Trails from Zero: 40%

As the release date of Sen no Kiseki III draws near, we like share another milestone on the Trails from Zero project — 40%! — with you before our progress temporarily slows down to play the latest game in the series.

Zerker has returned to college and my work continues to be as demanding as always, we were worried the project would significantly slow down as real-life caught up on us. Fortunately, Falcom friend Catasplurge offered his help to maintain the project’s steady pace. Needless to say, he has been successful. Both Catasplurge and Supremezerker have been slaving away at the Crossbell City sheet — which is completed for more than 50% by now — and I actually made some solid progress on the towns surrounding Crossbell City.

With everything said and done, the grand total is 41.69% at this very moment.

Screenshots

As promised, attached are nine screenshots from the PC version. The new logo has been inserted into the game, the slightly miscoloured portraits from the PC versions of Zero have been restored to their original colours, and our hacker has even started exploring the realm of editing in-game graphics, such as fixing Michelam’s “Wander” Land. Needless to say: all these screenshots are literally a work in progress.

Yes, we know the nurse’s outfit is pink.

Trails to Azure

From Zero we go To Azure, where translator Guren has passed the 60% milestone. This very moment his blog reports 61.66%. Zerker has already indicated that, unless he burns out on Zero before it is released, he would love to work on editing Azure next!

Trails to Infinity

Nick Wheat tweeted earlier that Trails to Infinity — the name you all voted for! — has passed the 20% milestone for editing. The actual re-translation is a bit further along the lines, around 30%. For more information on Trails to Infinity, see their blog Lost Heaven.

42 Replies to “Trails from Zero: 40%

  1. You guys are really incredible. Those screenshots look amazing and this is the most exciting update you’ve posted yet. Here I was thinking I’d be playing this one day and have to suffer low res vita graphics. But the pic port really looks terrific. Thank you all for the work. You’re giving joy to many people. Nice!

  2. Great job on this new milestone. I have a question, as you seem to be doing more than simply editing. Did you notice the flickering in both the Chinese and Japanese versions? Do you happen to have a solution to that?

  3. I have a question about the mid-battle screenshot: magics are normally referred to as “Arts”. While I do understand why you when “Art” (and I don’t really mind, as English isn’t my mother language), how come did you decide to change from “Arts”, which is the correct translation from Japanese? Also, “Art” (like Artworks) may sound confusing to some, while “Arts” sounds more like “Martial Arts”. Could you please elaborate on this?

    And again, a big thank you for the love you’re giving to this game!^^

    1. I’m a native English speaker, and ‘Art’, next to ‘Craft’ looks consistent, in that they are both singular. The localized Trails in the Sky series also all consistently use the words ‘Craft’ and ‘Art’ for these menus. You are only casting a single art or craft at a time, after all.

      Now, yes, while the Japanese literally says ‘Arts’ and ‘Craft’, the team here wants to provide everyone the best localized, consistent product they are able to.

  4. So far, we’ve been mostly focusing on the technical side of image editing and optimisation. I don’t really like the colouring/shading of the icons too much either, but that’s something that will be addressed over time.

  5. Something I wanted to ask about, since you are finally talking about the PC patch specifically. I tried playing the Japanese digital version (which you can buy from a plethora of store, to my surprise), and I had the feeling it wasn’t running very well, certainly not at 60 FPS, might have been some bad framepacing as well. Coming from the technically excellent Sky games on PC, it felt a bit jarring. Nothing I couldn’t get used to, but I wanted to ask if your “hacker” could also look into that. I guess it’s something that easier to do if you have the actual source code and can build a new version, like the Sky ports were made, but it would none-the-less be great to play the Crossbell games in fluid 60 FPS.

      1. Does “fix sloppy work” entail removing the flickering in windowed mode when you leave the game and go back? ‘Cause if that’s fixed, 60fps, and anisotropic filtering, this version is gonna be awesome.

        Also “Joyoland/Falcom”. Does that mean they’re using the Chinese version of the game?

        1. I don’t think I noticed any flickering using Alt+Tab on my end.

          Also , I’m adding the option to use borderless fullscreen, so perhaps the flickering might be gone with that as well.

          As for the Joyoland/Falcom, looking at other Falcom PC games ported by other companies, they seem to share quite a bit of the code.
          The Chinese and Japanese PC version are almost the same, Falcom basically removed the DRM and replaced the Chinese assets with the Japanese. In terms of optimization, I haven’t seen any difference.

          Overall, the original game isn’t optimized at all. With some hacking I was able to get a noticeable speedup, but even then, I doubt I’ll be able to get it running as fast as the Sky games, since you only can do so much without the source code.

          1. I see. I was wondering because the voice patch Zhenjian made doesn’t work on the Japanese version. I watched your mini-clip with voices, so I guess you remade the scenario yourself. But in our case, we need to do something about the Japanese version. This, unless you plan on adding voices yourselves. In that case, I won’t have anything to do.

          2. We still haven’t decided what to do with the voices, other than we can’t include it in the patch for copyright reasons, although the voice data in the script can be included.

            That means you’ll have to rip the voices from Zero Evo.

          3. Yeah, I get it. I’m completely aware of the problem with voices. I’m part of Zhenjian’s project, so that’s the main reason I’m asking. As I’m taking care of the English side of the patch, I was wondering if you were going to do something about them or not. And if not, we needed to know if the Japanese version was used, as it’s not supported as of today.

