itch.io

A straightforward and very good update! Multi-window might actually help me a lot in some situations!

Thanks Godnoken. ^^

I can understand the hesitation with fullscreen capture support though, it would increase load after all. Yeah, the performance hit of scanning an entire game window rather than just parts. The OCR should probably be gradually-improved regardless of this fullscreen mode idea but it definitely would necessitate it be refined faster too. (And I imagine the image-recognition aspect of this program is somewhat-tricky to design, it doesn't sound like a simple thing for the program to do.)

Awesome to hear about Manual mode staying. :D And thanks for the tip! I was wondering what those values did. Ah - you know I don't think I was always restarting the tool after adjusting settings so maybe that's why I was 'not noticing anything change' sometimes. Good point! That'll definitely help me tweak this.

That's understandable, the niche issue thing. (We tend to be niche-focused and doing/checking out weird things.) No worries, I can get by! It's mostly-solved as far as I'm concerned anyways since I found my workarounds. Plus, yes, your idea of making the window not take mouse input would 100% solve this specific issue I'm having, if I can't click it to active, Xsplit can't glitch out on it~

Actually I didn't skip the capture tutorial, I read it a couple times. I just suck at information-retention sometimes. ^_^; Sometimes I need stuff worded to me in a different way for me to fully understand it. It's a learning disability (it made me fail math as a kid, I never got my high-school diploma mostly because I could not understand many abstract concepts in it), and it made me misunderstand something in that tutorial for sure. The 'naming' is probably part of it, but I agree, I can't think of a better name either.

I see, it's not meant for fullscreen. Yeah - that's fine with some games with their text boxes in one place, but some games have their text all over the place, like the one I was testing ironically. (That game is one of those where the text box will be placed high or low based on the player and npc positions on the screen, among other visual tricks.) I guess it's possible to update the screen capture area manually either way, but this is also why I found the Manual mode just made more sense. Again, for games like that, at least. (Manual mode obviously has the huge downside of 'I must stop focusing on game controls to do this', which could be bad with more actiony stuff. I understand the value of Automatic mode for sure.)

Mixing Manual and Automatic could be functional, depending. I think my only real request would be to always let us have a standalone Manual option, just in case the basic direct approach is less buggy than Automatic functions for a person... Even if you don't wanna keep updating Manual mode (if it is a niche thing not used much, understandable), just letting it continue to exist is all I'd really ask. :)

As for making Automatic mode less destructive, could you maybe point out which options I should be exploring more? I did see a number of things that sounded potentially useful, but even with the mouseover tips I wasn't sure what I should be messing with. I did a few changes to some things I thought would help its formatting, but then was further confused because it seemed like I'd made no visual changes whatsoever even though I had changed some options.

Also no worries, feel free to take your time~

How strange! I kept both recommended models around in case I feel like further testing... But yeah, strange. Perhaps I should run both against a larger group of games eventually.

Thanks for the additional suggestions, I'll play with those three later too then~

(Consolidating my replies here~)

OBS is by far more popular, technically better but... Our previous computer didn't work right with it, which is why we got into Xsplit. Xsplit kinda sucks in some ways but it's serviceable. Fortunately, the two program are similar enough and share enough of the same toolset that if something works for one, it'll probably work for the other.

Ah Swedish huh! Neat~ We have a couple of Swedes in our audience too.

Oh that's interesting, so you do use chroma keying already! I definitely think it's best to use the lower-power method since a utility program like yours should definitely not make too much of a footprint.

1. Yes, basically!

2 - 4. Excellent~

It's certainly functional as it is, I got the blackness problem to mostly settle down. Ran another test and I think it's that...if I click the GameTranslate overlay that pops up over the game, then Xsplit thinks what I clicked is the 'active window' it should capture over the game window. (As I use an 'auto-detect' setting for capturing games.) Basically, Xsplit thinks the GameTranslate overlay is a 'game' if I click on it. If I avoid accidentally clicking any overlay elements this shouldn't be a problem though.

As for your 0,0,0 blackness I figured! I basically...well, here's a pic of that settings menu I configured for chrome keying the overlay right. If I chroma too little blackness, it just covers the whole game window. If I increase it too far though, that's what causes it to eat into the lettering and the text window and look bad. These are the settings I found to work best.

As for the Manual vs Automatic... I didn't really 'understand' Automatic. I initially used it but it didn't...well, literally seem to be doing anything with the games I hooked it to? TBH I sort of gave up tinkering with it very early on, set it to Manual, set my tilde key to be the Fast Key, and just press tilde to start a selection, drag it across the text I want to translate, and let go. Besides...if Automatic is (supposed to, at least) capture the whole screen...that may be messy. If I try to capture a lot of text with the Fast Key drag, like the whole screen in a complicated inventory, the text sort of jumbles up. So I think it's better to capture sections at a time anyways.

