Phantasmagoria subpatch - some "loose thoughts"

[mendosa]

Some time ago some people encouraged me to translate this game. I do not intend to start it - I have too many other projects, besides - Phantasmagoria did not strike me as Gabriel did. And there are also some technical "inconveniences", that may discourage a potential translator/subtitles creator.

But first - in this very old interview - I found following sentence: "(...) I developed a subtitle engine for displaying Kanji subtitles for the VMDs in Phantasmagoria".

Does anybody know something more about this project? I am quite sure it was never released /EDIT my bad - it WAS released/- well, but - maybe there are some tools left somewhere?

As I stated before - I am not gonna start translation/subtitles project, but if someone would start, I might help him in some way, as I made some preparations. Most of game menus are based on images - they can be changed using TraduSCI tools (at least I think so after doing GK2 - it should be compatible). Some of these menu texts are in MSG files, and I was able to change them almost succesfully - if we forget about Polish font (I think those can be done).

First big problem is that although subtitle files (MSG) are present in game resources, most (if not all) of the VMD related texts files are... empty.

Second, and the biggest problem is to show the subtitles for the spoken lines.

Well, I am not sure of this - but maybe comparing HEP, SCR and SYN files from GK2 subpatch (English or Spanish) with the same files in original GK2 resources would tell - what should be changed in there to make subtitles show?

[Collector]

You are getting into an era where the format of the SCI resource formats started to change. Endroz's tools might not work as well as as would be needed. There is probably a good chance that they would have to be redeveloped for the game. Even the Sierra Resource Viewer chokes on some of the MSG resources. While there are usually a number of left over resources mixed in with all of the others, I can't believe that this explains the large number of seemingly empty MSGs.

Endroz does not seem to be contactable these days, so the only thing that I can suggest is to do a small trial run translating the game to see what is possible.