adamstan

Okay, so I re-recorded GM soundtrack using converted MIDI files, cut it up and set up looping points, so that would mean that all three music versions are ready to use.
Also I started porting chapter 8:

Let's guess
BTW as you can see above, our protag-kun got himself side image, so he isn't completely faceless anymore (his face is based on one of the non-h CGs, I just added eyes and mouth to it)

I'm not sure, if GS/GM version of soundtrack will finally make it
Unfortunately, MIDI timing in Win 7+ is utter shit, so when I use MIDI out from PC98 emulator into software synthesizer in Win 7, it sounds like a drummer was badly drunk - when there are more tracks going on, notes have pretty random delays, and it all sounds rather sloppy. Supposedly XP was better at this, but I'm not sure if old XP machine I have will be able to handle PC98 emulation + synth work + audio recording. We'll see. If this doesn't work out, then there will be just two versions of FM soundtrack (PC98 and OPL3).
In theory, I could take music files from "JAST memorial collection" version, which are similar thing, but I don't like the sound of them, and they are 128k MP3 only.
Of course the best way to obtain this version of soundtrack would be to actually run the game on real PC98 with it's MIDI out hooked up to a Roland SC55 or SC88 synthesizer, and record that - but that's completely out of my reach...
************* EDIT *************************************
Problem solved! I found a software to convert music files from PC98 version into standard MIDI files, so now I can try different devices for playing them without the need to use PC98 emu.

Finished chapters 6 and 7 - 43% of game ported.

Another update, so here goes.
Common: 100.0%
Sora: 0.0%
Marika: 100.0%
Natsuki: 0.0%
Misa: 100.0%
Rikka: 100.0%
Touko: 88.24%
Total: 68.87%
Irru did say that they should finished the translation by the next week, although he couldn't be sure though that he can release it by the next weekend. Regardless of that, I think it would be nice though to get Touko's patch as Chinese New Year prize and it's even more fitting seeing that Touko's hair is red (If they want to take more time it's okay).
That's all for this week update.

Aaaaand chapter 5 is done, which means ~27% of original script is ported and working.
BTW here's the result of the edit mentioned in previous post:

I also added "lit by campfire" variation to the camp night background:

 

Now working on chapter 5. Meanwhile, I edited "M-burger" background. According to the text there should be girl at the counter/register, however background shows us this guy:

So I replaced him with this girl from Majokko Paradise:

Little progress report - I reached the end of chapter 4, and already did two choices that affect affection points

How long is the full script? I wonder what kind of playtime will actually be left after removing the gameplay.
Also, just wanted to say that project is one of the best things ever. In general. Among all kinds of things. It's the best.

Slowly making my way through the script. Currently I'm at chapter 3 (out of 12) with my porting:

 

I'm really looking forward to it - both to the game, and because I really want to see the results of that translation approach.
Also, thanks for the above paragraph.
Yeah, I experienced it firsthand - I was all for super-literal TLs.
Those were my feelings as well, perfectly put  , but as I slowly progressed in my JP knowledge, my stance softened and crumbled (even though I'm still a beginner). Now I just want something that isn't awkward
However, as you say, doing excellent liberal translation is extremely difficult, and knowing the audience is important, so I think that finally convinces me to use honorifics in my reworking of Sakura no Kisetsu (which currently suffers from clunky translation that tried to be liberal, but failed)

Ho boy this debate again. Then again, I'm not sure I've ever clearly stated my position on this. I have worked on projects where I've translated it both ways - leaving honorifics and a smattering of Japanese terms, and the alternative without leaving a single Japanese'ism in the translation. In my opinion, I think the ideal translation would never have any Japanese terms, except for things like food names and so on as that's how they'd be referred to in the west anyway. HOWEVER, it is extremely hard to do this and capture the nuance and please everyone at the same time (some would say impossible.) What people miss, though, is that if this is done seamlessly, the reader is completely unaware of the use of these terms in Japanese unless they're weaboos (note I consider myself somewhat of a weaboo so I don't mean this only in the derogatory way.) Weaboos are actively LOOKING for Japanese terms in the audio, or have a vague idea of what was in the original script and generally know some Japanese, but are usually not fluent in Japanese themselves. The more Japanese you know, the more forgiving you become of liberal translations since you have a better understanding that nuance is far more important than accuracy (they're subtly different things.) On the flip side, however, the target audience for these translations ARE weaboos, so the reality is they don't actually WANT a good translation, they want their little understanding of Japanese to make them think they understand it better if they're left in. Knowing your target audience is an important thing. Who are you translating it for? If you do an excellent liberal translation dropping honorifics and Japanese terms, you will get a fixed percentage of people that will be annoyed, irrespective of how good the translation is, and if you do a bad one, you'll get a large percentage of people that are annoyed. If you do a translation where you leave the honorifics and Japanese terms in place - provided you don't start making it clunky and literal, you'll actually get very few complaints at all. So in that regard, who are you translating it for if you're killing yourself to make it as liberal as possible? Fan translations are entitled to do whatever the hell they want. Official releases are a different matter... So anyway, if it's a trillion times easier to leave them in, and you end up pleasing more of the audience, why the fuck go about it the hard way? Put a handy translation notes card in with the game release explaining the few terms used for the few newcomers to the art form.
 
