Greetings & a question about Zeus 2

[sqykly]

Hi fellow OverKill Engineers, I'm sqykly, an OKE design and
programming enthusiast. After playing Carnage Heart for countless
hours (long enough to be surprised to learn that it was Wednesday and
I had a beard) I made the switch to its sequels, Zeus and Zeus 2:
Carnage Heart.

Having enjoyed the latter extensively, I decided I would play the game
in English. Apart from being an extension of and improvement upon the
Carnage Heart formula, it has native support for design sharing and
competitive modes, e.g. for tournaments, so it should be of interest
to any Carnage Heart community. There is only one problem - I know
very little Japanese, apart from being able to sound out all of the
names and such.

I have 90% or more of the game's Japanese text extracted, and I can
get at least the (hypothetical) translated dialogue back into the game
right now. The rest is in development, but it's hard to proceed given
that I have no translator. Hence my desperate plea: do any of you
know Japanese, or know anyone that does? Google translate and JWPce
can only take the project so far.

[Henry Soule]

This would be awsome.  I'm in desprate need of a new CH experience..  I've heard of fan translations in the past but wasn't sure if it was ever completed for the CH games.  My network is fairly international.  My penchant for obscure things leads me to meet diverse people.  And i've bumped into a handful of Japanese gammers.  I'll put out a distress call over facebook and twitter. :)

google translate has been surprisingly good at translating into english with Scandinavian at least.  The grammer may be all jumbled from from japanese to english, but at least one could get the context of a translated section and paraphrase it into normal english.  

May I invite you to the shared game save dropbox?  You can drop your extracted files there and we can pass it around.    

... ok that takes it, over the weekend i'll put up a forum at www.oke-doke.com  So Check back in may :)

--
"It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question."

[sqykly]

Holy faster response than I expected!

The Zeus games are just what you need if you've exhausted CH's
possibilities. Even in Japanese, you can probably surmise what most
of the chips do just from experience with CH. Zeus 2 plays much more
smoothly in an emulator than either of its predecessors, too. On my
very old laptop, it does, anyway.

Thanks for lending me your connections! It helps even just to know
there's someone out there (other than myself) that might enjoy the
translated game.

Will do on the uploading! I tried running the whole thing through
Google a while back, but for Japanese, the results are always
comically vague. Even for English words that are spelled out
phonetically, it's tough without context. For example, there's a land
mine in Zeus that Google consistently translates as "Jude Law"! I
think it's supposed to be "Rodeo", but "Jude Law" happens to be
spelled the same. But I digress.

Thanks for the help again!

On Apr 28, 3:41 am, Henry Soule <henry.so...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This would be awsome.  I'm in desprate need of a new CH experience..  I've
> heard of fan translations in the past but wasn't sure if it was ever
> completed for the CH games.  My network is fairly international.
>  My penchant for obscure things leads me to meet diverse people.  And i've
> bumped into a handful of Japanese gammers.  I'll put out a distress call
> over facebook and twitter. :)
>
> google translate has been surprisingly good at translating into english
> with Scandinavian at least.  The grammer may be all jumbled from from
> japanese to english, but at least one could get the context of a translated
> section and paraphrase it into normal english.
>
> May I invite you to the shared game save dropbox?  You can drop your
> extracted files there and we can pass it around.
>

> ... ok that takes it, over the weekend i'll put up a forum atwww.oke-doke.com So Check back in may :)

[Henry Soule]

lol Jude Law thats an awesome name for a land mine.  

Id like to give google translate another shot, it seems to get better by the month.  I just translated a Japanese tweet today and it came out as perfect English.   Of course it needs proper context to get it right, one or two words probably won't come out as accurately as an entire sentence or paragraph would.

I'd like to strangle the ArtDink executive who read the segmentation analysis and concluded it wasn't worth bringing the CH sequels to the west.  

Welcome aboard. 

[speedystevie]

Hi sqykly ( welcome ) and Henry

Hope all is well - happy belated Easter too

Great to see others like us who still enjoy the challenge of a 20 yr old game. How did you discover the website?

I was interested in the Zeus 1 and 2 but was discouraged because of the language barrier. This was about 5 yrs ago.  I have still like CH2 for the gameplay.

its layout is similar to the original so it was not to hard to figure out the menus.

Did you beat the hard map on CH2?  I have once ( beginners luck ) but am having a tough time the second time around and likely will run out of $$$.

I hope to get playing serious again - where you stay up for 10hr stretches.. but have to put more energy in retraining for a job.  Once I find employment I will be back into the game and blog thing.

[sqykly]

I got to this page via an old message board post at gamefaqs. I've
seen very few CH-dedicated websites in English that are kept current.
I guess ArtDink didn't expect mass appeal for the game - I remember
seeing a warning on the box that was like "Not for dumbies!" or
something to that effect. Can't resist a challenge =D.

The biggest adjustment from CH to Zeus 2, for me, was definitely the
switch from the Negotiation tab and factories to capturing OKE models
on maps. In the context of the plot (or what I can make of it) it
makes sense to be all guerilla-like in that way, but it actually had
me scratching my head for a while!

