English subtitles for videos?

Hi everyone,

does anybody know if there are any english subtitles for the Arcanum videos?

I know that it might sounds like a stupid question, since you can't show the subtitles in game, but someone might have already created them for foreign game translations.

Why I need them? I wrote a library that allows to show subtitles in games which uses Bink library to play videos, that includes many commercial games, including Arcanum. Everything without modifying or reencoding videos, so subtitles are not hardcoded in videos, which means that size of game translation packs will decrease in hundreds of megabytes.

Subtitle format doesn't matter, but SubRip (.srt) subtitles would be most helpful, since the library supports atm only .srt format.

If there is no English version available, subtitles in any other language would be helpful too.

Thanks in advance :thumbup:

P.S. Sorry for bad english, haven't slept for more than 24h.

 

I don't think there are any subtitles for Arcanum. But if you post the library, I'm sure somebody will make some for you. I may even have a go at it myself.

Does your library support multiple audio tracks? Arronax's banishment video has two tracks.

 

The library (I call it BikMod) is still under development, but I'll have it working in few days, since I'm atm finishing subtitle loading and drawing.

About it's features, it supports everything that original binkw32.dll supports, since it actually uses the original library.

It also adds features, currently only: subtitles support, debug output (logging API calls and other stuff), plugin support (allows to draw on decoded frame before it's shown), external configuration, disabling videos, showing video info.

About the subtitles, they can be created with any Subtitle editor, like this one: http://home.gna.org/subtitleeditor/. The .bik videos can be converted to .avi, so it can be played in the editor as well. Afair, there is also .bik codec available, so it's possible to play them without converting.

Btw, do you know if Russian or Chinese translations for the Arcanum have also translated videos?

P.S. By multiple audio track support, you mean for dubbing?

 

What about video scaling? That would be awesome for the high resolution patch.

02112.bik has two audio tracks, one for Nasrudin and one for K'an Hua. They have different speech, so you would need different subtitles for them.

 

That's a good idea, and easy to implement, since I have all image scaling algorithms already implemented for OpenArcanum. I'll keep it in mind.

I just checked it out, and I must say that I'm really surprised, since I think that I actually never heard the second audio track in game, I remember only the first one. I had to convert the bik video to avi to be able to hear it, since the official bink player plays only the first track.

Thanks for letting me know :thumbup:

Could you please also tell me when is the second audio track played in game?
(Lame question, I know, but I haven't finished game again in long time.)

Anyway, it's also easy to implement. I had to modify few things in library, but it won't take more than an hour, so I'll definitely will add support for multiple audio tracks.

About the subtitles, are you going to make them? They don't need to be in english, since I just finished support for unicode (UTF8) subtitles, so they can be either in Chinese and Russian.

 

The official player does support multiple audio tracks. Just browse to the movies folder, choose "Advanced Play", then set "Play this sound track number" to 1. This track is played if you join the Dark Elves at T'seng-Ang and then speak with K'an Hua in Caladon. You don't go to Thanatos and meet Nasrudin if you follow the evil path.

About the translations. Are you making some kind of database? Why would you want Russian and Chinese versions? I have a Chinese version of Arcanum lying around, but I haven't looked at it much yet. They had to patch the .exe so that it would correctly display the fonts, though.

 

Are we talking about the "binkplay.exe" tool? maybe there's some kind of switch to enable it, anyway, thanks a lot for the info.

I wanted the foreign subtitles for testing purposes only, since I want to support all languages. Surely it would be nice if there is some kind of multi translation pack for the Arcanum.

I just started testing the subtitle feature on converted movie, so I don't currently need the subtitles, so if you're going to make them, you have plenty of time. The .srt subtitles also supports font color and bold/italic/underline font style, and the library supports it as well, so you might change the font style as you wish.

I'll release the library next weekend or (probably) a bit sooner :thumbup:

 

Just in case it would be of any use.

 

Wow, haven't seen that before, thanks a lot! :thumbup: Do you think that you would be able to make a .srt subtitles from that? I'm already working on Czech version. Also, could you please tell me if Polish translation contains subtitles for the videos?

 

The most tedious part of making subtitle would be setting "display start - display end" times for each line.

That being said, it wouldn't be very time efficient to have ≥2 people do this very same thing from scratch when instead one person could prepare the subtitles for each video in one language while the other would wait for the final result and then translate the .srt files by simply replacing each line.

Since you're already working on the Czech version, I guess it would be best to wait until you finish the subtitles in Czech and once that's done, someone (Drog, me, or whoever else will have the time and motivation at the moment) would translate them to English.

No, it does not. Makes understanding videos a bit tricky for non-English speakers.

I can translate the video scripts to Polish and/or turn them into subtitles if you'd like that.

 

Can't agree more, it's not easy, but luckily Arcanum videos are pretty short and there are a great subtitle editors which makes everything easier, e.g. Subtitle Workshop.

I haven't finished the subtitles yet, since I'm still developing the library, so my version contains only few lines of the beginning for testing purposes only, so it would be great if someone could make the english version first.

I have the library almost finished, it's ready for (closed) beta testing, and if you are interested, I could upload it for you, so you can test the subtitles directly in game as well. Here's a preview:

That would be great, especially for our Polish folks :thumbup:

 

Just one more question before I start making the subtitles, is there anybody whos working on it already? If yes, I could start working on features which Drog has mentioned instead.

Btw, here's another preview:


It's now possible to use custom fonts from truetype font files, without need to install them first.

 

Two words: Holy crap!

You guys from HoL never cease to amaze me...

 

I just implemented support for more tracks, however I don't have chance to test it, could you please send me a saved game before the video with the second track it played?

I would appreciate that a lot :thumbup:

 

I don't have a save game, but you can watch the movie by running script 01093KanHuamovie.

 

Ah, thats a better approach, thanks a lot! :thumbup:

 

The BikMod library released for public beta testing:

http://tools.game-alive.com/forums/view ... hp?f=4&t=3

Please test it and report any bugs. :thumbup: