Chrono Compendium Project Discussion

[ZeaLitY]

I'm surrounded with tasks, so I want to discuss some of our objectives.

Strategic Goals

1. Contact Masato Kato and ask for an interview or some kind of audience.

Ah, so much I would do if I knew Japanese. But KWhazit has a new career and I'm not going to even think about asking him. I have a possible way open to Masato Kato, but we're stuck in a rut without a translator. We'll also NEVER know about the unused characters of Chrono Cross or tons of other ephemera that could greatly enhance our understanding of the Chrono series. Our perpetual difficulty in finding a translator is the Chrono Compendium's greatest shortcoming.

2. Find a reliable translator to complete works such as Missing Piece character details, Ultimania developer interviews, Dream Team interview in CT player's guide, etc. and establish rapport with Japanese Chrono community.

Ditto.

3. Enable fan projects wikis and forums on demand for fan project creators.

I've noticed that this isn't as important anymore. Only large scale fan projects need this kind of overhead, and there aren't nearly enough modders or ROM hackers to have that many large scale projects. The available talent is already stretched to death.

4. Finish Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes to serve as the new keystone of encouragement and enjoyment of Chrono series modification.

...All right, I'll reveal a big concern of mine. Even with TF 2.55, I had a map blank on me after editing only two or three locations. Like other instances of this, I could not reproduce the error. This has happened to a few others. Right now, it's really stopped my motivation cold. We've spent more time transferring assets than working on the project at this point. I have a placebo in the works for those desiring an original ROM hack, but it's nothing as grand as Crimson Echoes.

5. Form a group of fans to scour fan art and fanfiction communities to haul in high quality works for display.

If someone knows where I can find a bunch of eager, enthusiastic fans to pull this off, let me know. Because it hasn't happened yet. I've tried this project a couple times, but no volunteers ever came forward.

6. Complete Chrono Compendium Lossless Music Archive.

I need Mitsuda's Hopeful Weeds Chrono Cross covers in lossless, and the Chrono Cross sampler in lossless (though the music is identical to the real OST; this is just perfectionism).

Compendium Projects

Chrono Break Initiative

In professional and logical ways, the Chrono Compendium aims to support the development of a new Chrono game, tentatively titled Chrono Break. See the Chrono Break Request Form if you are interested.

Aside from that "Silent Protagonists for Chrono Break", there's no real viable way to raise publicity for a new game. The SP thing is way beyond our capacity anyhow. The best we could ever muster is pestering people to hand out fliers at anime conventions, and that'll help about 0%.

Chrono Compendium Creative Conniptions

Starting in 2007, the Chrono Compendium is having year-round contests for fan created works. The prizes aren't much, consisting of special ranks on the forums. Nonetheless, such a reason for expressing enjoyment for the series is as good as any, and the presence of constant creation will add an air of activity and vigor to the site. There will be four contests total, each spanning three months. They include...

          o Spring's Gift -- March, April, and May witness a fan art contest. Two categories will exist: one for technical brilliance, the other for passionate expression. The winners get the title Artist of Termina and Guardia Sculptor.

          o Summer's Cry -- June, July, and August will host a remixing contest. Winner is the Dreamin' Bard.

          o Autumn's Fate -- September, October, and November will play stage to a short ROM hacking contest. We can barely ask for anything as it is, so entries need not be a storied hack. For instance, Zakyrus's blackjack game at the Millennial Fair would be a valid entry. Entries are judged upon technical difficulty and execution and general quality. Competent hacks with plots will be heavily favored. The winner will be Architect of Kajar.

          o Winter's Fragments -- December, January, and February see a simple fanfiction short story contest. Entries are judged on quality, theme, and closeness to recreating the Chrono feel (which...sounds a bit stupid and subjective, but you can guess what is meant). We take full advantage of the holiday season to compose works here. Winner will be the Poet of Arni.

Wow, this has been a real barn-burner. Not!

Chrono Trigger Retranslation

The Chrono Compendium is using KWhazit's translation of Chrono Trigger to release a comprehensive script contrasting the English, Japanese, and retranslated English text of Chrono Trigger in an easily read and understood presentation.

