In case you didn't notice (and from what I can tell nearly no one did -_-), the link I posted earlier was not an April Fool's joke, but was in fact the real version 1.0 of my Grandia undub. I guess the joke is on me because no one was even paying attention to this project after being delayed for so long. In my defense, this took a lot longer than I thought it would for reasons outside of my control, including but not limited to, not having any free time for long periods, serious issues in my personal life, serious health issues, and technical challenges that I couldn't have predicted. I had even said it would be out by the beginning of this year, but then I didn't really even manage to get working on it again until early January. I feel comfortable in saying though, as far as undubs go, this is as close to perfection as it gets. This wasn't just a matter of inserting the Japanese voices into the English version of the game, this is the closest you can get to experiencing what it was like to play the Japanese version of Grandia II without speaking Japanese. I even fixed the ending sequence so that the original Japanese cast was properly credited. There were a few things I couldn't figure out how to fix, like some vocal sound effects that were done by the English cast, but I do hope to fix those with an eventual update if I can ever figure out where the voice data is located.
Here is a link to the torrent: Link
Now about the patch for the anniversary edition... that is probably not going to happen. I tried patching the map files from the Steam version with the changes I made for the undub, and things broke. Badly. I hate to say this, but whatever they did to the game engine in this port was extremely ill-advised. They made changes that completely broke the game's timing system, which probably caused all those sound issues they tried to fix but still never quite got completely right. I offered to let them use my re-translation if they wanted to, but I never got a response, so I guess it's not something they are interested in. To anyone who bought this port, I'm sorry, but it's just not worth the trouble it would take to patch my changes into it. In the end, it would be easier to patch the previous PC release, which I already said was not something I would do. But the good news is, there are at least two Dreamcast emulators that can run Grandia II fairly well on the PC, and the Dreamcast version is still, after all this time, the best version.
For anyone wondering exactly what the difference is between this patch and just playing the anniversary addition on your PC, here are some video clips I recorded for comparison:
Some things you will note as you compare the two versions:
-The translation in the anniversary edition is identical to the English dubbed version. The text often does not sync up correctly with the Japanese voices, and has some spots where even someone who does not speak Japanese would notice more is being said than is appearing on the screen (or less).
-Even beyond that, the timing of the text in the anniversary edition does not match up well with the spoken dialog the way it did in both the original Japanese and English releases. In fact, some lines are pretty grossly miscued. Notably, when Ryudo say "I don't care for her, or the kindness of strangers.", the line appears much too early. It's also not a very good translation of what he said (see the translation notes).
-There are severe audio miscues in the anniversary edition. The music transitions in the wrong places, making for a jarring listening experience.
-The lighting in the anniversary edition is weird. They seem to have added dynamic lighting to allow for better shadows, but this also resulted in many scenes appearing too dark, and other weird lighting glitches. For example, there is a transition that occurs right after Ryudo says "business is business" where the lighting behaves strangely. Overall the enhanced lighting does not appear to be a very well implemented feature. You can get rid of it by disabling shadows in the options, but then the characters have no shadows at all instead of the circular shadows in the Dreamcast version.
-The video stutters a lot in the anniversary edition. The recording exaggerated it, but there was stuttering even when I wasn't recording. Disabling vsync did not help...
-There were minor video/audio glitches in the recording of the Dreamcast version, but this was due to the game being played on an emulator. On a real Dreamcast, it runs perfectly.
So, I guess you can take it or leave it depending on your preference. I spent a ton of time and energy working on this undub because I wanted to create an English version of Grandia II that did justice to the original Japanese version. For what it's worth, I think the people who worked on the anniversary edition had good intentions, but unfortunately the results of their efforts did not live up to those intentions. In the end it is probably more my fault than anyone else's, because if my version had been out sooner than maybe the anniversary edition developers would have held themselves to a higher standard before releasing their version. Or maybe not. Either way, I have nothing personal against the people who worked on the anniversary edition, but I hope you will agree that if you want to experience Grandia II the way it was originally intended, this patch is the best way to do it. ;)
Friday, April 1, 2016
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
So about that new Grandia II release on Steam...
