Because of Certain Racist Things happening *right now*, I am trying very hard to keep my friendly face on despite preparing and training to defend myself should the need come. Forgive me for needing some time to myself.
Anyway, here’s today’s doodles. Since I can’t stick to any character or body type for more than a few weeks at most, it might make more sense if I just pick a general “vibe” or “outfit” or “theme” and have that be the go-to when people ask me what I want to see made/drawn and I don’t feel comfortable asking for blatant kink stuff. So this was me toying around with the colors I like. All I’ve really settled on is “Big coat is kinda comfy. Mini vest/apron thingy makes for a good color splash and a bit of modesty. Thinking of leggings/thigh-highs/legwarmers as building clothes from the floor-up instead of how pants are designed from the waist down just works better for what I like.”
I still find the process of drawing tedious, fickle, and I continue to rush through it to keep time spent doing it as low as possible. anyway uhhhh
Stay strong, y’all. Remember to treat yourself, find things you enjoy, check in on friends you like, and remember that your life is YOURS. May no law, rule, contract, or dogma prescribed to you ever rob you of agency over your own life.
Drawpile attendance is relatively down so the vast majority of the canvas this time was just me. I woke up feeling a little low-energy but I’ve been actually getting good sleep the past 3-4ish nights so I guess the extra energy went into doodles? Or something? I dunno.
This character is from Inhuman the webcomic by Cial. She can be seen on pages http://www.inhuman-comic.com/comic62.php and http://www.inhuman-comic.com/comic65.phpMaya. A fixed up version of a sketch I saved earlier.
ChaosBuster12 Asked: WHo’s Maya
AnnMWhite: Maya is a one-off character who showed up in a story I half-wrote one time idk. I assume she’s just trying to work up money to get her own car so she can stop driving the family’s shared car, and then some stuff happens and she ends up doing a dubious sidegig that pays better and eventually becomes successful enough that she goes legit and makes the side thing her main job.
Aside from that, not a lot of detailed background
I like the idea of Squee Helibusters being able to kick-jump off of their own shells for double-jump type shenanigans just like Ori’s Bash technique, even if it kinda breaks the rules of the setting being a fairly “possible/plausible” kind of soft sci-fantasy. stretchystomped on! SquishI describe Squee as kinda like “giant bunnies or mimigas” and Squee Helibuster as being kinda like “yoshi-esque-raptor-dragon-thingies” but really, given how I draw them, they’re much closer to kangaroos and I might make that a lore thing.roundSquishThis started as me looking at one of those memetic “sexy kangaroo” photos and trying to sketch the pose, and then it sorta loosely turned into Terra Netty.This is probably closer to the body-type I wanted for Nyx, but really this was just an excuse for a low-angle perspective shot with groin and paws and whatever else it is I seemingly doodle on autopilot.Pinks / First Post holding a cat friend via tail power and seconds before a BIG SQUISHY HUG squishKangaroo backside. Not really sure what’s up with this one, probably just sitting beachside.Fleet is from Dungeons of Aether and joins the roster of Rivals of Aether 2 as a playable fighter. There’s a silly trend where people draw her without pants and I wanted to toy with that too. The idea of her starting her day fully dressed and with pretty solid armor and cape only to have her pants vanish instantly and without obvious explanation in the middle of the day makes me laugh and it sounds like something she’d actually end up dealing with someday.I’m gonna probably call this blue character Nyx as a counterpart to the purple and green character Vex. They weren’t really meant to be this humanoid.
Friday Night / Saturday Morning around 4AM I decided to try 1/4th of a melatonin gummy (the package suggests one gummy is 5mg – the typical daily limit for an adult- and that the package’s recommended serving is 10 mg- which is probably more than one should really be having without consulting a doctor) 1: I was surprised that it was gooey, not really a tablet like I expected.
2: I slept 14 hours, effectively losing my entire Saturday and waking up darn close to midnight on Sunday. I’ve been awake since then and I don’t really have a good plan for resetting my sleep needs since most likely I’m going to probably suddenly get sleepy and fall out around mid-day today.
