Pirate localization. How it was
It just so happened that I happened to stand, one might say, at the origins of the so-called "pirate localization" of games in the territory of the former USSR. Many scold her, many are accustomed to and take this phenomenon for granted. I will try to tell how it all began and briefly share my considerable experience.
So, it was raining outside the window, and the calendar was counting 1991 ... For the
next few years, you can run without going into details, but you cannot completely forget about them.
ZX Spectrum, Z80 assembler, several cassettes of games with games adapted to floppy disks with the proud signature “Disked by Microspace”, demo scene, nights in assembler printouts of offal toys and demo loaders, development of some system programs. Communication with other groups through preloaders. Where are you now?
Finally, Spectrum is set aside, with gratitude and some regret.
The first project I came across on PC was “Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars”. After a week of picking in exe'shnik, I managed to understand how the game works. And the two of us, with a friend, started the translation. The translation was done with love, the game scenes adapted to the Russian language and I hope that the first users liked the result.
So why are pirated translations so clumsy?
Case put on stream. The translation term is literally limited to a few days.
The usual scheme - the programmer gets the game to work, pulls out the texts and gives for translation. The crowd of translators, even without seeing the game in the eye, translates the texts and returns them in a day, a maximum of two. After that, the game is assembled and, if you're lucky and the first time everything starts, the most terrible "mistakes" are corrected. At first, we were lying under the table seeing the masterpieces of translation. The “Message Log” in Diablo, the “Starburst Transmission” in the machine settings in a race, and many more. About the fact that female and male dialogues were constantly confused, I generally am silent. As a result, as soon as the game begins to work more or less, a still warm “body” is torn out of hands and sent into circulation.
In the late 90s, the Internet was still an expensive novelty, and everything was transported on disks. In the morning, the courier, who is also a tester part-time, met a train and picked up a pack of disks waiting for localization. In the evening, usually with a 9-hour train, everything that was ready was sent to the publisher - in circulation. So we usually got home deep after midnight.
Work on toys gave a huge knowledge base - I had to understand the self-made compressors, cryptographic systems, the structure of the resources of game archives. It has already reached the elements of the “matrix” - look, there is a packed picture, here the texts are clearly crypted, and here clearly some garbage is not worth attention. Still, it was nothing compared to when we started localizing the PlayStation (PSX}.
That's where the developers perverted in full. They tried to squeeze the maximum out of a small piece of iron, and therefore the interiors of the games were made “terribly” from the point of view of an external localizer. Textures are mixed into one graphic page which is loaded in video memory in a block. Text blocks are repeated for each level. All data was compiled in advance to static addresses, so there was no question of any excesses in the size of the original text. (Many probably know abbreviations such as “Vykh.”, “Zagr” and others.) Much worse was the case with fonts. The letters were scattered throughout the texture page, so the artist assembled a puzzle to redraw Russian letters on top. Often the letters were simply not enough and had to sacrifice the rarely used letters of the Russian language. I still remember the translator’s hysteria - “Someone
But still, the worst thing is the games of Japanese developers. The localization of these projects has become a real headache. It seems to be a game in English, but inside you feel the logic alien to our person. Sometimes it seems that the Japanese pay extra for each "perversion" used in the project. Otherwise, tell me why embed three different self-written compressors in one game, and it often happens that the unpacked file takes up less space than the packed one? Or do a few text encodings. We even went to the phrase, "So that you get a game, but in a more Japanese way."
Solving the text encoding in such games is worse than the dancing people in Sherlock Holmes. For example, how do you like the text encoding where the code 0x95 means that it is the 9th letter horizontally and the 5th letter vertically in the font texture? How are fonts formed in the Japanese? Very interesting - all the text is run through the program and the letters that are there are taken out into the font. This is still a good option. Worse when the subtitles - drove a couple of words, and in the texture only 15-20 letters. How to localize it? But they did. Although long and painful.
It seemed that after PSX there was no reason at all, but the era of Playstation 2 came. There, to all other charms, new texture formats were added - the so-called swizzle - when the pixels were twisted into something indigestible and to convert it all to a normal linear form, you need a special algorithm. But for the console, this is the native video memory format, with which everything works fine and quickly. For a long time, we tried to disassemble it ... And we collected them pixel by pixel in Photoshop trying to find the logic, and by exhaustive search - everything did not go. Once we managed to find the "leaked" documentation from the SDK - the addressing of the video memory was described there. And lo and behold! Things have gone.
Another platform, undeservedly forgotten by people Sega Dreamcast. At the time of her appearance, she simply tore all existing games for the quality of the graphics. Unfortunately, less than a year later she was replaced by Playstation 2 and forgot about the console.
Xbox is an ordinary PC in a beautiful box. In principle, nothing special was different, but stretched out a year or two.
A few years later, we were allowed to dig into the Xbox360 (Shhhh ... I didn't say anything).
For some time, the need for translations for the PSP surfaced, but thanks to the development of the Internet, localization has become unprofitable, because everything has spread all over the place.
Nintendo Game Boy, an old man of handheld consoles, strangely enough held his position for quite some time - and still people are played all over the world.
Time does not stand still, large publishers entered the Russian market who began to make a sufficiently high-quality translation at affordable prices for users. With the development of the Internet, downloading a game with a good translation from an official publisher has become very simple, and this marked the beginning of the decay of pirate localization.
