Lilly Blanche

Oh well. Good thing we've voiced the briefing and the ending cutscenes, otherwise putting all the text in there with only 320x200 worth of space would've been nightmarish O_o...

Progress report: All the main NOD campaign videos are done. Currently working on the bonus stuff. And here's a question: does TD support videos with resolution higher than 320x200?

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, giving a regular unit some unique name, but just for a single custom mission. Ah, I see. It's kinda unfortunate - I remember doing some crazy stuff in TS with this feature, like giving myself rocket firing RVs and stuff without actually changing the base game itself. Oh well. Thank you for answering!

Hello everyone! I've been wondering if there's a way to assign a unique name to a unit placed on a custom map made for Tiberian Dawn. I know there's a way to do this in Tiberian Sun (was done by the developers themselves with Slavik, who was renamed into "Nod commander" or something along those lines in one of the missions), but not sure about TD. I know you can modify certain building properties by adding specific lines to the .ini file, but what about units?

This is a wonderful tool! Can't wait to try it out with Tiberian Sun!

Is this a recent addition? I double checked everything prior to answering and noticed no tags. Now there is one! Weird. I'm not sure if ClaudioRed speaks English, though

Hola, ClaudioRed. ¿Puede indicar de que juego se trata? ¿Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun, Dune 2k o Red Alert 2 o Yuri's Revenge?

Thank you so much! This is PERFECT! I had tons of fun trying to beat this map, it took me... ahem, quite a lot of tries, actually, I wasn't expecting it to have so many surprises (those flamethrowers are EVIL XD), but I finally managed to get that "mission accomplished". By the end, felt well earned (though... I think I might be court martialed by the GDI command once they realize how many GDI soldiers I killed by accident as a result of my incompetence XD): I loved all the little touches in there, such as Agent Delphi running around showing you the correct path (I even managed to protect him long enough to make it somewhat close to the village before he got himself killed), the fact that NOD start circling the hostages like sharks (this makes me feel uneasy as a player, seeing them running around in there, who knows what they might do!) and the fact that you, as GDI, are forced to utilize covert tactics in order to liberate these people. Usually, hiding in shadows (and behind trees with flamethrowers) is part of Brotherhood's course. Also, I got this feeling that the NOD AI tried to go after civilians first any time it felt I got an advantage. It literally costed me a victory during one of the tries: I've taken out the last gun turret on the map, when suddenly a survived NOD soldier ran out of fire and started moving towards the village. The only units I had in that area were the tanks and a couple of rocket soldiers, who weren't quick enough to catch up to this sole minigunner. He ran past my rocket soldiers who failed to hit him (panicked, I guess?) straigth towards a civilian standing nearby and shot the poor guy, which resulted in me failing the mission (NOD were rather successful in killing them by dozens in this particular run, so by that point, any dead civilian could've been a game over). I was pissed. And impressed This is exactly what we needed - a challenging, beautifully made map that gives you something to think about, the one that requires you to plan ahead and use your units with top efficiency. Once again, thank you so much! This will surely go into the final package, and you'll be credited as promised!

It's amazing, actually. You come up with something at random, and then you realize that it actually means something somewhere and the meaning itself makes sense. That's what I call a lucky hit right there! Regarding the Dutch translations: that's fascinating. I told you already that I'm an interpreter, which means that learning stuff like this is something I enjoy greatly (I spend lots of time just reading about different, sometimes even obscure languages on Wikipedia). I know another country which has a somewhat similar mindset when it comes to translations: Poland. They translate stuff aimed at kids (or, the stuff they *think* is aimed at kids), and simply put subtitles on everything else if necessary. So, you get cartoons dubbed in Polish, and pretty much everything else that's not a cartoon / kids movie is shown in English with Polish subtitles. However, they do translate and sometimes even dub video games. Some of their translations even involved Polish TV and radio stars. But generally speaking, the vast majority of Poles dislikes translations and dubs and prefers the original versions. Here where I live, it's somewhat different. As you might know, most Ukrainians know and speak both Ukrainian and Russian, which means that our audience is capable of consuming products in both languages. However, there are more Russian language products than Ukrainian language ones. The main reason for that is that there are way more Russian speaking people out there around the world, so you get everything that's made in Russia + everything that's made in Belarus + everything that's made in Kazakhstan, etc. In those countries, usage of the language of state (which is mostly Russian across the board) is an order, not a suggestion. And that order is strictly enforced. In Ukraine, where there's only one state language - Ukrainian, this order is more of a suggestion instead. While Russian government does everything in its power to ensure Russian language's domination in and out, Ukrainian government does nothing at all to combat their actions. We translate and dub movies, cartoons, TV shows, etc officially, yes. But there's simply no such thing as "official Ukrainian translation" when it comes to 90% of software or video games, that market is dominated by Russian language. This leads to a very interesting situation - people of Ukraine usually don't like Russian translations of the said media, because they are often faulty and not precise. On the other hand, Ukrainian translations are valued highly, because they're few and far between, and are usully done by fans, meaning that the amount of extra care that goes into them is doubled, it's not just something a random dude made up in a studio because he was paid to do so, it's something a group of genuinely passionate people created knowingly and out of their own volition. Which is exactly what we're trying to do here with Tiberian Dawn. A project like this would never be commercially successful. If we were to look at what we're doing from a more pragmatic standpoint, it'd be possible to call it useless, a waste of time. But we're not looking for profit here. We're not trying to prove anything to anyone. We're doing this because we love what we're doing. In the end, it'll be a drop in the ocean of Ukrainian culture. Perhaps a tiny one, insignificant from someone's point of view, a waste of time and effort. But for others, it'll all be worth it. Even if only 10 people download this translation and try it, we'll be happy. It'll also be a chance for those few people to re-experience their childhood memories or try a really awesome game for the very first time. And we'll be happy for them as well.

Hello everyone! Name’s Lilly, and I’m in charge of a rather interesting project. We’re making a full translation of Tiberian Dawn (text, subtitles for cutscenes, dubbing for units and EVA) into my native language, which happens to be Ukrainian. In the process of doing so, I got this awesome idea to have a kind of a “bonus map” made specifically for this project, a nice additional mission to play for those who download the translation once it’s done. Unfortunately, I’ve no idea how to make cool maps for Tiberian Dawn from technical standpoint, and whatever I might learn in this short timespan will not be enough to deliver a quality result. However, I’m sure there are many talented mappers around here who might be interested in creating something like this. If you decide to help us out with this, you will be fully credited as a map designer and a co-author of the translation alongside everyone else. The map doesn’t have to be exclusive either – if you make it, it’s yours, and you may do with it as you please. To make it more interesting, we’ll try to create unique briefing, defeat and victory videos for it so that it feels like something from the campaign. So, here’s the basic premise (nothing fancy, really, ideas are welcomed): Enemy forces have occupied a nearby village. Commanding a small task force (some infantry, a jeep or two or an APC), player must regain control of the village and secure the area. There are two ways to reach the village: one is the most obvious route, practically screaming “go through here!”, but it’s heavily guarded by the bulk of the enemy forces (infantry, vehicles, maybe a guard tower or two). Sending troops through there is basically suicide. The second route is less obvious, and is the route the player should actually take in order to complete the mission. It’s still guarded and challenging, but not deadly. It allows player to flank the enemy forces, attack and enter the village from behind. Then, player has to destroy a couple of SAM sites scattered around the village. Once that’s done, player gets an airstrike and some reinforcements to finish off the rest of the enemy forces on the map, which then grants them victory. Victory conditions: - Find a way to get into the village. - Destroy the SAM sites in order to get an airstrike and some reinforcements. - Eliminate all enemy forces in the area using everything you've got. Defeat conditions: - Lost all units. - Heavy civilian casualties (basically, if there’s little to no actual “village” left by the end of the battle, either by accident or because of player’s actions, player should lose because there’s no reason to hold the village anymore). This is mainly to prevent the player from targeting the village itself once he or she gets an airstrike. Size: Per author’s discretion. Theater: SNOW (it's snowing heavily now where we live, so it would be most appropriate) Player: GDI Everything else – layout, actual object placement, additional stuff happening is all up to whoever’s making the map, no restrictions whatsoever. Let me know if anyone’s interested! And have a great day ?

Where did this alien come from? Did you just pick it at random? If you don't mind me asking, that is. By the way, here's something fun: "Nyer" means "Victory" in Hungarian, and "guds" means "God's" in Swedish. So, combined, it means "God's Victory". Which is pretty damn awesome

You've nailed it! Tried the same thing, it worked. So, it's not the size of the file that kills it, it's the extremely long path name. The shorter videos worked not because they're smaller in length, but because they had shorter names - "gdi1", "nod1", etc. But "bkground" and the other one I tried afterwards, "tbrinfo1" (or something like that) crashed, because the file name was longer, which, combined with a pretty deep path, made the encoder go haywire 'cause it couldn't handle the overly long destination. That's... a very interesting find, I think! Once again, you've saved this whole thing. I don't think "Nyerguds" means "savior", but it really should. It's got "guds" in it which sounds kinda like "good" at any rate Thanks! As for the palette, I'll see what I can do about that!

Okay, here's a weird thing. It still converts smaller files. I've just tried subtitling "nod1", and the converter did its job. Which makes me think size is the problem, somehow. Though, I cannot be certain. The only way to know if my theory is true is for someone else to try a "big" conversion. Here's a subtitled "bkground" video as .pcx files: https://mega.nz/#!gpdyUQzS!7vA0yReGcctpludbP9GEMXCEUJt2-fH8KCmj1kzJID0 And here's the audio file to go with it: https://mega.nz/#!41EWCDQZ!UKdAi4rPqapVYqUgePPdAGs9qsE1Gw1Kzmn7NW0PJGo If you're unable to convert it, this would mean that the encoder cannot handle videos that are longer than some specific amount of time, making translating or dubbing them esentially impossible. If it works on your end, this would mean that my encoder is very selective for some weird reason, and the only way to proceed with this translation would be for me to convert whatever I can myself, and then send you the things I couldn't do. Now, I do realize that by this point, I'm a huge pain in the butt, and I do not wish to bother you any further with these things, but... if my theory is proven to be false and you can convert these files... then you'll hear something along the lines of "Help me, Nyerguds. You're my only hope" coming out of me... Hehehe, that's a pretty big looking "OK" button And what's even more impressive is that the whole thing didn't break. Strangely enough... I'm kinda okay with that. People can be quite slimy at times.

Did that, rebooted, no dice. Well, this is, uhm... unfortunate. Can't really release a translation featuring only half of the campaign That's a pretty clever way of doing it, too bad it didn't work out! Though it must've looked funny

Hmm... I get a "buffer overrun" error while trying to convert a bunch of .pcx files for "bkground" cutscene into .vqa. Just tried other videos - still works fine, just this one is giving me an error like this so far. Weird. UPDATE: Nevermind, it does this with every single new video I try to convert, the old ones still go through the process without any errors, but anything new I try to do gives this "buffer overrun" error. This is... uhm, pretty bad D:

UPDATE: Gdi1-15 are finished, tested and seem to be working as intended. Hurray! Now, that's enough for one day. I'll take care of the additional stuff encountered in the course of the GDI campaign tomorrow, and I'll try to get at least some of the NOD videos done as well. Loved that GDI general's character development. You really feel for the guy by the end of it all. Also, Carter... I feel so sorry for him, I never realized what happened to him when I played it way back when That's how we're doing it - each actor has his or her own folder, each actor's folder has a separate character folder that contains a text document detailing what we need, and an additional folder with all the English audio files. We send a package like this to our actors, they record their lines, then we take their files and arrange them exactly as the original files are arranged. In the end, we get everything in one place, sorted nicely, ready to be converted / renamed and put in the game. So no worries, it's serious business Ah. That changes it, then! I thought they left EVERYTHING in English aside from unit voices and EVA. Makes sense! I wonder why no proper Dutch version, though? Shouldn't be THAT hard, at least it's not Japanese with thousands upon thousands of symbols and variations. I'd offer my help in making one, but the only Dutch I know is from Les Miserables musical, and that's not gonna help much

I wonder how I never got the idea to do so. Perhaps it's simply because I instantly skip all the intro movies, and my brain simply never registered that they are there to begin with Ah, yes, the renaming part. Well, thanks to you, now I know this little command line renaming script which helps me out immensly, so that shouldn't be a problem anymore! I'll never understand this kind of approach to translations. The main goal is to make everything understandable, and the bare minimum is text and subtitles. Dubbing the EVA and units while leaving everything else "as is" will allow players to experience the gameplay portion of the game, but everything else will likely go unnoticed even by those players who know English well enough to not require any kind of additional assistance. Heck, I'm a certified interpreter and I STILL needed some visual aid in order to translate those cutscenes properly, because the amount of military-specific terms and abbreviations combined with rapid speech patterns of some characters makes it really hard to catch on the first try. Doing nothing with the 80% of the game's content and then calling it "the official Japanese version" just seems lazy to me. When I played through TD for the very first time ages ago, I had no idea what was going on aside from the fact that there are "good guys" and "bad guys" (who are actually much more interesting), and we're fighting 'cause reasons. All the little jokes, details and hidden conflicts went right past me, and I suspect the same thing happened with Japanese and a lot of Dutch players. You can retell the absolute minimum in the manual, but that will not do the trick. I own Tiberian Sun in Spanish and French, though those CDs are extremely old (they're original ones) and I'm too afraid to use them 'cause they might break. I speak Spanish, and in my opinion, this version of TS is pretty damn good, especially the voices. However, I remember there being some nasty mistakes in texts, and it seemed like the cutscenes and the actual gameplay portions were translated by different people. For instance, Slavik has two completely different voices - one for cutscenes, and one for the "Slavik unit", they sound nothing alike, and whoever's playing the game for the first time will probably be extremely confused as to what is even happening. The French version has really good infantry voices, and Cabal rocks - the actor himself has a very charismatic, deep and rich voice, magnified by additional special effects. It's just a pleasure to listen to. Unfortunately, I don't speak French well enough to comment on how good or bad the actual translation is.

Wow. Thank you so much, Nariac! It works, I can test my videos quickly now The general doesn't seem too happy about it, though. He knows he'll be working three times as hard now that I know how to summon his face whenever I feel like it instead of going through hell every single time I need to check something XD (He's saying "Курва" ("Kurva"), which means... uhm... well, kinda like "damn", but worse :D)

That does sound like a viable option, though I've no idea how to make maps for TD, let alone add them to the game. As I've mentioned before, I know my way around TS mapping, but all that stuff is new to me when it comes to TD.

Thank you, everything's working out just fine so far, two GDI videos done and look great. Once you get into it, the process kinda becomes automated, though the sheer number of videos scares me a little XD Oh well, all in due time. Random people are asking me to send them the "beta" (or, uhm, whatever one may call it) version of this translation for testing already. Not going to happen, too risky at this time. I'd rather test everything extensively once the whole package is ready. Speaking of testing... is there a more efficient way of ensuring the videos are working correctly aside from beating every single mission in the game to get to them? I can make these subtitled videos much faster than I can play through the entire game, and as much as I love Tiberian Dawn, I'd rather not have to spend hours and hours going through both GDI and Nod campaigns just to make sure that one typo got fixed and video #12 works as it should. I know XCC Mixer can play .vqa, but it doesn't provide reliable feedback as to whether or not it'll work right in the game proper, and there's no way of knowing if sound works either. I remember someone mentioning a codec of some sort which allows viewing .vqa files in Windows. Would that offer reliable feedback instead? Or, if the only way is to beat every mission, would you happen to know where one could get a bunch of save files for this version of TD? XD (Normally, I'm against cheating, but... yeah, I'd give this a pass :D) I suppose I could try renaming every new video "gdi1" and test it out that way, but... something tells me that it's not the best way to go about this. I appreciate the insight into the audio thing. By the way, regarding sounds: in order to replace the unit and EVA voices, I just have to make sure my .wav file is set to mono, 22050Hz, and then simply covert it to .aud using the "copy as AUD" XCC Mixer feature, right? (well, also name it accordingly and put it into the correct .mix file afterwards). The Japanese version. Is it official? I've tried Japanese voice pack, sounds more or less acceptable, but there's no text translation? If that's the way it shipped in Japan, I fail to see the reason behind wasting money to voice the units in Japanese and leave everything else in English. Seems kinda pointless. And if there is a version with Japanese text... well, color me impressed - that must've been a huge pain in the butt considering how complicated that language and its writing system are. As for the German one... yeah, uh... I've no idea who came up with that idea. Not a fan of killing robots myself, especially when there are clearly people walking around everywhere. The worst example of their censorship, as far as I'm aware, is Zero Hour. What a mess that was, poor German players

