HTLS: Turn-based open world Wuxia RPG

[ArcaneLurker]

Heroic Outlaw?

[rusty_shackleford]

taiwan's obsession with being different from china is ******* me hard

[Lhynn]

I have long been upset that English lacks a proper term for the Robin Hood archetype, this project has reminded me of that.

Takes from the rich to give the poor? ...
Socialist?

Oh, wait, the rich are stealing from the poor in the first place...
Hmm
Oh, I know
Anti-semite!

[Acrux]

English lacks a proper term for the Robin Hood archetype

A cool guy who I would like to be my friend

[rusty_shackleford]

For posterity:

The first ability you get is 野球拳(yě qiú quán), literally 'wild ball fist'/'baseball fist'. It's inherited from the original 1996 Heroes of Jin Yong game. It's a reference to Yakyuken, japanese strip rock-paper-scissors, and also a reference to 1990s H-games.
I have absolutely no idea how to translate this and keep any of the reference intact.

[edit]
Going to store terms here I've translated but am not committed to. Either because I'm unsure, needs review, or I just don't like how it came out and I gave up until later.

• 乾坤共济大法(Qiánkūn Gòngjì Dàfǎ) — Supreme Technique of Cosmic Harmony

[ArcaneLurker]

For posterity:

The first ability you get is 野球拳(yě qiú quán), literally 'wild ball fist'/'baseball fist'. It's inherited from the original 1996 Heroes of Jin Yong game. It's a reference to Yakyuken, japanese strip rock-paper-scissors, and also a reference to 1990s H-games.
I have absolutely no idea how to translate this and keep any of the reference intact.

I had an odd feeling it was related to janken. Something about the animation.

[rusty_shackleford]

Not quite sure when 0.2 will release, but it should be !!EVEN HIGHER QUALITY!!
Glossary is at over 100 words/phrases now. Translating 250 lines at a time, checking for any errors, updating prompt and adding glossary items. It's an iterative process.

[rusty_shackleford]

Realized that the AI wasn't getting enough context for cutscene-related dialogue, going to have to parse the cutscenes and stitch them together

[rusty_shackleford]

I bet it would be easier to report errors if you could just hit a button and all strings on the screen are logged to a file

also need to separate out all the HTLS-specific stuff. I suspect even most of my glossary will carry over to other games, and my glossary is getting yuge.

[rusty_shackleford]

弼马温 — Bìmǎwēn, It's used exactly once in the script. I can't figure out a good way to translate this in context without sounding really awkward because it's such a specific term. Its literal translation is borderline nonsense, checking various dictionaries suggests it's a homophone for another term. The definition is the official position for Sun Wukong in Journey to the West — the monkey(yes, specifically had to be a monkey) who ****** in the food for the horses because it kept them from getting diseases. As you can see, that's not something that translates well…

[rusty_shackleford]

My current idea for how to handle the name placeholders is hooking the method that replaces them in the game files to leave it as-is, let the autotranslator plugin translate the text
will have to extend the autotranslator to add some hooks to customize a string via callback before a translation is applied, and mark whether a string should be cached or not

next translation update will probably be dialogue only, I'll just merge the output files on top of the existing translation to overwrite them but keep everything else. I'll move onto the other stuff after.

[rusty_shackleford]

Thought of a way to greatly speed this up by having the AI judge the translation on a scale of 1-10 in terms of how much it needs a manual review
:weeb:

Probably need to tweak it a bit but it's already flagging stuff that I'd have to find via manual review, so…

[rusty_shackleford]

Selection_021.webp

[rusty_shackleford]

The full script is going to come in at about ~700-800k words. Not quite TToN-tier, but it's significantly bigger than I would have guessed.

[rusty_shackleford]

Dialogue for 0.2 is 'finished'. Every single line of dialogue was redone. All of it had to be thrown out because so much was generated with low context or when I didn't know what I was doing.

There's 579 lines marked 5 or higher by the AI, 150 at 7 or higher, and 10 at 9 or above.
I need to work on integrating the 0.1 content in with this, other than the quest descriptions which I'll probably generate again to improve them.

I have the export(exports from my local tolgee instance -> compiles into single XUnity txt file) working, got all the dialogue in the game, stomped on the code that replaces the {name} templates but I still need to handle it on the English side.

I want to wrap this up and move back to working on ModHQ, this helped kill my programming burnout I think, at least.

[edit]

Decided to just pull in the existing non-dialogue translations I had already. The game is 'playable', but there are untranslated things that need special case handling. I'd say about 99% of the game, and 80% of the UI, is translated. I'd be fine releasing this as a beta version once I fix the name issue.

