Chaos;Child Eng Vita to PC (.mpk & .scx)

[nahucirujano]

Hi guys, how are you?
I'm nahucirujano from Argentina.

Today I was attempting to port the Vita official english translation of this game into the PC japanese version (like it was done with Steins;Gate 0).

I'm not a programmer or anything, I'm really noob at this, but I had some free time and gave it a try.
When I say this I mean just replacing files just to see if it worked, haha. I knew that the odds of actually working were really low.

After learning about the files this game uses, MPKs, I successfully extracted script.mpk (using QuickBMS and chaos_child.bms) obtaining 216 .scx files.

The original Vita english script files are also .scx files, and actually, they are the exact same files, except Vita has 1 more, look:



What it really surprised me was the fact that the Vita .scx files are larger than the PC ones.

I tried replacing 1 file to check.
I replaced the first chapter .scx. I successfully reimported script.mpk, now slightly larger due to the replaced file.

The game opened, but as soon as I started a new game, it crashed.
I tried with the system .scx but it didn't even opened.

So, is there any other way to do this?
Any other tool I don't know of?
Some way to manually open and edit .scx files if replacing them makes the size of the .mpk larger?

Here are the original script.mpk file, and both Vita and PC (extracted) .scx files in case somebody would like to check it out by themselves.
Any help will be appreciated.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=116RjI42X8hVMFF0RydIiJrBh96rWkQU4

PS: By the way, I tried to do the same with the PS3 version, in this case it has a script.cpk, so I used a CPK Repacker, and again, the output file is much larger and the game doesn't even launch.

[Delutto]

After learning about the files this game uses, MPKs, I successfully extracted script.mpk (using QuickBMS and chaos_child.bms) obtaining 216 .scx files.

It's seems that Vita mpk file has a different compression and *.scx files was extracted incorrectly.
Upload the script.mpk file from Vita to check this out.

[nahucirujano]

After learning about the files this game uses, MPKs, I successfully extracted script.mpk (using QuickBMS and chaos_child.bms) obtaining 216 .scx files.

It's seems that Vita mpk file has a different compression and *.scx files was extracted incorrectly.
Upload the script.mpk file from Vita to check this out.

Thanks for your reply.
The Vita version does not have a script.mpk file, instead it's one folder called script, which contains all 217 .scx files included in my upload.

[Delutto]

So, I think that Vita scripts are encrypted. I don't know how Vita systems works and can't help you with this, but I read on internet something about Vita file decryption with MaiDumpTool.
The Steam page of the game says that have English subtitles.
Maybe you can ask for help on Clan DLAN.
Good luck hermano.

[nahucirujano]

So, I think that Vita scripts are encrypted.

You were right, those .scx files were encrypted.
I used MaiDumpTool, and somehow, it worked:



The thing is the game crashed near the beggining (after all the intro).
I reverted the game back to Japanese to skip that part. I saved.
I changed back to English, I loaded the game, and a couple of lines after this screenshot moment, the game crashed again.

I guess I should give up, since apart from swapping the files I don't know what else I can do if the game doesn't respond (this must require some knowledge about this engine which I don't have), and if I can't open and edit those .scx files :S

[Delutto]

You were right, those .scx files were encrypted.
I used MaiDumpTool, and somehow, it worked:
The thing is the game crashed near the beggining (after all the intro).

Well, now we can go on. Game crash with Vita files was expected, will be need export the texts from Vita decrypted *.scx files and import to PC *.scx files.

The Steam page of the game says that have English subtitles.

Are you pretty sure the game isn't yet not localized in English?
Anyway, upload that Vita decrypted *.scx files. Let me see if I can help you.

[nahucirujano]

The Steam page of the game says that have English subtitles.

Are you pretty sure the game isn't yet not localized in English?
Anyway, upload that Vita decrypted *.scx files. Let me see if I can help you.