Well, it's certainly been a while hasn't it? I think it's fair to say that at this point the amount of time I have let this project hang up in the air is completely inexcusable. All I can say in my defense is that the last two years have been probably the most difficult time in my entire life, and I genuinely have not had the energy to devote to a project like this. But I still have every intention of finishing it, and the release of Grandia II on Stream has given me a great deal of motivation.
When I first heard that Grandia II was being re-released on Steam with the original Japanese voices, my response was cautious optimism. I knew from experience a quick copy and paste would not be enough to make Grandia II bilingual, so I assumed the people working on the port would have to spend some time and energy to do the job right. I wasn't necessarily expecting them to go back and re-translate from the original Japanese like I did, but I at least thought they would get the cut-scenes properly synced with the voices, and take care of some of the more egregious discrepancies between the Japanese audio and English text. Sadly, neither seems to be the case. The timing of the cut-scenes seems to be hacked into barely syncing up, but it doesn't match the timings used in the original Japanese version at all. And the script is, as far as I can tell, completely unchanged, ignoring cases where the English script and what is being said in Japanese are two completely different things. Unfortunately, this is a pretty common scenario for games that include the Japanese voice track, where changes in the script made to suit this English localization are also used in the subtitles. Not every game with Japanese voices is guilty of this, but I think it's more common than not.
If the re-release had been a truly well done attempt to make Grandia II bilingual, I might have just dropped my undub project altogether. But as it is, nothing has really changed. What I am going to do though, is to try and contact the company that did the re-release and see if they are interested in incorporating my script into their version. This would be as good of an excuse as any to finally get this project finished, and it would also allow the greatest amount of people possible to play Grandia II the way it was originally intended. I will let everyone following this blog know if I receive a response (yes both of you ;P). If not, I am going to make a serious effort to get this finished by the end of this year regardless.
Edit: So far I haven't received a response to my inquiries from either Skybox Labs or Gungho Entertainment. I did take some time to look into the data structure of their port though, and I think I can safely say it would be trivial to insert the changes I made to Grandia II's script into their version. So even without official support, releasing something like a "better translation" patch would definitely be doable. I'm not sure exactly how the FMV subtitles are handled, but hopefully I could figure it out. My only concern is, given the many, many bugs that have been reported in their version of the game, I seriously have doubts that Skybox Labs will be able to completely fix them. A lot of the bugs reported seem like things that really should have been caught before the game was released, had even basic QA testing been done. For now I would seriously recommend that anyone who is interested in the Steam version of Grandia II wait to see if the bugs get fixed before buying it.
When I first heard that Grandia II was being re-released on Steam with the original Japanese voices, my response was cautious optimism. I knew from experience a quick copy and paste would not be enough to make Grandia II bilingual, so I assumed the people working on the port would have to spend some time and energy to do the job right. I wasn't necessarily expecting them to go back and re-translate from the original Japanese like I did, but I at least thought they would get the cut-scenes properly synced with the voices, and take care of some of the more egregious discrepancies between the Japanese audio and English text. Sadly, neither seems to be the case. The timing of the cut-scenes seems to be hacked into barely syncing up, but it doesn't match the timings used in the original Japanese version at all. And the script is, as far as I can tell, completely unchanged, ignoring cases where the English script and what is being said in Japanese are two completely different things. Unfortunately, this is a pretty common scenario for games that include the Japanese voice track, where changes in the script made to suit this English localization are also used in the subtitles. Not every game with Japanese voices is guilty of this, but I think it's more common than not.
If the re-release had been a truly well done attempt to make Grandia II bilingual, I might have just dropped my undub project altogether. But as it is, nothing has really changed. What I am going to do though, is to try and contact the company that did the re-release and see if they are interested in incorporating my script into their version. This would be as good of an excuse as any to finally get this project finished, and it would also allow the greatest amount of people possible to play Grandia II the way it was originally intended. I will let everyone following this blog know if I receive a response (yes both of you ;P). If not, I am going to make a serious effort to get this finished by the end of this year regardless.
