User blog:RottenBlock/Theoretical Project: Translation Unifier

So here's an idea I've been thinking over for a year or two now, never with any serious plans to implement it because of the amount of work required, but it still holds my interest.

The idea is this: since every Alicesoft game in System 3.5 and System 4 prior to 2015 can be decompiled and recompiled using open-source tools (and in the future, I hope to get my System 1-3 decompiler working as well), it's theoretically possible to do large-scale, automated changed to their code and text. In broad, the process is simple: decompile each game, run a simple regular expression replace script over the source files, and then recompile. My aim here, in this dream scenario where I have all the time in the world, would be to create a program that could swap any proper noun you want to be the same across all available Alicesoft games.

JAPAN or Nippon? Fiend or Demon Lord? Are the scorpion-tailed Gal Monsters "Magisco" or "Magic Scorpoions?" Do you want every game in the series to follow the MangaGamer terminology, even the older games or non-Rance games, or maybe the wiki's terminology? Or even the HGTP Rance 1 translation that doesn't recognize the word "Lynx"? Do you want Rance to be named "Steve"? Well? Do you, punk? Theoretically this is all possible. I imagine people releasing their own XML files with their preferred translation for others to share.

Unfortunately, while the broad strokes are simple enough, the detail work is extremely time consuming. It's not enough to simply search for "Sill" and replace it with "Haruka," because that would also catch every instance of "silly" or "window sill." Obviously some of that can be accounted for with careful regex work, but the fact of the matter is that the only way a project like this would be a success is if someone or a team of someones went through each game with a fine-toothed comb to find every possible edge case and build it into our script. Does someone shout "Rance!" at one point, but "Ra--!" at another point, and "Ran--!" at another? And that raises another problem: what about characters with the same name, or character's names like "Ran" that can show up when someone else's is abbrevaited? Each instance of each name would have to be individually isolated.

What about names that aren't written in plain text, like the hexidecimal monster names in Rance 1? Some data, like the CHR files in Widenyo or the monster data in Rance VI, have never been hacked and would need someone to either crack them or to have the program inject entirely new code to overwrite their results, like my incomplete Mamanyonyo translation does. And of course, images are an entirely different level. While the program could be built to inject them into the data, and the aforementioned XML files could be bundled with a ZIP file full of replacement images, that's a huge job in and of itself. And last of all, the fact that we still can't decompile games from post-2015 is a super-irritating second huge job in and of itself, albeit one that deserves attention with or without the rest of this program.

So ultimately, I think that while the project is hardly impossible, it's too much work to actually bring to life. But I figured it might be better to share than to leave forever in the back of my mind, so... here it is!