Happy (late) new year!

Dear Citizens of Monopolis,

it's been a while! Work and the "end" of Corona caused my time to reach negative values last year. But i still managed to accomplish some goals, such as

- Creating a working GitHub Actions workflow/pipeline to automatically create xDelta patches
- Adding pre-xDelta-Patch-creation checks to the pipeline, which automatically checks various Regular Expression patterns on the whole English script
- Cleaning up the whole repository
- Adding some more missing translations

Overall 2023 wasn't a great year for this translation, and i don't know how much time i will be able to invest in 2024. But even a little progress is better than nothing!

One of the great things last year was Ethanol creating a Python tool to dump and rebuild PS2 ISOs, usable through the command line. A version that i am using can be found here:

https://github.com/Risae/Growlanser-6-English-Translation/blob/main/build/03-isotool/isotool.py

This is super useful and might help other people to start reverse engineering PS2 games!

Thanks to the super programmer and creator of the emulator Duckstation, Growlanser 5 and 6 now have a custom made graphics fix

https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/9187

This fix automatically activates once you play any version of Growlanser 5 and 6. Now, As far as i know, the only thing broken in both games is upscaling. Here's hoping that in the future the PCSX2 emulator will also support this. The character models in Growlanser 5 and 6 have a lot of detail that is only visible in higher resolutions.

A lot time and effort has been invested by the PCSX2 community to improve the built-in Debugger, and i have been closely monitoring that (since it makes my life so much easier). The debugger now supports

- Subsequent searches/next scan: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10260
- Save addresses and import/export them: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10518
- And hopefully soon automatically search for .mdebug and .sndata: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/10224

Recently 2 fan translations, which i have been following for some time, were finished:

- dotHack Link: https://dothacktranslate.wordpress.com/projects/hacklink-english-fan-translation/
- fate/Extra CCC: https://iwakuraproductions.wordpress.com/2023/12/08/fate-extra-ccc-english-patch-released/

Congratulations to both teams! I hope everybody will be able to enjoy those gems. And i still  hope that the teams will publish their tools - I would love to take a closer look at how fate/Extra CCC managed to handle the xboxhuge script of the game.

The Growlanser 1 translation, done by Poorchief and his team, also seems to be making progress. Here you can find a live-stream of cj iwakura playing the translation:

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZXx38OoNuYc?si=hzRj4CgH0Jz4xBNe

The spirit of fan translations has not died out, and i can't wait to see what the future holds.

Repository moved over to GitHub and other news

Dear Citizens of Monopolis,

after finally having some breathing room and time to focus on our Growlanser 6 translation i decided to move our Bitbucket repository over to Github. A lot of features, which are available only on Github but not Bitbucket, are very useful and it was time to do the switch. Our new GitHub repository is now available under: https://github.com/Risae/Growlanser-6-English-Translation

A few changes and fixes to the translation have also been implemented in the last few weeks, a lot of those thanks to our Super MIPS Hacker Ethanol! It is still a lot of work to provide a fully functional translation of Growlanser 6, but the end of the tunnel is slowly getting closer. Occasionally we will provide a "snapshot" of the current state of the translation as an xDelta patch on the GitHub repository. If you happen to test this version and find any issues like

- Translation is wrong/typos
- Japanese text has not been translated
- Or just general issues that you experience

please open an issue on our GitHub repository!

Aside from that i have been working on improving the Growlanser 5 and 6 Toolkit. It is now possible to merge a japanese and english script of Growlanser 5 (and 6, probably). But it's not fully functional - in quite a few english GL5 scripts there are more entries present than the original Japanese version, so its not working for all of them. But i'm working on  finding a simple solution to that.

As always, thanks a lot for the support and encouragement from the Growlanser community. With the translation being fully open source everyone can look and check out our translation - and as such we are open to pull requests.

And, on another note related to Growlanser:

A vtuber seems to have stumbled across Growlanser, and the english translation of the video got more than 150.000 views!

Any advertisement is good advertisement, so here's hoping it will help ignite the flame of curiosity for a new generation of Growlanser fans.

Growlanser 5 & 6 Toolkit and happy new year!

