Monday, October 31, 2016

Problems with Text-Hooking and Japanese Games

Now, normally this blog is the place where I play the smutty Japanese games and toss (oo-er missus)... um give out advice on how to play them if you can't read Japanese.  This time I'm going to flip it around to as I've been hitting a few problems with text-hooking and getting things to just damn work, and I'm wondering if any of you out there might have fixes for some of the problems I (and likely others) have been experiencing.

There hasn't been as much H-game content on here lately.  I think the Echidna Wars DX piece I blogged yesterday might have been the first for a while.  This is partly because Monster Girl Quest set the bar so high that there's only so many "generic RPG Maker clone with ten short vanilla H-scenes" games you can play before the novelty factor wears off.

A bigger problem has been the slow and steady degradation of the tech I use to extract and translate the Japanese text into something close enough to English to be able to follow what's going on.  If you don't know how it's done, I found this handy guide on hongfire to be very helpful when I was setting up things on my machine(s).  How it works in general is you create a shortcut for the game, go into properties and redirect the link to start AGTH first, AGTH copies the text to the clipboard, Translator Aggregator picks up whatever is in the clipboard and sends it off to various web sources to be machine translated.  What comes back isn't always that accurate of a translation, but it's usually close enough to be able to roughly follow what's going on (This was how I was able to create the enormous Let's Play series of Monmusu Quest: Paradox last year).

Unfortunately, time passes, software gets upgraded, compatibility problems arise, and trusty tools start to degrade.  Translator Aggregator used to link to multiple web sources such as Google, and between four or five sources it was usually possible to get a good translation of a passage.  Over time those web sources started blocking TA until currently there's only one, or maybe two of the sources still working.  It's still possible to 'read' whats going on, but it's fiddlier and some of the more complex RPGs such as the ROBF series become very difficult to play as the detailed instructions the player needs to follow in order to advance the plot end up being literally lost in translation.

Couldn't read it... :(
This is a relatively minor problem when compared to the games that use oddball engines where text hooking slides off.  Dieselmine's Monmusu! Reverse R*pe Academy looked interesting despite being a more standard visual novel than a game, but nope, AGTH couldn't hook in.  I could hook Succubus Rhapsodia, but that game suffers from a similar problem to the old Succubus Quest games - the combat spams so many lines of text to the clipboard that digging out the juicy stuff becomes a chore and the game loses its charm.  A shame as the artwork - especially the various succubus designs - looks fucking lush.  One I wouldn't mind seeing an English translation of, but I'm not sure whether the gameplay holds up well enough for there to be the demand to get someone to do this (as happened for the original MGQ and Violated Hero games).

Looks gorgeous, but too damn fiddly to really enjoy... :(
Unfortunately, on top of this, a recent Windows 10 update seems to have completely buggered either AGTH, some games, or how AGTH interacts with those games.  This seems to affect the various games built off RPG Maker engines.  Attempting to start them through AGTH results in the game crashing right after launch.  At first I thought I might be screwing up the settings somewhere, but a look around revealed some other people have been having similar problems and the cause might have been the recent Windows 10 anniversary update.

These are dark times indeed for monster girl hentai games enthusiasts...

To be honest, I've been bumbling around with the same translation setup for a while and it's inevitable it would reach the end of its natural life cycle.  The question is, what next?  I'm going to do some digging, but I thought I'd throw the question out on the off chance some of you might have already encountered and solved some of these problems.  Please chime in with useful advice and links in the comments below.

I suppose I could always get off my lazy ass and actually learn to read Japanese.

(remembers how bad he was in school at French and other languages.  weeps.)

13 comments:

  1. ITH (Interactive Text Hooker) is what I use for some fiddly games. It's what I ended up using with Waffle games such as the spectacular Kyonyuu Fantasy series, and it works well for other games as well.

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  2. Civildeviation31/10/2016, 18:19

    By any chance do you use ITH with windows 10? If so, have you been able to get custom hook codes to work? Lots of games like repure aria pretty much require a working hook code :-(

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  3. I found ITH to be more fiddly than AGTH last time I tired to use it. Though, at this point, "more fiddly" is better than implodes the games I try to hook it to...

    I was never able to find a working hook for Castle of Repure Aria that didn't drop half the characters and render the next unreadable. Was hoping someone would get around to translating that one as it's a really nice metroidvania-type game. (I have a review of another nice game in the same genre - but that one's a lot more heavy on the vore side of things).

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    1. I use Chiitrans for RPG Maker games and have no issue doing so. You can have it play in the background and then alt tab it when you want to read the text or dialogue that you are interested in. I also run Win 7 cause Win 10 is full of bugs and has support issues (it's like Win 2000 all over again). For VN's....there is also Visual Novel Reader.

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  4. Have you played Quest Failed yet?

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    1. I played the demo with the slime girl a while back. I did a check and saw they had a release out with 5 monster girls, so I'm aiming to give that look fairly soon. Looks promising.

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  5. *heavily sigh* You are correct M.E.hydra i even request Monmusu Gyaku Rape at hentaibedta and excitedly waited for it to be uploaded , only for me to found out that ITH nor AGTH can't hook it which left me in despair....

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  6. Your problem with TA is easily solvable: Use the latest version (currently r184).

    http://www.hongfire.com/forum/forum/hentai-lair/hentai-game-discussion/tools-and-tutorials/68499-translation-aggregator/page100#post4548026

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  7. Demon Angel Sakura comes out this Month. Well at least part of it.

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  8. I have ITH, AGTH, ATLAS for translations and Visual Novel Reader to combine them all into one powerful tool. The result is that all the managing I have to do from time to time is manually copy paste text from a dialogue choice sometimes (different text stream). There's still some games which don't work with it, but for those some times the built in hookers of VNR just fix the problem.

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  9. Civildeviation02/11/2016, 02:49

    Last time I installed VNR it botched my system so I couldn't do any text hooking in windows 10. Don't suppose you know of a good guide for installing and using it in Laymen's terms do ya Anon?

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    1. Nope, I don't - I pretty much googled how to install VNR and came to some hongfire thread... ... it's also very much a setup once and forget kind of thing

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  10. Probably not helpful, but I used Chiitrans Lite to make it though MGQ Paradox.

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