[Question] Will FF7 support Chinese?

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Jeff Chen

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I'm from China, and trying to localize FF7 into Simplified Chinese.

But It seems that there are lots of problems in front of my goal:
1. The tool Cosmo seemed not supporting Chinese characters very well. After saving and loading, some characters messed up.

2. The game itself does not support Chinese too. I wonder if it is possible to make a font for this game. (I can suply a complete collection of Chinese characters)

Can anyone answer me? :love:
 
BTW-- This game was developed by Japanese, and had a Japanese version. So it will support double-byte characters. Maybe it IS possible to make the game to do what I want?
 
I don't know if there is a PC version of the game in Japanese?  I know there was for FF8 but never really heard for FF7.  Anyway, it should be possible, you'd have to create and import a Chinese font, and if there's too many characters, you'd have to get it to support double-byte characters like you say -- if there is a PC version of the game in Japanese, that may be a better starting point.
 
That's My problem -- I don't know how to make a font for FF7 at all.

Anyway, I'm just a newbie on FF7 modding :P
 
That's My problem -- I don't know how to make a font for FF7 at all.

Anyway, I'm just a newbie on FF7 modding :P
Click to expand...

I found the character set for the Japanese version, however it's not unicode, they have a custom set that is much smaller 1 byte per character.  That's it really. As for translation etc. Well there are quite a few things to modify. The font set is in a TIM file somewhere in the game, next you have to translate the Japanese or English version into chinese and re encode the entire script. The latter is an interesting task :)

I haven't got around to combat script things yet.
I'm mostly poking the PSX version at the moment anyhow

Cyb
 
:-?
Although I don't understand some of you said above, I'll try~

What is the SCRIPT u mentioned? Do u mean the dialogue text or the game script?

Sorry for knowing nothing & asking everything~ :love:

BTW= I'm from China, so translation is no problem to me. But the part of cracking REALLY is.
I wonder why programmers aren't using UNICODE for every program? It'll be much better for people like me then~I mean the dudes who like translating programs into their own language :P
 
:-?
Although I don't understand some of you said above, I'll try~

What is the SCRIPT u mentioned? Do u mean the dialogue text or the game script?

Sorry for knowing nothing & asking everything~ :love:

BTW= I'm from China, so translation is no problem to me. But the part of cracking REALLY is.
I wonder why programmers aren't using UNICODE for every program? It'll be much better for people like me then~I mean the dudes who like translating programs into their own language :P
Click to expand...

The Game script is packed together with the dialogue text character movements window information etc. All that is handled by the game script.  The program for FF7 is actually kind of small. Most of the game is in a custom game script format on the disks (or installed on your disk if you have the PC version).  UNICODE was not a standard tell quite late in the game firstly. Secondly Sony uses Unicode now I believe for PS2 software.  The Playstation memcards (1mbit original ones) use SJIS format (2 bytes per character), I wrote a convertor to make that into something viewable on Unicode systems a while ago.

To really answer your question, it's unrealistic considering the program was started in 1994 or 1995 almost ten years ago.  Memory space was still a big consideration then and thus I don't think multinational language and universiality was imperitive in there mind.
By going to UNICODE type setup that would expand the script size by about 80%. That's considerable because they also had to fit FMV's and other things on the original disks.

Granted it would make your job easier, maybe, things just didn't happen that way :)

China - almost everyone I've met from China is very nice. :)

Cyb
 
:oops:
hehe...hehehe.hehe.......

I've got my tongue lost......
Click to expand...
What are the basic Chinese symbols? If there are < 96 then you might be able to do it. The problem comes in a few spots, changing the text template (bitmap that holds the fonts), and then changing the 'Japanese' characters to Chinese (if you have FF7 Jap). If you have the english version I'm not sure what you would need to do because it has a much smaller alphabet than a Japanese or Chinese translation. Numbers for example should not be changed (because they use the Arabic number system throughout the world anyhow).  I think upper case ENGLISH letters should be left alone,  comma and a few other symbols the rest are used for Japanese characters.  Although a bare minimum number are used.

I remember there are a bunch of translators around working on these projects.  There was one board I use to go to alot I'll have to try and remember it.

Cyb
 
There are 6762 characters, I just counted.. :isee:

I'll paste them in a new topic (prevent messing this one).

Maybe we should think of another unusual way...
 
There are 6762 characters, I just counted.. :isee:

I'll paste them in a new topic (prevent messing this one).

Maybe we should think of another unusual way...
Click to expand...
Well apart from rewriting the FF7 engine completely..?
FF7 Jap was a mix of Japanese characters and ASCII symbols.  I think they used the full 256 symbols but I'm not positive. I will have to dig up the information I had on it.

Cyb
 
:wink:

Does FF7 support inserting pictures into the dialoge window?

If it is possible, I could just make every dialoge using bmp(or other image file format), and then insert them into the dialoge.

Although it may be a space-costing solution, but it will not require any change of the FF7 main program, just some changing in scripting.

 :isee: (right?)
 
I'm from China, and trying to localize FF7 into Simplified Chinese.

But It seems that there are lots of problems in front of my goal:
1. The tool Cosmo seemed not supporting Chinese characters very well. After saving and loading, some characters messed up.

2. The game itself does not support Chinese too. I wonder if it is possible to make a font for this game. (I can suply a complete collection of Chinese characters)

Can anyone answer me? :love:
Click to expand...
Maybe you can find out useful information in squarecn.com :)
http://www.squarecn.com/ff/ffsky/bbs/disp.asp?owner=A103&ID=1432819&CurPage=1
 
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