3: Last week I kinda told some people I was planning to do kind of an important thing today, but since my sleep is messed up and my emotional state is kinda hit-or-miss I’m not sure I should actually do it _today_ I should probably wait until I’m in a good state to handle a high-emotion scenario.
4: If I’ve been dodging answering “how’s your day going?” It’s probably because the funky sleep + work needs + funky emotions = most answers I could give would bring the mood of the chat down, so I’m deliberately answering that question less unless I am in fact in a good mood. Or if the chat in question is a Serious Mode type of chat. But earlier this week I accidentally ruined one of my friends’s livestream with dumb low-sleep logic and it was bad enough that they ended the stream and then I felt really bad about that because in most cases doing something enough to cause the stream to end is absolutely a bannable offense. So uh… until I can at least get a reliable 2 hour nap on a schedule, I’m still gonna be a bit more reserved on what I post and where.
I think that’s it for the status update?
Some fun stuff: * The first episode of the new Ranma 1/2 is out on Netflix and I enjoyed that a lot more than I expected. It’s got some parts that I’m a little antsy about, but they got to the matter of Ranma’s sex-swapping very quickly and it wasn’t kept as a secret from his romantic interests. So that’s cool, but I’m still hoping later episodes of the show don’t start getting too Weird about the sex thing. And I know different cultures view that kinda different too so… I just dunno. Admittedly it’s a little frustrating that the core of the show revolves around an unwanted curse that the character has to deal with that darn near most of my friends would absolutely punch somebody to have put upon them. But the dysphoric element of it is still relatable.
* Agatha All Along has been a great mystery thriller adventure so far with lotsa fun bits and only a moderate amount of blood. I’m a bit worried it’s going to get more violent by the end, but I’m already invested in seeing it through. I’m absolutely convinced Agatha is going to kill everyone by the end, but I really really really hope she has a change of heart and doesn’t because I already like this coven a lot. But given “witch killer” has seemingly been her identity since before the events of Wandavision, odds are not looking great.
* Played Soulstone Survivors. It’s OK. Grindy, kinda more Gauntlet Legends than Vampire Survivors and it’s not really meant to ever be an “afk-game” from what I can tell because inevitably enemies and bosses *will* do direct-targeting attacks, you are unlikely to have a build that can tank that until mid-level, and you’re unlikely to have any character that can out-dps to the point of screen-clearing all ranged attackers even if you’re already grinded a character’s talent trees very high.
* I tried Voids Vigil, a shump-survival type game by the makers of Boneraiser Minions. I… don’t really like it very much at all unfortunately, but it’s in early access. It feels like it wants to be way more of a shmup, but it doesn’t have the music nor the bright exciting colors that get me hype for a shmup.
*I experimented with modding Quake but I don’t really seem to like *playing* Quake or Quake 2 very much and I can’t really figure out any specific reason why. And I didn’t really figure out how to do extra scripting type modding without having to recompile the game so I kinda just put it down for now.
* I also tried a little bit of Half-Life / Half-Life: Source with consideration for modding. Source didn’t seem to like my gamepad for input. Non-Source worked just fine with my gamepad. I played far enough to get the HEV suit and stopped there. I get the impression Half-Life is not really my kind of videogame. I like how it looked, though! It’s the specific era of 3D videogame environment graphics that kinda locked into my brain.
Finished Yars Rising a week or two ago, I enjoyed that quite a lot. While it is primarily a Metroidvania-y type of game, there is a good bit of classic Yars-style gameplay in there too, especially when going to 100% achievements since the Hack List is pretty much all YARS gameplay and no Emi. There was a reward for clearing it too! Though I don’t see myself using said reward much.
And apparently it’s known for this to last for months. That’s. Not fun.
Most of the worst of it has passed, I think, but I still occasionally get some of those symptoms. The most annoying ones being extreme sensitivity to sounds/light for a while, falling asleep seemingly at random, and then waking up feeling fully energized seemingly at random and then suddenly running out of that fully energized feeling and just feeling tired but unable to sleep for hours.
