What happened?!

We're very sorry if things haven't been progressing as of late. And yes, you guessed it, College. Winter break is almost up. Finals is coming nearer and nobody has time to even talk to each other. Timezones makes a huge effect and people having Thesis or Term papers to submit. In short, busy~

Archeia and Renasci has been fixing another issue too. We won't be elaborate, but that ate most of our time. But during one of the few moments we worked on BBI, we DID find a way to make the code cleaner. The only problem with this is that we have to redo what we have done. We also remembered that by default, the engine had text skipping, but it was disabled in this script we're using. We're currently trying to fix this issue. Mostly because the Alphonse cursor won't stay on the end of each message. We'll post a poll later to ask which one people prefer.


We will now leave off some art:

We're back baby~

Time to full steam ahead!

Status Update ~III~

The engine right now is going a major overhaul. Nothing that time consuming, but it's not going to take that long. The change is mostly to make the code cleaner and faster! This is also to avoid bugs suddenly appearing, as seen in the BBI second demo by the testers.

So far, we're thinking of what to do to make the map exploration to stop lagging. But here's some important survery that we want to ask people. We will really appreciate it if you guys take the time to answer them~ It will affect the entire project :)

1.) Do you guys prefer keyboard controls or mouse controls?

• Pros for Keyboard:
• It's faster and easier to code.
• It's also prone to less bugs.

• Cons for Keyboard:
• It won't be true to the original source engine.
• It doesn't feel novelly for some people (but compare it to Disgaea and the rest, I think it's fine~)

2.) Do you guys want the literal English translation and a patch for the original BBI engine?

• Pros:
• In case for some reason, you guys hate our rewrite.
• You like Out of Character fanfictions
• You don't mind ellipses overload (or we can remove them).
• You like a very docile Edward.
• You like the fact Edward becomes Envy's XXX doll.
• You like the fact that Ed and Roy are tsundere for each other in a very obvious way.
• Refer to #2 again.

• Cons:
• It will be a while because the engine is a mess.
• If you hate everything from Pros except #1

3.) The Release Date.

• Please check the Poll to vote~

• Pros 
• for December 25:
• Well...it's out faster. And I guess, best Christmas Present ever?
• for February 3:
• It's Edward Elric's Birthday~
• for Oct. 3:
• It's most likely complete, maybe, and that it's Don't Forget day~

• Cons 
• for December 25
• It's going to be a demo.
• for February 3
• Probably not a full game still
• for Oct. 3
• It's way offs the calendar.

Thank you for reading.

Status Update ~II~

Sent a demo to two six people for feedback on the game's presentation before proceeding to big things (and finding some bugs). Some stuff were fixed and all that. One of the things we noticed:

a.) font must be installed, but I will fix this so that you won't have to.
b.) video card (OPENGL) must be updated. Your codecs must be updated. Or else, the movie file won't play at all. This mostly happens at Windows XP. So install the latest K-lite codec now!

We still can't work on it fully, Faith is sick and unable to send us the script files. Archeia is still flooded with work. BBCircle can't work without Faith and Renasci is contemplating whether to retranslate them.

Sorry for the long wait~

Status Update

We're very sorry for not updating much! This is because this week and next week are the midterm exams for two of our important members, Bluebird's Circle and Archeia. We'll be back on track once that is over! Sorry for the wait!

~Ren Ren

Progress~Progress~ VIII-2

Hello again! Bluebird's Circle here! Okay... Hear me out on this report. Okay? It's sorta' long and sorta' depressing--but you'll rejoice anyway.

So today consisted of me (having had only three hours of sleep) waking up at 7 AM to work on rewriting the terrible rough translations of Day 4 nonstop until I was finished at 8 PM...

OH MY GOD! I've never been more miserable in my entire life... I didn't have a single thing to eat, a single glass of water, or even a little nap on my carousel of self imposed (well...almost self imposed. Archeia and Renasci whipped me a few times to make sure I was still going...) AGONY! And it was all for you guys! *cries*

I hope everyone will appreciate my sacrifice of a whole day in my meek and shorter than Edward life.

Here is an image of me RIGHT NOW with ripped up edits that didn't make the cut to my left:

Anyway, there is some joy to come out of my sorrow and woe. And that's the fact the DEMO WILL COME ANY TIME NOW!!! YOU HEARD ME!! 4 out of the 8 DAYS PEOPLE!

*plays chorus of angels*

It's been a tough journey. The halfway checkpoint is so near. I hope you all enjoy the demo when it comes out. And remember me after I am eventually murdered by Renasci.

I'd like to thank the rest of the team! You guys are amazing people. We will get this done together! And of course, I thank whoever's reading this post. You guys pushed me too!