I would like to know...how to make Automatic...work, though. I didn't actually get it to do a thing for me, so I can't comment on if it would be useful to me or not.

EDIT: Oh, I see. I tried again and got Automatic mode to work. I didn't realize you also had to still MANUALLY select a capture area while Automatic mode was on and then the model got to work automatically. ...That said, I don't like it very much for a common habit it seems to do that this gif shows...

I think a controlled manual capture is better in most cases. Less-intensive too, I'm sure, than the translation tool running across the whole screen all the time.

And yeah, if there's text all over the screen GameTranslate can...be very messy about displaying it, which basically makes a full screen auto-translate sort of a jumble. In both Manual and Automatic modes. Here...

This is a shop screen: Untranslated, Automatic, and then Manual, respectively. Either type of translation of this screen is quite messy when I try to capture the whole screen's text. Manual's layout is worse than Automatic's, but of course Automatic here was also still flickering the translation to different variations too. All sort of a mess, regardless of what I pick for a screen-wide catch-all capture area.

So yeah, Manual with capturing sections at a time feels better...for right now, anyways. Surprised to hear it's been neglected; it actually feels the best right now, so I would ask that you don't leave it behind too much in the future. :)

I just tested out your new guide, left a reply over there on that post about my experience with it, since it might be useful to others too. :)

On another note, along the way, I also ran some more capture tests with my stream broadcaster (Xsplit). It is currently not possible to capture the game with the translation overlayed on top of it without capturing the entire screen space, but that function's a privacy risk we almost always avoid using since if anything sensitive pops up over the screen in that area it will also get captured and displayed. We typically capture by application process, not by screen-space, as such.

It IS possible to capture the game application, then also capture the translation application on top of that, but the translation application capture weirdly covers the whole screen as black when this is done. (There is technically a game behind all of that blackness lol.)

It is possible for me to then Chroma-key out 'Black' on the translation application capture to let the game be visible, but the text is kinda painful to read in this situation.

If you want to make this program more-accessible to streamers, here's what I suggest... It would be nice if we could customize how the translation overlay displays itself.

1. Customizable background color. If I could control the background behind the text to be a different color (like green). then I could easily chroma it out cleanly. (Or heck, just give the option for a transparent background.)

2. Customizable text color. If I could change the color of the translated text itself, I could pick a color that stands out more-easily on top of the game, especially after chroma-keying the background out.

3. Optional text border. If I could add a border around the text, that would help it stand out atop the game as well.

4. Optional text shadow. Again, would help readability.

Here's a quick mockup of what I'd find ideal personally, if those four customization settings existed for the overlay function:

Even beyond streamers, these suggestions could just be a nice way to customize things for any users. Your approach of putting white translation text in a black box works for now of course, but these are things I would hope for in the future. :)

EDIT: Ah, with a bit more tweaking of how strongly the chroma-key was told to react, I was able to capture just the black box and not black-out the whole game screen. 

That being said, it will sometimes blink the whole screen black for the capture display due to how the black chroma-keying is working to cull out the rest. That would be quite unpleasant for viewers if it keeps up. I might be able to tweak further to stop that from happening, but the customization ideas I shared would solve it for good.

Thanks for this guide! I ran a bunch of tests and can give some results, maybe it'll help others here too.

I experimented with the test text input (nice function, I didn't notice it there before!) and tossed a bunch of somewhat-tricky Japanese proverbs at both of the  two models you recommended. I seemed to have both the most accurate generations with the Q4_K_M model, which took 3-4 seconds to work; Q8_O model was faster by like a second but also notably-worse. I attached both models to a Japanese game I was running and got similar results to the tests, so Q4 just seems superior and doesn't at all intensive even for my average-power computer.

Dumping screengrabs of the game and putting it into Google Translate is still a little more accurate than Q4, but Google Translate is also way more of a hassle and notably slower with alt-tabbing required. Q4 is certainly getting the job done and being accurate enough to play a game comfortably I would say. (I tested with a Japanese RPG and got a lot of varying NPCs to test with, and I got the idea of everything everyone was saying. I threw their words into Google Translate too and it was the same information, sometimes a bit more accurate but either way, it works.)

Notably and surprisingly to me: One thing Q4 did better than Google Translate at (and this is likely a credit to the image-recognition you put into GameTranslate too) was translating fancy, tilted text. The RPG in question that I was testing with tilts all character names at the top of their oddly-shaped dialogue boxes; Google called one NPC 'Penguin Hote Clerk' while Q4 more-correctly read the text as 'A Penguin Hotel Employee'.