I dunno. I’ll manage. I don’t plan to go back to taking those meds if I don’t have to. But I figured now that I know there’s an actual term for what’s happening to me, I should probably make a note of that somewhere.
AnnMWhite 10:56 so what I’m thinking right now is that the dragon fairies are typically small and not particularly physically strong, so while they were able to copy the power of Embiggening from Bunnies, they had to use tools to compensate for other things that were biological traits of their inspiration. So the Cookie Kiss Cookis thingy is like. small sweet tasty edible projectile. And the pancake makes things flat like a pancake! But they spring back out unflat after little bit, so you can launch off like a trampoline. The pancake itself is edible
I’m revisiting the older design of Variable Sugar who I’m sure I had redesigned since the original, but I can’t find it. Anyway, in this iteration of the design, Variable Sugar was one of the fairies who decided to follow Big when she decided to seek out the homeland of the rabbits. Where Sugar came from, when she was young and rabbits were still common, fairies were considered a common companion to bunnies and they often shared food and housing openly with each other. While at at land of the bunnies, she got hungry and found a packet of familiar Carrot Crisps. She snuck into the package to eat, but was spotted by Kazhooey who couldn’t tell what was in her food, but knew it was some kind of pest. She struck, knocking Sugar unconscious. She is found the next day by Ribbon Badge, a bit confused and unable to quite recall recent events very well at all.
She had always been a playful, mischievous, and playful personality since she was young. But after her injury, she seems to get her feelings all jumbled and mixed together. So while she’s a bit more defensive and outspoken about trying to stay safe, when she decides she wants to do something that seems fun, those moments of fun seem uh disproportionately intense and energetic and will continue until she’s exhausted or trapped and restrained. She has an Embiggening tool similar to RB’s, but it is only compatible with Deluge/Berry type actions and only has two cartridge slots available.
Jackie is one of the residents of Nueva Esperanza. She typically only wears a few bags for carrying fishing gear and some boots to make it easier to navigate mucky terrain without getting stuck. While it’s an open secret that she is the most promiscuous person living in Esperanza and has a record of trouble-making from excessive drinking, she is also one of the most prolific fishers and writers living in the area and that is very useful for keeping everyone fed and keeping a flow of revenue/value to trade with other areas. She has a fluid and unpredictable martial arts style all about going with the flow. The vaguely ghost-like patterns on her thighs are said to glow when the spirits of ancestors are watching and proud. In a pinch, she can also use her fishing gear as makeshift weapons.
She was one of the people who was suspected during a trio of murders in the area. It was quickly evident that she was not the killer and in fact had almost been a victim. But while she had a good hunch who was responsible, she refused to share the information when asked. She never says why she refused, but she was almost certainly scared of retaliation.
An earlier sketch of what I hoped would fit for Jackie before I looked around for other references.
I didn’t design this one. But when I saw the super shiny blues and how well it contrasts with the orange I knew I had to keep the design around until I can work on it more. I definitely want to give this one maybe a white coat or vest or something so that the eyes aren’t drawn directly to the chest and groin. But I think their casual look without any of the clothing probably will work just fine, if a little bit on the generic side.
Can’t remember what I meant to name this one, but I think the general color scheme is going to stay about the same. The idea is that Hard Reset is very fond of this particular Helibuster and wants to spend more time with them. But while on what should be been a routine scouting task, things escalate when mercs kick off their arson plot, and this one can’t find a way out of it. And well, Squee and Helibuster have an *extremely* explosive reaction to high heat. Rez’s own training and performance scores skyrocket after that, but they have an open disdain for the simulator training because it’s “not real, it’s too systematic, too predictable, too safe”.
AnnMWhite 23:51 Awww, I can relate to that *nosebumps and nosebumps nosebumps and hides in ur pillow OwO*
(Without giving myself a case of disphoria and self-loathing I mean?)
Anyway I watched this video (and a couple others from this channel) recently and it’s SO COOL.
Makes me really really want to get more serious about music again. Has me fantasizing about mock up cartoon intros and rhythm games and stuff. But I think for now I might just want to try to remember to cycle between guitar, keyboard, 3d modeling, and sketch animation on my time off. Or writing. I dunno, just gotta stop letting myself get in ruts of doing the same one thing on loop for extended periods.
