Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (13738)

• Translating Return To Ringworld

  17 août 2016, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  As indicated in my previous post, the Translator has expressed interest in applying his hobby towards another DOS adventure game from the mid 1990s : Return to Ringworld (henceforth R2RW) by Tsunami Media. This represents significantly more work than the previous outing, Phantasmagoria.

  
  
  Return to Ringworld Title Screen
  

  I have been largely successful thus far in crafting translation tools. I have pushed the fruits of these labors to a Github repository named improved-spoon (named using Github’s random name generator because I wanted something more interesting than ‘game-hacking-tools’).

  Further, I have recorded everything I have learned about the game’s resource format (named RLB) at the XentaxWiki.

  New Challenges
  The previous project mostly involved scribbling subtitle text on an endless series of video files by leveraging a separate software library which took care of rendering fonts. In contrast, R2RW has at least 30k words of English text contained in various blocks which require translation. Further, the game encodes its own fonts (9 of them) which stubbornly refuse to be useful for rendering text in nearly any other language.

  Thus, the immediate 2 challenges are :
  

  1. Translating volumes of text to Spanish
  2. Expanding the fonts to represent Spanish characters

  Normally, “figuring out the file format data structures involved” is on the list as well. Thankfully, understanding the formats is not a huge challenge since the folks at the ScummVM project already did all the heavy lifting of reverse engineering the file formats.

  The Pitch
  Here was the plan :

  • Create a tool that can dump out the interesting data from the game’s master resource file.
  • Create a tool that can perform the elaborate file copy described in the previous post. The new file should be bit for bit compatible with the original file.
  • Modify the rewriting tool to repack some modified strings into the new resource file.
  • Unpack the fonts and figure out a way to add new characters.
  • Repack the new fonts into the resource file.
  • Repack message strings with Spanish characters.

  Showing The Work : Modifying Strings
  First, I created the tool to unpack blocks of message string resources. I elected to dump the strings to disk as JSON data since it’s easy to write and read JSON using Python, and it’s quick to check if any mistakes have crept in.

  The next step is to find a string to focus on. So I started the game and looked for the first string I could trigger :

  
  
  

  This shows up in the JSON string dump as :

    
      "Spanish" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle.",
      "English" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle."
    ,
  

  As you can see, many of the strings are encoded with an ID key as part of the string which should probably be left unmodified. I changed the Spanish string :

    
      "Spanish" : " !0205Hey, is this thing on ?",
      "English" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle."
    ,
  

  And then I wrote the repacking tool to substitute this message block for the original one. Look ! The engine liked it !

  
  
  

  Little steps, little steps.

  Showing The Work : Modifying Fonts
  The next little step is to find a place to put the new characters. First, a problem definition : The immediate goal is to translate the game into Spanish. The current fonts encoded in the game resource only support 128 characters, corresponding to 7-bit ASCII. In order to properly express Spanish, 16 new characters are required : á, é, í, ó, ú, ü, ñ (each in upper and lower case for a total of 14 characters) as well as the inverted punctuation symbols : ¿, ¡.

  Again, ScummVM already documents (via code) the font coding format. So I quickly determined that each of the 9 fonts is comprised of 128 individual bitmaps with either 1 or 2 bits per pixel. I wrote a tool to unpack each character into an individual portable grey map (PGM) image. These can be edited with graphics editors or with text editors since they are just text files.

  Where to put the 16 new Spanish characters ? ASCII characters 1-31 are non-printable, so my first theory was that these characters would be empty and could be repurposed. However, after dumping and inspecting, I learned that they represent the same set of characters as seen in DOS Code Page 437. So that’s a no-go (so I assumed ; I didn’t check if any existing strings leveraged those characters).

  My next plan was hope that I could extend the font beyond index 127 and use positions 128-143. This worked superbly. This is the new example string :

    
      "Spanish" : " !0205¿Ves esto ? ¡La puntuacion se hace girar !",
      "English" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle."
    ,
  

  Fortunately, JSON understands UTF-8 and after mapping the 16 necessary characters down to the numeric range of 128-143, I repacked the new fonts and the new string :

  
  
  Translation : “See this ? The punctuation is rotated !”
  

  Another victory. Notice that there are no diacritics in this string. None are required for this translation (according to Google Translate). But adding the diacritics to the 14 characters isn’t my department. My tool does help by prepopulating [aeiounAEIOUN] into the right positions to make editing easier for the Translator. But the tool does make the effort to rotate the punctuation since that is easy to automate.

  Next Steps and Residual Weirdness
  There is another method for storing ASCII text inside the R2RW resource called strip resources. These store conversation scripts. There are plenty of fields in the data structures that I don’t fully understand. So, following the lessons I learned from my previous translation outing, I was determined to modify as little as possible. This means copying over most of the original data structures intact, but changing the field representing the relative offset that points to the corresponding string. This works well since the strings are invariably stored NULL-terminated in a concatenated manner.

  I wanted to document for the record that the format that R2RW uses has some weirdness in they way it handles residual bytes in a resource. The variant of the resource format that R2RW uses requires every block to be aligned on a 16-byte boundary. If there is space between the logical end of the resource and the start of the next resource, there are random bytes in that space. This leads me to believe that these bytes were originally recorded from stale/uninitialized memory. This frustrates me because when I write the initial file copy tool which unpacks and repacks each block, I want the new file to be identical to the original. However, these apparent nonsense bytes at the end thwart that effort.

