A couple o' questions...

[MorteTheSkull]

Then again, without cencorship we wouldn't have gotten such memorable phrases as "you spoony bard!" and "son of a submariner!" lol

[-Steve-]

and if I'm playing and suddenly a parent walks into the room and such...

How old are you? 9?

[PGN-X]

lol probably, shucks i didn't think cussing in games was that big of a deal, if you don't want to get caught playing a game with cussing in it then don't play it, as simple as that. Don't have a cry because Dejap puts cussing in there translations

[grinvader]

Like in tales of phantasia, when they are on the ship, arche screaming clesses name, there is nothing else that really fits.

The original thing is even more hardcore. Dejap really smoothed it out.

Oh well. I'll go through the PSX version once to see if Namco changed it or if they kept it.

[Tomato]

Actually, from what I've been told, the ship scene is tamer in the SFC script but raunchier in the PSX script. They chose to use the PSX version of that dialogue for a variety of reasons that I can't recall at the moment.

[grinvader]

Ah, thanks for correcting me.

[-Steve-]

They chose to use the PSX version of that dialogue for a variety of reasons that I can't recall at the moment.

The amusement of the general public? The best line in that whole game (ToP) is when Klarth is talking to Cless about the two girls... right before the drunken moaning of Arche, actually.

"Mint has that elegant style to her, but I bet Arche ****s like a tiger!"

lol, I laughed my ass off.

[DarkDragoon]

You don't have to censor "fuck" out, you know.


Hmm, speaking of that line, if the game ever came over, I wonder what that line would be altered to...

"but I bet Arche parties like an animal" perhaps?

[grinvader]

More like "but Arche cooks the best, nay ?"

Localisation...

[Agozer]

More like "but Arche cooks the best, nay ?"

Localisation...

In it's evilest form. Well, not really. I'm sure some things are more evil.

[Cidolfas]

Yes, that line would probably be changed beyond recognition... and in my opinion it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, considering that if they left it in, they'd have to deal with so much bad press/ratings that the sales simply wouldn't be worth the trouble of localization. Considering that the rest of the game can easily appeal to ten-year-olds, bickering over one or two lines just wouldn't be worth the while of any company.

[-Steve-]

You don't have to censor "fuck" out, you know.

I was just being nice to the author of the topic

[adventure_of_link]

I think we here in the US are much more anal about censoring nudity/penis/vagina, the whole works moreso than Japan.

Well sadly we have to care aboot the little kids that may either intentionally or accidentally sneak a peek at the particular program. Now, as for e-porn and movies (the ones you buy on VHS and DVD), nudity is allowed in those, yes, even the genitals.

[Jenia]

<sigh> for pete's sake,-Steve-,if I hate cussing it doesn't mean I'm a tiny kid!
I'm 15,I just don't like that kind of stuff...
also,I do not see the problem of making a censored version of each translation.
it should take less than an hour.

[Agozer]

also,I do not see the problem of making a censored version of each translation.
it should take less than an hour.

If you can do it, my all means do so, but I don't think DeJap will bother making censored versions.

[ThunderClaw]

also,I do not see the problem of making a censored version of each translation.
it should take less than an hour.

I'm not so sure you understand exactly how mentally taxing romhacking can be. Even with GUI-enhanced tools (that you must write yourself), a translator must pick through the script BY HAND and manually rewrite every line within certain limitations such as compression. Oddly enough, the string "This water is cold" may fit in an area, whereas the string "Geez, frigid water" may not, even though it's shorter! The SNES uses a variety of different compression techniques that can take common words such as 'This' 'cold', and the like and compress them down to one byte of data, whereas uncompressed each letter would take up one byte.

Also, there's no efficient way to check your work. Aside from the fact that you're tracing through hexidecimal code, you have no assurance whatsoever that the strings you just changed are well and truly got every single sexual refrence and watered it down. You got the boat scene, and the elven village, but what happens when someone happens to trip across a refrence you missed? At best, they calmly tell you and you're looking at another dive into the hex, and at worst, they flame you, which is annoying, and you're still looking at another dive.

