Community Translation - Ukrainian Language Add-On

[Lilly Blanche]

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? 

[Nyerguds]

Nope, it doesn't. 320x200 is the maximum. The encoder won't let you use more anyway, for the C&C1 type.

Note that TS is a bit of a different case; technically the game supports higher than 640x400, but the encoder locks that in as maximum. Though if I remember correctly a hacked version was posted somewhere on ppmsite in which that restriction was removed, since in reality 640x480 works perfectly fine in TS.

[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... 

[Nyerguds]

I dunno, the Spanish guy managed to get that all subtitled 

The Kane end speech is a different matter, of course. Hard to subtitle, on that SATSEL.CPS picture (though I guess it's technically possible). But it's just a separate AUD file so it's not hard to replace.

[Lilly Blanche]

I'm not talking about subtitling the original videos. We've made two new briefing videos for the bonus mission which will be included with the translation. However, we couldn't actually film the actor due to some limitations, that's why these briefing videos are similar to what one may find in the N64 version of the game - a static picture of the actor, a voice over and some additional information and illustrations shown to the player. In the end, some of the stuff turned out difficult to make out, but since the video is voiced, and the character explains EVERYTHING, it's not a big deal. The whole thing is completely optional anyway.

[Nyerguds]

Ah. I see... so it's not about subtitles.

Well, the game managed, and it even limited itself to 320x156, so it should be possible. You just have to start thinking in terms of single pixels when spacing and resizing stuff 

There are methods to get crisp image on lower resolutions though, if you sharpen images and play with the contrast and brightness.

[Lilly Blanche]

Yeah, I'm trying different things here at the moment to see if I can make it all work. It would have been so much easier if we could just film the actor actually talking, but alas, the only guy who agreed to take part in this thing (and who actually served and has some uniforms ready to go) doesn't have anything even remotely close to a green screen setup -_- . I can do a lot of stuff, but I ain't gonna be sitting there cutting him out every single frame of the video, that's just insane  

[Lilly Blanche]

UPDATE:

All the Ukrainian voices are IN!  
Gonna tweak'em a little bit, but everything sounds great so far. 

[Nyerguds]

Awesome! I can't wait to see/hear the final product

[Lilly Blanche]

Ask, and thou shalt receive. Here's a tiny video filmed in terrible conditions (because cnc ddraw just doesn't work for me) with some of the voices. It's basically me sucking hard in nariac's mission  You can't see jack, but you can hear some: 

https://youtu.be/bjv5PUXyfRY

Some of the things said in the video, if anybody's curious: 

Infantry: 
Na marši! - literally, "en marche". 
Tak pane! - "Yes sir!"
Vas zrozumiv. - "Understood".

EVA:
Prybulo pidkriplennia - "Reinforcements have arrived".
Odynyciu vtračeno. - "Unit lost".
Systemu keruvannia polem boju deaktyvovano. - "Battlefiled control system has been deactivated".

Commando:
Jak skažeš - "Whatever ya say".
Zdorov. - "Heya", "whatsup", etc 
Stavajte u čerhu! - "Form a line!" (so that I can shoot you easier). 

[Nyerguds]

Haa, you really need to manage that commando better xD

Love his voice, though.

Small style hint, though it's your choice whether to follow that or not, of course: in the original game, only the vehicle voices have radio crackles before and behind them. The infantry don't.

I personally think that "Battle control terminated" clip is really long, though... won't that get annoying? You could always go for something simpler like "Mission aborted".

[Nyerguds]

So, any progress on this?

[Lilly Blanche]

Hello everyone, I am stil alive. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but I am, in fact, not dead, and neither is this project!
 
What happened was, uh, well... you know how people are shooting here sometimes? Yeah, well. I had to be relocated to a different city (like, on the other side of the country), because they needed assistance with their law enforcement. Basically, they needed more men (and women) to fill in the ranks, because they sent a detachment or two to Eastern Ukraine to help deal with that stuff, and that created problems within the departments as well as lack of manpower, and that's disastrous, because crime levels began to rise, and, well, the whole thing turned out to me a huge mess, and they sent my butt (alongside with some other unfortunate souls) to help out. Now, before you start imagining me as Princess Xena or something, nope, I'm just a regular law enforcement officer who sits in her office most of the time doing boring stuff, and none of that really matters. But a body is a body, and what you need for people to see are bodies being right where they should be. 