          4. My idea is that the patch EXE will have the code for playing back the voices, and the scripts will include the different voice codes for each line.

            Of course, without the sound data (that’ll you have to copy to a given folder, when the time comes I guess I’ll make some script to make things easier), it won’t play anything, the game will go on without voices.

          5. I see. In that case, we won’t have to do it ourselves. Are you planning on adding an auto-scroll function to voices and not voiced dialogues? At the moment, I asked Zhenjian to add an auto-skip logic specific for the XSEED version of Sora no Kiseki FC, as at times English subtitles are ages longer than voices. That would be a good feature to have.^^

            And thanks for all the explanations so far.

          6. As a side project, I was making a voice patch for the 3rd XSEED version. I didn’t spend much time on the auto skip, but what I was able to do is to “sync” the text to the voice clip lengths. Sometimes it can sound a bit awkward depending on how the line was translated, but just saying it can be done without many trouble.

          7. Gotcha, I have an idea about what you mean with sync’ing. That’s good to know, and I appreciate you taking the time to answer all my questions.^^ Looking forward to the final product.

  6. 40% already?! Holy Poms!!
    Congrats Guys for Everything you’ve done for bringing Zero to reality!
    While on the subject of changing/updating the graphics, would it be possible to use the much better sprites from the PC/Vita version and port it to the PSP version? I know some did succeed on doing it (but with a different game of course) but I’m no expert on this subject matter so just take this as a suggestion of all sorts.
    Again More Power to you guys and here’s for 50% in the next update!

  7. Yes! Yes! Yes! I’m so excited and happy to have finally stumbled upon this page, hearing news and seeing how far/determined you guys are really made my evening. I loved the Trails in the Sky series, and just finished the pc version of Cold Steel 1 today. I’m in love with this series and Prince Olivert.

    CS1 was really good, but everytime they referenced Crossbell, or the events going on there my heart would always sink a little thinking I’d never be ale to experience it and that I was missing out on some great stuff(Crossbell sounds too interesting. Now I’m torn between playing CS2 when that eventually comes out on PC or waiting to experience Crossbell first for the proper, chronological play order.

    I know you guys still have a long way to go, so I wish you luck!

  8. Do you guys know anyone who can patch the typos in maidump Tokyo Xanadu for ps vita? It pains me that such a great game is plagued with many typos… Thanks in advance!! 🙂

  9. Man I am thankful you guys are working on these translations. I love trails so much, and played the leaked english translation of trails of zero, but was super dissapointed when I found out the only english patch for trails of azure was garbage machine translation. I was going to just play it anyway, but now I have hope with trials of azure being more than halfway done! I will wait and play it in it best state! Seriously, I love you guys lol

  10. Hey, just learned about you guys, and I have to say I am VERY impressed by what I see here! I once stumbled onto a list of 10 must play JRPGs that aren’t Final Fantasy, and the Trails series was their number 1, with the caveat “It’s a shame they’re not in English.” I was quite sad, and did a quick google search to see if any translation plans were in the works… Aaaand it told me that the english version of First Chapter was releasing on PC in like a week. Miraculous Timing, yeah? I’ve devoured the series since then, trying for 100% completion of all but the most insane things in each game, and just finished Cold Steel on PC about a month ago, probably less. Still need to go through that one again, new Game + it for all the bonus goodies and bonding points and notebook entries…

    And ever since finishing First Chapter, I knew 2 things: 1) The claim that they never intended to translate Second Chapter unless the sales were good enough, and the sales were more than good enough, meant that I would be very happy with a steady drip of Kisekis for the rest of eternity…
    and 2) I needed to understand why this “Crossbell Arc” was in limbo as far as official translation and also to rectify that situation. While I do want an official English port, so I can give them money for it as I’m sure they deserve it, you ALSO seem to deserve whatever I can give, which I’m sure is only my applause and thanks what with legality and all.

    So I tip my hat and salute. Well done, good fellows!

    1. They are editing the translation for zero, if you want to play it roughly translated you can google zero no kiseki eng patch iso. I played that version of it, you need a psp emulator like ppsspp. Ao no kiseki has an eng patch iso too, but it sucks, so I am waiting for these guys to release it. The translation for that is like 86% done according to this blog http://gurennoheyakara.blogspot.nl/p/games.html

  11. I just want you all to know that I’m very excited. The Trails series is probably my all time favorite, and I’m looking more forward to this than any other game this coming year. Thank you for all the work you’re doing. If there’s something I can do to help the project I would be happy to help, though I understand that you’ve probably got things under control as is. Still, thank you, you’re heroes

  12. I’m totally looking forward to this!! I’m currently playing the second chapter of Trails in the Sky, and will play the sky 3rd and Cold Steel in PC ,sadly, the 2nd hasn’t been released yet, which means that the 3rd of CS might take years to be localized, which is why I’m excited for the Crossbell arc. I don’t know, but it seems to be more interesting than the rest, and I don’t want to run out of trails games to play. Keep it up guys, I wish you all the best in this project 😀

  13. This is not at all the place for this, but I’m currently losing my mind as I burn a day off of work, waiting as patiently as I can manage for Cold Steel 2 to release on PC. “Releases February 14th” apparently means at 1 in the afternoon. I may cry, and not in a good way.

    But hey, at least I hear that you all are approaching another Zero Milestone, yeah? That’s great to hear!

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