If you have any other suggestions, I think I'd personally be interested in another more-intensive and more-accurate model than Q4, seeing that Q4 doesn't seem to push my system that much at all. (But I'm also happy sticking to Q4 for now too.)

Thank you! ^_^

Ah yes, as for its stream-friendliness... I use Xsplit (which I think officially makes me a weirdo) for stream capture, and it behaves a little oddly with GameTranslate. I can still capture the untranslated game just fine with no conflicts, and I can kind-of capture the overlay translation separately, but it's weird and the text is surrounded by blackness, so I can't really overlay the translation atop the game. (Well, it might be possible with some 'greenscreening' of the black part of that capture layer; I might have to play around with that more once the program is capable enough for me to stream with it.) I'm not too bothered if I can't capture the English translation in overlay, it's certainly enough just to translate it for myself since I'm fine with reading it out for my audience, but it would be an extra boon if I can get it to capture the translation too.

You're quite right about there being many games out there that are cool enough to struggle through without knowing its language, and I've done that too. That's really cool that's what got you to learn English! What's your native language, if you don't me being curious? We have people from all around the world join our streams, and we are close to quite a few people who are ESL (English as a Second Language) and it's always fun to see and learn about the quirks that a primary language adds to a secondary one.

My specs... They're currently: AMD R5-2600 (Stock AMD Stealth Cooler), Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 2x8GB DDR4 @ 3200 MHz. It's not the most robust computer but this old thing's been kicking around for a while and it's been one of my more reliable computers I've owned. :) I hope to update from it at some point...but that move has to come first.

Also, heck yeah, thanks! I've got a little weekend here so I'll follow the guide and run some tests and see how it works out for me.

The last couple years have been particularly hard on us too, so I very much sympathize. Passion's such a hard thing to keep up sometimes. We do Twitch streams/YouTube as a profession, and we used to be more passionate (and still can be), but now sometimes I just have to take the day off due to depression. Sucks, but self-care is also important, and fortunately, most reasonable people are sympathetic to you needing breaks. Don't be afraid to take them if you need them. :)

I wish us both an improvement in life. We have some positive prospects of our own, but it's mostly a matter of waiting till we can finally move. (The apartment market is cut-throat in America, so it's been a real challenge.)

On the subject of my profession, I'm eager for this program for that reason too. :D I like to check out weird and obscure stuff on my channels, and I've already played several non-English games which I managed to translate one way or another. It's fun to engage that other side of the world's games on my English channels, where a lot of viewers will not even know these games existed before I cover them.

Yes, indeed, LLMs are a bit too much for my PC I think, hence the slowness. Kind of an older thing I got, I do want to upgrade but the money's not there for it currently. But perhaps language-specific LLMs will manage to be fast enough for this computer to make the process more viable...that's my hope anyways!

As to your last point, very interesting! Shorter text...that might be alright with how I would use these! Take the time that you need on the guide, but I'll definitely get right to reading it when it's done. (...80% of users use the Japanese-English model? Wow, I figured that percentile would be high, but not that high!)

I figured you intended to improve them further, but it's good to get that confirmation. :) I had faith in your project when I looked at the program's extensive update log. I can tell when somebody is passionate over what they are working on, haha.

I did attempt using some of those other model options but indeed, the site to download them at is quite a cryptic place. I used some of the suggestions you linked but they were exceptionally-slow at generating and didn't really give me the best results. They also kinda crashed on me half the time. A proper guide might be handy, I'll give them another shot if you do write one later. :)

Language-specific models I imagine are both faster and more quality, since they only have to page through one language and not everything. I'm personally hoping to mainly use your program to translate Japanese games to English, and occasionally Chinese games too.

Just picked up your product during the Halloween sale, I don't feel the default translator is quite up to snuff yet but I adore how you've put this program together and its functionality besides, so I look forward to seeing this grow and improve. Didn't realize you were having potential health issues; we've been there. I wish you the best in recovering and I hope you can find financial balance with this application.

Oh heck yeah, you got to that concept you mentioned to us a long while back! <3 This is great to see, we'll have to cover this.

Thanks for the QoL update. :)

Wishing you luck. This definitely sucks, and I agree, itch.io are not the villains here. (Given how they directly called out Collective Shout in their official update about this, I'm fairly certainly they're pissed as well.)

Wishing you luck moving forward. People didn't push back against this sort of censorship when it was 'only things they didn't like', and now we're here. I hope things can turn around.

Thanks man, I'll respond later, was busy with work. :)

Oh...that would explain it yes! Oops.