Edit: So far I haven't received a response to my inquiries from either Skybox Labs or Gungho Entertainment. I did take some time to look into the data structure of their port though, and I think I can safely say it would be trivial to insert the changes I made to Grandia II's script into their version. So even without official support, releasing something like a "better translation" patch would definitely be doable. I'm not sure exactly how the FMV subtitles are handled, but hopefully I could figure it out. My only concern is, given the many, many bugs that have been reported in their version of the game, I seriously have doubts that Skybox Labs will be able to completely fix them. A lot of the bugs reported seem like things that really should have been caught before the game was released, had even basic QA testing been done. For now I would seriously recommend that anyone who is interested in the Steam version of Grandia II wait to see if the bugs get fixed before buying it.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
A Musical Interlude
It's been waaay too long since I posted something on this blog that wasn't undub related, but over the past couple of days, I've actually been working on something pretty cool that I wanted to share here. It's a little app called Microtone. For anyone not familiar with microtonal music, basically the idea is to compose music using a scale other than the traditional 12-step scale used by almost all modern music. For some examples of microtonal music, check here, here, and here.
While microtonal music is certainly nothing new, very few instruments and tools exist for making it. Consequently, not that many people attempt to create music using non-traditional scales, and very little good music exists outside the boundaries of the standard 12 tones. I created Microtone as a quick app that people could use to experiment with different scales lengths, so that they might get ideas they wanted to use in serious compositions. Microtone itself is not really suitable for anything beyond experimentation, but I still think that it may serve the purpose of getting people interested in microtonal music. Or you can just mash your hands into the keyboard to make funny noises... Either way. ;)
Microtone works best with either Firefox, or a Chromium based browser (Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.). Internet Explorer doesn't work at all (not even the newer versions), which is probably a surprise to no one. Using Firefox is preferable, because it appears to have a better audio mixer. Chromium based browsers may have weird sound distortion issues when playing more than two notes at a time. Also, if you have issues hitting multiple notes at the same time on your keyboard, you may want to look into a keyboard with n-key rollover. Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments. ;)
Monday, December 30, 2013
Better Than Nothing
After much delay and procrastination, I am proud to finally present... a not yet complete undub of Grandia II. I'm sorry about this guys, I promised on many occasions that I would have this done by the end of the year, but this just wasn't a good time for me, and nothing has really gotten done in months. I don't want to make excuses, but the truth is I've been having a lot of difficulty in my personal life, the least of which is that my finances have been severely depleted by unexpected expenses, and it's very difficult for me to justify spending time on anything that doesn't have at least the potential to make money. I have added a Paypal donate button the to upper right corner of this blog in case anyone wants to help out. I'm not really asking for money in return for completing the patch or anything, but I'm not going to lie, this is likely not going to get done until my financial situation improves pretty dramatically...
Well, enough about that. I'd like to take a little time to talk about the background of this project and just exactly why it has taken so long for an undub of this game to appear. Grandia II on the Dreamcast was my first experience with the Grandia series. I was a die hard fan of the Dreamcast while I was in my teens, and as an avid RPG fan, buying Grandia II when it came out was pretty much a given. I'm not going to say the English voices ruined my experience, because they aren't the worst I've ever heard by any means, and Grandia II was the first RPG I played that even had voice acting so I didn't have much to compare it with. But the fact remains, when you listen to the Japanese voices of Grandia II, it's obvious which voices you would want to play the game with if you had a choice.
As undubs began to appear on the internet, I began to take notice. The first undub I can recall playing was Xenegears for the Playstation, and in my opinion it massively improved the experience of playing the game. I am not really fundamentally opposed to English voice acting or anything, it's just that most attempts to dub Japanese RPGS go horribly, because either the voice actors phone it in, or the lines they are given to read just sound unnatural in English no matter what you do. I actually preferred to play the Kingdom Hearts games in English because the English voices were much closer to those used in the movies the game was based on, so it's not like I never enjoyed playing a dubbed JRPG. However, Grandia II always stuck out in my mind as a game I would really like to be able to play with the original Japanese voices. I decided that it was worth my time and effort to at least attempt to undub the game.
