bad.
When NewGBAXL showed me PWtr’s new tool, it was like a whole new world opened up. What would have taken me a few days could have been done in a few hours, and the amount of work/repetition required for the whole project was reduced immensely. I could catch up to where the translators were, which was chapter 5.
A big issue surrounding the whole project was just getting translations done. I didn’t want to rely just on DeepL/Google Translate, and I wanted the project to be fully translated by people with experience. However, most of the translators we could get were mostly college students, meaning their time was limited outside of summer. Jebbi could translate most of the game by herself, which was amazing. She said she had a lot of fun doing it. However, she moved to a new country, job, and life. So she was unable to continue translating past chapter 5.
Cindi and Bingokemski could not stay on the project either, which left the project in a very awkward spot. Because of how effective the new tools were, I was able to catch up from chapter 1 to chapter 6 in about 2 weeks (!), but now with nobody to actually translate the project itself, there was very little to actually do.
During this downtime, a person named aldi_09 joined up; they had an illustration degree and were very proficient with Photoshop. With their help, they were able to get the title screen re-done in English, along with the save banners, and around this time, NewGBAXL was able to insert new menu translation graphics.
While this was happening, a few people would join the discord, saying they were willing to help, but sadly, after talking to them for a bit, they would never turn up again. I’ve done a few searches, posting on Reddit and NewGBAXL and on the Lupin fan forums, but nobody would come. After months of waiting, I eventually decided to go against the original plans for the project, and I began to make machine translation edits.
This took about a month since it was a lot of text, and I had to figure out things like context, but eventually, it was all done, and I began to work on the project again. Around this time I started to look into getting disc 2’s FMVs in English, it was easy to make an MP4, but figuring out how to get the THP back for the game to run was much more difficult. I got it working, but the audio slowed down a lot, and after trying like 4 different converters, I found someone named Aaronrules5. They had some experience with working on them, and after figuring it out, he figured out the main issues.
THPConv.exe has 2 versions, but the only difference between the 2 was that 1.01 had an option to enable interlacing. There was only 1 main converter that actually made it in 1.0, which is what Lupin used. They also discovered that Davinchi exported the audio quality at 48Hz, whereas the original used 32Hz. After that, I was just trying to figure out how to translate the audio, which was very tricky, and I ended up using YouTube’s auto caption option to figure it out (it wasn’t very good). I posted this to the Romhacking Discord (Rest in Peace), and a person named Muttvil offered their help to get a more proper translation. While still not perfect, it was way better than what I had. Once all this was done, I still had audio-popping issues I couldn’t figure out, but I decided to return to it later.
I finished translating the game from Chapter 6 to Chapter 8, and about this time, a person named Mashedmonk came into the project to help. They first went through the whole game, doing more proofreading after my good friend Arhkma stopped in chapter 5, but not being done with that just yet, they looked into the audio popping issues, and after a while, they were able to figure out the issue, using more steps than I did, but now the audio isn’t popping anymore! They also decided to make an SRT file (subtitle file) so that anyone with video editing software could just drag and drop the SRT file, and it’ll give the subtitles for that video. They also cleaned up my improved subtitle translations, which was amazing.
At this point we’re very close to finishing the actual translation, NewGBAXL finished the rest of the menu graphic changes, thus making the whole game itself transalted! He then played the game on a WIi (most testing at this point was only ever done on Dolphin) and fixed up all the text alignment, so things looked a bit less sloppy. Lastly, they got around to fixing the history bug. In the history tab, it wouldn’t actually show any spaces for ASCII, only S-JIS, which meant all the words were next to each other. After cooking for a few days and making the biggest Gecko code known to mankind (most are 1-3 lines at most), the fix was done! This does work on consoles, but requires a few extra steps to get it done. After all that’s said and done, the 1.0 was released.
I’m happy it’s finally done and out there; there were some points where I wanted to leave the project due to annoyance, but I’m glad I got to stick with it till the end. Guess it’s not often you get to release a translation hack, even moreso for something you’re interested in.
So, whats next?
The art tutorial will be either finished or soon to be finished with my next post; otherwise, Arhkma plans on streaming the Lupin game sometime in the future, so be on the lookout for that and other videos with me included in (There should be one released soon). See you next time!