Touhou Patch Center:Über

Welcome to the future of Touhou game patching.

Dies ist unser Versuch einer neuen Herangehensweise an die Erstellung von Spiel-Patches. Diese ist...

	mehrsprachig	– supporting game translations for any language you want
	selbst aktualisierend	– instant releases reflecting the current translation consensus
	offen	– integrating anyone into the translation and hacking process
	langfristig	– preparing today for the games of tomorrow

Mit all diesen Punkten lösen wir uns von der klassischen "Romhacking"-Tradition und der Vorstellung von abgesonderten "Übersetzergruppen" und legen die Patch-Erstellung direkt in die Hände der Fans.

Wenn man mal darüber nachdenkt, hängt die gesamte nicht-japanische Touhou-Fangemeinschaft an der Arbeit einiger weniger Übersetzer. Dieses Projekt würdigt ihre Arbeit für diese Community und unterstützt sie in einem noch nie dagewesenen Ausmaß.

Motivation

Es gibt eine ganze Reihe von Gründen, ein solches Projekt in Angriff zu nehmen. Dies ist eine Liste dieser Gründe, in der Reihenfolge, in der sie entstanden.

Accuracy

Die ganze Idee entstand, nachdem wir mal wieder eine Übersetzungs-Debatte auf touhouwiki.net miterlebt hatten. Nach einer Weile fällt einem auf, dass Touhou-Übersetzungen nie endgültig zu sein scheinen.

No matter how long a particular translation of some aspect has endured, years later, someone with perhaps a bit more knowledge of Japanese culture can come in, debate it, and eventually have it changed. During these debates, people are sometimes shocked about how little sense the original translation made or how it distorted the original meaning, and thus, the general perception of the content. That's why touhouwiki.net's policy openly encourages this process.

In the end, the wiki page everyone looks at is edited and the correction is made. And all of this would be fine if we were merely translating pieces of literature.

But we're talking about games here. The English patches stay frozen at a certain state and are never updated - because their original developers continue to believe in their own translation, they considered the job done as soon as they've released the patch, or even have long abandoned this fandom in case of the older games.

Unsere Idee: Wir bauen ein neues Patch-System, welches die Übersetzungen näher an die eigentlichen Patches bindet, und schauen, wohin das Ganze noch führt.

At a first glance, we don't look very different. We, too, use a wiki system where translations can be edited by anyone. But not only do we provide a convenient translation interface to make this process as simply as possible, our pages are also written in such a way that they, after some initial configuration, can be automatically parsed and converted back to the original game formats.

Nach jeder Bearbeitung auf Touhou Patch Center aktualisieren sich die Patches automatisch auf dem neuesten Übersetzungsstand.

Dadurch umgehen wir von vornherein Situationen, in denen sich ein alter Patch von dem Text auf dem Wiki unterschiedet. Dann wird selbst der Durchschnitts-Fan, der sich nicht für den Patch-Vorgang interessiert, für die Tatsache sensibilisiert, dass Touhou-Übersetzungen auf Jahre hinaus diskutiert werden können - aber jetzt werden ihn diese Korrekturen sofort erreichen.

Speed

The former privilege of playing Touhou in English has now turned into an expectation. Patches are now demanded by the fandom, and they are expected to be finished in a reasonable amount of time.

We're going to satisfy this demand by completely separating the technical modification and hacking process from the translations. The time this process takes depends on the complexity of the game's programming, our experience & knowledge of the game's data formats, and the useless encryption applied on those.

This is going to become very apparent once ZUN releases a new Touhou game.

For new games, we will release a working, self-updating patch as soon as the basic hacking work has been done and the content has been put up for translation. For a typical ZUN game, this takes no longer than a couple of hours after we get our hands on the executable.

And this is the only "release date" that will matter. The fandom then experiences how the game is incrementally translated as they play it. A certain translation patch then only is done once the translators, working independently of the administration, have finished translated everything. Yes, this means that our patches will stay unfinished, slightly incorrect, and a bit ugly for quite a while. But for the majority of Western fans who have little to no knowledge of Japanese, it will be better than having no patch at all.

Mehrsprachigkeit

Jetzt haben wir also eine automatische Engine, um die Spiele schnell zu patchen... aber warum sollen wir uns jetzt noch auf englische Übersetzungen beschränken?

