Pirate localization. How it was
It just so happened that I had the opportunity to stand, one can say, at the origins of the so-called “pirate localization” of games on 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 down 1991 ...
The next few years, you can run without going into details, but not to mention them at all impossible.
ZX Spectrum, Z80 assembler, several cassette boxes with games adapted to floppy disks with the proud signature “Disked by Microspace”, demo scene, nights in assembly prints of giblets of toys and demo loaders, development of some system programs. Communication with other groups through preloaders. Where are you now?
Finally, Spectrum is put aside, with gratitude and some regret.
The first project I got on the PC is “Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars”. After a week of picking on exe's, I managed to understand how the game works. And the two of us, with a friend, began to translate. The translation was done with love, the scenes of the game adapted to the Russian language and I hope that the first users liked the result.
')
So why do pirated translations come out so clumsy?
The case is on stream. The term of the transfer is limited to just a few days.
The usual scheme - the programmer gets the game to work, pulls out the texts and gives to transfer. A crowd of translators, even without seeing the game in the eye, translates the texts and returns them in a day, maximum two. After that, the game is going to, and if you're lucky and the first time everything starts, the most terrible "bloopers" rule. At first, we lay under the table seeing the masterpieces of translation. "Log messages" (Message Log) in Diablo, "Zvezdanutaya transmission" in the settings of the machine in a race, and many more. The fact that women's and men's dialogues are constantly confused, I generally keep quiet. As a result, as soon as the game starts to work more or less, the still warm “body” is pulled out of the hands and sent to the circulation.
In the late 90s, the Internet was still an expensive novelty, and everything was shipped on disks. In the morning the courier, who is also a part-time tester, met the train and picked up a pack of disks waiting for localization. In the evening, usually by a 9-hour train, everything that was ready was sent to the publisher - in circulation. So we usually drove home deep after midnight.
Work on toys gave a huge knowledge base - I had to understand self-made compressors, cryptographic systems, the structure of game archives resources. It has already reached the elements of the “matrix” - you look, here is a packed picture, here the texts are clearly cryptographic, but there is clearly some kind of garbage not worth attention. And yet it was nothing compared to when we started localizing the PlayStation (PSX}.
That's where the developers perverted the full program. They tried to squeeze the maximum out of a small piece of iron, so the insides of the games were made “terrible” from the point of view of the external localizer. Textures are mixed into one graphic page that is loaded by block into video memory. Text blocks are repeated for each level. All data were compiled in advance at static addresses, so that any excess of the size of the original text and the speech did not go. (Many people probably know abbreviations like “Exit”, “Zagr” and others.) It was much worse with fonts. The letters were scattered throughout the texture page, so the artist collected a puzzle to redraw over Russian letters. Often there were simply not enough letters, and it was necessary to sacrifice the rarely used letters of the Russian language. I still remember the hysteria of the translator - “Someone, think up a synonym for the word USA in three letters but without the letter ''”.
But the worst thing is the games of Japanese developers. Localization of these projects has become a real headache. It seems to be a game in English, but inside there is a logic alien to our man. Sometimes it seems that the Japanese pay extra for each "perversion" applied in the project. Otherwise, tell me why build in one game three different self-written compressors, and it often happens that the unpacked file takes up less space than the packed one? Or make several text encodings. We even went to the phrase, "So that you get a game, but in a Japanese way."
Solving the encoding of the text in such games is worse than the dancing little men in Sherlock Holmes. For example, how do you code the text where the code 0x95 means that this is the 9th letter horizontally and 5th vertically in the font texture? How are the fonts formed by the Japanese? Very interesting - the whole text is run through the program and the letters that are there are taken out in 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? But they did. Although long and painful.
After PSX, it seemed that all obstacles didn’t worry, but the era of the Playstation 2 came. There, to all the other delights, new texture formats were added - the so-called swizzle - when the pixels are twisted into something indigestible and you need a special algorithm to convert it into a normal linear form. But for the console it is the native format of video memory, with which everything is fine and works quickly. For a long time we tried to disassemble it ... And pixelated pixel by bit in Photoshop trying to find logic, and we didn’t go over the top. Once we managed to find the “leaked” documentation from the SDK - the addressing of the video memory was described there. And lo and behold! It went.
Another platform unfairly forgotten by the Sega Dreamcast people. At the time of its appearance, she simply tore up all existing games for the quality of graphics. Unfortunately, less than a year later, the Playstation 2 shifted it and forgot about the console.
Xbox - ordinary PC in a beautiful box. In principle, nothing special was different, but it extended a year or two.
A few years later we were allowed to dig deeper into the Xbox360 (Shhh ... I did not say anything).
For some time, the need for translations for the PSP has surfaced, but thanks to the development of the Internet, localization has become unprofitable, because everything has spread to torrents.
Nintendo Game Boy, the old man of portable consoles, oddly enough held the position for a long time - and still people are played all over the world.
Time does not stand still, large publishers entered the Russian market and began to make a sufficiently high-quality translation at reasonable prices for users. With the development of the Internet, downloading a game with a good translation from the official publisher has become a very simple matter, and this marked the beginning of the fading of the pirated localization.
Personally, I left this industry a few years ago and, in principle, I do not regret. Although the experience gained over the years may be interesting for others. Therefore, if you want to know the details, I can try to make a cycle of articles on localization. Consider the main problems and errors made by developers to this day.
