@assault_freak, in one moment you speak of JGT as though it is a helpful service for the community, but then you blame it for Japanese developers not wanting to create higher quality translations.
From my perspective JGT has allowed many more non Japanese blind gamers to enjoy the great Japanese games.
This seems like a very good thing to me, as many more people get to experience these quality games, raising the standard for quality games in the community in general, and giving the Japanese game developers a larger player base without any of the cost in time and money of developing hand written translations.
I think that without tools like JGT, instant translate, or QTranslate, far fewer people would experience these great Japanese games and so they would be much less popular.
You understand first hand the costs in developing hand written translations as you spent considerable time on the BK3 translations.
From my perspective JGT brings games from being mostly not playable, to very playable, with sub par translations for storyline.
This seems like an improvement to me in almost every way.
If an English translation was important and feasible for a Japanese game developer to begin with, I don't think a sub par story translation provided by JGT would stop them from continuing with it.
For instance, BK3's translation continued to be worked on even though JGT existed, and I think it turned out very well.
The JGT manual is very supportive of that translation, advising people to purchase them both to support Yukio's great work, and so they can enjoy the higher quality translations.
I have purchased them myself and donated extra when I did so, and I have also purchased them for other avid BK3 players I know personally.
Sure, Japanese game devs can say that since JGT exists they are not going to bother with a hand written translation, but were they really going to if it didn't exist?
Probably not, because it is very costly, as you well know.
So that would leave us with those games being not playable rather than mostly playabel with sub par storyline translations.
Consider the Planet Saga demo. If the developers are still spending their time to finish the game, would they be worried about an English translation?
I think not, which means without JGT or similar tools, non Japanese players would have to fumble through non translated menus, and with zero idea of what is happneing in the story, rather than a partial idea.
Or more likely, far fewer non Japanese players would enjoy those games, and they would be far less popular.
I don't think the local cache reduces incentive for hand written translations any more than the existing JGT addon did, other than players don't have to deal with the server being down or slow as often.
The cached translation records are from all Japanese games, so a translator could not choose one game to translate, they would have to guess which games the records are from, or just translate all games at once.
And as already mentioned, I advise people not to try cleaning up the JGT translations because of the difficulty of dealing with string combinations.
That sort of thing is much better handled by the game developer creating language files that let translators deal with the strings before they are combined with each other.
Also, your worry that community members are going to spend time equivalent or greater than the time you spent working on BK3's translation in order to clean up all the JGT translations, especially against my advice, and when your hand written translations are available at such a resonable price, seems a bit silly to me.
You know first hand how much time that consumed, so it surprises me that you would suggest it as something people are likely to do.
If you're just trying to make an argument that writing hand written translations is more costly than people realize, and so not feasible for every Japanese game, then I agree with you, and that is a big reason that JGT exists, to bring us from no translation, to a sub par machine translation.
I just don't appreciate you blaming JGT when cost in time and money is the larger factor in feasibility.
@threeblacknoises, the cache will only get updated when I release a new version of JGT, with new cache files.
It would have taken more work to get the addon to automatically download new cache files, or to update the cache on the fly.
I'm not an expert in Python, so I was going for the solution that accomplished the most, while keeping the work required for me as low as possible.
I already had to rewrite a lot of C# string splitting and substitution methods in python to get the local cache working at all.
That is some of the difficulty I mentioned previously.
It does not matter much though, since the English translation cache is already pretty saturated, so running into non translated text is pretty rare.
@pitermach, thanks for the appreciation, I spent a lot of time getting the local cache working, so it is nice to hear people say thank you.
It actually doesn't work the same as the AHC cache.
JGT already had a local cache that kept the last 200 results in memory to make menu navigation faster, but did not save them to disk because of my unfamiliarity with python and working within the NVDA addon environment.
The new JGT comes with a full download of all the translation records in my database, and a port from C# to python of most of the string splitting and substitution code that the server usually performs.
People really should be able to play offline most of the time with the new version of the addon.
AHC was supposed to have a feature that automatically downloaded the latest full cache when you switched to a different language, but I ran out of time to implement it.
Agreed there is definitely room for hand written translations.
If ShadowRine or Planet Saga had hand written translations, I would happily pay for them, and encourage others to do so as well.
Despite my disagreement with assault_freak about JGT being the reason we don't see more hand written translations; I very much appreciate his work on the BK3 translations.
~ Ian Reed
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