Romhacking projects aren't something you spend an hour on and call it good. They're ongoing, brutal sons-of-bitches, but also one of the most rewarding forms of reverse-engineering out there.

[Cebu]

also,I do not see the problem of making a censored version of each translation.
it should take less than an hour.

I'm not so sure you understand exactly how mentally taxing romhacking can be. Even with GUI-enhanced tools (that you must write yourself), a translator must pick through the script BY HAND and manually rewrite every line within certain limitations such as compression. Oddly enough, the string "This water is cold" may fit in an area, whereas the string "Geez, frigid water" may not, even though it's shorter! The SNES uses a variety of different compression techniques that can take common words such as 'This' 'cold', and the like and compress them down to one byte of data, whereas uncompressed each letter would take up one byte.

It seems like a "quick and dirty" censorship approach might not take that long. Though changing sentence structure would require an incredible amount of work, it would seem that replacing all characters of "unacceptable" words except for the first and last letter would probably suffice.

Once the initial run through of modifying the script to prepare for insertion is done, it doesn't seem like it would be incredibly difficult to do a quick replace of all the words in the list.

If a word is used often enough to be stored in a lookup table, censoring it becomes even easier than if it's stored directly in each string, since it would require changing it in only one place.

As a fictional example, if a user is offended by elephants, changing a sentence from "You smell like an elephant" to "You smell like an e******t" shouldn't require anywhere near as much work as making a more major change to the sentence.

To relate to other forms of entertainment, a very large number of CDs with explicit lyrics are also available in censored form for distribution in certain stores (ie: Walmart is one that comes to mind), or are censored for radio. Though altering a fraction of a second of audio isn't going to remove the context, it's enough to satisfy most people. Similarly, I think that there may be some merit to the idea of doing simple forms of censorship for some translations.

Romhacking projects aren't something you spend an hour on and call it good. They're ongoing, brutal sons-of-bitches, but also one of the most rewarding forms of reverse-engineering out there.

No one is saying that you can finish a romhacking project in an hour. Like many areas of computing, though, an extra hour (or several hours) to improve the user experience for a sizeable portion of your user base can make a project even more rewarding.


And now I'll go completely off the deep end with a somewhat wild idea:

Then again, it might also be possible to develop a graphical filter that incorporates an OCR engine to do something similar. (Admittedly, it would likely take a year or more to develop, though I imagine using one of the various GPL-based OCR packages as a basis might speed that slightly).

Taking the idea a step further, if you have an OCR engine that can recogonize foreign characters, and an available open source translation library, it would then be possible to produce a dynamically generated translation (though admittedly it would be on the level of what you'd get from something like babelfish).

I've given some thought to what would be required on the image processing side and it seems like all this could be done in a relatively short period of time (if you can think of several years as a short period of time in the long run).

Here's the largest problem that I can think of in producing this type of system, and working around it would require some assumptions about the nature of the image itself:
The new text may or may not fit in the same amount of space as the old text.

With most text in console games (nowhere near all, but a significant portion), text is displayed in a solid color on a solid color background. In many SNES games, it's even displayed on a separate layer. If you can idenifty larger areas of solid color that contain text (or layers that appear to contain nothing but text), the job becomes much easier.

Assuming that you can identify a region of the screen that contains text of a certain size with a solid background, it should be possible to use a font library capable of handling vector-based fonts (ie: TTF) to generate replacement text that will fit within the original area. With an SNES game as an example, if you are applying this text replacement filter in conjunction with an upsampling algorithm, you should be able to produce readable text, since you'd wind up with a pixel area that's actually much larger than the size of the original text area.

The next largest problem would be that doing all this in real-time would likely require large amounts of processing power. Though techniques such as buffering previously processed text areas in texture memory might help to alleviate the problem, that may not be enough in and of itself. With that in mind, it's possible that not only would this type of project take several years to complete, it might also take that long for hardware to catch up to the point where it becomes usable.

[rage46]

Use a hex editor and do it yourself. Then when you give up after two weeks tell me so I can laugh at you. I tried it and it is friggin hard and takes some skill, which is why Dejap has my respect for translating a myriad of games.

[badinsults]

Stupid. If you can't handle certain words, then you will not last in the real world. Everybody swears.