This might seem contradictory given I'm currently working on haruuru and we're not using any Japanese terms, but then ours is a fan translation, and some of us really wanted to try to do it without (me included). I think we've done a very good job on this (no dudes here.) Note also we played the game through before beginning the translation too. My translation commitment on that project is also almost complete. However, for games set in Japan, I think from now on if I were to choose, I'd just leave them in.

Well, I've finished this, and I loved it. I think a couple of melodramatic developments were out of place, but otherwise the stories were enjoyable, and with the help of the walkthrough and quick skip feature, going back to redo the same heroine for a different version of the story was relatively painless. It would have killed me to go back without the walkthroughs as some things were not ever going to be obvious. I enjoyed most of the heroine's routes, though Mahiru was really funny until confession, her route got pretty boring after that, and she's too young to lewd for my taste so it was the only disappointing route. QP was the star of the story; very funny, and he had the same VA as Mihiro in Wagamama high spec which I spotted pretty quickly. The stand out thing for me was Rinka's VA has been in every sugar and spice game before this one, and she always played my favourite heroines or side characters, so it was awesome to get her again, especially since I quite enjoyed her route. She even did the 'just kidding' uso da yo thing in her original character in S+S1 so I'm sure they were paying homage to the original game. A couple of endings I thought weren't happy enough, tending to the bitter side too much when they were bitersweet, but overall they were satisfying. I loved the H scenes in general too; there were even some interesting realistic scenes amongst them, though scattered amongst other typical VN fare, and there were plenty for each heroine. The final word on the use of "dude"? We all agree it was a bad choice, and initially I would have liked to have explained it away as the translator choosing it because of Chiho being a tomboy character, but after hearing her in native Japanese, and getting to know the heroine, apart from her calling herself 'boku', there was nothing tomboy about her IMO. It reeks of the translator not having played the game first, and just translating it straight up.

I just have finished preparing graphic files - including backgrounds, cgs and sprites with side images.

BTW this classroom background was one of the hardest to edit. I had to manually redraw ceiling tiles, because the amount of ditheriing on them was too much for smoothing algorithms (original version below).

(looks like I have to correct sprites positioning )
Now it's time for actual scripts porting...

For me, Sakura no Kisetsu is a classic. However, it's a bit unapproachable now, with old engine and awkward adventure-gameplay system - which is much more annoying than, say, YU-NO. As I wrote recently in recommendations thread:
 