Anyhow, now I'm back home, with full Internet access and quite a lot of time to spare. Good news: while I was away, other people finished everything up. 
What's left are the score and the COMING ATTRACTION screens. And that's pretty much it! 

Oh, we've also recorded a short video to serve as an intro for Nariac's mission, and an ending, too! However... even though the original quality is pretty good, it looks EXTREMELY PIXELATED in the game. Any ideas how it would be possible to make it look less... crap? Oh, by the way, both you, Nyerguds, and Nariac are in the final titles  

[nariac]

On 13/09/2017 at 9:30 PM, Lilly Blanche said:

Hello everyone, I am stil alive. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but I am, in fact, not dead, and neither is this project!
 
Oh, we've also recorded a short video to serve as an intro for Nariac's mission, and an ending, too! However... even though the original quality is pretty good, it looks EXTREMELY PIXELATED in the game. Any ideas how it would be possible to make it look less... crap? Oh, by the way, both you, Nyerguds, and Nariac are in the final titles  

Welcome back! I'm glad you're doing okay and that the project is going well.

Flattered to be in the credits! Glad you enjoyed the mission I made for you. Looking forwards to seeing the video you made for it too! <3

[Lilly Blanche]

Thank you so much, Nariac!

Progress report: 
The coming attraction screen is done and working perfectly. However, it looks like I'm not going to be able to do the multiplayer scores screen, since when put back in game, the palette seems to be messed up. It's 100% connected to the fact that I went through some cheating in order to translate it. Basically, I used XCC Mixer to turn the .wsa file into a bunch of PNG files, then used RAD tools to turn those into a video, edited it, then turned it into a bunch of PCX files and then turned those back into .wsa. Since I have to finish this translation today, and I don't seem to be able to find a way to correct the palette, I suppose we'll have to do without that screen. A shame, but I've been fighting with it since like 9 AM, and I'm honestly done. 

[Lilly Blanche]

The translation's gone gold. It's gonna be available for everyone to download in the next couple of days. We've also made a short trailer in the style of the 90s game trailers, here it is: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_fYdijxNFk&feature=youtu.be

Here's what's said in the video, if anyone's interested:

"In the late 1990s the whole Earth was shaken by a meteorite that crashed on the Tiber River, Italy. The space object had a mysterious but extremely valuable substance in it, called Tiberium. An ancient secret society, known as the Brotherhood of Nod, was the first to acquire the technology to exploit Tiberium's potential for their own gain, and later - to move forward with their global domination plans. In response to Nod's actions, the United Nations creates the Global Defense Initiative - an international organization tasked with fighting terrorism regardless of its nature. Situation gets worse each and every day, and the world is at the precipice of a Third World War.

Enemy forces approaching.

Yessir.

Unit lost.

Catch this little present of mine!

Nuclear weapon is ready for launch.

Now in Ukrainian."

[Nyerguds]

Oh, wow, I almost thought you pulled a Russian Disappearing Act on us too. Though to be fair, I haven't been here much either, or I would've noticed this reply, umm... half a year ago -_-

Anyway, Glad you're all right and back in the saddle! you got a link for the pack somewhere? I'd like to mirror it on the ModDB page of the patch.

As for the WSA files, I got a tool that can correctly convert them now, with no hassle at all.

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2017/CnC64FileConverter/release/

---

I just found the release... so, uh, you ended up repacking it? Could I still get the files to upload it as language pack on the site?

And from the included readme it seems the CCConfig tool wasn't translated. That's pretty easy to do though; the translation guide should cover that.

[Lilly Blanche]

19 minutes ago, Nyerguds said:

Oh, wow, I almost thought you pulled a Russian Disappearing Act on us too. Though to be fair, I haven't been here much either, or I would've noticed this reply, umm... half a year ago -_-

Anyway, Glad you're all right and back in the saddle! you got a link for the pack somewhere? I'd like to mirror it on the ModDB page of the patch.

