Myst Fan Translation?

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BlizzieM
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2020 10:00 pm

Myst Fan Translation?

Post by BlizzieM »

Hi!
I am new user who's interested in game development and would like to try their hand in fan translating Myst. The problem is that I have two issues I would need to solve tho:

1: Injecting translated texts into the game so that when players open the book or a note, so that instead of original pictures it shows pictures with the translated text.
2: Show subtitles and have them sync when FMVs are playing.

I assume ScummVM could be used to do this but I am not sure where to start, so I wonder if you people have any ideas where I should start? :)
bgK
ScummVM Developer
Posts: 71
Joined: Sat Feb 13, 2016 12:40 pm

Re: Myst Fan Translation?

Post by bgK »

Hi,

That should be pretty feasible. I suggest targeting Myst Masterpiece 25th edition as it has some niceties that would make it easier than the other versions.

1. In the scummvm-tools package, the extract_mohawk tool can extract the .mhk datafiles. The extracted images are in the PICT-JPEG format. It's possible to convert them to png using imagemagick (convert PICT:0015_80_PICT_1000_menu_bg.bin menu.png). Once translated, the images can be converted back to PICT-JPEG using "convert translated.png -compress jpeg pict:0015_80_PICT_1000_menu_bg.bin". Then the construct_mohawk tool can rebuild a .mhk datafile.
Now, if you make .mhk files that contain only your translated files you can get ScummVM to load the english datafiles and use your translated resources on top of them. To do so, name the archives with a language suffix, for example myst_[language].mhk, and add a matching detection entry in the ScummVM source code.

2. Subtitles are going to require actual coding work in ScummVM. One solution is be to make .srt files for the video files, load them and display the appropriate text using a TTF font. There is a .srt parser written in ScummVM style here that could be integrated in the mohawk/myst engine: https://github.com/sev-/scummvm/blob/c3 ... titles.cpp. ScummVM already has everything necessary to render TTF fonts, but please note that rendering text in a way that looks good is always harder than it seems.

Hope that helps.
BlizzieM
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2020 10:00 pm

Re: Myst Fan Translation?

Post by BlizzieM »

Thanks for the reply! I will surely try implementing these at some point.

Sadly my coding skills are lacking for now, so I think I shall look into this again once I've got little more experience with coding. I assume ScummVM uses C++ so I need to look into that language first. Once I've got some more experience tho, this should be a fun little project to do on the side :D
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