As we supply the entire automatized infrastructure required to patch the games anyway, we reduce the adaptation to any other language to the mere input of the translated text and the editing of some graphics. Thus, we can effectively promote translations to languages where an "old-school patch group" would have never existed or been considered necessary.

Existing patching groups can benefit from this system, too. By working with us, they'll...

save the hacking work and the resulting duplication of effort
receive permanent hosting on our server
and their translations will get more exposure
while retaining full credit for their work.

In the true Touhou spirit of "more of everything is better," we are open to host translations into any language people want us to have. No matter if it is a widely spoken world language, a regional dialect, or even a constructed language.

Fange einfach an, in deine Sprache zu übersetzen, und du hast im Handumdrehen einen funktionierenden Patch.

But just... Why? Why all this madness?

Könnt ihr euch an die Zeit erinnern, in der Touhou das Beste überhaupt war?

When it seemed like a never-ending source of varied and high-quality content, made possible by the intense dedication of people like you and me?

No? But we sure do. And we want to savor this feeling.

Ihr habt bestimmt die Legenden gehört, dass es nicht länger als 20-30 Minuten nach Erscheinen eines neuen Spiels auf der jeweiligen Doujin-Convention dauert, bis es Fanart von den neuen Charakteren gibt. Also warum sollte man bis zu 2 Monate auf einen Englisch-Patch warten, und das war's dann? Mit unserem System können die Fans selbst offen das gleiche Maß an Hingabe zu Patches zeigen, das wir bei Fanart schon lange gewohnt sind.

This project is supposed to be a benchmark of what can be possible - when everyone can work and immediately contribute under optimal circumstances, without the need of unnecessary middlemen. All this would clearly be overkill for any other franchise. But in view of the Touhou fanbase and its own pride, it will certainly be significant, and worth the time of everyone involved.

This will be the Touhou main game translation project to end all Touhou main game translation projects.

Other advantages

Patch stacking

Our engine allows to use an unlimited amount of patches at the same time, sorted through a priority list.

Let's imagine you have a thorough understanding of English, but would rather want to play a certain game in Spanish. Unfortunately, the Spanish translation of that game hasn't been finished, but the English one has. In this case, you would download and activate both the English and the Spanish patch and put the Spanish patch on top of the English one. Now, all text that has been translated to Spanish appears in Spanish, and the rest appears in English - all while running on top of the same, unmodified game executable.

In addition, you are also able to select the types of data each patch is allowed to modify. To use the above-mentioned example again, you can, for example, keep spell cards or music titles in English to keep a common ground for forum discussions.

As with the whole engine, this is not limited to languages only. Every single patch that uses this engine can be re-used and combined with other patches. Thus, our engine could also be used to implement things like hitbox display removal, Vsync patches, replay desynchronization bugfixes... the possibilities are endless.

This turns our engine into a full-fledged Touhou modkit, allowing you to fully customize your Touhou experience.

Keine Verdoppelung von Spieldaten, keine Installation

In our case, this is more of a necessity resulting from all the other features than a clear feature or design goal on its own. This also comes with the nice additional benefit that the game directory stays clean and unmodified - instead of being crammed with lots of modified data files and patch loaders.

About this site

Ach nee, nicht noch ein Touhou Wiki.

Nur, dass dies eben genau nicht "noch ein weiteres Touhou Wiki" ist. Wir haben keine Artikel über Charaktere, Orte, oder das über-9000ste Embodiment of Scarlet Devil-Remix-Album. Genau so wenig streben wir an, mit anderen Webseiten zu konkurrieren, die sich als Touhou-Lexikon bezeichnen, egal in welcher Sprache.

Our focus lies strictly in providing multilingual translations of original Touhou game data. We are a data repository first and a wiki second.

Terminology

Touhou Patch Center (abbr. thpatch): Name of this website and the server-side data conversion modules.

Touhou Community Reliant Automatic Patcher (abbr. thcrap): Name of the patch engine - i.e. all code written for this project.; Yes, the abbreviation is deliberate. We thought it would be a funny contrast to have a well-made piece of software with a name showing the developer's actual distaste for the subject matter.; If you find that too offensive, just think of it as an anagram of patchr.

Touhou Patch Wiki: Ursprünglicher Name dieser Webseite - ist uns spontan eingefallen, als sich das Projekt vom deutschen Touhou Wiki löste. Angesichts aller anderen Touhou-Wikis da draußen trägt dieser Name nur zur allgemeinen Verwirrung bei. Bitte verwendet ihn deshalb nicht.