How I Translate Animal Forest e+

I realize that many of you may not be familiar with how I actually go about translating Animal Forest e+. Hopefully this little blog post will shed some light as to why I've put in well over 1,000 hours on this project!

When I started working on hacking Animal Crossing around September 2017, there weren't many resources. It was actually BrianMp16's Aimal Crossing: Gamecube First Steps to GCM/ISO Modding video that inspired me to work with him on modding Animal Crossing! It was around then that our Animal Crossing Modding Discord server was created.

Our first goal was working on texture modding. I created a simple texture editor for player faces, wallpapers, carpets, & player shirts. After understanding how most textures worked, we decided that getting a model viewer/exporter/editor working was a big priority. Not knowing at the time that the GameCube Animal Crossing titles used an N64 graphics emulator of sorts, we started attempting to reverse engineer the model format. These are some of the images BrianMp16 created in our hilariously wrong attempt to understand how the models worked.

Eventually I realized that it was emulating a custom version of N64 graphics display lists, and created a mostly working model viewer and exporter!

Sometime around mid September 2017, I decided I'd begin translation work on Animal Forest e+! I'd always wanted to play the game, but my understanding of Japanese is very basic, so I had never been able to fully enjoy it.

My first goal was to understand how Animal Crossing & Animal Forest e+ stored their text data. I quickly discovered that Animal Crossing (and it's previous iterations) use a split BMG (Binary Message Group) file implementation. One file, referred to as a table file, is used to locate the dialog requested in the actual text file. In Animal Forest e+, they use a fairly standard version BMG file rather than a split version.

Now that I understood how messages were stored, I had to write a text editor for the games! Trying to edit text and manually edit the dialog offsets by hand would've been a nightmare. My first text editor for Animal Crossing and Animal Forest e+ was very rough, and I hadn't discovered the in-text game commands that exist in the games! This is an early screenshot of what it looked like.

This program was made pretty poorly, and was a pain to translate in. Eventually I begun working on a successor to this editor that could handle editing text from any game between the N64 version and Animal Forest e+! This is an early view of how it looked.

At this point, I still didn't understand all of the in-text commands. With the help of BowsersEnemy, I was able to document all of them for Animal Crossing. Animal Forest e+ used a new system of in-text commands that was quite a bit more robust than the previous titles. I actually just recently finished documenting what all of the important ones do!

Now we reach today. The editor has evolved quite a bit since the beginning. It has features like an in-editor translation window, a 1:1 preview window to see how text will look in Animal Forest e+, the ability to jump between message sequences like links, and much more! Here are some screenshots of the various features:

Using all these features, looking at the game's code, and just trial and error in general have streamlined the process of translating this game immensely! The total time I spent making these various tools for the community has been at least 300 hours. The text editor alone took around 150-200 hours!

That's a glimpse into the tools I use for the trade. Hopefully it's given a much better understanding of why translating these 22,000+ dialogs takes so much time and effort! I may make more of these blog like posts in the future!

As always, thank each and every one of you for your support. This project wouldn't be possible without it!