Well, sometimes I do things on a whim, and shortly after writing the above, I decided to give it a try Actually it's quite fun for now - writing things in Ren'py is almost like directing your own puppet-show .
The goal is to rewrite Sakura no Kisetsu into standard VN structure with branching choices system - getting rid of the "look/think/talk with everything to trigger next scene" system. I do this by arranging texts from various "think" "look" and "talk" sections into the order that gives the best flow (and inserting small connecting bits in between where absolutely neccessary). I also plan to re-edit it or partially retranslate the lines that annoy me too much 
As I see, Brazilian Portugese translation uses similar approach, but they used assets (graphics and music) from the remake, which I'm not too fond of - they are very blurry, while the pixels from dithering are still very visible, so it's like the worst of both worlds . I'm working with assets from PC98 and DOS versions. I also plan to have switchable soundtrack, with all three versions available:  PC98 - original FM soundtrack, GS - PC98 MIDI music replayed with SoundCanvas soundfont and AdLib - PC DOS version FM soundtrack.
While browsing graphic files extracted from both versions I was surprised. I expected Japanese PC98 version to have mosaics (and if such were the case, planned to have mosaics on/off switch in the options), however, the version that is floating around the net is uncensored. Probably somebody hacked files with HCGs from English PC version into it? Graphics and scripts formats are identical between two versions, only music files are different because of different sound hardware.
I looked at files more closely and yes, it seems that some CG files were replaced - while all graphic files from PC98 have 1996-04 dates, HCGs have 1999-10.
For now I have ported first two scenes - talk with parents in Shuuji's home and first meeting with Reiko on the way to school - complete with music and sprites with facial animations, just like in the original Some preliminary screenshots coming in ~12 hours.
Of course for now it is all pretty basic - just full-screen background and standard ren'py textbox. I'm still not sure whether to go with that approach, or try something more like in the original, with borders etc, and the actual scenes taking just small portion of the screen? Also, I'm still not sure how much smoothing (if any) should I use while converting backgrounds and sprites. But we can discuss that when there are screenshots.
 
*I'm not sure in which subforum should I place it. It's clearly not "Original Visual Novel", it's also not exactly "Translation Project" (although probably some translating will be involved). Well, I hope our mods will help me by moving it into most suited section.

Yeah, my bad, should have posted original too:
 

Steam > JAST > MangaGamer > others
If VN is on Steam I buy it right away, If not I check JAST (love their region pricing). 

So, here are screenshots from current state:



I wanted to post a video too, but MSI Afterburner has problems with framerate...
I found original censored version too - had to look for FDD images instead of HD images with preinstaled game.

For me, Sakura no Kisetsu is a classic. However, it's a bit unapproachable now, with old engine and awkward adventure-gameplay system - which is much more annoying than, say, YU-NO. As I wrote recently in recommendations thread:
 
Well, sometimes I do things on a whim, and shortly after writing the above, I decided to give it a try Actually it's quite fun for now - writing things in Ren'py is almost like directing your own puppet-show .
The goal is to rewrite Sakura no Kisetsu into standard VN structure with branching choices system - getting rid of the "look/think/talk with everything to trigger next scene" system. I do this by arranging texts from various "think" "look" and "talk" sections into the order that gives the best flow (and inserting small connecting bits in between where absolutely neccessary). I also plan to re-edit it or partially retranslate the lines that annoy me too much 
As I see, Brazilian Portugese translation uses similar approach, but they used assets (graphics and music) from the remake, which I'm not too fond of - they are very blurry, while the pixels from dithering are still very visible, so it's like the worst of both worlds . I'm working with assets from PC98 and DOS versions. I also plan to have switchable soundtrack, with all three versions available:  PC98 - original FM soundtrack, GS - PC98 MIDI music replayed with SoundCanvas soundfont and AdLib - PC DOS version FM soundtrack.
While browsing graphic files extracted from both versions I was surprised. I expected Japanese PC98 version to have mosaics (and if such were the case, planned to have mosaics on/off switch in the options), however, the version that is floating around the net is uncensored. Probably somebody hacked files with HCGs from English PC version into it? Graphics and scripts formats are identical between two versions, only music files are different because of different sound hardware.
I looked at files more closely and yes, it seems that some CG files were replaced - while all graphic files from PC98 have 1996-04 dates, HCGs have 1999-10.
For now I have ported first two scenes - talk with parents in Shuuji's home and first meeting with Reiko on the way to school - complete with music and sprites with facial animations, just like in the original Some preliminary screenshots coming in ~12 hours.
Of course for now it is all pretty basic - just full-screen background and standard ren'py textbox. I'm still not sure whether to go with that approach, or try something more like in the original, with borders etc, and the actual scenes taking just small portion of the screen? Also, I'm still not sure how much smoothing (if any) should I use while converting backgrounds and sprites. But we can discuss that when there are screenshots.
 
*I'm not sure in which subforum should I place it. It's clearly not "Original Visual Novel", it's also not exactly "Translation Project" (although probably some translating will be involved). Well, I hope our mods will help me by moving it into most suited section.

I am not 100% certain on this one. From my experience, 向 is an odd kanji with some words whose meanings I still don't fully understand. I know it only as "facing (toward something)" and verbs and nouns that go with it seem to carry such and related meanings. In this case, I don't know the positions of the listener and the speaker, and I don't know how they are facing each other and the surroundings. From the point of the speaker, the said bulding could indeed be to the left as it's writtein in the JP line. However, from the perspective of the listener, that could actually be his "right". It could be that's why the TLer wrote it as "right" because when the speaker is explaining, she would use the listener's perception of left/right, not her own.