I could use someone to create a vanilla retranslated ROM with Temporal Flux. But already, two anonymous people have claimed they're putting the translation in, as have others in the fan project community. One effort is on an already edited ROM, so that's out for a Retranslation patch, and the other is using Chronotools with some difficulties (Ramsus could hardly get it to compile), so we might have problems there too. Now, I may end up doing the entire vanilla ROM myself in traditional Compendium fashion, but if anyone with a meticulous eye for quality and an insatiable desire to achieve wants to do this in a timely fashion, let me know.

Imminent Goals

   

* Investigate reviving the old Compendium with a PHP Nuke backup.

I'll pass off my backup someday and this will be a walk in the park. We'll get to see how crazy we all were back in the PHP Nuke days!

   

* Import the Wikipedia articles for CT / CC/ RD / CB.

No idea how I'm going to do this. CT and CC are featured and RD and CB are good articles thanks to my efforts and the help of others in at WP:VG, but the Compendium's MediaWiki version doesn't support all the markup (like for references). I could just paste a text only version with no hyperlinks with the reference section manually intact. Still, any time the Wikipedia articles are changed, I have to change the ones here. Redundant work like that is bitter...

* Investigate the Cross Programmer's ending once and for all.

I'll make a thread about this soon. I know for a fact that we'd probably learn all about it with a translator.

   

* Find backups of Melody of Legend.

Still looking.

   

* Create the speed run pages.

This is going to be a little difficult to maintain, but it's possible with Molotov's help.

   

* Release Project ZEAL chapter 1.

Project ZEAL needs a bigger community. Of the few that volunteered in the recent topic mentioning its release, half will probably regularly write, and much more than the total amount responding are actually needed to sustain a project like this. It's a magnificent idea, but we don't have enough writers to keep it going or make it worthwhile.

~

Well, my attitude seems a little weary; I guess if I were truly disappointed in something, it'd be our inability to get a translator. There's a true goldmine of information waiting out there.

[Kyronea]

If someone knows where I can find a bunch of eager, enthusiastic fans to pull this off, let me know. Because it hasn't happened yet. I've tried this project a couple times, but no volunteers ever came forward.

I'm willing.

I could use someone to create a vanilla retranslated ROM with Temporal Flux. But already, two anonymous people have claimed they're putting the translation in, as have others in the fan project community. One effort is on an already edited ROM, so that's out for a Retranslation patch, and the other is using Chronotools with some difficulties (Ramsus could hardly get it to compile), so we might have problems there too. Now, I may end up doing the entire vanilla ROM myself in traditional Compendium fashion, but if anyone with a meticulous eye for quality and an insatiable desire to achieve wants to do this in a timely fashion, let me know.

I'll consider taking a crack at this, though don't expect much...I am notoriously unreliable when it comes to actually creating this kind of stuff. Hell, the only reason I even have time is that I'm taking a bit of a break from all the Chrono Trigger + stuff while Zakyrus works on preparing the public beta.

Ah, so much I would do if I knew Japanese. But KWhazit has a new career and I'm not going to even think about asking him. I have a possible way open to Masato Kato, but we're stuck in a rut without a translator. We'll also NEVER know about the unused characters of Chrono Cross or tons of other ephemera that could greatly enhance our understanding of the Chrono series. Our perpetual difficulty in finding a translator is the Chrono Compendium's greatest shortcoming.

This is one time where my inability to learn any different languages apart from the occasional word or two really frustrates me. If only I knew Japanese...I'd join in a heartbeat.

What about that Hyena20 GameFAQs user? It's the only person I can think of right now apart from KWhazit who might be interested. (I can think of many other translators but they're either busy with their own fandom or just wouldn't be interested.)

[Ramsus]

Chrono Trigger Retranslation

The Chrono Compendium is using KWhazit's translation of Chrono Trigger to release a comprehensive script contrasting the English, Japanese, and retranslated English text of Chrono Trigger in an easily read and understood presentation.

I could use someone to create a vanilla retranslated ROM with Temporal Flux. But already, two anonymous people have claimed they're putting the translation in, as have others in the fan project community. One effort is on an already edited ROM, so that's out for a Retranslation patch, and the other is using Chronotools with some difficulties (Ramsus could hardly get it to compile), so we might have problems there too. Now, I may end up doing the entire vanilla ROM myself in traditional Compendium fashion, but if anyone with a meticulous eye for quality and an insatiable desire to achieve wants to do this in a timely fashion, let me know.