Unable to find any existing dumps of Grandia II in the usual places, I bought a copy of the Japanese version on eBay and dumped it myself. I was already aware that in some cases undubbing can be achieved simply by copying files between versions of a game. After some experimentation I discovered that you could get the cutscene voices to be in Japanese by copying the GR2.AFS file from the Japanese to English version. But there were a lot of problems. First of all the voices were not synced with the English text. The English text would typically go by more quickly than the Japanese voices, causing the end of sentences to be cut off. Additionally, the battle voices were still in Japanese, there were cutscenes that needed to be subtitled, and the English translation was somewhat liberal, making it not sync up well with what was actually said in Japanese. The battle voices weren't too difficult to fix, as they were just located in different files and worked by simply copying them over. The cutscenes subtitles were doable as well, because Sega's encoder for the SFD video file format had been floating around the internet for years. But editing any resyncing the English text to match the Japanese voices? That was going to be a problem. To give you an idea, here is the overall picture of what has to be done to get at the actual English text.
The Grandia II game engine stores most of it's data in map files, located in the "MAP" folder on the root of the disc. This folder contains a series of files, with names following the format of "(4-digit hexidecimal number).AFS". For example, "3E01.AFS". There is no external indication what data each file actually holds. All of the game's script is located within those files, in addition to textures, geometry, and other miscellaneous data for each map in the game. AFS files are actually package files, which contain other files (similar to a ZIP file). If you can extract one, it will leave you with a series of unnamed files that contain the data for one map. The first file will always be the one that contains the script (don't ask me why). However, it will be compressed in a proprietary format called L62C, a variation of the LZW compression scheme. If you can somehow manage to decompress the files, you will be left with a file that contains the script, but also contains much incomprehensible data necessary for the map to function. Additionally, the text itself will contain special control characters that control how it is displayed, at what speed, and even what is happening in the actual game while the text is being displayed. If you can figure all that out, you will still need to figure out how to modify the pointer tables within the file containing the text, because unless you do, it will cause the game to freeze if you attempt to load a script file that has had text inserted. Even if you can figure out how to to all of that, you still have to figure out how to recompress the file in the L62C format so the game will be able to load it, and then repackage it in it's original AFS file.
Yea, there's a reason no one has undubbed this game yet. On an undubbing difficulty scale of 1 to 10, 1 being a game where you only have to copy a file from the Japanese version for it to work, and 10 being a game that requires hacking close to the level of what would be required in a full translation, Grandia II is about a 9. And actually, because I did end up re-translating the parts of the game with spoken dialog, this is in actuality a partial retranslation. It was very lucky for me, that I ran across a set of tools programmed by an Italian hacker named Mat for the specific purpose of allowing the game to be translated into other languages, because without those tools this undub would have never happened. I have some skill as a hacker, but reverse engineering proprietary compression formats from scratch is a little beyond me. So special thanks to Mat, because without his work this project would not have been possible.
If you have the tools you need to edit the game's script and reinsert it into map files, that should be all you need to fix the text to sync up with the Japanese voices... or so I thought. But as I discovered there were still cases where inserting text caused problems, as was stated in the documentation for Mat's tools. I had initially thought it was just an issue that could be fixed by inserting or removing bytes from the end of script section I modified, since that seemed to fix the problem in most cases. But then I ran into a map file where this was not effective, and any changes to the script that modified it's size caused the game to hang no matter what I did. I eventually figured out that this could be fixed by modifying a certain control code in the script that contained a pointer to an arbitrary location. While exactly why they though this was a good idea eludes me, it was an easy fix once I figured out what was going on. It was the figuring out what was going on part that took me so long.
I thought after fixing that issue a completed undub would follow in a relatively short period of time, but things didn't quite work out that way. For one thing, I'd forgotten that the amount of spoken dialog increases notably toward the end of the game. That combined with personal issues that have kept my very occupied lately have delayed this project too long in my opinion, and I felt like the people who have been following it deserved something, even if I couldn't deliver what I'd originally promised. So, I am releasing this preview version of my undub for you all to enjoy. ;) I haven't tested this patch as much as I would have liked to, so don't be surprised if there are still bugs or other issues. Please report any problems/mistakes you may encounter in the comments. This will also help ensure a higher level of quality for the eventual final release. Additionally, if you would like to help me out and possibly motivate me to get the final version done a little sooner, please consider donating. Donating is entirely optional and I can't promise it will dramatically impact my time frame for finishing this project, but it would really help me out in general.
