recruiting Chaos;Head Noah PC Port and Translation Project

[DrDaxxy 17]

Chaos;Head Noah (stylized as ChäoS;HEAd NoAH) is an updated rerelease of Chaos;Head, a 2008 visual novel by Nitro+ and 5pb. This version includes six new endings that were not present in the original; one for every main heroine. However, while the original version was only available on PC, the updated version was available on practically every platform but PC.

We at the Committee of Zero intend to change that.

The original Chaos;Head was translated on TLWiki years ago. We intend to build on this work, but heavily revise it and edit it as to match our writing style. Please bear in mind that we are not associated with TLWiki's team in any way, and this project is not related to their own abandoned Noah port and translation.

Staff

We are currently in need of:

• A translator with some amount of past experience and the availability and diligence to make steady progress over a few months to a year.

Our core Noah team consists of:

• Engine Reimplementation for PC: SomeAnon, DrDaxxy
• Translator: [RECRUITING]
• TL Checker: SnowedEarth
• Editor: Kumin, Discontinuous Qualia
• CG Editor: Cypert

Keep in mind that this list does not include everyone in the Committee of Zero. We have many members, including those who have done... zero work.

Progress

At the moment, not much work on the translation itself has been done. We've set up the basic workflow and are putting together an organization system, so once we finish our current side project, we should be all set and ready to jump on translation work no later than the start of the new year (assuming we find a translator by then).

However, what this project currently lacks in translation work, it makes up for in porting work. Our technical team is building a complete reimplementation for PC of the N2System engine that the Xbox version of Noah runs on, and we've made substantial progress. Right now, the engine is capable of reading and interpreting the game's scripts (though it currently only displays backgrounds and plays in-game audio - nothing to show off yet).

Notes

By the way, SciADV fans may be interested to hear that we recently released a patch for the Steam version of STEINS;GATE fixing many of that version's shortcomings. We don't feel this warrants a Fuwa thread on its own, but we wanted to mention it.

The port will likely be finished before the translation, and once that happens, we plan to release it, so Japanese speakers can read the VN on PC.

If you're interested, and think you can help, then aside from this thread and my PMs, the best places to contact us are via e-mail at sonome@dareno.me or our Discord.

Edited November 26, 2016 by DrDaxxy

[Fred the Barber 1,562]

Very exciting project to me personally. I hope you're able to find a translator for it. Good luck, and thanks!

[Nandemonai 338]

Sweet.  I'm still hopeful that Chaos;Head will get properly picked up (after all, Steins;Gate on Steam was a pipe dream only a few years ago) but this is the next best thing.  Oh, and thanks for reminding me I should play more Chaos;Head

[Zakamutt 1,010]

I'll be interested in the Japanese port when it comes out. One important thing for me (and likely quite a few others) that read in Japanese is for text hookers to work with it. I think s;g 0 actually uses some bitmap table reference instead of actual text, so there might be problems (I think someone made a patch for that though, so it's certainly possible).

[DrDaxxy 17]

14 minutes ago, Zakamutt said:

I'll be interested in the Japanese port when it comes out. One important thing for me (and likely quite a few others) that read in Japanese is for text hookers to work with it. I think s;g 0 actually uses some bitmap table reference instead of actual text, so there might be problems (I think someone made a patch for that though, so it's certainly possible).

Text hooking support is not our priority for a first release. Though it may work by accident, or in a future update. We're also open source so anyone else looking to add it wouldn't have to reverse-engineer anything.

What you say about S;G 0 is correct. Someone made a patch that translates dialogue between font character indexes and "actual text" so a hooker can attach. S;G 0 (and in fact most other SciADV releases) isn't based on N2System though, but a completely different engine.

[DarkZedge 1,028]

This is pretty nice, hope you can find your translator

Best of luck to you guys :3

[Funyarinpa 1,222]

Good luck on not getting slapped with a C&D for the port (lay low once you get a translator if you ask me), but besides that, this is interesting and I wish you the best of luck. Any plans to make a TL patch for the Vita version (via homebrew) once the PC port is done and released?

[Aizen-Sama 221]

Lol, so there's a TLC but not a translator? What. I can't wrap my head around that, but whatever. At least you have one guy covering a Japanese-related task, so I won't rage as hard as I would normally do.

Good luck finding someone arsed to spend an hour per day. In my opinion you shouldn't be asking for that thing especifically, because in most of those cases nobody will spend one hour per day every day until the project is over. Maybe I'm just overexaggerating. 

Anyways, good luck again.

[DrDaxxy 17]

Thanks for the warm welcome, guys. We're glad you like what we're doing. 

4 hours ago, Funyarinpa said:

Good luck on not getting slapped with a C&D for the port (lay low once you get a translator if you ask me), but besides that, this is interesting and I wish you the best of luck. Any plans to make a TL patch for the Vita version (via homebrew) once the PC port is done and released?

Because of the port aspect? Or because it's Noah? Like with regular fan translations you'd still have to have your own copy of the game, we won't distribute that. Similar engine reimplementations (like OpenTTD, ScummVM, or in the realm of visual novels, RLVM) usually don't run into trouble. Chaos;Head Noah is pretty old by now; the developers have plenty of opportunities to bring this game to the PC/the West. It's also already readable (and pirate-able) on PC by way of the PSP version. So yeah, we don't think we're stepping on anyone's toes with this.