THANK YOU!

...I'm going to go drink some water now...

Progress~Progress~ VIII

For now we are sorting out Day 3 and Day 4. Apparently, Bluebird's Circle missed some event(s) so we ended up rewriting them with the other events added in.

As for another news, Bluebird's Illusion can be played in MAC but it won't be something direct...Instead, it’s a fairly inexpensive way to play Bluebird's Illusion on your Mac. Using a free program called Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/) you can run Windows in a window on your mac.


You’ll still need a copy of Windows  and it takes maybe half an hour to get everything set up (including installing windows). Another alternative is a paid program which you may have heard of called, Parallels.

We’d love to hear how this worked for you, once the demo is released! We're still working very hard!

- A little off note

I was looking over TVTropes BBI page earlier and saw this:

"In the Roy ending, Alphonse dies and Edward is heartbroken; but life goes on, Roy becomes Fuhrer while Ed ends up as a General and they even start dating."

I'd have you guys know that this is totally false and whoever wrote that, well, let's just say the entire team wants to murder that person. They never DATED, ok? Maybe a scene in the novel can be intepreted as that but this is totally false. It ends after Ed gets over crying. Jeebuz.

This game isn't yaoi but it does has short fluffy shounen-ai-ish elements that shouldn't be that disturbing, except I guess if you went with the DIRECT creepy, pride!ed (bad) ending. Sorry to disappoint a lot of fans but it just isn't!

Progress~Progress~ VII

TLDR; Archeia is sick and unable to work. Renasci is doing the rest of the work. BBCircle is writing

Break~Time

Sung by Bluebird's Circle~!

Recruitment~

First off, a Translator - Someone that can understand Chinese/Taiwanese Slang. This is just for the developer diaries. There is no need to be worried about translating hordes of scripts. They're just a few images~

We would like at least 2 Beta testers with low PC specs. Aka, your laptop/computer isn't upto date and autodated (WinXP OS is a-ok). This is for us to test if the game is too laggy for some people. If you're interested. Please leave a comment over here and tell us your PC OS, RAM, processor etc. and we'll select from there.

Thank you~

Progress~Progress~ V

This is how I feel right now when things aren't going my way.

STUPID CODE, I'LL FIGURE YOU OUT SOON, JUST YOU WAIT.

Later...

HA GUESS WHAT I WON!

CG is now fully functional~

Progress-wise, day 4 is under construction. Day 3 is rewritten. 

Demo is almost near if only these stupid menus work properly.

Progress~Progress~ IV

Renasci reports:

Oh my, what is this~?
I was working on an installer for BBI and it works nicely well. So far the game is clocking around 180 mb. We'll see how it will look once we cut it down...sometime...

Progress~ Progress~ III

The current status of the BBI:Re team.

Because it's literally impossible for us to contact the translators... The already overworked people of the team went ahead and trudged through the blazing inferno and fought over a series of epic trials and tribulations and facing the final evil overlord of the year, just to translate the remaining 2 days that were required for the demo.
We also translated and made the opening song singable in English for you guys. the day before.

Bluebird's Circle still has to rewrite them and colors still has to edit them and Archeia still needs to whip them to make sure she's satisfied with the outcome before she try to program it in. Overall, we're exhausted and we'll keep working hard as much as we can.

It might not be possible for us to release it by October 7 because of this...unexpected draw back. Let's just say that we'll elaborate the happenings more in the developer diaries than just rant about it in the blog. We're very sorry everyone! We're apparently really horrible with release dates! We'll just keep quiet for now and see how it goes. Everyone's getting sick because of the climate change and we need to be in full health. Thank you for bearing with us!

If you guys want an indepth  progress, just check the progress log!

Progress~ Progress~ II

Okay, update for the day! If you ever check out the Progress Log, you can see some developer notes there sometimes on how we spent the day and what we achieved and all that stuff. So go check it out :D

And now, have some screenshots~
You can now skip a scene completely or just far forward.

Progress~ Progress~

Think of it as a countdown.

Happy FMA Day~

Since today is a special day, we wanted to do something ~special~

And 21 votes say a video. 

So a video it is!

Unfortunately, Archeia is really sick and was unable to show more stuff (and her laptop crashing randomly or losing batteries). We also took some time trying to figure out how to apply subtitles made from Aegissub (wanted to make it animated but it was taking too long) and converting mkv to either avi, wmv or mpeg (and thank goodness we succeeded). So after many blood, sweat and, tears...here's a new vid that shows off other visual effects, and hopefully, better grammar and spelling. We cut off the scenes and added a new one. Just to tease :D

Of course, Fullmetal-Alchemist.com's Project Don't forget :D

Release Date Moved: October 7, 2011

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I'm afraid we'll have to move the release date for the demo to October 7. For those who are rather curious to what is going on:

• Translator problems. Everyone is busy apparently and some got grounded, some just aren't that interested and those who are already busy with rewriting and programming had to translate it with measly Chinese knowledge and friends and connections.

