[Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Reichu » Wed Feb 27, 2019 9:17 am

Thanks, SSD! Nice to have them out of the way at last!

I'm forcing myself to do the... not-so-fun parts of the game right now. I have no idea how to inject text into the ROM without deeRez around currently to hold my hand, but I'm doing a subtitled playthrough (...VERY SLOWLY) if ya'll want to pretend.
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Reichu » Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:59 pm

Some technical notes for later (whenever deeRez returns from IRL):

1. I'm discovering some text that's not in any of the patch files. (I know, right? Stubborn junk is hiding everywhere!) I'll be keeping track of it as it go and I'll post a listing later.

2. Right now, the patch files have identical occurrences of any dialogue collapsed into a single occurrence. So, for instance:

Code: Select all

# Shinji Ikari, Rei Ayanami, Misato Katsuragi, Shigeru Aoba, Ritsuko Akagi, Makoto Hyuga, Female Staff
"はい。\n\0":
'???',

This is from evs_2, and the line in question in "Hai". Having every instance of this collapsed, and calling upon a single translation, is a bit of a problem, since a lot of these brief, recurring utterances are VERY context-specific. One person's "hai" could be "Yes, sir", another person's "hai" could be "Okay" or "Sure". Another time, the smoothest translation might have it bounce off whatever it's responding to. So basically, these need to be split back apart so that they can be translated contextually. I'm not sure how to do that without breaking things, though, so for now I'll just keep notes on which lines will eventually require the treatment.
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Ambiant23 » Sun Mar 03, 2019 6:51 pm

How far is progress so far?

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Reichu » Tue Mar 05, 2019 5:37 am

View Original PostAmbiant23 wrote:How far is progress so far?

You're welcome to scan through the patch files on the GitHub and marvel at the sheer amount of stuff that doesn't have any translation yet.

DeeRez once calculated completion percentages but he hasn't been active for a while. Incidentally, without him around, progress doesn't mean much anyway.
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby deeRez » Mon Jun 10, 2019 2:40 am

I’m still here, I kind of stopped checking up on Eva in hopes of making the wait for the final less painful. :-|

I’ll have to read up on the questions previously asked, but awesome job keeping the translations going until March!
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Tumbling Down » Tue Jul 16, 2019 9:21 am

I'm surprised that Gainax/Khara/whoever doesn't see potential for profit in releasing this game to English-speaking audiences, or other Eva games for that matter. They're releasing the first of the ANIMA novels in English later this year, and it's hard for me to imagine that an Evangelion novel would sell more copies than a video game.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Reichu » Tue Jul 16, 2019 9:59 am

Seven Seas are the ones who are releasing Anima overseas, not khara.
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Tumbling Down » Sun Aug 11, 2019 11:01 pm

I know that a patch doesn't exist, but is there a decent enough translated script online that I could refer to the script as I was playing?

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Reichu » Mon Aug 12, 2019 7:22 am

I linked to the patch files on this very page of the thread. Whatever's there is what you get.
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Tumbling Down » Tue Aug 13, 2019 4:43 am

View Original PostReichu wrote:I linked to the patch files on this very page of the thread. Whatever's there is what you get.

Thanks/sorry. I only did a Google search and looked at the first page, didn't look at this page.

I did the math awhile back to see how much it would cost to pay someone to translate an anime, but I have no idea how I'd calculate that for a game, since I don't even know what I'm looking at in these files.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Reichu » Tue Aug 13, 2019 7:38 am

Well, between those patch files, you're looking at every piece of extracted raw Japanese that's in the non-graphical portion of the game. Everything there would have to be eventually translated, and you can probably see that it is a pretty huge amount of text. There's a good reason nobody has bothered translating this thing before.

Trying to play through the game while attempting to consult with several text-based translation files for every little decision you have to make and everything anybody says sounds like the epitome of "you might as well just force yourself to learn Japanese; it would be a better use of your time". Otherwise, it's just a matter of waiting, really. DeeRez and I got it started, it's just stalled at the moment. People who translate and patch games for fun have lives outside of that. I've been waiting on the patched version of Napple Tale -- which has basically no text at all compared to NGE2 -- for years now, and after a while you just get used to hearing "yes, it's still being worked on, please be patient".
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby scenikeight » Wed Aug 14, 2019 12:11 am

Reichu, are you guys looking for any more translators? I'd happily put my hand up to contribute, even just a little bit, especially considering how much of it isn't done yet. After SIRP I've been dying for another Eva game project to get stuck into.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby The_Max » Wed Jul 01, 2020 4:23 pm

View Original PostReichu wrote:(Cross-post, for whoever is liable to look here and not in Discussion.)

To make some of the valuable lore from the game more widely available until such point as the patch is finished, I've subtitled the key content from Rei and Kaworu's PSP scenarios. (The videos themselves are rather poor quality, but for now they're good enough.) Much of Kaworu's scenario has been previously translated, but this is more complete and freshly polished. I've mentioned some of the content from Rei's before, but as far as I know this is the first time it's been available in English. Enjoy!

- Rei (Beyond Her Heart)
- Kaworu (Broken Wings)

(To grab transcripts of the subtitles, look beneath the YT video player. To the right of "SAVE", there should be a button with an ellipsis symbol. Click that, and the option "Open Transcript" should present. You can copy and paste from there.)


Reichu, first of all, this is fantastic. Thank you.

Now... this is the first time I see this and the implications are very serious. So, in summary (correct me if I am wrong), the fruit of knowledge is "destined" to pursue the fruit of life in order to create "perfect" lifeforms (it's the representation of the human desire of avoiding death). In fact, Earth's Lilith "chases" Earth's Adam.

