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tymmur

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Everything posted by tymmur

  1. I don't get it either. It's a name like so many other names. However the replies makes it funny for some wicked reason I can't explain. I wouldn't have mentioned double vision if nobody else had made the comparison, but after reading what people had written and then seeing those two lines at the bottom, it looked like a chance I couldn't throw away. It's a shame the forum changed the formatting though. It looked right when I clicked submit reply. Oh well, the message got through.
  2. Recently Browsing 3 members tymmur AaronIsCrunchy AaronTooNerdy I feel like having double vision
  3. Speedrunning sounds like you are doing it wrong. You better start thinking like a proper engineer. Why do something yourself if a machine can do it much better/faster for you. Get a car That's actually a pretty good idea. Sometimes fan translations works pretty much out of the box while other times, the CS knowledge needed is quite significant. Extracting and inserting scripts into gamefiles can be an interesting task, both due to encryption as well as syntax. One of my greatest moments with VNs isn't great written stories. It's actually a VN engine, which crashed whenever it tried to display English and it just felt so great once the English text was displayed ingame. Alternatively you could join op with some original VN project and help writing the script with jumps, variables and other coding aspects. It's less demanding and you would likely avoid having to read hex. It's also possible that you shouldn't settle for just one. A translation takes a long time to make. It's quite possible most of the technical issues will be solved early on and then the need for technical skills will be months apart while the translators goes through all the lines. Perhaps some work in the end will be needed even if you made a proof of concept patch early on to make sure the game will accept the English text.
  4. Fitting for a country giving us the blues music genre. Just watching the forum gives me the blues.
  5. Oh you meant black text on white background. Yeah that's fairly common. Sort of like paper simulation. I was talking about all the blue stuff, which is why I didn't quite get what you meant by that statement.
  6. There is a big difference. The pink Fuwa was unintended while the blue JAST is intended. I just checked. It's the grayish color I remember. The only color I remember before that was back in the monochrome days where it happened to be blank and white (obviously). I don't think I have seen any text editors or spreadsheets with that harsh coloring.
  7. It's not about being ugly (only @OutoftheBox said that). It's about actually feeling physically unwell when watching it. I admit I'm more sensitive to light than the average person (particularly flashing lights), but still that page affects me negatively physically, which is fairly rare for a static homepage. I can't even remember experiencing that happening before. I did some thinking about this. The key here might not be that it's different shades of the same color, but the fact that it is all blue. Blue is the shortest wavelength we can see, which mean it's highest frequency light, which affects our eyes. The high frequency in turn mean it's the kind of light with the most energy. Maybe starring into high energy light like that overloads something in the eye or the connected nerves, at least in some people. It does transfer significantly more energy into the eyes than if it were red light, which is the lowest energy light we can see. Natural occurring light is primary low energy, meaning lots of red and very little blue. Starring into blue lights isn't something we would be able to do naturally, meaning genes, which would not be able to cope with it would not be a disadvantage until modern times. While the physics are facts, it's just my theory on how the eye/nerves/brain responds. It may or may not be correct, but it got me thinking: what would happen if I see the very same page, except it is in shades of red? I'm not sure I would like how it would look, but it would be interesting to know if it triggers some bad feeling or not. Another thing about blue. Research has shown that blue light triggers a hormone release from the brain. This hormone is a "wake up" trigger, which makes sense since the sun is the only natural source of blue light. Reading on a screen with blue light is now a cause of insomnia and it is actually recommended to read paper books rather than ebooks before sleeping due to this issue. This mean checking for new posts on an all blue forum just before going to bed would be a bad idea.
  8. I will try to be a bit more constructive. The colors clash big time and look downright hostile. I don't want to look at them for extended periods of time. In fact I don't want to look at them for even a minute. After the Pokemon incident with kids in Tokyo being rushed to the hospitals, one of the universities started studying nice and hostile colors. They ended up with some software, which can analyze a picture and tell how nice/calm it is on a scale from 1 to 10. Even without that software I can tell you get max 3, likely lower than that. To make matters worse, the font is kind of small, making me strain my eyes even more. I totally do not feel welcome there. The font size issue should be correctable by telling the browser to increase the font size. I tried inverting the colors (as in each color channel becomes 255 - value). It actually becomes better that way, but it's still far from good. That isn't a solution either. That's all I have to say for now. The colors made me leave before I studied it enough to comment on the actual contents.
  9. Last time the universities accepted new students (must have been last summer), I looked through the list of grades required to enter each field of study. If too many applies, then the threshold is increased and it drops if they have problems getting enough. Japanese stood out big time. They rejected like 2 out of 3 yet at the same time the grade threshold was significantly lower than any other language. The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that Japanese attract a whole lot of people with horrible grades. My first thought was "good thing I'm not there. It would be horrible to work in groups if that is the standard". I wouldn't be surprised if the problem is due to people watching anime rather than studying, but if they keep doing that at the university, they will drop out. The biggest problem is if two people in a 3 people group watch anime instead of working on the assignment, all 3 fail and will have to repeat or drop out. That seems like quite horrible conditions for serious students.
