Well, a year later and I finally got around to hunting down and patching the elusive Japanese bug, mainly thanks to an ePSXe save state sent to me by the Vedge. This confirmed that MAGROM had been the problem and I reworked that. Replaying pieces of the game I'm still kind of embarassed by how choppy alot of the dialog is, but I'm no editor (and BARELY a translator, thanks to some study, 3 dictionaries and some software). The fixed patch is available from the menu. I recommend using a fresh copy of the ISO given the way the PPF patch process works.
I do have a sort-of solution to the movie patch. Firstly, I'm not using any form of P2P to distribute the patch. Don't like the technology, don't use it, and there's no chance of convincing me otherwise. If someone is willing to host the file, contact me and we can make arrangements. The alternative isn't great, but what I had envisioned is a sort of library system for the movie patch. So that I'm not taking any money for this effort, I'll ship out up to 5 copies of a CD with the patch at my cost (domestic only, sorry). By asking for the CD, you're agreeing that if I'm asked for another copy of the patch, you'll forward the CD at your cost. And the cycle continues...
It's been a month since my last progress report, but the time has finally arrived. The 100% Beta patch will be available shortly, once I've completed packaging. I finished the edit just after 9PM tonight and the patch is generating as I type. Please refer to the README in the package for instructions as well as information on the movie patch.
Also on the menu (in a few days at least) will be the Players Guide. I've still got some work to do, but it's pretty much intact now. Hopefully within a week I'll have it ready for public consumption.
Not much of an update, as I'm in the middle (almost exactly, percentage-wise) of the edit. I've got a couple of Anna's date files and the full string of month files to go. I wanted to get the side-events done first, so once I start the month files, I'll go from start to finish, hopefully making for a more consistent feeling story. I'll hopefully be into the months by the first part of next week. Depends on how much I get done tomorrow on Anna's remaining files.
I've gotten the menu graphics cleared up too, so those kanji "shadows" that were in a slightly different color of black. They look great now. Of course, I need to make sure they match the in-game text too. So much clean up... :-)
I've posted this in a few places, but can anyone can help me identify this? Is it a game? Is it anime? These are just stunning.
The other thing that's been side-tracking me is the player's guide. I've been doing some of the strategies as I've been working on the main girl's dates. For a little entertainment, here's a couple graphics from what will be the guide. These are scans from the art book, with a little correction courtesy of Microsoft Image Composer.
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Not quite there, but it can't get much closer...
Now the bugger. I created a new PPF just for giggles to get an estimate on the size. 476 Meg. That's not a typo. 476 Meg. Compressed in RAR still comes in at 182 Meg. I was figuring earlier to release a text patch and a seperate movie patch. At this rate, it looks like the movies have to be distributed in chunks. That, or this patch goes out on CD. I can't imagine anyone wanting to put up the bandwidth for that.
I've also started some preliminary work on the guide. I'm playing with the format at the moment, so I don't have much (read: no) content. More on that when I get there...
I'd like to also take this opportunity to say that because I'm trying to be very true to the original, there's some stuff in here that's, shall we say, questionable. One sub-girl, Ayumi, is a "Shotokon". The dictionary didn't help, so I pasted the kana into Google and found a Japanese dictionary page. Turns out that word means someone who's into boys... I translated her script today and yeesh it was giving me the willies.
90.2%... Wow, for some reason I'm just screaming through the script now. I'm down to 12 files: the last 5 months of story, 5 subgirls, and the mysterious "MAGROM" file that I'm probably going to do last. I'm skimmed it and can't figure out where it's supposed to fit in. For a change, I switched up a few pictures in the screenshots area.
I received the translated movies on Sunday and I'll get those subtitled soon. The bugger is that I'm still having trouble figuring out how to insert them. It's got to be because they're streaming, because besides the sector information, there's an additional 16 bytes that for some reason I'm having trouble working around. On top of that, I can't seem to reproduce files of the same size. I'm hoping that I can just pad the end with nulls, but we'll have to see...
The game plan at the moment is to finish up the translation, take some time to try to figure out the movie insertion, subtitle the movies, then do the text editing, giving me some time to digest it. Some of the things I know now are really going to clean up earlier translations that I was a little skittish about.
Also, I haven't said as much publicly, but I'd like to thank everyone who's taken time to write me and compliment my work. More than wanting to get it done, I want it to be good. I hope that the final product measures up to the feedback I've gotten so far on the unfinished work.
Since I haven't done much playtesting the new text, I'm not putting out a patch just yet, but I hit 82.4% text inserted today. All the main girls are complete now, as are 6 of the 12 subgirls. I'm not sure how much I'll get done this week. We're having a tree removed from our yard on Wednesday and my Mother-in-Law probably will want us over at their place on the 4th.
I do have a buyer on the extra copy of Bloody Bride I picked up on Yahoo Japan. I'm expecting that to arrive by the end of the week (I hope, the holiday may change that). If there's interest in picking copies up of Yahoo Japan, where there usually are 1 or 2 copies on any given day, please let or know. Perfect example is one copy I saw this week on YJ for 100 yen. We're talking $1.00 and change here.
The other thing is I added the Artifacts link on the menu to show some of the non-game things we've got for Bloody Bride. I thought I won a guide book off Yahoo Japan. Turns out it was two of them.
It's alpha and it's still pretty Engrishy, but if you're game, so am I! To celebrate hitting the 2/3 mark, see here for the patch v.69 Alpha. It's text only, but hey, that's most of what I've done anyway.
Also since there's been some confusion, when I say that my wife imports alot of stuff from Japan, I'm basing the shipping on her experience dealing with deputy services and sellers who don't ship internationally.
To this extent, I'm going to help. I've won an auction to get the players guide (we already have the art book). I figured while I was getting that sent, I'd bite the bullet and get a cheap copy of the game at the same time to combine shipping. Unless something happens to my bid, I'll have an extra copy of the game that I'll make available for my cost plus shipping to the buyer. I just want to see some other people get to play this little beauty. :-)
I'll update more on this when I get the items and make sure that they're working. For those who don't know, the game itself (when complete) comes with a sticker sheet, mini-CD of voice outtakes and an ad for the player's guide.
Couple of things. One, I'm at 61.3%, which represents the story and date text. I've also got 4 of the movie files subtitled. Not sure how I want to put their text to the website, or even if I will. Anyway, that's a far more time consuming process than the text, simply because I'm not used to listening to Japanese and actually making sense out of it. I know a few words, but I'm only going to fiddle with them when I need a break from the text.
Secondly, I added a link to Yahoo Japan's auction site to search for Bloody Bride items. My wife does a good amount of business purchasing animation cels from Japan and is willing to help anyone wanting to try to win a copy of the game from Yahoo Japan. Please understand, the shipping is going to be high, as she works with a few deputy services. The seller will ship the item to the deputy and then the deputy sends it here. My wife says that from experience, the combined shipping on video game CDs runs around $20, and that's on top of the winning bid and possible deputy service charges. If you're still interested, she can be contacted .