Personally, I left this industry a few years ago and, in principle, I do not regret it. Although the experience gained over the years may be interesting to others. Therefore, if there are those who want to know the details, I can try to make a series of articles on the topic of localization. Consider the main problems and mistakes made by developers to this day.
So, it was raining outside the window, and the calendar was counting 1991 ... For the
next few years, you can run without going into details, but you cannot completely forget about them.
ZX Spectrum, Z80 assembler, several cassettes of games with games adapted to floppy disks with the proud signature “Disked by Microspace”, demo scene, nights in assembler printouts of offal toys and demo loaders, development of some system programs. Communication with other groups through preloaders. Where are you now?
Finally, Spectrum is set aside, with gratitude and some regret.
The first project I came across on PC was “Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars”. After a week of picking in exe'shnik, I managed to understand how the game works. And the two of us, with a friend, started the translation. The translation was done with love, the game scenes adapted to the Russian language and I hope that the first users liked the result.
So why are pirated translations so clumsy?
Case put on stream. The translation term is literally limited to a few days.
The usual scheme - the programmer gets the game to work, pulls out the texts and gives for translation. The crowd of translators, even without seeing the game in the eye, translates the texts and returns them in a day, a maximum of two. After that, the game is assembled and, if you're lucky and the first time everything starts, the most terrible "mistakes" are corrected. At first, we were lying under the table seeing the masterpieces of translation. The “Message Log” in Diablo, the “Starburst Transmission” in the machine settings in a race, and many more. About the fact that female and male dialogues were constantly confused, I generally am silent. As a result, as soon as the game begins to work more or less, a still warm “body” is torn out of hands and sent into circulation.
In the late 90s, the Internet was still an expensive novelty, and everything was transported on disks. In the morning, the courier, who is also a tester part-time, met a train and picked up a pack of disks waiting for localization. In the evening, usually with a 9-hour train, everything that was ready was sent to the publisher - in circulation. So we usually got home deep after midnight.
Work on toys gave a huge knowledge base - I had to understand the self-made compressors, cryptographic systems, the structure of the resources of game archives. It has already reached the elements of the “matrix” - look, there is a packed picture, here the texts are clearly crypted, and here clearly some garbage is not worth attention. Still, it was nothing compared to when we started localizing the PlayStation (PSX}.
That's where the developers perverted in full. They tried to squeeze the maximum out of a small piece of iron, and therefore the interiors of the games were made “terribly” from the point of view of an external localizer. Textures are mixed into one graphic page which is loaded in video memory in a block. Text blocks are repeated for each level. All data was compiled in advance to static addresses, so there was no question of any excesses in the size of the original text. (Many probably know abbreviations such as “Vykh.”, “Zagr” and others.) Much worse was the case with fonts. The letters were scattered throughout the texture page, so the artist assembled a puzzle to redraw Russian letters on top. Often the letters were simply not enough and had to sacrifice the rarely used letters of the Russian language. I still remember the translator’s hysteria - “Someone
But still, the worst thing is the games of Japanese developers. The localization of these projects has become a real headache. It seems to be a game in English, but inside you feel the logic alien to our person. Sometimes it seems that the Japanese pay extra for each "perversion" used in the project. Otherwise, tell me why embed three different self-written compressors in one game, and it often happens that the unpacked file takes up less space than the packed one? Or do a few text encodings. We even went to the phrase, "So that you get a game, but in a more Japanese way."
Solving the text encoding in such games is worse than the dancing people in Sherlock Holmes. For example, how do you like the text encoding where the code 0x95 means that it is the 9th letter horizontally and the 5th letter vertically in the font texture? How are fonts formed in the Japanese? Very interesting - all the text is run through the program and the letters that are there are taken out into the font. This is still a good option. Worse when the subtitles - drove a couple of words, and in the texture only 15-20 letters. How to localize it? But they did. Although long and painful.
It seemed that after PSX there was no reason at all, but the era of Playstation 2 came. There, to all other charms, new texture formats were added - the so-called swizzle - when the pixels were twisted into something indigestible and to convert it all to a normal linear form, you need a special algorithm. But for the console, this is the native video memory format, with which everything works fine and quickly. For a long time, we tried to disassemble it ... And we collected them pixel by pixel in Photoshop trying to find the logic, and by exhaustive search - everything did not go. Once we managed to find the "leaked" documentation from the SDK - the addressing of the video memory was described there. And lo and behold! Things have gone.
Another platform, undeservedly forgotten by people Sega Dreamcast. At the time of her appearance, she simply tore all existing games for the quality of the graphics. Unfortunately, less than a year later she was replaced by Playstation 2 and forgot about the console.
Xbox is an ordinary PC in a beautiful box. In principle, nothing special was different, but stretched out a year or two.
A few years later, we were allowed to dig into the Xbox360 (Shhhh ... I didn't say anything).
For some time, the need for translations for the PSP surfaced, but thanks to the development of the Internet, localization has become unprofitable, because everything has spread all over the place.
Nintendo Game Boy, an old man of handheld consoles, strangely enough held his position for quite some time - and still people are played all over the world.
Time does not stand still, large publishers entered the Russian market who began to make a sufficiently high-quality translation at affordable prices for users. With the development of the Internet, downloading a game with a good translation from an official publisher has become very simple, and this marked the beginning of the decay of pirate localization.
Personally, I left this industry a few years ago and, in principle, I do not regret it. Although the experience gained over the years may be interesting to others. Therefore, if there are those who want to know the details, I can try to make a series of articles on the topic of localization. Consider the main problems and mistakes made by developers to this day.