[rusty_shackleford]

The token god demands more tokens

If you were curious what

Every single line of dialogue was redone.

means:

Selection_022.webp

[rusty_shackleford]

0.2 released
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3444-english-***** ... -tu-lo-shu

0.2 uploaded. I'd consider this the beta for the final version. I'd say it's playable start to finish. Various UI elements will be untanslated(I'd guess about 10-15%). Consistency issues between stuff, and so forth.

TLDR is dialogue has been completely redone and is probably nearly on-par with a high quality professional translation. I'm aware there are still some issues, but there should be significantly less. I went thru a lot of trouble to make the translation as 'authentic' to the source material as possible.

---

Only the dialogue has been redone. I'm aware there are various inconsistencies between the rest of the text(skill descriptions, quest descriptions, item names/descriptions, etc.,) Additionally, because the intent is rely on zero runtime auto-translation, there are now untranslated parts of the UI I need to hunt down and fix.
Names are also using their old translation pass and have not been re-generated… yet.

HTLS Tweaks is also included as it's a required part of the mod. It's required for the translation to work, I was going to release it separately but meh. It includes various stuff like battle speed increase(1.5x by default), jumping in shallow water, allowing you to remove skills from your hotbar and so forth. It also sorts saves by most recent when loading. and limits the FPS when in the background. Some of this can be changed in the config file.

If your character's name shows up as chinkrunes, it means you need to add a translation for it. You can go to the Translation/en/Text/ directory and add to Name.txt, there's already one there for the default name. You want to do all 3 — Surname, Name, Surname Name. Chinese do surname first then name. Just look at the one there for the default name to understand it.

The AI translator still exists as its own plugin until I move the rest of the hooks into the tweaks and it gets removed.

Also, I'm aware the UI sizes are still borked. I'll fix it eventually.

If you guys want to play it now, the only thing I'm looking for reports on is dialogue issues & untranslated UI elements.

[rusty_shackleford]

0.3 released. If you're considering playing this, it's in a fine state now.
viewtopic.php?t=3444-english-translatio ... -tu-lo-shu

0.3 uploaded, all quest text redone, all item names & descriptions redone, various UI fixes.
If you want to play it now I'd say go ahead, you'll find only minor issues.
Note that translations created 'on the fly' via regex will take a moment to translate properly, but will be cached after that. When I release a 1.0 version I'll just include a full primed cache with it.

0.4 will be redoing NPC names, 0.4 or 0.5 will be skills, martial arts, and insights pass. After that, 1.0 should just be translating the endings + fixing up any issues discovered.

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm so far past sunk cost that I just want to get this finished btw.

[rusty_shackleford]

Minor dialogue sample if you were curious at how the dialogue reads:








No manual touchup to it, just dialogue that was on an NPC infront of me when I loaded my game.

[rusty_shackleford]

Need to do a passthru to find any translations missing their surrounding brackets【】

[rusty_shackleford]

I had someone tell me that other people asked(…) if I could post some samples of the translation, so here's the intro

None of this has been manually touched up beyond what I've done via proooompting.

[edit]
The reason you see brief chinese popup then turn to English is because it takes a moment for the regex to process the string, if it had a full cache there'd be no chinese. It's not live translating it or anything.

[rusty_shackleford]

While fixing the names of forged items not being translated I discovered that certain material combinations create unique items. The couple I investigated seemed to require your character to be told about it, but I don't know if that holds true for all of them.

[rusty_shackleford]

Need to do a passthru to find any translations missing their surrounding brackets【】

also fixed this, it was ~3000 lines, I messed up the brace replacement code when translating(I strip them off because it tends to mess up the AI)

[just]

appreciate all the work
played htls long time ago but dropped it
i think it's time to go at it again

[rusty_shackleford]

posting this here before I delete it and forget

► Show Spoiler

J2 1.33 stc_026.webp

[Tween nazis and fags]

Could someone either point to a torrent tracker that has the latest version of the game, or just upload your steam folder somewhere? I can remove Steam DRM myself.

[Vergil]

Does this game have uh "danmei" (耽美) elements?

[ArcaneLurker]

I'm supposed to get what?

If they're the poisons, I have two of them, shouldn't they be green?

[rusty_shackleford]

I took a break because I burned myself out while translating it, a bunch of updates to the model I was using for translating have came out since then(including being much cheaper.) I'll probably get back to this to finish it up at some point, as I want to complete the game.