Okay, so without further ado, here is a link to the patch:
Grandia II Undub Patch 0.90
Well, enough about that. I'd like to take a little time to talk about the background of this project and just exactly why it has taken so long for an undub of this game to appear. Grandia II on the Dreamcast was my first experience with the Grandia series. I was a die hard fan of the Dreamcast while I was in my teens, and as an avid RPG fan, buying Grandia II when it came out was pretty much a given. I'm not going to say the English voices ruined my experience, because they aren't the worst I've ever heard by any means, and Grandia II was the first RPG I played that even had voice acting so I didn't have much to compare it with. But the fact remains, when you listen to the Japanese voices of Grandia II, it's obvious which voices you would want to play the game with if you had a choice.
As undubs began to appear on the internet, I began to take notice. The first undub I can recall playing was Xenegears for the Playstation, and in my opinion it massively improved the experience of playing the game. I am not really fundamentally opposed to English voice acting or anything, it's just that most attempts to dub Japanese RPGS go horribly, because either the voice actors phone it in, or the lines they are given to read just sound unnatural in English no matter what you do. I actually preferred to play the Kingdom Hearts games in English because the English voices were much closer to those used in the movies the game was based on, so it's not like I never enjoyed playing a dubbed JRPG. However, Grandia II always stuck out in my mind as a game I would really like to be able to play with the original Japanese voices. I decided that it was worth my time and effort to at least attempt to undub the game.
Unable to find any existing dumps of Grandia II in the usual places, I bought a copy of the Japanese version on eBay and dumped it myself. I was already aware that in some cases undubbing can be achieved simply by copying files between versions of a game. After some experimentation I discovered that you could get the cutscene voices to be in Japanese by copying the GR2.AFS file from the Japanese to English version. But there were a lot of problems. First of all the voices were not synced with the English text. The English text would typically go by more quickly than the Japanese voices, causing the end of sentences to be cut off. Additionally, the battle voices were still in Japanese, there were cutscenes that needed to be subtitled, and the English translation was somewhat liberal, making it not sync up well with what was actually said in Japanese. The battle voices weren't too difficult to fix, as they were just located in different files and worked by simply copying them over. The cutscenes subtitles were doable as well, because Sega's encoder for the SFD video file format had been floating around the internet for years. But editing any resyncing the English text to match the Japanese voices? That was going to be a problem. To give you an idea, here is the overall picture of what has to be done to get at the actual English text.
The Grandia II game engine stores most of it's data in map files, located in the "MAP" folder on the root of the disc. This folder contains a series of files, with names following the format of "(4-digit hexidecimal number).AFS". For example, "3E01.AFS". There is no external indication what data each file actually holds. All of the game's script is located within those files, in addition to textures, geometry, and other miscellaneous data for each map in the game. AFS files are actually package files, which contain other files (similar to a ZIP file). If you can extract one, it will leave you with a series of unnamed files that contain the data for one map. The first file will always be the one that contains the script (don't ask me why). However, it will be compressed in a proprietary format called L62C, a variation of the LZW compression scheme. If you can somehow manage to decompress the files, you will be left with a file that contains the script, but also contains much incomprehensible data necessary for the map to function. Additionally, the text itself will contain special control characters that control how it is displayed, at what speed, and even what is happening in the actual game while the text is being displayed. If you can figure all that out, you will still need to figure out how to modify the pointer tables within the file containing the text, because unless you do, it will cause the game to freeze if you attempt to load a script file that has had text inserted. Even if you can figure out how to to all of that, you still have to figure out how to recompress the file in the L62C format so the game will be able to load it, and then repackage it in it's original AFS file.