• College is in the way. Archeia and BluebirdsCircle are main victims to this. Set aside from scarce free time, they spend their time rewriting the plot, programming, editing images for the new engine and finally, topped with translation work. Studying time takes priority. We don't want them to fail, don't we~

• We want to include Day 4 no matter what. Just Day 3 isn't going to cut it. We want this demo to be halfway through the game! At least the next time we release, it'll be the last 4 days of the game. Go! Go!

• Renasci's complicated trips to the hospital. Don't even ask~

Thank you for understanding! Please be patient with us and wait warmly~

Don't forget~

White suits you Edward~

With the arrival of October 3 close at hand, the team is working really hard right now to release a demo by then~ The demo will hopefully feature Day 1-3/4. Currently, translations are under way. The Progress Report should reveal what activities were done for today and how far we are~

On another note, we now call this project as Bluebird's Illusion Rebuild rather than a translation patch. This is because we ended up editing the story to make things a whole lot more enjoyable (while still staying true to the original story outline), remade the entire engine from scratch, recreated the sprites to be higher quality, and finally, remade the battle system to be less frustrating than the original.

So many changes in order to maximize the experience that you can get from this game. Hopefully, we will succeed in this regard.

We're still looking for translators with free time just to make everyone's job easier :)

Thank you for following us and hopefully we'll go somewhere!

We thank you for your support. Check back with us soon for more updates and info.~

Translating Still~

We're still translating Day 3 onward because of the branching points. 

Everyone is busy with Junior/College/Work so we couldn't focus on BBI 100%. 

We're very sorry but we hope that everyone will remain patient!

We're not dead

...It's just that with all the translating on top of college, going to the hospital, working and all those crazy life events--we haven't been able to focus ourselves like we want to.

Despite everything, we CAN leave an image though. It's not very interesting to say the least, but we hope it will do.

★Remastered Version Preview

After many tears, sweat and bloodshed, the remastered version is finally functional!

Enjoy, ENJOY, ENJOOOOOOYYYY

~Words from the crying heart of Archeia~

OMG! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!? It's actually REAL! xD

~Words from the torn heart of Bluebird's Circle~

Yesterday, I updated the progress report like crazy and early this morning. Hopefully everyone is enjoying our progress so far!

▼Remastering Progress

Hi everyone! Renasci speaking and I'm here to deliver the latest news!
Archeia is working very hard but had to take a break today due to her final exams for this trimester. But she left us with these images to show her progress!

Subtitles are not final

Title Screen is finally implemented!

Monologues are in!

CG and Indicator is now properly placed~ The only problem remaining is using the original size

And finally, I'll leave some art~

★Remastering!~~

=comparison between the original JPG and our PNG=

~CLICK PICTURE FOR FULL VIEW~

Bluebird's Circle here on more updates! So--the team decided we were going to remaster everything from the start. Sound effects, smoothing out the sprite work and replacing the low quality tracks with orchestral ones. Everyone's pitching in to help! Just improving and smoothing. :)

=============================

Archeia here, I successfully worked with the engine and the result can be seen below:

This is NOT, I repeat, NOT in the game.

Now it has italics etc. 

Choices are given a cursor instead of changing font text for the sake of readability and accuracy.

★Scans and Scripts

Archeia managed to talked to Bluebird's Circle's earlier and gave us the RAW and modified version of Day 1-4 scripts. We're currently changing how some things are phrased for the sake of fluency~

Bluebird's Circle, Faith, translated Bluebird's Illusion manga pages a while back. Archeia took the liberty of editing and cleaning them. Here you go~

★Collaboration~

I recently contacted the Bluebird's Circle and we are on a collaborative effort to translate the game!
Unfortunately, it'll take a day or two for us to fix the Day 1 - 4 scripts to something comprehensible. But please don't worry, we're working very hard on it!

Archeia on the other hand has been busy with her finals in college. We've been working hard on making the English script work on Nscripter instead of PONscripter or ONScripter-EN due to the lack of the menu bar. It's really taxing and time consuming to do so, but we're doing our best!

That's all of the news for today. Instead enjoy this awesome preview from Bluebird's Circle:

More updates

Bluebird's Circle here! :D Hey guys! I just wanted to say, we've finished the whole script for day one. *hazza!* We'll see what happens!! Most likely, we'll have a demo for you guys soon! ^^ Keep reading for more updates on the patch!