I had been seeing video clips of a super cute game called Devil Connection. I believe it’s the same artist responsible for Makemon. For a while I thought it was a fan animation or a music video all the way up until I saw the announcement video for a Steam demo.
However, the game is a visual novel. The game is entirely in Japanese. And while I had taken some college courses for Elementary Japanese around 2011/2012 at Columbus State University, I did not learn enough vocabulary to be able to work my way through a Japanese VN without a lot of struggle.
BUT! Translation tools are very strong right now, and they can even piece together context from screencaps without a perfect manual transcription of the text on screen. These tools are NOT ready for sensitive tasks like handling medicine orders or preparing official legal documents , but for a low risk task like playing a videogame, a handful of missed cultural notes and some completely wrong translations here and there is low risk.
So I started trying to figure out what it would take if I wanted to do a soft translation of the demo. I browse to the install location Steam put the game at.
v8 javascript engine? The Chromium license? So this must be a browser-based game engine like Electron!
I see a lot of .pak files in locales that seems like it might be the game pre-translated! …wait no that doesn’t make sense, the game has only ever been shown in Japanese. those must be translation files for Chrome itself. In resources I see app.asar. I don’t remember what an asar file is, but it sure feels familiar. Is it a zip file? No. Renaming it to .zip and extracting with Ark does not work. So back to google. And sure enough, more confirmation that this is almost certainly an Electron app. Doesn’t take long to find the info on how to pack and extract an asar file.
cd resources npx asar extract app.asar custom-unpack and boom, now I can explore the files. I’ll have to remember to repack it to run it.
From here, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. I notice the folder named tyrano and was curious about that. But I first open index.html in a text editor and take a look around. Immediately see the text “Loading TyranoScript” and a short web search later I find out that TyranoBuilder Visual Novel Studio is a visual-editor based visual novel game making engine similar to Ren Py. Neat! I had been toying around a little with RenPy recently so seeing there’s other options like this that are already up and available on Steam seemed quite promising.
So my immediate goal is “Find where the dialogue text is stored”. At the moment I feel like searching with my own eyes rather than relying on grep or “find in files” in Fleet, partly because I’m curious to get my bearings on how this game is packaged in general more than I am eager to translate the texts.
Roughly 10 minutes of skimming the files in the root directory for the asar, I realize the most obvious place to put the Data for a game would probably be the Data folder, so I take and peek
Oh hey a Scenarios folder, that sure sounds like where one might put the scenario text for the various scenes in their game.
I open up Chapter1.ks and quickly notice that the ratio of instructional commands to dialogue and scene text is actually quite a bit higher than I was expecting. I also quickly realize that my plan of translating things has made no room for interactive buttons that are drawn as graphics, or any of the signposts or jokes that are in the background images.
—
Jump forward about 2 hours. I now have a TSV file with a preliminary auto-translation of the most important texts in Chapter1.ks to reasonably followable (if unflavorful and not very regionalized) English text. I’ve also taken the un-modified copy of the extract .asar file and renamed it to /app and renamed the original app.asar to app.asar.ignore. The existing app.asar.unpacked is left untouched. Doing a short test run to ensure I can still run the game without having to repack everything.
Devil Connection (Devil Connection) Start from the Beginning Start from Continue Option Collection
Looks like it at least loads from the /app folder. After clicking start it didn’t go straight into chapter 1, the text I’m seeing here is something else. Looks like it’s from scene1.ks
(omg wow the game looks much prettier in action than it does in the videos \=OuuO=/ )
Quick smoke check to see if it’s gonna blow up if I just put in any old text here.
Oh… I didn’t planned for text overflows. And that’s going to be a _constant_ issue as the romanization of any given Japanese text is going to be roughly 2-3 times the characters used on average and Kanji that might only take two or three characters might instead be words that take as many as 12 or more characters… Oh well. It’s something I might be willing to fix if I were more devoted, but for now I just want to see if this’ll even work.