Yes, I am. The link you provided is for the Anime series. There's no official english release for PC (neither announced yet):
https://vndb.org/v14018
It exists a project, Commite of Zero, but they aren't updating any progress.
They say the project is still alive.
I know, I could simply wait (actually I'm playing this game on my Vita), but still, I wanted to give this a try in case this was just a matter of swapping files, copying and pasting text, replacing, compressing things and the sort, well...

Here are the decrypted .scx Vita files:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=17Dzl5jAqjenhdOLhH72Y4YxSvgtAoVxT

[Delutto]

Yes, I am. The link you provided is for the Anime series.

I didn't even know Steam sells anime, sorry for the misunderstand...
Well, there's some obfuscation on texts, probably a char indexes table, I can't help you with this... sorry.

[nahucirujano]

Yes, I am. The link you provided is for the Anime series.

I didn't even know Steam sells anime, sorry for the misunderstand...
Well, there's some obfuscation on texts, probably a char indexes table, I can't help you with this... sorry.

Lol, I didn't know either.
Even so, thanks for all

[ZDiamond]

DELETED

[ZDiamond]

Well if you just said end of June I wouldn't have done this lol. I was just frustrated due to the constant delaying of the patch. Thanks for the reply.

[CoZKumin]

Hello there. I'm here from the Committee of Zero. As much as we appreciate that there are others out there who care so much about Chaos;Child that they would go through the effort of creating a patch, we would rather there not be multiple English patches floating around and creating confusion as to which version is the definitive.

You see, just adding the scripts directly from the Vita version of Chaos;Child to the PC version creates many problems. For example, certain voiced lines in C;C were split up into two for the English release, and this creates an error later in the game that results in character voices playing on the wrong lines. And the issues are not only from a technical perspective. The original version of Chaos;Child's translation was littered with typos and translation errors, one of the untranslated CGs makes a certain puzzle impossible, some of the less-important images were *literally* machine-translated, and some voice-only lines remain unsubbed, among other issues. Frankly, not only was the original Chaos;Child's English release unacceptable from a professionalism perspective, so is the act of porting the scripts only, as it leaves these terrible issues in the game, in addition to creating some others.

We, the Committee of Zero, have been making our own patch of Chaos;Child for the past half of a year. If we wanted to release a patch that did the bare minimum of making the game run properly, we'd have released within a day of the game's release. Our reasoning for not doing so is that we wished to pull apart the game and fix many of the core issues with the English release. We, essentially, are standing in for the quality control the official release lacked in addition to doing all the porting to assure the game not only runs on PC, but runs without issue and with technical improvements (such as adding subtitles to the aforementioned voice-only lines, which turned out to be a bit trickier than expected).

In any case, our patch is nearing completion--we are certain that it will release before the end of June, and we would like you, ZDiamond, and all others coming into the thread to consider whether or not such improvements are worth the wait. A bare-minimum port simply cannot deliver the full Chaos;Child experience, so I would like to request that ZDiamond removes his patch (perhaps with the condition that you may put it back up if we somehow do not release by our deadline of July 1st), and I would like to encourage the readers of this thread to hold out for the proper release that Chaos;Child deserves.

[Delutto]

We, the Committee of Zero, have been making our own patch of Chaos;Child for the past half of a year.

Can you share some information about the *.scx file structure? So people will be able to translate the game to another languages too.

[DrDaxxy]

There's a few text decoders floating around the net, and we have some incomplete documentation at https://committeeofzero.gitbooks.io/mag ... ormat.html (2.3 to 2.5).

https://github.com/CommitteeOfZero/sc3n ... src/parser is probably our most complete public reference source at this point.

We do have a proper standalone string table de-/encoder suited for translation and we will release that at some later date.

Though I should warn you that editing the scripts alone is not enough if you need characters not part of the standard charset (and I think even the Latin extended characters that are at the end of it don't look quite right by default). You'd also need to edit the font and native game code (for correct character spacing - normally the game assumes every character past a certain range is fullwidth). This is also something our tools address but I can't tell you when we'll have anything suitable for third-party use yet.