So, it was raining outside the window, and the calendar was counting down 1991 ...
The next few years, you can run without going into details, but not to mention them at all impossible.
ZX Spectrum, Z80 assembler, several cassette boxes with games adapted to floppy disks with the proud signature “Disked by Microspace”, demo scene, nights in assembly prints of giblets of toys and demo loaders, development of some system programs. Communication with other groups through preloaders. Where are you now?
Finally, Spectrum is put aside, with gratitude and some regret.
The first project I got on the PC is “Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars”. After a week of picking on exe's, I managed to understand how the game works. And the two of us, with a friend, began to translate. The translation was done with love, the scenes of the game adapted to the Russian language and I hope that the first users liked the result.
')
So why do pirated translations come out so clumsy?
The case is on stream. The term of the transfer is limited to just a few days.
The usual scheme - the programmer gets the game to work, pulls out the texts and gives to transfer. A crowd of translators, even without seeing the game in the eye, translates the texts and returns them in a day, maximum two. After that, the game is going to, and if you're lucky and the first time everything starts, the most terrible "bloopers" rule. At first, we lay under the table seeing the masterpieces of translation. "Log messages" (Message Log) in Diablo, "Zvezdanutaya transmission" in the settings of the machine in a race, and many more. The fact that women's and men's dialogues are constantly confused, I generally keep quiet. As a result, as soon as the game starts to work more or less, the still warm “body” is pulled out of the hands and sent to the circulation.
In the late 90s, the Internet was still an expensive novelty, and everything was shipped on disks. In the morning the courier, who is also a part-time tester, met the train and picked up a pack of disks waiting for localization. In the evening, usually by a 9-hour train, everything that was ready was sent to the publisher - in circulation. So we usually drove home deep after midnight.
Work on toys gave a huge knowledge base - I had to understand self-made compressors, cryptographic systems, the structure of game archives resources. It has already reached the elements of the “matrix” - you look, here is a packed picture, here the texts are clearly cryptographic, but there is clearly some kind of garbage not worth attention. And yet it was nothing compared to when we started localizing the PlayStation (PSX}.
That's where the developers perverted the full program. They tried to squeeze the maximum out of a small piece of iron, so the insides of the games were made “terrible” from the point of view of the external localizer. Textures are mixed into one graphic page that is loaded by block into video memory. Text blocks are repeated for each level. All data were compiled in advance at static addresses, so that any excess of the size of the original text and the speech did not go. (Many people probably know abbreviations like “Exit”, “Zagr” and others.) It was much worse with fonts. The letters were scattered throughout the texture page, so the artist collected a puzzle to redraw over Russian letters. Often there were simply not enough letters, and it was necessary to sacrifice the rarely used letters of the Russian language. I still remember the hysteria of the translator - “Someone, think up a synonym for the word USA in three letters but without the letter ''”.
But the worst thing is the games of Japanese developers. Localization of these projects has become a real headache. It seems to be a game in English, but inside there is a logic alien to our man. Sometimes it seems that the Japanese pay extra for each "perversion" applied in the project. Otherwise, tell me why build in one game three different self-written compressors, and it often happens that the unpacked file takes up less space than the packed one? Or make several text encodings. We even went to the phrase, "So that you get a game, but in a Japanese way."
Solving the encoding of the text in such games is worse than the dancing little men in Sherlock Holmes. For example, how do you code the text where the code 0x95 means that this is the 9th letter horizontally and 5th vertically in the font texture? How are the fonts formed by the Japanese? Very interesting - the whole text is run through the program and the letters that are there are taken out in 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? But they did. Although long and painful.
After PSX, it seemed that all obstacles didn’t worry, but the era of the Playstation 2 came. There, to all the other delights, new texture formats were added - the so-called swizzle - when the pixels are twisted into something indigestible and you need a special algorithm to convert it into a normal linear form. But for the console it is the native format of video memory, with which everything is fine and works quickly. For a long time we tried to disassemble it ... And pixelated pixel by bit in Photoshop trying to find logic, and we didn’t go over the top. Once we managed to find the “leaked” documentation from the SDK - the addressing of the video memory was described there. And lo and behold! It went.
Another platform unfairly forgotten by the Sega Dreamcast people. At the time of its appearance, she simply tore up all existing games for the quality of graphics. Unfortunately, less than a year later, the Playstation 2 shifted it and forgot about the console.
Xbox - ordinary PC in a beautiful box. In principle, nothing special was different, but it extended a year or two.
A few years later we were allowed to dig deeper into the Xbox360 (Shhh ... I did not say anything).
For some time, the need for translations for the PSP has surfaced, but thanks to the development of the Internet, localization has become unprofitable, because everything has spread to torrents.
Nintendo Game Boy, the old man of portable consoles, oddly enough held the position for a long time - and still people are played all over the world.
Time does not stand still, large publishers entered the Russian market and began to make a sufficiently high-quality translation at reasonable prices for users. With the development of the Internet, downloading a game with a good translation from the official publisher has become a very simple matter, and this marked the beginning of the fading of the pirated localization.
Personally, I left this industry a few years ago and, in principle, I do not regret. Although the experience gained over the years may be interesting for others. Therefore, if you want to know the details, I can try to make a cycle of articles on localization. Consider the main problems and errors made by developers to this day.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/60477/
All Articles