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My introduction


tymmur

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Hello fellow VN readers

 

After having read fuwa for a while I have decided to take the risk and dared to enter new territory, which is to start my very own thread for the first time. I figure I have to start with an introduction or I will run the risk that people will have no idea who I am.

 

My VN timeline:

2005ish: first VN encountered. VN reading didn't take off, partly due to poor availability at the time, partly because I didn't fully get it at the time

2007-2008: VN reading started to be multiple titles and titles good enough for me to remember

2011: encountered Musumaker

2015: joined Fuwa

2016: joined Luna translations before it got big. Worked technical on most titles (VNDB's list is incomplete) and ended up managing who did what for Majo Koi Nikki

2016: fixed script syntax issues in the majority of lines in Ayakashi Gohan (uncredited, though it looks like nobody really got credited). Released 2017

2017 Luna collapsed

2018 started a thread on Fuwa

 

The story of Musumaker (which is mainly a story of my VN involvement)

It was released in late December 2008. A week later somebody on HongFire started a translation. With tools available and extracted script a number of people started working on it. I encountered it in 2011, realized that the scripts people had uploaded were in various formats and the game could handle none of them. I investigated the problem, figured out how to do it right and then wrote a script to convert all the files into the right format. I published the script, thinking people would be overjoyed, but the translation had been dropped by that time :pyaa:

All what was left of the entire team was one wannabe translator named RaurosFalls. Even worse, he wasn't even that great a translator (at the time). However wanting the translation to finish, I continued to improve the script handling and tried to recruit more people. It failed, but RaurosFalls did study Japanese and on translating and by 2015, having reached 15%, he started over, retranslated everything based on his newly gained skills and a partial patch was released. This did indeed help recruiting, but nobody with skills able to deliver anything useful. We then started talking about the fact that being on HongFire was a problem. By that time it had ended up being the only serious translation project and the only one for "a real VN". If we were to be taken as serious as it was at the time, we would have to move. None of us had picked HongFire in the first place.

The choice ended up being Fuwa due to the active and apparently significantly more serious translation community. We did and more serious people got interested in Musumaker, though we still failed to recruit anybody. However then the miracle happened. The newly formed Luna Translations showed up and we agreed to join. We should be working on some title we never heard of before called Majo Koi Nikki and once it would be done, the entire team would move to Musumaker (spoiler: that never happened). Eventually RaurosFalls realized he is not in the VN community to translate a VN. He is in to translate Musumaker and moved back to working on Musumaker.

Now started a really interesting time because I worked on two titles at the same time. Luna was started with the goal of aiming really high regarding quality. Right from the start the workflow was prepared to be professionally with multiple steps, each to improve quality. Most noteworthy editing (which we had forgotten about for Musumaker). Witnessing the same text at each step and see how reading enjoyment improves significantly was really an eye opener. Sure it helped to work together with authors of work such as The Freditorial and re:Edit. The quality goal really was/is really high and as such the demand for quality from each contributor was equally high. Really important here is that the part translated by RaurosFalls passed quality inspection, which was good news for the translation quality of Musumaker.

The next event took me completely by surprise and it was something, which would change everything. MusumakerHD remake was released. This was great and horrible at the same time because I suddenly had to deal with a new engine and port/move the existing translation into the new format. This was a major task, but since I would have to generate a new file format anyway, I made the decision to abandon the old translation approach and develop a format, which allows using the workflow I encountered for Majo Koi Nikki. It was a lot of hard work and it seemed like the task took forever, but eventually it all worked out. None of the code I had written over the years could be reused and I had to start all over. The tools provided by HongFire only worked for the old engine. The only reused item from the pre-HD days are the translated lines themselves. We were still just two people, but eventually more would come and it's best to be prepared.

The collapse of Luna Translation meant the deal about getting more people went with it. However in very late 2017 I finally figured out how to recruit people. During 2018 the team has grown and grown and the team now consist of no less than 9 people, all aiming high on quality. This would however be more impressive if it would be 9 people working at the same time, but one step at a time. While there is more technical work to be done, I'm now spending more time on managing and coordinating other people. More than 50% has been translated by now, but more impressively is that RaurosFalls has personally translated more than 30k lines.

 

For a person who is unable to translate, edit or graphical work, I do think I left my footstep on the VN translation community anyway.

 

Life outside of VNs: now that's not a short or boring list, but I keep most of it to myself. I got accepted at the university of my choice in first attempt. Here I learned programming and other interesting stuff. One class I have had to take without really being my choice included project management and management of human resources. This has later turned out to be useful.

 

That's it for my introduction to the VN community. It might be somewhat longer than the average introduction, but not only did I wait way too long to write it, I have also been active, hence having a longer background story. Hopefully from now on, if I post something, nobody will go "who is that guy?".

Come to think of it, this might be the first introduction post, which mentions involvement in an already released translation.