Yea, there's a reason no one has undubbed this game yet. On an undubbing difficulty scale of 1 to 10, 1 being a game where you only have to copy a file from the Japanese version for it to work, and 10 being a game that requires hacking close to the level of what would be required in a full translation, Grandia II is about a 9. And actually, because I did end up re-translating the parts of the game with spoken dialog, this is in actuality a partial retranslation. It was very lucky for me, that I ran across a set of tools programmed by an Italian hacker named Mat for the specific purpose of allowing the game to be translated into other languages, because without those tools this undub would have never happened. I have some skill as a hacker, but reverse engineering proprietary compression formats from scratch is a little beyond me. So special thanks to Mat, because without his work this project would not have been possible.
If you have the tools you need to edit the game's script and reinsert it into map files, that should be all you need to fix the text to sync up with the Japanese voices... or so I thought. But as I discovered there were still cases where inserting text caused problems, as was stated in the documentation for Mat's tools. I had initially thought it was just an issue that could be fixed by inserting or removing bytes from the end of script section I modified, since that seemed to fix the problem in most cases. But then I ran into a map file where this was not effective, and any changes to the script that modified it's size caused the game to hang no matter what I did. I eventually figured out that this could be fixed by modifying a certain control code in the script that contained a pointer to an arbitrary location. While exactly why they though this was a good idea eludes me, it was an easy fix once I figured out what was going on. It was the figuring out what was going on part that took me so long.
I thought after fixing that issue a completed undub would follow in a relatively short period of time, but things didn't quite work out that way. For one thing, I'd forgotten that the amount of spoken dialog increases notably toward the end of the game. That combined with personal issues that have kept my very occupied lately have delayed this project too long in my opinion, and I felt like the people who have been following it deserved something, even if I couldn't deliver what I'd originally promised. So, I am releasing this preview version of my undub for you all to enjoy. ;) I haven't tested this patch as much as I would have liked to, so don't be surprised if there are still bugs or other issues. Please report any problems/mistakes you may encounter in the comments. This will also help ensure a higher level of quality for the eventual final release. Additionally, if you would like to help me out and possibly motivate me to get the final version done a little sooner, please consider donating. Donating is entirely optional and I can't promise it will dramatically impact my time frame for finishing this project, but it would really help me out in general.
Okay, so without further ado, here is a link to the patch:
Grandia II Undub Patch 0.90
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Still Unfinished Business
Okay, so here's the deal. Earlier this year I made a post indicating that my Grandia II undub project was stalled out due to a problem that was causing hangs after inserting text into a certain file. The file in question is the one that contains the script for Mirumu village. I was originally hoping to get some outside help in getting the issue solved, but that didn't happen. I wasn't even able to successfully contact the person I was trying to get help from, and to be completely honest I'm not even sure if they're still alive. So that was kind of a downer... but, as it turns out it didn't matter. I was able to solve the issue, and at this point I see no reason to believe I shouldn't be able to get this thing done without making compromises.
I'll make a post later explaining the technical details of what was going on, but for now I'd like to thank anyone following this project for being willing to put up with my perfectionism. The issue I was facing was not a critical one, and I could have produced a very respectable final product by simply working around it. Just not one I would have been satisfied with.
The fact it took so much time to solve was more a question of my not having enough time to work on this project recently than anything else. That, and I was operating under the assumption I'd be able to get help from someone who'd already solved the problem for quite a while until I finally gave up. But now I'm over the hump, and barring any unforeen issues, a release should be coming soon. I say "should", because given the amount of difficulty this game has given me so far (the text insertion hang is not the only issue I've had to deal with), I may yet run into other issues that could delay a release before I get done. The overall project completion is currently sitting at around 90%, but right now I'm extremely busy and my time to work on it is limited. I think a release before the end of the month is possible, but don't hold me to that. In the mean time, here is a quick video I made to show off undubbed battle voices:
Note that any graphical glitches you may notice are due to the emulator I'm using to test my modifications (nullDC). There are emulators that can play the game without nearly as many glitches, but I use nullDC because it has a few features that make testing easier.