Patches for console versions may follow, but we don't want to plan too far ahead. The Vita version in particular is unlikely though; IIRC it's based off the Muv-Luv engine (which is supposedly a massive pain to deal with). Sorry about that.

4 hours ago, Aizen-Sama said:

Lol, so there's a TLC but not a translator? What. I can't wrap my head around that, but whatever. At least you have one guy covering a Japanese-related task, so I won't rage as hard as I would normally do.

Good luck finding someone arsed to spend an hour per day. In my opinion you shouldn't be asking for that thing especifically, because in most of those cases nobody will spend one hour per day every day until the project is over. Maybe I'm just overexaggerating. 

Anyways, good luck again.

Yeah, we realise how that looks. I also tend to roll my eyes at translation projects without a translator (or in some cases without anyone). But we're not ideas guys here - we're doing the port regardless of whether or not the translation succeeds (and we know we can pull that off). So we can definitely provide something of value here. Some of our members have worked or are currently working on translation projects, so rest assured we appreciate the effort that goes into translation and we're aware of what we're asking here. But in return, we can promise a pretty good chance that those efforts won't be in vain. 

Might sound weird to have a TLC when the translator position is still open, but the reason for that is that SnowedEarth feels he currently doesn't have the combination of time and efficiency to translate this in a reasonable amount of time.

And that's what we're looking for, really. Someone who's good at it and can work often enough that we make steady progress and don't sink into quicksand, and long enough at a time that we don't take years to finish this either. The specific numbers for "how long" and "how often" heavily depend on the person, of course. Maybe "one hour per day every day" is a bit much, but we figured it's a good enough general guide. I'll bring it up with the others, we might reword that.

[Nandemonai 338]

5 hours ago, DrDaxxy said:

And that's what we're looking for, really. Someone who's good at it and can work often enough that we make steady progress and don't sink into quicksand, and long enough at a time that we don't take years to finish this either.

You may be a bit optimistic in hoping for such a thing.  Even the professional companies occasionally take forever to translate a title.  Chaos;Head Noah is about 2 MB of text.  That's decently long.  Kudos on the port, and I'm really looking forward to it.  But how many of your people have been involved with a fannotation project before?

[Decay 2,561]

A reliable translator who won't flake out on you isn't easy to find by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also not an unreasonable goal. Maybe you shouldn't be asking for specific daily time investments, but the sentiment behind that is perfectly acceptable.

Edited November 25, 2016 by Decay

[Nandemonai 338]

I wasn't referring to that.  That seems fine.  (I mean, if you get a bunch of people who flake, that's a pretty big problem, because then the style is very inconsistent.)  I was referring to not wanting the game to take multiple years to be translated.  Getting the whole game translated in a year might be ... a bit of a tall order.

[Decay 2,561]

13 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

I wasn't referring to that.  That seems fine.  (I mean, if you get a bunch of people who flake, that's a pretty big problem, because then the style is very inconsistent.)  I was referring to not wanting the game to take multiple years to be translated.  Getting the whole game translated in a year might be ... a bit of a tall order.

Most of the game is already translated though.

[Nandemonai 338]

That's true, hadn't considered that.  It would depend on how much is new in Noah, then.  Are these new routes or just new endings?  Because the individual character endings in Steins;Gate are cool, but they aren't really proper routes.

[DrDaxxy 17]

Alright, so we dropped the "one hour per day" and replaced it with something more flexible.

We come from the SciADV fan community. Our image editor, Cypert, worked on the Spanish translation of STEINS;GATE (which was done in under a year), through port lead developer SomeAnon we're friends with the Russian translators of STEINS;GATE (which took about a year too), and TLC SnowedEarth is currently working on an unannounced medium-length VN translation project (which started in early October and is predicted to finish next August). These two aren't his first projects either.

We don't have precise numbers for the size of the text original to Noah yet. But indeed, the larger part of the script was in the original Chaos;Head and is already translated. TLWiki lists 24k lines for C;H, 32k lines for Noah (though keep in mind there are changed lines too). So yeah, we think "under a year" is a quite realistic target. 

The routes are proper routes, with flags to set and changed scenes throughout the VN - it's similar to how STEINS;GATE changes depending on how close you get with Kurisu. The biggest differences are the endings, of course, but unlike S;G they're not the only differences.

[Nandemonai 338]

Interesting.  So round up to 10K lines to account for tweaked lines in the original (total guesstimate), and let's say the target is 200 days to finish the translation.  That's ... 50 lines per day.  Huh, much more doable than I thought at first.  And thanks for taking the time to respond to some random dude on the Internet questioning whether you know what you're doing

[littleshogun 960]

Sorry for to be late posting here, but let me said good luck to your project there. And hopefully you'll manage to recruit the translator and starting the translation for extra content there. Look forward to the finished product.

[BobJones2 0]

So this project dead?

[Baldur 7]

3 hours ago, BobJones2 said:

So this project dead?

No. They just released an improvement patch for Steins;Gate 0 PC.

And they are also active on Twitter. You should pay a visit to the site linked in the first post

[artisticman 0]

Goodl luck M8, looking forward to it. Also any chance of a ps3/xbox port as well? Thanks