I would love to check the new build to see if things have been ironed out, but that refund you did for me...it went through, I got the refund which I appreciate. However that also seemed to lock me out of further downloading the program's new builds... "This download page has been disabled and is no longer available. The purchase associated with it has been refunded." ...I imagine you didn't mean for that to happen. ^_^;

I know itch.io lets you hand over review keys/codes as a developer though... I'm a content creator and I've gotten some games for free via itch.io codes so that I could review them. Maybe you could toss me one of these so I can regain access to the program? You can contact me privately through Discord if that works; my username is 'charemplaysgames'.

Appreciate it man. I gave the new build a run. Unfortunately, now this happens after the 'login successful' prompt, and then everything immediately closes an instant later.

Oh, managed to trigger one more error. Not sure how, but delivering.

Aw, well I appreciate that man! :O I don't REQUIRE a refund, I'd just like a functioning program more than anything, but if you feel like doing that it's your choice. I admit I've gotten very frustrated today in failing to use it, but if the bugs can be solved that would be great. I think your program has potential, it's just not there yet. (Kinda feels like it needs a $5 Early Access version or something until it's all polished up and maybe expanded a bit, then $15 would be fair. I guess Itch doesn't really have an Early Access feature though.)

Here, let me give you another console log I noticed. When I start the program up, it actually gives me this odd message which might relate to the other problem? Perhaps this will give you more to work off of.

The 'fluidsynth error' line happens at the end of program startup. It's very confusing as I have a perfectly-functional MIDI device on my system.

The stuff following that fluidsynth error line happens when I try to do my first generation. (The generations do seem to work and play fine, but it seems something is buggy with that process; the message certainly sounds ominous at least.)

Generation works fine, but whenever I save what I got, it saves as a 0 kb midi file that has no data in it. This happens every time I try to save anything I've produced. What's going on?

The console also gives this error, which I assume is what's causing this.

EDIT: It seems like this happens only if I do too many generations at once, like more than 4. It seems I'll need to save the progress frequently or I may lose all my generation work.
EDIT 2: No, it seems that it can break even with one generation. I am LUCKY to be able to save anything I make in KobiMusic...

I also have the same issue MayroSMM was having, though the workaround site you linked did work for that at least.

I dunno man. I get you're working on this solo and trying to recoup some losses, so I'm not trying to be mean here. But while these generation models you put together are cool and worth paying some money for, the program itself is very basic and buggy to the point of losing work and needing to restart it to restore function. If this cost like $5 I wouldn't really mind, but at $15, I'm kinda feeling like I spent too much for what I received. I expected something a bit more polished at that price tag.

Hopefully I can get some support. >_<

It has, thank you so much! ^_^ I can see the sprites a lot better; the dragon's fattening is very good. I've known of Voidflame for a long time and I can tell he was the artist here, he did a great job.

Awesome, I'll watch for that! From what I played it was really neat. :)

Could there perhaps be an offline download provided? Unity's WebGL can be a little glitchy for me.

Grats on the big update man! :)

You're welcome. ^^ Here's hoping, I'll be keeping an eye out!

Oh neat! I had fun covering this one on a quick video and thought it was cute, if obviously unfinished. I didn't think you'd update it further, tbh! I wish you luck on the Godot 4 port, and I hope this can turn into something bigger.

Excellent update~

Awesome work so far! Really looking forward to this.

Congrats on the release! I was curious. Aside from the vore/fat content, is there anything explicitly adult in the game? I just picked it up and would love to stream this with a friend unless there's anything actually-explicit in the game.

Sweet, thank you for letting me know! ^_^ And sure! I'll save a note to contact you. Is there somewhere I can more actively contact than on itch?

Hey Poobslag! I was curious about something involving this developing project. It looks absolutely cool, and I was thinking of streaming the game, but I wanted to know: Is it entirely SFW? It certainly seems the case from the first chapter and general vibe, but I like to be careful.

These Dragon Air Mail games are really cute! Love the wholesomeness of these vore games. :)

I had an idea I wanted to share with you, if you still have interest in developing content like this. :D Is there somewhere I could contact you, maybe?

Oh my, this looks kinky-cute~ :3

NP! :)

I really love the theme of this jam, thank you for hosting it! I just discovered both this and last year's LSDJAM recently, and now that the deadline is passed I'm eager to cover a lot of the games from both years on my channels. (I'm a streamer/YouTuber.)

...Your game has nothing to do with LSDJAM, was not made for or during the Jam, and appears to have been submitted to at least 19 other Jams at this time. https://puu.sh/IDXmX/446eccd411.png

I'm not a moderator here or anything, but I felt it was worth pointing this out.

It's clear you're trying to get attention for your game, but this really isn't the right way to do it. You aren't following the spirit (nor likely the conditions) of these Jams at all, and are just using them for free advertising space.

C'mon, man.

Le lien de téléchargement est en panne... Est-il possible d'en obtenir un nouveau ? :) J'étais vraiment intéressé à jouer à ce jeu.