Yeah, thinking about this more now, it makes it seem like the MC is breaking the 4th wall, while that may have not been the intention xD ... One thing is to put TL notes outside the narration lines in some .txt or .pdf document (or game's menu and similar - like pop-up notifications), and totally another to directly make it into narration. You're right. It doesn't work well.
You're really investing yourself and your time into this project
You read my mind. That's exactly how I feel regarding this stuff too. That's one of the main reasons I didn't want to touch A Sky Full of Stars' honorifics. You need to be seriously creative in writing if you want to do this right (and hopefully don't end up translating "Oniichan" as "Dude" xD). I still don't like how I can hear "Yoshioka" in VA's speech, but in translated lines see "Honoka" instead. However, I decided that it's for the best to leave it like that since it's not too big of a deal.
Yeah, that sounds okay to me. Have in mind, though, that whichever style you pick here should be consistent with the entire script. It's one of the toughest editing jobs to just pay attention and make it all consistent at the end.

I can see why they added those TL notes. I am not entirely against them here, but... isn't there a way to just write her line in another way then that won't require a TL note at all? Say, something like:
As for honorifics...
...I just had a long discussion about it with someone a day ago or two. That question is quite problematic, and I don't know how to help you with that. It's a tough question. Considering how I myself am lost about it, I don't think I should be giving you advice on that matter.

Today I finished editing backgrounds - upscaling and smoothing. For each image I created one or more smoothed versions, layered them with original, and then mixed them in various proportions by hand (using eraser tool with different settings). The goal was to make them look at least decently in 600p resolution - some were more forgiving, and some thougher. I didn't smooth them completely - after all, there's "pixel" in pixel-art However I think the effect is nice. Here's one image for comparison (it was used in previous screenshots, but I feel this version looks better):
Original (480x296, 16 colors - game ran at 640x400 but interface took much space):

Edited (1066x600):

Now, graphics-wise, there are sprites and CGs left.

Don't allow yourself to be too fixed on Japanese sentence structure. They have a different way of writing. Once you start reading more JP, you start noticing that even the sentence order isn't like in English (like for example, introducing the fact first, and then the action that caused it). And you probably already know that the order of information present in JP sentences is often in reverse compared to their English counterparts (like how final verbs in JP are usually at the end, while in English they come right after the subject).
Now that's an old VN right there. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The art does look MS-DOSish xD
The thing is... ピカピカ is a common "to" adverb (I saw it in some of those 1000 most used Onomatopoeic words in JP). It just means "shiny" (remember Pikachu from Pokemon? ). However, it can also denote something being new (as in "a shiny new thing I just bought"). And that's the sense in which it was used there in that line. "I am a brand new, fresh, first year high school student." However, the MC added (死語) after the word, probably as a mild joke (ピカピカ is definitely not an obscure, archaic word that's gotten out of use). I think it's one of those Japanese sarcasm thingies you see from time to time. Someone more experienced would probably be able to explain it better than me.
Yes, it is awkward. It's too stiff and I'd argue it may have been done by a JP native, not an English speaker xD ... However, I am not surprised. VN translations in the 90s were shit. I read Divi-dead, and yeah... that one was quite an experience to read through.

Shinfuji indeed sounds like a better name than Shindou. That being said... you didn't mention it, but is this VN voiced? If it isn't, you can go with either of the names which sound better. However, if it's voiced, I'd keep their names to how the seiyuu pronounce them.
I feel so proud of myself, being able to understand this sentence just fine at my current level of JP xD
I think the JP line held more punch than this, but it's okay. I would just rearrange the order to:
"I'm Shuuji Yamagami. My new life as a high school student begins today." - it sounds more natural to me this way. Can't pinpoint why though xD
That being said, if I had to TL it from scratch, I would have TLed it as:
"I'm Shuuji Yamagami, a sixteen-year old, who just became a high-school student (today)."
死語 - too bad this had to be dropped xD I like how it sounded in Japanese. I guess the MC of this VN tends to joke a lot
I didn't read this VN yet, but if you do manage to finish this project of yours, I'll be quite interested in checking it out