On the other hand, I don't see a genuine interest of the fruit of life about the fruit of knowledge but Kaworu is grateful to it because through that knowledge he learned about the music. And we know the more time he spend with Lilim the more he sympathises with them.

Somehow, both are interested in the other but when they reunite (no matter how) the outcome is destruction and when they separate the outcome is feeling incomplete and alone. It's the hedgehog dilemma with the fruit of life and the fruit of knowledge. And don't forget that, according to the story, we are part of one side.
Hey there! I am using EvaGeeks.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby deeRez » Mon Sep 07, 2020 10:07 pm

I've been tinkering more and more now with the game again.

1 - I didn't mention it here, but figured out that the game uses the DEFLATE algorithm for compression.
A while back I isolated the exact decompression the game uses and ran the code as-is but slowly in a Python MIPS abstraction I wrote.

I assumed it was a proprietary compression algorithm, which would have meant it would be a pain to write a compressor since I'd have to understand the exact format in and out. But by luck I realized some of the look up tables used by the game for decompressions are also used by the DEFLATE algorithm, and sure enough it was that algorithm. So now we have both a compressor and decompressor for this game.

https://github.com/rezual/nge_2_re/blob ... /zipped.py

2 - Recently I wrote this Python script:
https://github.com/rezual/nge_2_re/blob ... t_codes.py

What it does is, it takes the rodata and data patches in the patches folder, and generates cheat codes for CWCheat/TempAR.
I've not tested on actual PSP hardware with CWCheat/TempAR, I think it'll probably crash due to lack of memory,
but it works in the PPSSPP emulator (one needs to set PPSSPP to interpreter core and turn off fast memory, see top of python script for more info).

Yes, we've had the ability to replace text with the translated text using cheats,
but that had a limit where the English text had to take less memory than the Japanese text or else it'd be cut off.

Not good. What other translation projects do is find where the Japanese text is referenced in the game code,
and in every place patch it to point to the translated text loaded elsewhere in memory.

Finding all those references is too tedious, but that is what they did for the Miku PSP game translation.

What I ended up doing instead is writing code (injected via the cheats generated by the above python script) that
hijacks the game's draw text and strcpy/sprintf functions, to make them look up any inputted Japanese text to see if it's address has a translated English variant somewhere else, and if it does, uses the translated version in the strlen, strcpy, etc. operation.

This ended up working beautifully. We no longer need to worry about how long our translated text is,
except in cases where the game itself cuts off the text.

3 - Furthermore I've figured out how to do half-width fonts.
I need to tweak individual letters better, but I'm just happy I found the location.

Before:
Image

After:
Image

But there are some down sides to variable length fonts, in that the game has a couple of menus
that utilize spaces to keep things neat and tidy. I'll have to revisit this problem later.

4 - There's a bunch of lines in patches/eboot_rodata.py that are untranslated because they're really vague.
I'm going down the list and manually machine translating them.

I'll add a symbol to denote it's machine translated before I push it to github.

Initially I was freaking out by how bad the machine translations are, but
then I realize it's easier for people to correct mistakes than to contribute to something that's blank.

5 - So the above deals with the Japanese text in the game executables, but we still have a lot of text in the pictures,
events, and random chats.

For events, I'm working on a website where translators will be able to play any scenario from the game (with bare minimum effects)
and provide a translation in the website. More on this later.

For random chat text, that's the big one. There's a lot of duplication there, like 10 ways a character might say "No problem."
"Really, it's no problem" "It's not a problem"
I need to figure out how the game groups these to come up with a format that'll make translator's lives easier.
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby deeRez » Tue Sep 08, 2020 7:30 am

I've completed the missing lines in eboot_rodata with machine translation:
https://github.com/rezual/nge_2_re/blob ... _rodata.py

The fields that were machine translated have a MACHINE_TRANSLATED comment next to them.
I'm going to machine translate the rest of the events / pieces of text as well.

Intent here is to reduce the entry cost of people assisting with translations.
As people validate the translations, they can remove the MACHINE_TRANSLATED comment little by little.

But now is the worst time to try to assist with translating, while I'm tweaking and overwriting/batch reformatting things.

Next thing I plan to do is to machine translate the EVS/IMTEXT/BMTEXT files,
and then I plan to change the format of those files so it's easier on translators.
(Currently the IMTEXT/EVS/BMTEXT files are stored as out of order phrases)
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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby Harukajunko » Thu Aug 19, 2021 8:30 pm

Hey Sorry if this is a bother just found out about this and wondering if it is still being worked on. Just found out about the games and really wanting to get into it but I can't read Japanese.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby TojiWasScrewedOver » Tue Feb 22, 2022 7:09 am

View Original PostHarukajunko wrote:Hey Sorry if this is a bother just found out about this and wondering if it is still being worked on. Just found out about the games and really wanting to get into it but I can't read Japanese.

I believe the project has been cancelled unfortunately.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby FelipeFritschF » Wed Feb 23, 2022 6:28 pm

I talked to deeRez not too long ago and it's still in progress.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby TojiWasScrewedOver » Thu Feb 24, 2022 2:29 am

View Original PostFelipeFritschF wrote:I talked to deeRez not too long ago and it's still in progress.

Wait, when?! How is progress! Oh my god, it'd be amazing if it's close to finish. You don't know how badly I want to play this game finally. The project hasn't been updated in 2 years on Github. If he needs help with anything he should ask the AGT team on discord, as I'd bet they'd love to help!
Last edited by TojiWasScrewedOver on Fri Apr 01, 2022 11:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: [Game] Neon Genesis Evangelion 2: Another Cases

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Postby TojiWasScrewedOver » Sun Mar 13, 2022 2:05 pm

Since it's still being worked on apparently, I hope there's a chance of it being released this year!


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