  10. Better that than the other way. I tried getting yelled at for not doing what the boss wanted me to do, but forgot to tell me. It was the last day before vacation started and I was forced to work full time the entire vacation. Actually way more hours than that and as a nice bonus, it was unpaid. On the first day after the vacation, I showed up to declare "I quit" and handed over keycard and stuff like that. Naturally I was busy during the vacation to get something else elsewhere (meaning I didn't quit to nothingness) as well as figuring out how I could quit without announcing it in advance. I would love to tell what happened next, but I have no idea because I have never heard from them again. Within a week I started going to the new place and I spent the next month or so being happy every morning because I would go to a place where people would be nice to each other and nobody were yelling or tried to shift blame to other people. I never thought that what I used to think as normal would suddenly feel like a luxury. I spent a few months in that hellhole, but it was an invaluable learning experience of what to avoid.
  11. Buying the VN you intend to translate cost money as well, but I wouldn't call that a justified reason for donations. Servers could be a reasonable expense to pay with donations though. There are some free options, but anime fansubbers usually require more from their servers than the free ones can offer. This mean a monthly cost. They usually also have a decent URL, like group-name-translations.com, which is another running cost. Fansubbing used to require expensive hardware, but now it is about making a subtitle track (cleverly named .ass files) and insert it into a video file container, which is something all computers can do. There are free software for this task, though I will not rule out that you can get better results if you pay for some more professional software. Back to the topic of VN translations. I can't think of paid software, which helps enough to justify an expense big enough to open for donations. You can get quite far with free homemade tools (like extractors). Oddly enough I find Notepad++ to be excellent for writing the text itself. It's a decent editor with spellcheck (typo detection), makes it easy to select the correct text encoding (usually shift-jis) and important here: it's free. In fact I can't think of anything but graphical applications, which might justify non-free software.
  12. I'm not quite sure what to think about this topic. It's good and bad at the same time to sell fantranslations. The good part is a licensed release can get something the free patches can't provide, like uncensored CGs and a simple installer. The quality might increase as well. The bad part is that it makes fan translations more closed. Attracting more people to work on a fan translation requires openness, which mean the secrecy makes it harder to gather a team to work on the same translation project. Perhaps the secrecy is the biggest danger to free translation patches. If a new group starts and I translate one file for them, then they can only sell the final patch if: A: I accept (it doesn't matter if they pay for the acceptance or not) B: my work is not included The reason is from a legal point of view, I would have the copyright for the translation of that file since I wrote it. However at the same time there is copyright on the original Japanese text meaning an official commercial release would require permission from both copyright holders. I assume the legal departments of the publishers are aware of this issue. In other words the risk that your work end up in a commercial release against your will would be minimal. The fact that I'm not skilled enough to do a proper translation is besides the point. It could have been fixing script bugs or altering png files (English text or decensored). Precisely what the added content is doesn't matter. What matters is all contributors included in the sold "package" agrees to the sale. To answer the question: no. If a new group needs help with something I might be able to do, the "risk" that they sell the translation is not really on my mind. In fact if I know I will end up spending hours on the task, my main concerns would be "do I like the VN in question?" and "what is the risk that it will be abandoned shortly after I finish?". Obviously other concerns like "Do I have the time required for this task?" would be something I would have to consider. If people sell their translation, they usually kept it close to themselves. If I can't see what people are doing, I will for sure not give them any money. Do people actually donate to unreleasted translations? Or to fan translations in general? I thought the non-profit approach would be the universally adopted approach unless the translation is sold to a licensed publisher.
  13. I started reading from the start to figure out what the newly found thread was all about. I figured it was spot on and decided to quote it rather than just writing the very same thing. The date did make me consider if I should quote it or not. Another confession: I didn't read the entire thread. I got bored after just two pages It did serve the purpose just fine though. I could read the last page while knowing the concept of the thread.
  14. Are you saying you don't have any sort of database underneath the interface? If that is the case, then I predict it will become a maintenance nightmare. What you are essentially talking about is a database of translation statuses. VNDB seems perfect for this as it is based on progresSQL. I'm not an expert on webapps, but I find it hard to believe they can beat databases on database tasks. If I understand you correctly, you are more or less just drag-n-drop elements into the page and then manually filling them out and this mean manually making the page for each VN. It sure sounds like a lot of work. I know it's not there. For some reason it never made it into VNTLS. It's also listed as dead in the translation overview thread, despite my reply telling otherwise. I don't know why Musumaker suffers from this issue, but it seems quite hard to tell that the translation progresses. My point wasn't what was on VNTLS. It would be outdated anyway. My point is I can autogenerate a file with the current translation status and update it sometimes multiple times daily. If your page includes that file, then you will always have an up to date status without anybody updating manually. I just don't know what format such an included file should have, which is why I'm asking which format would suit you.
