Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

With the addition of Recca and Red Soul to our dynamic team, we at Dynamic Designs are no longer limited to English as our soul language expertise. These fine fellows both hail from other parts of our lovely world and English is not their native language of the areas in which they reside. It is in fact their second language. This means that our team is now primed and ready to handle translations involving other languages.

However, we aren't just limited to the languages of our core members. We are working behind the scenes on partnerships with other fine fellows to bring games we worked on to many more languages in the future. These may be core projects, joint projects or non-joint projects. Our interest is seeing that the entire world enjoys these games. To that end, we'd like to start taking the steps necessary to see that this occurs. I'm going to start working with some of our past releases to add new fonts that will have accent marks for foreign languages. Then we will work with fine trustworthy fellows to try and get these games into other languages.

For now, thanks to Recca, I'd like to announce Chrono Trigger Romanian as an official Dynamic Designs project and the first of what I hope are many fine things to come. This is a project Recca brought to us as he entered the group. It is already mostly complete with a few technical glitches to be worked out. We hope to be releasing this project to the world quite soon and thank Recca for bringing this project with him.

As a final note, please feel free to speak the native language of the project in that particular forum. I will also be modifying the main site in the next couple of days to add this project to our list of projects under Non-English translations just like the Forum. We look forward to the new avenues of game awareness this will bring to our Non-English speaking friends around the world.

Outstanding!!

Flawless Victory!
err.. I mean, great news!
I believe it is a great endeavor,
one that will create great opportunities
to spread our work to the confines
of the Earth.
Did I sound like a world conqueror there?
LOL

Great news, thanks Taskforce! Hopefully, this will help attract more people who share our passion in romhacking/translating, as well as vintage games and increase the popularity of D-D's projects. I also thought that I should add a bit of info about my CT project. Initially, I had actually started translating it to brush up on my Romanian grammar (I live in an English speaking country - Canada; which I moved to when I was very young). So in a way ironically, English was my first language and Romanian my second. Afterwards, after seeing the progress I made, I decided to pursue it to the end and to polish the script which I had translated about a year and a half ago. As Taskforce mentioned, there's some bugs in the patch which need to be cleared before it's released. This is currently being worked on now and hopefully won't take too long. Now, let us all pay homage to our Divine Emperor Red Soul! May he show us the way to salvation!

When Red Soul gets a spare moment *Pant* *Pant*, maybe you can inspire him to get going with a Portuguese translation of something. A good candidate would be the first game font TF fixes with "accents". Maybe you can be the emperor who gets RS actually working on a Portuguese version of the same game concurrently.

Collectively, we've looked at doing Mystic Ark, Villgust, Feda, and Burning Heroes. I already have a volunteer ready to handle BH French, and a different person has Silva Saga-II French well underway here... http://silvasaga2.blogspot.com/ This is being done by 4ph, a member of our forums. He has consented to let us build a project page and download link for it here at D-D when he gives the word. Notice 4ph has some diacritical markings already built into his font.

I see good things ahead going this direction. These Western ports should go fast because the menus are already built, and the debugging of the routines is accomplished. The only issues I see slowing anything down are graphic hacks here and there.

I too believe "localization" of our english patches, as it were, shouldn't take long since the system is very well in place.
I could even start with Silva Saga 2 since PH's table modifications worked wonderfully and all those dreadful diacritical markings display correctly.
I'm inclined to believe a french font and table is sufficient to create a Portuguese translation.

I think that would be a great start Red Soul, seeing as that was the project you're probably most familiar with. Also, it will take me a bit of time to get fonts into other games. Remember that I am not a Non-English speaker and all those needed accents are foreign to me. I don't know who needs what for which language. What is absolutely required and what isn't. Building them will take time on my part.

That leads me to a question for Bongo`. There are two ways to do accents for fonts. Most everyone considers the only way is to add them to the font tiles, however I do know of a clever way to do it that I've seen in other games that might be a better option if he wants to do the assembly hack(s).

That is to use the same font and modify the font display routine to add them where needed. Then you can either use a trigger byte for those symbols and/or use a separate table section for those symbols.

like
a=30
b=31
c=32
d=33
e=34

Then you can have

é=F034
ê=F134
ë=F234
è=F334

of

é=a0
ê=a1
ë=a2
è=a3

(this is just a very small snippet example. I know I didn't even cover all of the options for the one letter I chose)

and the font display routine would move above the character when it encounters this situation and add the accent above the letter (where there is space for this to happen)

As I've said. I've seen this in a few games in the past and it worked beautifully. However, the question is, what kind of work it would take to do it this way.

Would it be easier just to build a full graphic set of fonts or just the accents and let the display routine handle them.

How about showing the world a Portuguese graphic in SS-II using 4ph's font?

Yes, I know it takes time, don't worry buddy ^.^
It may be that with PHs help with tables, you might
even not need to worry about this at all.

I was waiting until we got SS2 released officially to fiddle with it
in the sense of translating it to portuguese, this might be the ideal
time.

Edit: its a good idea to take our times into prepping the tables or whatever is needed,
since it seems that the way to go would be creating a sort of universal table rather
than one geared towards, say, only portuguese. That way, Recca could easily work
on Romanian versions of the patches eventually.

I should have a picture here somewhere, I'll update the post
when I find it.
Heck, if you guys greenlight it, I could start working on the portuguese
version tonight haha.