Now I’m going to use a short python script to replace the relevant texts in Chapter1.ks based on my Translation.tsv.
—
Another hour later. Had a change of plans. Rather than manually doing an excel file for each file to translate, I concatenated all of the .ks files into one big text blob and went through all of them looking for lines that needed translating. Feed the lines through auto-translate to populate the translation column like we did with the proof of concept. And use another python script to automatically go through all of the .js files and replace each matched line with their corresponding translated text.
Translation is going OKish with this approach, but there’s certain sections that the LLM refuses to parse due to sensitive content. As far as I can tell it’s something involving tickling or clothing? Or both? Either way, I got worried I wouldn’t be able to continue, but I gave it the text to continue from and skipped over that section, so maybe it’ll be fine…
—
Guess I’m taking a break on this now, I am frustrated and want to play videogames and eat and stuff.
—
It’s tomorrow and I’m doing a quick followup on this:
1, there are a _ton_ of text lines in the file that I’m not sure are actually used in the demo and might have been intended for the full game or something?
2, because it’s so much longer than I expected, it’s a lot harder to automate the process of translating the relevant sections. I can do some basic filtering like ignoring lines that start with known control characters like # or [, but that means quite a number of lines that require an effect to happen first will get skipped unless additional processing is done to skip over matching bracket pairs and focus on only text that might be contained within.
3, I tried messing about with only translating the Chapter 1 file instead of trying to translate everything. And it mostly works, particularly if I go in and manually insert the lines myself. However, the automated injection I wrote is failing resulting in the game failing to even _boot_, and Steam continues to show it as “Running” despite there never being a window for it visible.
I might experiment more with this later if I come up with a better way to automate out the parts I don’t want to do manually, or if I limit the scope to only translating the parts I am encountering my own playthrough. But for now the old and familiar method of screenreader+side translator is probably the better option than translation injection. It’s *definitely* doable, but it’s enough tedium that I wouldn’t do it for fun.
—
Edit: I think the answer to “why the total text so HUGE!?” is because the “System” folder under Scenario also have their own scenarios, and I accidentally included the Scenario1 file twice???? oops.
If I take another crack at this, what I’d do is along the lines of writing a script to:
Iterate every line of the file. For each line,
1: if the line starts with #, delete the line (Sets the character name, I believe. Since it’s a command, I’m reluctant to mess with it.).
2: If the line starts with *, delete the line (I’m not sure, but I believe these are for numbered labels to jump execution around).
3: If the line starts with //, delete the line (ECMAScript Comment).
4: If the line starts with {, delete everything up until the closing } (this may need to span multiple lines).
5: If the line starts with ;, delete the line (It’s a Tyranoscript comment).
6: if the line starts with [, we assume every pair of [ and ] is a command tag, First, we temporarily store an array of each text entry that exists outside of any command tags in the line. Then, we discard the original line, and insert each of the found text entries as a new separate line. (The idea is that we don’t lose any of the important narrative/dialogue text and keep those on separate lines so they’ll be easy to translate/inject later without risk of touching the commands.)
7: Once we’ve gone through the entire file, we save the file as “all-chapter-texts-no-metadata.txt” 8: make a translation table for every line in _that_ file, with column 0 being the source line, column 1 being the translated line. 9: use that translation table to run a find and replace on every text from that file. It may be best to run it against one file at a time and ensure the game still runs after updating the one file. That way if something gets replaced that shouldn’t be, it’ll be easier to catch. And if we kept a safe backup copy of the extracted files, we can use a diff-tool to check for the offending unintended changes.
okay I’m gonna go eat stuff and play game now bye ^O^
Alixesque requested “If you have a favorite character you’ve made recently I’d love to see!!”
I don’t really have a super favorite immediately on my mind, but I’m still kinda toying around with the ideas of whatever it’s like in the world Ribbon Badge and Zooey inhabit, so another doodle of RB for the moment! SUDDEN COOKISS (may not contain kisses)
ZBombiiBunnii wanted a new sketch of Dark ZBombiiBunni carrying a love-dizzied ZBombiiBunny also heart shaped bomb