Going back to the topic of video cutscenes... I went through some stuff and managed to put my subtitled video in the game, and it looks more or less fine, aside from those weird white borders: My steps were as follows: 1. Used XCC Mixer to "copy as PNG". 2. Used RADTools to turn it into .avi, raw data, 15 frames. cropping's "top" value to -22, and the cropping width and height to 320x200. 3. Used Virtualdub to add subtitles, saved. 4. Used XCC Mixer to extract the audio file. 5. Used RADTools to turn the .avi into a bunch of .pcx files, 256 colors, Windows system colors - never, halftoning - never. 6. Used VQA Enc 0.5b2 to turn the .pcx files back into .vqa and .vqp. 7. Tested the .vqa in XCC Mixer - works like it should. 8. Played the game, saw the thing I showed you Any ideas?

Here's a "fun" story: when I was trying to make that TS translation of mine ages ago, I actually contacted that guy asking for help. I even wrote him a nice and professional letter in Russian with all the fluff, very respectful. You know what kind of a reply I received? Without going into the specific details and lexical constructions contained in the body of his "letter", he told me to go and have sex with myself in many different poses, ending his message with something along the lines of "go crawl somewhere and die". I am not kidding. In fact, I might still have that exchange saved somewhere in my mail box. Not 100% sure since it was so long ago. I guess he really hates my nation or something. So, yeah, I'm not surprised at all

Oh, I will not dare bother you with all that RA and TS stuff! In fact, I know my way around TS and its files, years ago I tried making a translation for it but couldn't, because I had no idea how to make fonts. That was the only thing stopping me. Everything else - images, unit names, mission texts, audio and video files - I got figured out. Funny thing - TS uses a very peculiar menu system which makes it so the original menu can be translated only by editing a couple of very specific files in a rather... unusual way. And Firestorm uses graphics for its menu, which is a pain in the butt. So yeah, the fonts were the main issue. Perhaps, now I could create Ukrainian fonts for TS by using your font editor and finally make it all work. Who knows? Absolutely! I'll send you everything once it's done. It's the least I can do, after all, you've spent so much time helping me with this thing! And I agree - it's better to have it available there. This patch is IMO the best way to play TD today, so I'll be redirecting people to it's official site anyway

The first public release of the translation will feature full text translation including subtitled videos + dubbed unit and EVA voices. If it is well received by people and there's sufficient demand, we might invest into dubbing the cutscenes as well. The reason for this is that it's one thing to dub the units (basically, you just get a bunch of people with nice voices who can read out loud and act, and voila), and an entirely different thing to dub videos. We can deliver the first at practically no cost, the second will require a lot of work all across the board and if there's no interest towards the project upon release, there's no real necessity to invest into cutscenes. That, and I'm planning to work on Red Alert and Tiberian Sun next, using the same approach - full text, unit + EVA / Cabal voices, subtitles, if successful - dubs. I'm a huge TS fan by the way - I think the atmosphere there is fantastic, and I'd love to translate it into my native language as well.

Got it!.. Or, uhm, I think I got it. I hope I got it XD I'll get back to editing graphics as soon as I'm done with videos - I need a distraction from all them fonts and pixels Speaking of which, I'm almost done with the GDI campaign-related videos (talking purely about translation here). Once it's done, I'll start trying to put the subtitles in, which... I have a feeling, is gonna be almost as hard as making a game from scratch XD