Dear Citizens of Monopolis,

during the translation of Growlanser 6 i tried to gather as much information about the game as possible. Whether it be a simple manual or a game guide, as long as it can help our translators better understanding the World of Growlanser 5/6 then it will be useful.
Since Growlanser 5 was already translated to english, it is also important that we (the GL6 translators) keep consistency with various words that are used in both Growlanser 5 and 6. One example of this would be the character names from Growlanser 5 (since 6 is a direct sequel).
So, a few months ago i started to create "combined" Growlanser 5 Japanese + English script files.
Using those files we are able to quickly search for a japanese word and find its english original english translation.
But this was a lot of manual labor, and i'm not finished at all with the scripts. I definitely need to automate this process and, thanks to my new position at Monopolis Corp., i learned a little bit of Python programming.
So, using my newfound Python skills i started to work on a "Growlanser 5 / 6 Toolkit" and already made a little bit of progress:

https://github.com/Risae/Growlanser-5-6-Toolkit

I'm a complete novice when it comes to programming in general, so i doubt that my code is anything but good looking or efficient.
But i pretty much want to create a tool that is able to do all those things that i can do manually, with little to no manual input, and for anybody to use in the future. The program currently only works in windows (...at least i think it does...) and it includes the following 3rd party applications in order to work "out of the box":

- abcde
- Strawberry Perl Portable (for abcde)
- Python 3.10.1 embed
- quickBMS

Currently the Toolkit is able to

- Automatically convert "raw" Growlanser 5 and 6 Script files (.SCEN/.SCEC/.SDMY/.STXT) into actual script files that can be used by abcde's Atlas (including dumping options)
- Dump the Bytecode of Growlanser 6 Script files

Here are some of the things that i will try to implement in the future:

- Combine 2 dumped scripts into one script (combined GL5 JPN + ENG Script)
- Dump/Reinsertion of a games "GLX_XXXX.DAT" file
- Somehow transfer the character names and other text box information of the Bytecode directly into script file
- Hopefully be able to create a GUI in which you can work on script files, just like the Fate Extra CCC guys have it
- And other stuff that i will maybe find useful

Aside from that lots of stuff has been accomplished this year, with the most notable thing being the creation of a simple buildbot (+ the xDelta patch) and being able to subtitle Growlanser 5 and 6 ingame movies.
There is still a lot of work to do like fixing the VWF Code, translating & editing various scripts and images and adding subs to the movies. But, as far as i can tell, we made good progress.

A big Thank You to everybody that made the Growlanser 6 Translation possible - especially Mako, Ethanol and Haruka!

Enjoy the beginning of the new year, and hopefully one day we will see a remake of Growlanser!

Buildbot now automatically creates xDelta patches

Dear citizens of Monopolis,

Over last few days i have been searching for ways to automate the Xpert2 ISO dumping and rebuilding process.
This was the only thing i couldn't automate using a CLI, since Xpert2 only supports a GUI.
I asked around a few Discord servers and it doesn't seem like there currently exists a tool that lets you use a command line to dump and rebuild a PS2 ISO.
So, yesterday i found this neat little tool:

https://github.com/npocmaka/batch.scripts/blob/master/hybrids/.net/c/mouse.bat

With this i was able to add mouse movement & clicks to my batch file (which does all of the compiling and stuff).
After a bit of testing everything seems to work flawlessly - After the files are compiled (using quickBMS and abcde) Xpert2 is automatically started and the script interacts with the GUI.
The Buildbot xDelta patch can be found here:

https://bitbucket.org/Risae/growlanser-6-english-translation/downloads/

And here's the updated Buildbot script for anybody interested:

https://pastebin.com/raw/YGbBsbzq

xDelta (work-in-progress) Patch now available

Dear citizens of Monopolis,

recently i was researching again on ways to more easily provide translation patches, instead of translated game files like we do right now.
I came across a Github project called "xdelta3-gui-2.0" by Moodkiller:

https://github.com/Moodkiller/xdelta3-gui-2.0

Using this neat little tool i was able to create a working xDelta patch, which supported the rebuild ISO from Xpert2.
The xDelta patch is (currently) only about 1.7 MB in size and that is pretty awesome.
And, it supports patching on Linux and Mac out of the box!
You can find a very recent xDelta patch in the downloads section of our repository:

https://bitbucket.org/Risae/growlanser-6-english-translation/downloads/

I sadly didn't find an easy to automate the dumping and rebuilding process of the ISO yet.
I will periodically update the xDelta patch with the latest repository files.
If anyone has experience with automating/testing GUI Software/Apps then kindly visit us on our Discord Server.

Steps on how to patch your Growlanser 6 ISO:

1. Download the xDelta Patch from our repository
2. Unzip/Unrar the downloaded file "Growlanser_6_English_xDelta_Patch_XX.XX.20XX.rar" in a new folder
3. Put your Growlanser 6 ISO into the same folder
4. Rename your Growlanser 6 ISO to the following (so the patching script is able to find the ISO): Growlanser 6 Precarious World.iso
5. Run (on Windows) "3.Apply Patch-Windows.bat"
6. There is a new ISO called "Growlanser VI Precarious World English Patched.ISO" which you can use to play the game in english.

Should you play the translated ISO and find any text issues or bugs then kindly let us know in our Discord server!