You can ignore Archeia's ranting below but please remember:

We're not giving up on this game and

we'll make sure that it's going to be enjoyable!

With that warning. I'm going on and rant~
I hate to say this but I can see why this game has so many failed translations to English. The script isn't so good. There, I said it!

The game suffers from ellipses overload (ex. Re..........Really......) for almost 95% of the game's script. Almost everyone has ellipses in their sentences every 5-10 of it or some sort. But that wasn't the biggest thing I have against it but rather the one below.

Edward is very unEdward-y, he doesn't react when he's called short, he has SELF-CONTROL which is very unlike him. He's also a complete doormat for some odd reason. I can see him having some self-restraint but not much to this effect.

Example script A:
Fandub: I swore never to put that white, putrid filth in my mouth and I haven't broken that oath since I was seven. I'm not breaking it now. I just don't get how people like that stuff I mean seriously, that stuff's secreted by a cow for hell's sake.

Original: That white stuff that comes out from a cow...how can I drink it?!

And when Al was going to call him short, Edward didn't even try to stop him or react. And when Al cooked food for him that had milk in it, he complained that it has milk and he doesn't want to eat it anymore even though it tastes good.


But!

Even though, Edward greatly dislikes milk, either for its taste, the fact that it is "an opaque, white liquid secreted by a cow" or both. He does, however, greatly enjoy stew and marvels that something comprised mainly of milk can taste so good.


At least Roy Mustang and Alphonse are in character to say the least.

(Ellipses are cut off for the sake of my sanity)

Roy: Speaking of which, this is the first time I've had the opportunity to drink Colonel Elric's tea! But it seems the taste isn't quite enough.
Edward: Well I apologize! I'm not the one who made the tea! It was those people at the other department.
Roy: Is it now? It's not like you could brew such wonderful tea!
Edward: *angry* Re...Really?

I will stop now before I scare people off haha~

Video 1

As promised! :)
Just some things:

1.) The font isn't final. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that one.
2.) Archeia did most of the leg work and didn't sleep at all just to make sure the text is inserted properly. For her first time, this is great! Please praise her for her hard work~
3.) The dialogue is based on Midnight Banshee's (Dejavu had her permission before so we just assumed we're allowed to use it as well since the project was also passed on to us), the Bluebird's Illusion Circle fandub and our own. Proper credits will be given and the like. We'll fix it of course, this is just to demonstrate the...hacking I guess XD

And a huge leap was made

Well they did say, 7th time is the lucky charm. I would like to thank the academy for---I mean Archeia, for finally fixing our main problem. Apparently, all we needed was the super awesome Notepad++. Internet, you never failed us~

**Archeia: After rechecking my email with star she said that she was using Onscripter-EN and I am glad we actually did the right thing and used it! I almost went with PONscripter hahaha.

**Renasci: Yeah, almost got ourselves off track there!

*minutes later, an onscripter-EN error happened*

**Archeia: You know what? Let's just move to PONscripter. I can't find that damn array error.

**Renasci: Me neither...

**Archeia: There we go, much much better. All I have to do is fix that spacing and change the font to something presentable.

**Renasci: Good job! Now all we have to do is find a translator...

**Archeia: ...Snap. I'll have to ask midnight banshee's translations or wait for that fandub.

Now that the text problem is fixed, full steam ahead!

History and a new beginning

This game was used to be translated by a scanlation group called Dejavu, but without any updates, Archeia asked for her files and if she could have the project instead. So she used to translate this game but had to step down due to many obligations. I asked her if she could pass it on to me, she gave me all the tools I will need and the PSD files. The Progress Report shows what I have done for the day, but the screenshots will be over the main blog post.

So far, I'm trying to figure out how to translate the toolbar but the maps should now be all replaced and the like. I still have some images that remain to be translated, but I'll check it out once I finish the basics :)


I finally figured this out. The only problem remaining is the script insertion, for some reason it works for OTHER parts of the game but in the very beginning, I have an issue where Alphonse is calling Edward, Brother. Weirdness '_')

Finally figured this one out as well. Apparently there's a variable called brothers#here, that's why the script has been bugging out on me. So I guess the only way to avoid it overall is to add "text here" in every dialogue. I have problems with my nscripter versions, one is that if I use the chinese one, the text will be sticked together regardless if I had it even spaced. As seen here:

If I use the english version, I get these weird symbols as seen here:

Well, I'll figure something out. Hopefully it won't take long :)

If there are any chinese speakers out there, please let me know as some of these files I cannot translate! Thank you very much for the interest.