Quick entry. Time to open this up for the new year. I've got my fingers crossed that we can release a patch for Segagaga before summer hits, but I won't promise anything.
Technical, material, and personal considerations stalled our work over the holidays, and we're picking up where we dropped our bit back in early December. We have lately given our attention to the movie files on the Segagaga disc. These contain the animated sequences available for viewing on Youtube, as well as other segments such as the Mogetan commercials.
Mogetan is a saurian handpuppet who is supposed to be a kid, curious about Sega and videogames. He asks questions to a female puppet named (in lieu of an actual name) Miss, voiced by Kikuko Inoue, the same woman who plays Alisa.
These files are encoded in .sfd format on the Dreamcast disc. We're ripping the files from our backup of the disc, converting them to AVI format, adding subtitles, and converting them back into .sfd format movies. These movie files will form part of the patch that our audience will apply to their backup copies.
I'm not sure how the subtitles will look on the screen, since the videos are stored at a smaller aspect ratio than they appear on a player's television. The videos are stored at a 4:3 ratio, and they play at a 5:3 ratio. I have .wmv versions of three of the opening movies uploaded onto my personal site, and they are versions of the movies stretched to a 5:3 aspect ratio. The Dreamcast presumably applies some sort of filter to the compressed images that make the jaggy sprites seem smoother, so hopefully the same standard will be applied to the subtitles.
Here are the videos, followed by some notes. I have chosen only those videos that play at the start of the game, in order to prevent spoiling anyone who's keeping himself fresh for the game.
(1)
Company Policy
This video plays right after the Sega and Hitmaker logos run across the screen at startup. I had to block the kanji at the top of the screen in order to make the English text readable. Thankfully, this is the only video that has distracting text over the space where a subtitle will go, so this does not need to happen again.
This is also one of the few instances where I've put the translation at the top of the screen-technically making it a supertitle-in order to prevent blocking the majority of the original material's activity.
(2)
Presidential Decision
This video plays right when the player starts the game. I had to hunt around the internet in order to learn the specific script language used in .SSA subtitle formats in order to change the text color. I have decided to use alternating yellow and white letters for now.
Since the text-only portions of the game assign specific colors to specific speakers, I will try to assign those colors to each character's subtitles in the final version.
(3)
Tour of the Main Office
During this scene, the screen quickly cuts to a black background with Japanese writing. In the effort to make our localization as thorough as we can, I have cut those frames from the animation and replaced them with English frames.
That's all for now. This blog ought to see more regular updates now that we're on the move again.