One other thing. I just want to be clear on the fact that I am going to release this undub for the Dreamcast version of Grandia II, and only the Dreamcast version of Grandia II. The Dreamcast version is the original, and best version of the game. The PS2 port is a mess, and the PC port is defficient in at least a few areas (sound/battle glitches). That being said, if anyone wants to take on the project of porting my undub to one of the other version of Grandia II, I am willing to share my knowlege and resources. Just as long as you understand that my experience with either version is limited, and I know for a fact there would be unique challenges in porting my undub that I do not intend to solve for you.
I'll make a post later explaining the technical details of what was going on, but for now I'd like to thank anyone following this project for being willing to put up with my perfectionism. The issue I was facing was not a critical one, and I could have produced a very respectable final product by simply working around it. Just not one I would have been satisfied with.
The fact it took so much time to solve was more a question of my not having enough time to work on this project recently than anything else. That, and I was operating under the assumption I'd be able to get help from someone who'd already solved the problem for quite a while until I finally gave up. But now I'm over the hump, and barring any unforeen issues, a release should be coming soon. I say "should", because given the amount of difficulty this game has given me so far (the text insertion hang is not the only issue I've had to deal with), I may yet run into other issues that could delay a release before I get done. The overall project completion is currently sitting at around 90%, but right now I'm extremely busy and my time to work on it is limited. I think a release before the end of the month is possible, but don't hold me to that. In the mean time, here is a quick video I made to show off undubbed battle voices:
Note that any graphical glitches you may notice are due to the emulator I'm using to test my modifications (nullDC). There are emulators that can play the game without nearly as many glitches, but I use nullDC because it has a few features that make testing easier.
One other thing. I just want to be clear on the fact that I am going to release this undub for the Dreamcast version of Grandia II, and only the Dreamcast version of Grandia II. The Dreamcast version is the original, and best version of the game. The PS2 port is a mess, and the PC port is defficient in at least a few areas (sound/battle glitches). That being said, if anyone wants to take on the project of porting my undub to one of the other version of Grandia II, I am willing to share my knowlege and resources. Just as long as you understand that my experience with either version is limited, and I know for a fact there would be unique challenges in porting my undub that I do not intend to solve for you.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
No News isn't Good News
Sorry I'm a bit late writing this post, but there's really not a whole lot to say. Basically, the reason my undub of Grandia II is not yet complete, is because I ran into some problems with text insertion that are preventing me from making edits to certain files. For what it's worth, I did my best to try to reverse engineer a solution myself, but the behavior of the particular opcode in the game's script responsible for causing hangs when text is inserted has thusfar eluded me.
That's the bad news. The good news is, I have made an appeal to a higher power that I fully expect will be able to help me get past this issue. I just can't say for sure when. Worst case scenario, I will try to work around the text insertion problem by making some edits to increase the brevity of the script in files where inserting text causes problems. Not huge ones, but ones that will undoubtedly be undesirable in terms of translation accuracy. So in the mean time sit tight. This thing is gonna get done, one way or another.
That's the bad news. The good news is, I have made an appeal to a higher power that I fully expect will be able to help me get past this issue. I just can't say for sure when. Worst case scenario, I will try to work around the text insertion problem by making some edits to increase the brevity of the script in files where inserting text causes problems. Not huge ones, but ones that will undoubtedly be undesirable in terms of translation accuracy. So in the mean time sit tight. This thing is gonna get done, one way or another.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
The Waiting is the Hardest Part
To be honest, I haven't made much progress on this undub in the past month, as I've been busy with other things. This is a situation that will soon be corrected. But for now, I thought I'd at least post another video showing off some stuff that has gotten done.
Note the FMV subtitles, which thankfully were a lot easier to get in the game than I expected them to be. Grandia II barely even has any dialog in the FMV sequences to begin with, so I guess I could have ignored those scenes altogether. But as I hope you've realized by now, this is not going to be the kind of half-assed copy and paste audio file undub that you're probably used to.
Note the FMV subtitles, which thankfully were a lot easier to get in the game than I expected them to be. Grandia II barely even has any dialog in the FMV sequences to begin with, so I guess I could have ignored those scenes altogether. But as I hope you've realized by now, this is not going to be the kind of half-assed copy and paste audio file undub that you're probably used to.
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