It's worth noting that I was trying to build chronotools on Mac OS X, which threw some cross-platform library and compiler issues/bugs into the mix. If I had more time, I'd be able to fix it, but someone using any decent x86 Linux distribution should be able to build it without any problems (if you get some problems with template syntax and GCC 4, add -fpermissive to the CFLAGS in the Makefile).

[ZeaLitY]

Looks like Shadow Usagi is going to make the vanilla translation.

I've never succeeded in bringing Hyena20 to the Compendium, probably because we endorse the entire series.

[Teh Mick]

Chrono Trigger Retranslation

The Chrono Compendium is using KWhazit's translation of Chrono Trigger to release a comprehensive script contrasting the English, Japanese, and retranslated English text of Chrono Trigger in an easily read and understood presentation.

I could use someone to create a vanilla retranslated ROM with Temporal Flux. But already, two anonymous people have claimed they're putting the translation in, as have others in the fan project community. One effort is on an already edited ROM, so that's out for a Retranslation patch, and the other is using Chronotools with some difficulties (Ramsus could hardly get it to compile), so we might have problems there too. Now, I may end up doing the entire vanilla ROM myself in traditional Compendium fashion, but if anyone with a meticulous eye for quality and an insatiable desire to achieve wants to do this in a timely fashion, let me know.

It's worth noting that I was trying to build chronotools on Mac OS X, which threw some cross-platform library and compiler issues/bugs into the mix. If I had more time, I'd be able to fix it, but someone using any decent x86 Linux distribution should be able to build it without any problems (if you get some problems with template syntax and GCC 4, add -fpermissive to the CFLAGS in the Makefile).

Ah, thanks for the tip ! I'll use it to compile Chrono Tools on my Kubuntu Feisty laptop.
With some code editing, I got ChronoTools working on my Kubuntu Dapper AMD64 desktop and resulted the patch I posted in Kajar Laboratory.

Note that I dumped the text from the vanilla ROM and ChronoTools is creating the IPS thus my original file is not affected at all. Also, like I said, I investigate further the problems I have with ChronoTools once I have finished with the script. I could really need a hand on this.

[Ramsus]

Ah, thanks for the tip ! I'll use it to compile Chrono Tools on my Kubuntu Feisty laptop.
With some code editing, I got ChronoTools working on my Kubuntu Dapper AMD64 desktop and resulted the patch I posted in Kajar Laboratory.

Note that I dumped the text from the vanilla ROM and ChronoTools is creating the IPS thus my original file is not affected at all. Also, like I said, I investigate further the problems I have with ChronoTools once I have finished with the script. I could really need a hand on this.

I originally got it to build on Mac OS X with a few minor edits, but the ctdump program crashed on a call to an iconv function whenever I tried using it on the ROM. If I had time to investigate, I would give it a shot, but my C++ is rusty at best anyway. As such, I'd be really interested to know if you encounter any similar problems and fix them.

Anyway, good luck. Feel free to try recruiting as much help as you want here.

[Chrono'99]

Chrono Break Initiative

In professional and logical ways, the Chrono Compendium aims to support the development of a new Chrono game, tentatively titled Chrono Break. See the Chrono Break Request Form if you are interested.

Aside from that "Silent Protagonists for Chrono Break", there's no real viable way to raise publicity for a new game. The SP thing is way beyond our capacity anyhow. The best we could ever muster is pestering people to hand out fliers at anime conventions, and that'll help about 0%.

What about the VG Cats connection? A Chrono Break reference or subliminal request in the official FFXI webcomic wouldn't be anything groundbreaking or fate-altering, but it's perhaps one of the most accessible initiative, provided Ramsoomair agrees. It would raise a very tiny bit of publicity... Tanaka has said that the FFXI team sometimes or often visit the FFXI community to see how things are going, so if one of those guys could see something about Chrono Break and recall the good old days when he was working on CC...

[ZeaLitY]

I'll e-mail him!

[Mystic Frog King]

   

* Release Project ZEAL chapter 1.

Project ZEAL needs a bigger community. Of the few that volunteered in the recent topic mentioning its release, half will probably regularly write, and much more than the total amount responding are actually needed to sustain a project like this. It's a magnificent idea, but we don't have enough writers to keep it going or make it worthwhile.

Hmm. I can't help there, sorry. Trouble is, the community on these forums on the most part just isn't into fan fiction; and I don't even know if any other large Chrono fansites exist. (Being new myself to this whole thing and all =/)