As for the WSA files, I got a tool that can correctly convert them now, with no hassle at all.

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2017/CnC64FileConverter/release/

---

I just found the release... so, uh, you ended up repacking it?

And from the included readme it seems the CCConfig tool wasn't translated. That's pretty easy to do though; the translation guide should cover that.

Hi there!
It's been a pretty long time. Yes, the translation was released as a repack on one of the most popular Ukrainian sharing sites. Users can download a full game, or just the translation in order to install it manually, if they so desire. The config tool wasn't translated, but I wrote a pretty detailed explanation as to how to use it, and the settings we applied as default worked out fine for those who downloaded the game. 

Thank you for all your help! This project would have been impossible without you. 
As for the WSA files, I don't know if it's worth the effort at this point, since so much time has passed and the translation's been out for months, meaning that the main audience that was supposed to play it has probably already done so without the translated WSA files, and I doubt that people would want to re-download it all again just for the sake of one animation. 

You've found the release, so I assume you've got the necessary files already. If not, I should still have everything here. You're free to upload the translation wherever you wish, I'd be honored to see it featured somewhere else, as would be everyone else who  worked on this project

On a side note, since then, we've translated Tiberian Sun and Firestorm: both the original game and the expansion now feature full text translation, everything that's in-game has been fully dubbed, and the cutscenes got a multiple voice over treatment, with voices corresponding to those in-game (meaning, CABAL sounds the same in the voice over and in the game proper, etc). It's going to be released in a week or two, if anyone's interested. Once that's done, we'll be shifting our focus towards the Red Alert series, starting with Red Alert 1 and finishing with Yuri's Revenge. 

[Nyerguds]

Yeah, I checked out the other thread... impressive work! Good luck on the other games.

I just mentioned the translation of CCConfig because it's really the easiest part to translate. No character set conversion, no inserting in mix files. You just make a copy of the "ccconfigeng.lan" from the translation guide, rename the "eng" part to "ukr", open it in Notepad, replace the text inside, put it in the folder, and it works. The only real work is making sure the text fits on the tool.

[Lilly Blanche]

So... my sound engineer is telling me about credits and stuff. You are fully credited for providing substantial tech support throughout the whole duration of this project, pretty much everywhere I could manage to squeeze our names in: the text of the repack's release, the installation instructions, the game itself - during the ending cutscenes, etc. I value my honor too much to just ignore someone's help and forget to mention it once the work is done. Here's the proof: 
 

Spoiler

Repack Release Credits:
(Tech Support : Nyerguds)



Ukrainian Translation Separate Release:
(Tech Support: Nyerguds)



Separate Translation Install Screen:
(Tech Support - Nyerguds)



GDI Ending Cinematic:
(NYERGUDS - creation of fonts, tech support)



NOD Ending Cinematic:
(NYERGUDS - creation of fonts, tech support)


Unlike those people you've worked with before, we keep our promises.

Thank you. 

[Nyerguds]

Ah, no, sorry. That was a bit of a misunderstanding. I was not questioning whether I was credited, but you can understand that I got a bit worried after you disappeared and I then found the pack released as full game repack, without any further mention to me of that translation pack I asked to mirror on the patch website. It just felt a bit too much like that Russian fiasco for a moment.

I read everything you posted, though, and the release site there, too. I know why you disappeared, and I know I'm credited. No worries

[Lilly Blanche]

Well, I'm glad we cleared that out. And as for those people to the east of our borders... may God be the judge for them, that's all I can say. 
This project means a lot to me. Perhaps, more than anyone can imagine. C&C was one of the best things about my childhood, and thanks to you, fans like myself now have the chance to relive it while reading and hearing their native language. No matter what some might say, language is more than just a tool for communication. It's a part of who you are. So, once again, thank you so much for making this possible. 

[Nyerguds]

No problem.

It might be easiest if I just upload the whole Ukranian repack on the ModDB site, actually... the current system of language packs and video packs is admittedly a bit of a mess. And then you guys have another download mirror for it.

To be honest, the language packs system was only created that way because I found it neat to be able to install all those languages together. I admit that that probably isn't really relevant to people who just want to have the game in their own language