Supported Engines

• RPGM Games
• Text Files
• Certain VN Engines (Renpy, Tyrano, Kirikiri, etc)

Overview

This is a translation tool that can be used to translate games. Specifically you can translate text files from games and the tool will handle most of the hard work. There is no GUI interface at the moment, everything is done through the command line.

This tool mainly uses GPT for translation, but it can be configured with other models as long as they share the same format.

Setup

Note that this will very likely require either a bit of programming experience or the motivation and time to learn. This will also assume you are using Windows 11. (But should work on Windows 10 too)

Tools

• VSCode - Code Editor I use. During install. Enable the following:

Add "Open with Code" action to Windows Explorer file context menu
Add "Open with Code" action to Windows Explorer directory context menu

• Python & Pip - Language. Google guides if pip isn't found in later steps.
• Git - Version Control. Will show you what has been changed. Amazing for translation. You may also need to setup your credentials which can be whatever you want.
• GPT API Account - Will need to create an API Key.

You will know Python and Git are installed properly by opening a command prompt or terminal and typing the following.

python -V git -v

Which will display the version.

Setup Environment

1. Open Project in VSCode

1. Create a new folder where the tool will live.
2. Download the ZIP by clicking CODE at the top.
3. Extract the ZIP into the folder.
4. Shift + Right Click and select Open with Code

5. Should now have the project open in VSCode.

2. Install Dependencies

1. Click View > Terminal
2. Type the following command to install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Setup .env

1. Copy .env.example and rename it to .env
2. Open .env and enter your GPT API Key and Organization Key.
3. The rest of the ENV is where you will set things like wordwrap for game text.

That will about wrap it up for setup.

4. Setup Prompt

1. Create a file named prompt.txt
2. Copy what is in prompt.example and place it inside prompt.txt. You can change this but I would mostly leave it the same.

Translation

modules contains the scripts needed to actually translate each game engine. For example rpgmakermvmz.py is for translating RPG Maker MV and MZ games.

I am going to go step by step into my process. This will hopefully give you and idea of how you should approach AI Translation of a game.

1. Setup Formatting

1. Navigate to the game folder (Where game.exe is).
2. Shift + Right Click and select Open in Code.
3. Press CTRL+SHIFT+X and type JSON formatter. I recommend the one by Clemens Peters but choose whichever works.
4. Navigate to the www folder and right click data. Then click Format. This will format all the files and make them look pretty for editing.

2. Setup Version Control

This is going to help us track changes we make while translating. It is extremely helpful and I do not recommend skipping it.

1. Press CTRL+SHIFT+X and type Gitlens. Install the extension.
2. Now create a new file .gitignore in the game directory and add the following to it:

# Ignore all files
*.*

# File Types
!*.mps
!*.dat
!*.json
!*.txt
!*.project
!*.js
!*.zip
!*.7z
!*.csv
!*.ain
!*.fnl
!*.ks
!*.tjs
!*.yaml
!*.rb
!*.rvdata2

# Other Needed Files
!.gitignore
!README.md
!patch-config.txt
!GameUpdate*
!patch*
!Game.dat

# Ignore
previous_patch_sha.txt
kabe3_save.dat
kabe3_system.dat
psbpack.dat
Save*

This is going to ignore files we don't care about.

3. Now click the source control button on the left. (Or hit CTRL+Shift+G -> G)
4. Click Initialize Repository. This is going to create a new repo that will track all changes. You will see them pop up after.
5. Committing a change is a lot like saving them. Type Initial Commit in the message box and hit the commit button to save changes.

6. Now are changes are saved, but we are going to want them saved on another branch as well so we can compare them later. Press CTRL+Shift+P -> Type Create Branch -> Type original and hit Enter.
7. Press CTRL+Shift+P -> Type Checkout -> main or master
8. Now if you navigate to Source Control on the left and click Gitlens at the bottom and select branch icon, a checkmark should be next to your main branch.

When we make changes later you will be able to directly compare them with the original files.

3. Names and Genders

1. Find the names and genders of all the main characters in the game.

This is going to help the AI properly handle subjects and genders. For example:

水無月 士乃 (Minazuki Shino) - Female
怪盗エース (Phantom Thief Ace) - Female
暗黒斎 (Dark Kokusai) - Male
フトシ (Futoshi) - Male

Japanese first, followed by English in Parenthesis, followed by the gender.

2. You will place this inside vocab.txt in the DazedMTLTool project under # Game Characters.

Do your best to find as many characters as possible before hand.

4. Non Map Files

1. Translate the Non-Map files. By Non-Map files we mean files inside data that aren't MapXXX or CommonEvents. Things like Actors, Weapons, etc. To start, place these inside the files folder.
2. files will contain all the txt files that are to be translated. After the tool is run, the translated files will be placed inside translated

3. Now open start.py by double clicking it to open it and then press F5. If prompted, select Python Debugger and Python File. This will start the tool and you will be prompted.

4. Enter 1 to select Translate. Then enter 1 to select the rpgmakermvmz module. This will begin translation.

5. After its finished, copy the files in translation back to the game data folder and check in game to see if it properly translated.

Note: You can check translations.txt to see what was translated and even paste that into vocab.txt to add extra context for locations or items. This will make the AI translate it consistently later on. However, the bigger the vocab file the more expensive, and if its too big it might reduce the quality of the translation.

6. We can now commit these files as well to essentially save them. Back in the Game Project in VSCode, check the Source Control tab on the left. It is going to list all the changed files. If you click on one it will show you the specific changes.

7. Commit/Save these changes by typing what the changes are in the message box and hitting Commit. The Gitlens tabs will show you all your commits and you can go back and forth as needed.

At anytime, you can right click a file and select Open Changes > Open Changes w/ Branch and select original to compare with the original files. Very useful.

5. Map Files

1. Now we can start translating the actual dialogue. I always recommend starting the game first and checking the first dialogue that pops up. Then translating that map file. You can use Snipping Tool to screenshot some text, grab it, and then use VSCode to search through the files.

For example, this is the first line of this game.

2. Use Snipping Tool to screenshot and grab the text. Then go to the VSCode Game Project and search that text.

3. As you can see Map049 is where the text lives. Copy that file to files in the tool.
4. Open rpgmakermvmz.py in VSCode by double clicking it.
5. At the top of the module, there will be a lot of variables. What we mainly care about for this tutorial are the CODES. These codes label what the actual text is. For example:

401 Code = Dialogue 102 Code = Choices 122 Code = Variables etc...

When a code is set to True the tool will translate all instances of it in the game files. As a rule of thumb, 401, 405, and 102 will translated 95%+ of the game. This is what we are going to do, make sure those codes are set to True and the rest are set to False

6. Next look into .env and set the wordwrap for the text. Wordwrap will set how many words before a newline. No need to think too hard just lower it raise it as needed in game. 60 is a good fit for most games and you will be able to change it later by rerunning the map files through the tool.

7. Now we can finally translate, simply repeat the steps you did for the non-map files and it should work.

8. Once you confirm that the text is translated and looks good in game, you can then copy and paste the rest of the Map files into files and just run the tool. You can use Estimate to give you an estimate on the cost. Most games are around $20.

6. Plugin Files

You may notice that there is some text not translated in the menus. This text usually lives in plugins.js.

1. Navigate to the game project and search the text you are looking for. You can simply translate the text directly here as needed. This varies game to game but as long as you use the search functionality in VSCode you should have no issues.

Final Thoughts

That is about all the knowledge you need to get started on translation. RPGM games are easiest for this tool but it can handle some other engines and most text files. The general process remains the same.

Feel free to shoot me questions in the Discord if you have trouble. Good Luck!