  15. Me too. It would be awesome to do stuff and then rewind if you don't like the result, sort of like saving in a game and then try something, which might be really stupid. Or more realistically in life, you see a bad result and didn't realize what happened until it was too late.
  16. Me too, though I would say more like half. Usually a post dies if I get some sort of "writer's block" and can't get the post to say what I planned or if I wrote it and then take a look thinking "what did I do? It is nowhere near what I planned. I wouldn't want to read that if somebody else wrote it". There is a Japanese saying "don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you". In this case it is "don't post garbage"
  17. Clearly it makes no sense not to write the title correctly. How am I to know that "Tincle Twinkle Festival" is supposed to be Tincle ★ Twinkle Festival! It's not like those two titles have anything in common once you remove the the non-character letters. Joking aside, what I see as the biggest issue is not reading the stars/explanation marks or anything like that. The biggest problem is computer stupidity. For instance if I ask the browser (the find in browser, not google) to search for the title without the star, it will not find the title, which includes the star and vice versa. Humans should be able to handle a few typos and missing exclamation marks and still figure out what it is supposed to say, and I don't really care for such perfection, particularly if it is about keys not present on the keyboard. Being unable to locate the post I read last week because the computer is bothered by this issue is a fare more severe issue.
  18. I don't get the idea. What is the benefit over VNDB? There is the review section, which seems to be on the TODO list on VNDB. Now you talk about translation status, which has been mentioned on VNDB debating if it should be implemented or not. You should fetch the source for VNDB and implement more features (it's open source). If you insist on making your own site, you shouldn't try to rival VNDB, but rather do what VNDB will not do. This mean implementing what has been requested on VNDB and then flat out refused. Hook codes is one of those issues. Another is VN engine (which would be useful info for translators). Reading html from VNDB is beyond stupid. It requires a whole lot more CPU power and bandwidth for both the server and your client doing it. The API is working quite well API guide. You can usually get all the info you need and if not, you can request an update to the API. In fact being open source, you can code it yourself and submit it for review. I think it would be a good idea to inform of any intension of relying on the API. It would be polite and helps track down issues if a bug causes way too much load on the server. Such problems should be solved rather than resorting to blocking due to not knowing who is causing the issue. Musumaker is completely missing from the list even though it was actually being translated even when VNTLS was active I have written about the translation status in post 2. It's a link to autogenerated text: translation status I wrote a script to verify the syntax of the VN script (highly needed due to engine issues), which mean it should run every time the translation is updated. While reviewing every single line anyway, it detects modified lines and calculates translation progress based on this. In other words it is a fully automatic system, which is more or less always up to date. Even better, it's fairly easy to modify/expand, meaning it wouldn't really be an issue for me to generate a link where you can read the translation status in whatever format you want. That is, it will display the current status without history. All you have to say is which format you want the info in and precisely which info is needed. Once the format is established, it will stay that way (unless requested otherwise) even after the remake is released. The total number of lines will be altered, but other than that, it should stay the same.
  19. That is correct most of the time and it is usually strait forward. However do read the patch readme/install instructions. I have once come across a fairly complex installer, which meant the translation patch included a translated installer. I can't remember if it was a VN specifically, but the concept exist meaning it is something we might encounter eventually. The big problem regarding a guide for installing translation patches is that it more or less requires a guide for each VN engine or perhaps even each VN. The engines aren't really designed with unofficial translations in mind and injecting one anyway mean the translation would have to adapt to whatever funny ideas the engine might come up with. Most of the time those differences are dealt with inside the patch installer, but not always. There are also the issue that the translation patch might be kept small and then have an optional big addon, like a decensor patch. How to handle something like that also varies from engine to engine and you would have to read the readme.
  20. In that case, do you want to borrow "C++11 for Programmers"? It's a great book for the target audience, non-fiction and clearly outside your target genre I think you have firmly convinced me that I should never become a writer. While I get the concept of getting to know what exist, the concept of reading everything, regardless of how boring it is seems a bit extreme to me. It seems to me like the teaching approach where you get a bunch of sentences with incorrect grammar and you have to correct the grammar. It contains the fundamental flaw that you are presented with an incorrect version, but not the correct one and that involves a risk of copying the incorrect approach. Any study method, which involves the risk of learning the failure is flawed by design. I agree it makes no sense, but you seem to miss the point. It's not about what we think or know or the sites we visit frequently. It's about what is said in places where lots of people visit frequently and without any VN knowledge, they will not know any better. It is a major contributor to why VNs will have a hard time becoming popular in the general public and actual facts has nothing to do with it.