Edited by tymmur
Minor clarification
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6 minutes ago, VirginSmasher said:

And you still have Luna Translations in your signature. :makina:

:pyaa: How did that happen??? It doesn't show up on my screen, but indeed when I edited my profile it was indeed there :huh:

I think it's gone now, but I wonder how it was hidden from me and if signatures from other people are missing as well.

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41 minutes ago, tymmur said:

I think it's gone now, but I wonder how it was hidden from me and if signatures from other people are missing as well.

You can disable all signatures from some setting...
But also disable certain person's signature by pressing the small "x" on the right top corner

Edited by Kiriririri
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I enjoyed reading your post.

Your story isn't truly a new one, as it shares some similarities to other fan translation groups (working on a project, member leaving/very few member available and group disbanding wise), but it shows one of the most important (if not the main) prerequisite for any fan translation project: the technical part. Without that, no matter how good you can be at reading japanese, your project will never fly off.

As always, programming skills are needed especially in this area, since we have no source code access for obvious reasons.

I feel kind of sad that your tools for the original musumaker got "wasted" and couldn't be utilized on the HD version, but that didn't stop you, which is great.

Also, kudos for your old timer RaurosFalls team member, 30k lines are no joke, especially considering that manga gamer themselves take a few years to translate that amount.

 

Looking forward the final release of this translation project of yours! Good luck out there!

Edited by きょうすけ
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6 hours ago, きょうすけ said:

As always, programming skills are needed especially in this area, since we have no source code access for obvious reasons.

Regarding Musumaker this is actually worse than first meets the eye because one of the really big problems is that if you just replace the Japanese text with English text the game will crash. I had to figure out a way to solve this problem and access to the source code most likely wouldn't help much because it's a question of getting the engine to do something it wasn't designed to do.

6 hours ago, きょうすけ said:

I feel kind of sad that your tools for the original musumaker got "wasted" and couldn't be utilized on the HD version

It's worse than that. All the tools made by other people have been "wasted" as well because they too have been aimed at a different engine. Also all the translation done by various people early on is gone and no longer used. Now it has all been redone to ensure quality. However nothing is wasted as such because without the old translation or tools, the translation would never have started in the first place. Also whenever I have started on a new tool to make the script (it's the 3rd right now), the first thing I did was to make a design to prevent repeating the same issues as the old one turned out to be. This mean even if the old tools aren't in use, the experienced gained from them has helped improve the current one.

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Fun facts about this thread:

  • Originally intended to be posted on the 1st, but I got posting backwards that day
  • It's genuinely my first thread
  • To the best of my knowledge, information in the first post is actually true despite being intended for the first of April
  • This thread made me realize my outdated signature. When asking around why nobody told me, everybody said they thought it was intentional nostalgia :huh:
  • I noticed the Leaderboard for the first time because this thread apparently made me win yesterday
  • I had way more fun writing and reading this thread than I expected
  • Nobody will ever read this because of a post 404 issue

 

EDIT: this is my 404th post. It spoils the joke a bit to point it out, but I didn't freeze my account to preserve the number. That would have prevented the weekly progress report for Musumaker.

Edited by tymmur
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8 hours ago, tymmur said:

Regarding Musumaker this is actually worse than first meets the eye because one of the really big problems is that if you just replace the Japanese text with English text the game will crash. I had to figure out a way to solve this problem and access to the source code most likely wouldn't help much because it's a question of getting the engine to do something it wasn't designed to do.

But you did it, didn't you? Which is another victory on your part.

Quote

It's worse than that. All the tools made by other people have been "wasted" as well because they too have been aimed at a different engine. Also all the translation done by various people early on is gone and no longer used. Now it has all been redone to ensure quality. However nothing is wasted as such because without the old translation or tools, the translation would never have started in the first place. Also whenever I have started on a new tool to make the script (it's the 3rd right now), the first thing I did was to make a design to prevent repeating the same issues as the old one turned out to be. This mean even if the old tools aren't in use, the experienced gained from them has helped improve the current one.

Absolutely. Nothing is totally lost, as the experience gained is yours forever and will only serves to improve your present and future projects.

Wish I had 1/10 of your programming knowledge.

 

Quote

Nobody will ever read this because of a post 404 issue

Can't stop laughing from this one.

Edited by きょうすけ
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I just remembered how the signature issue started. When Luna Translations died, I went to my account and instead of deleting, there was this "use signature" button. I figured I could just click that one and sure enough when I checked, my signature was gone. I didn't realize other people could see it and that I only removed it for myself.

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4 minutes ago, tymmur said:

I just remembered how the signature issue started. When Luna Translations died, I went to my account and instead of deleting, there was this "use signature" button. I figured I could just click that one and sure enough when I checked, my signature was gone. I didn't realize other people could see it and that I only removed it for myself.

Apparently it didn't want to leave you yet :P

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