  But leaving those bytes as 0 produces an acceptable resource file.

  Text On Static Images
  There is one last resource type we are working on translating. There are various bits of text that are rendered as images. For example, from the intro :

  
  
  

  It’s possible to locate and extract the exact image that is overlaid on this scene, though without the colors :

  
  
  

  The palettes are stored in a separate resource type. So it seems the challenge is to figure out the palette in use for these frames and render a transparent image that uses the same palette, then repack the new text-image into the new resource file.

  The post Translating Return To Ringworld first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• subtitles dont show ffmpeg issue

  30 septembre 2016, par Bilal Shahid

  I’m using below command to burn subtitles to a video. I have successfully done it via terminal in ubuntu. I’ve used this library in android android library and I’ve run the same command to do the same task but it wont work the command executes successfully but in result video I don’t see any subtitle.

  fmpeg -i /home/s9iper1/a.mp4 -vf "subtitles=/home/s9iper1/titles.srt:force_style='Fontsize=24,PrimaryColour=&H0000ff&'" -c:a copy /home/s9iper1/out.mp4

• [Aug-Sept 2013] Piwik 2.0 Development Update !

  3 octobre 2013, par Fabian Becker — Development

  This Development Update is the first in a new series of posts we’ll be writing to keep you, our loyal users, informed of our efforts. We hope these updates keep you excited about Piwik’s future, and if you’re a developer, we hope they inspire and challenge you to accomplish more yourself !

  Despite this being our first update, it will probably be one of our biggest. We’ve gotten a lot done as we race towards the Piwik 2.0 release ! Just see for yourself :

  What we’ve accomplished

  Theming

  Piwik now supports theming, a feature that was requested often in the past. Because of our switch to the Twig template engine and other major code changes it is now possible to change the way Piwik looks. Additionally, developers can use the dynamic stylesheet language LESS, instead of CSS. Piwik will automatically transform the LESS code into CSS.

  Piwik 2.0 will ship with a new dark theme called PleineLune (french for Full Moon) that makes use of the new theming feature. Another theme with a left-aligned menu was created during the Piwik Meetup in Paris. Both of these themes were created by Thomas Zilliox, a very talented designer and CSS expert.

  

  PHP 5.3 Namespaces

  For Piwik 2.0 we decided to make use of namespaces, a feature introduced in PHP 5.3. The usage of namespaces makes our code more readable and allows us to better modularize the platform. This is in part why we are raising the required minimum PHP version to 5.3 for Piwik 2.0. (Remember to update your server !)

  Translations in JSON

  All translations are now stored in JSON files which makes storing translations in Piwik a lot cleaner that the giant PHP array we previously used.

  Side note : if you’d like to make Piwik available to more languages, please sign up at translations.piwik.org. We’d love to have your help !

  UI Tests

  We now use UI tests to make sure that changes to the code don’t break the UI. UI tests use PhantomJS and CutyCapt and are automatically executed on Travis CI. Whenever an integration test fails the script produces a screenshot diff that shows the difference. Learn more.

  

  AnonymizeIP supports IPv6

  The AnonymizeIP plugin now masks IPv6 addresses. The concept of the config option ‘ip_address_mask_length’ has now changed to reflect the level of masking that should be applied to the IP. With a masking level of 1 Piwik will mask the last octet of an IPv4 address and the last 80 bits of an IPv6 address.

  All Websites Dashboard usable with 20,000+ Websites

  The All Websites Dashboard is now usable even if you track many thousands of websites in your Piwik instance. We rewrote parts of the archiving process in order to make this possible. Making Piwik fast and memory efficient is a constant concern for core developers.

  Plugins can now add new Visualizations

  Piwik Plugins and Themes can now create new visualizations for your report data. They can also specify their own ViewDataTable footer icons or modify existing ones. This will allow plugin developers to create new ways for you to view your data, customize existing reports so they look great in new visualizations and provide extra analytics functionality accessible in each of your reports.

  The new TreemapVisualization plugin makes use of this feature to let you view your reports as treemaps. It serves as an example of this new functionality.

  Piwik Marketplace

  The Piwik Marketplace is a new platform developers can use to publish their plugins and themes so all Piwik users can easily access them. The marketplace is hosted at plugins.piwik.org and is currently in an early development state, but we’re already able to host plugins !

  Developers can easily publish their plugins by adding a commit hook to their Github repositories. Every time you push a new tag, the marketplace will make a new version of your plugin available. The marketplace will provide a centralized platform to search for plugins and also provide statistics on plugin usage.

  Install Plugins and Themes in one click from within Piwik

  Piwik has offered since the beginning the much-loved “one click update” feature. We are bringing the same functionnality to the Marketplace : you will be able to install Plugins and Themes in one click directly within the Piwik interface ! Similarly to WordPress or Firefox, Piwik will let you extend the functionnality of your analytics platform.

  Conclusion

  In Piwik 2.0 you will be able to install plugins and themes from the marketplace. And, if you’re so inclined, you will be able to create and host your own plugins/themes on the marketplace so everyone can use them. This is by far the accomplishment we are most excited by… the possibilities it opens up for Piwik’s future are truly unlimited. We hope you share our excitement !

  Au revoir, until next time !

  PS : our mission is to liberate web analytics ; thank you for sharing the word about Piwik 2.0 !