  21. Somehow that makes me think of Rainman reading the phonebook. So much is released that everything is unrealistic. You do have to filter somehow. I'm not sure I like the combo of wanting to be a writer and losing interest in the storyline. I wasn't talking about explaining sales. I was talking about the "announcements" people make when a VN is announced in English. People who has never seen a VN and has clearly never seen the yet to be released VN in question knows everything about it and makes anti-Rapelay marketing against it. I have seen it happening multiple times. As those proclamations seems to show up again and again, they affect the public opinion and they play their role in why VNs will never become popular. It's not claims you see in the VN community, but they are present in the places where people are most likely to be exposed to VNs for the first time. It doesn't really make sense to make such claims against all age VNs on steam, but it happens. Steam would naturally never allow that, but facts will never get in the way of people who bash something for their own amusement. I didn't talk about the number of sales, though I would assume that would be affected too.
  22. I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Just ask Apple. Over the years they have made products, which didn't match any existing markets. Sometimes it went poorly (like the Newton) and sometimes it went well and sort of created the market for the product (iTunes Store, iPhone, computers small enough to put on a table, home computers with floppy drives, CDs etc). I would say VNs are sort of the same thing. They can't really get into an existing market, but it has a chance of making a market of its own. With VNs trying to create a new market, it certainly have to rely on good reputation and type. Sadly I feel like VNs suffer from what happened to the gaming industry in the 80s. Some people managed to make great games and then Wall Street went in to get easy money and released garbage. It was a disaster because great quality and garbage got mixed together. The poor quality companies died, but so did some good ones because selling a $30 game is hard when the shop has a barrel of $5 games. Even if they were of worse quality, people went for 6 games for the price of 1. There is a number of great VNs out there, but there is certainly also quite a lot of garbage, which isn't worth the money or time. Money isn't the greatest in VNs, but that haven't stopped some companies from mass releasing cheap VNs with little or no contents. While there is a market for both, it does mean that somebody plays a good VN, tells somebody else about it and the other person goes "I'm not sure about this thing. I will pick a cheaper one first to see what it is" and then the result is a dropped VN and no more VNs for that person. I think the quality/price issue might be the biggest issue for VNs becoming popular. There is also the Rapelay issue, which told people what products from Japan is all about. It doesn't matter what the truth is. Whenever a VN tries to make it into the general market, people "knowing it all" warns about it because it's one of those evil things. Clearly it's much better to play a game where you shoot everybody.
  23. I don't see was in school and wishes they were in school as mutual exclusive. In fact after reading your post about escapism, I say it's part of both. If they want to escape the harsh adult reality, they want to go to a place they can relate to, where they have experience of not having those problems, which happens to be back in school. I guess one could argue that the effect of those two reasons stack. Having said that, the argument doesn't add up for me. While I do enjoy the school setting, I absolutely hated school and would never go back. I don't think I enjoyed any place of teaching until I started my university days. However that would be a problematic VN setting. Some people wouldn't be able to relate to it at all, some would relate to art and some "hard science" like math, but usually not both. This mean it would be a setting, which should be avoided because it reduces the number of people, who can relate to it, regardless of how it's done. Everybody have the experience of school though, hence why I said everybody can relate to it. While it wasn't everybody, who enjoyed school, everybody can relate to the setting and it could be argued that it would be wishful thinking about how it should have been in school. Most people didn't end up with a harem in school. In fact quite a number of guys failed to get a girlfriend. VNs might be the escape that "I tried to get her to date me, but failed. I can do that in VNs".
  24. First of all, reading your post is quite annoying. The dark letters on while background blurs with the theme I'm using, making it quite hard to read. I wondered if I should call troll due to the hard to read text and the statement that VNs are games with poor gameplay. However assuming the hard to read text is unintended, I carried on trying to read it and grasp what you are saying. I have come to the conclusion that I sort of agree, but that the same time I don't. The problem is I would classify VNs as VNs, not games and not books. Games are optimized to be games. Books are optimized to be books. VNs are optimized to be VNs. VNs can pass as a book, but aren't optimized for it and doesn't beat books for book quality. VNs can pass as games, but they aren't optimized to beat regular games in the aspects we normally use to judge games. Your post makes it sound like the problem is VNs, while I would say the problem is incorrect classification of VNs. Having said that, explaining what a VN is to people, who never tried it might make it hard to make them understand what it is, which might be precisely why VNs will not be popular (hence this thread). People seeing a VN on steam might have a hard time figuring out the quality if they compare it to what else they can find on steam. I can't remember which one, but an all age VN made it into steam greenlight and the comments were like "this must be one of those rape games from Japan. We better stay clear of this one".
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