Speedystevie, which hard map in which Zeus? I haven't played Zeus 1
in a long time - the colors don't show up right for me in epsxe. The
last map of Zeus 2 was not nearly as difficult as map 2, where you're
supposed to run away because you're outnumbered 50 to 6 (or something
like that). I can take out all the carriers and 21 OKEs and "save" 3
out of 4 allies in that one. I tried to wipe them out, but I never
had enough funds to rearm and repair long enough to do it. The last
level has similar odds, but it seems a lot easier with access to
better hardware.

Believe me, I know what you mean by 10 hour OKE design marathons!
Somehow, those turned into disassembly marathons, which is how that
language barrier is going to come down.

Henry, where's this saved game shared stuff repository you were
talking about? I tried using the OverkillEngineer website but didn't
see an "upload" link. I'm eagerly anticipating this new site - what's
in store for it? Message board? Chip repository? Competitions?
Everything available free time allows =D?

On Apr 29, 12:27 am, speedystevie <speedyste...@teksavvy.com> wrote:
> Hi sqykly ( welcome ) and Henry
>
> Hope all is well - happy belated Easter too
>
> Great to see others like us who still enjoy the challenge of a 20 yr old
> game. How did you discover the website?
>
> I was interested in the Zeus 1 and 2 but was discouraged because of the
> language barrier. This was about 5 yrs ago.  I have still like CH2 for the
> gameplay.
> its layout is similar to the original so it was not to hard to figure out
> the menus.
> Did you beat the hard map on CH2?  I have once ( beginners luck ) but am
> having a tough time the second time around and likely will run out of $$$.
>
> I hope to get playing serious again - where you stay up for 10hr stretches..
> but have to put more energy in retraining for a job.  Once I find employment
> I will be back into the game and blog thing.
>

[sqykly]

Whoops! I hadn't checked my email. The (lightly annotated) plot
script is dropboxed, labeled mes_bin_friendly.sjs

[Henry Soule]

I'm gutting that site as we speak.  I used to have a lame file sharing system where the users needed to find their own cloud sharing option and then submit the link in a google form.  I'm wiser now and will have a fully functional upload system on www.oke-doke.com very soon. 

Have you received my Dropbox invitation to the Psx Game Save folder?

you can put a folder in with what ever files you want to share, your welcome to grab what we have in there as well.

[t_wilson]

Hello there, I have a question. Can designs for CH be imported to Zeus
2? Henry, did you find out anything on transferring designs between
game saves for CH?

[Henry Soule]

Unfortunately not.  It doesn't look possible at least through the english game.   Unless you fancy hacking up the game save in a hex editor.  Good luck with that. ;-)

SpeedyStevie may have an answer, he's been playing EZ and may have discovered a way to transfer designs. 

Hope he checks in 

[sqykly]

Transferring designs from CH to either Zeus is probably not possible.
The chips have changed a lot of their parameters to reflect
differences in the games and add a lot of flexibility. For instance,
the chip that scans for obstacles has an object height field and a
higher/lower selector, so you can determine what objects your OKEs can
fly or shoot over.

Transferring designs between Zeus 2 saves is supported in-game, as is
copying ally and library designs. If you're slick, you can get enemy
designs off of the disc as well. I know there's a way to get designs
from Zeus to Zeus 2, but I'm not sure if it's in-game or not.

[sqykly]

I'm dropping in to say that the Zeus 2 project is not dead and is still in need of a translator!  I'm pretty certain I have all of the text extracted (including text that's stored as pictures of words... ugh!), a LOT of it is ready for editing, and some of it can be patched to the game right now, at this very moment.

I'm doing the weapon select screen right now and need opinions.  Instead of picking a weapon then picking ammo for it from an appropriate list, Zeus2 has one list of all available munitions, and you get the weapon that fits the ammo you've chosen without a separate list.  It's a little confusing, so which of these seems more clear:
"Uranium Assault" (what's made of uranium?) vs "Uranium AP" (they're armor piercing bullets, but what are they for?)
The literal translation is "Uranium Armor Piercing", but it won't fit and it's still unclear.  "Uranium Armor Piercing Assault Rifle Ammo" will definitely not fit.  Similarly, there's stuff like "Gallium Beamgun"[literal], "GS Shot/Shell/Shotgun", etc.

As you can see, I am dead serious about translating this game and making it the best translation it can be, but I can't read the dialogue, most of the help screens, and most of the tutorial.  So somebody should start learning Japanese =D.

[OverKill Engineer]

Hey Just letting everyone know that i've launched a kick ass dedicated website for Overkillengineer.

http://oke-doke.com

Its just memory card file sharing at the moment but many more features are on the way.

As soon as I have the forum and books configured (this week maybe) we can begin collaboration on text translations for the japanese games.  I'm wondering if we can somehow work together with one of the carnage heart fansites in japan to assist in the translation.  We should at some point see if we can make meaningful contact with the japanese fans.