Announcements An indefinite delay with the Felghana patch. 15 Replies  Alright, I thought I'd provide an update since things aren't going as fast as I was hoping. Due to a recent development, I've had to make several changes to the Felghana patch unfortunately. This has cost me some development time and prevented me from getting to the final bit of work needed. Suffice to say, I think I'm getting close to wrapping up the last minute changes I had to add, before I finally get to the ReadMe. My plans for the rollout of this patch are basically this: Once the final candidate patch is ready, officially version 1.00, I'm gonna email it off to my donators & assistants in a descending order of my choosing (top donators to bottom). There's a reason for that, which I'll explain after it goes public. Also, a 12 day countdown will be initialized here. Once that 12 day countdown is over, the patch will be added to the download engine here and will be made available for everyone on the YsF translation project page. So that's the gist of it. I had always wanted to do some kind of "grand" countdown thingy and this Felghana project, my most ambitious and bold one yet since I entered the fan translation scene in late 2001, provided the opportunity to do so. Little did I realize it would be somewhat undercut the way it was, but I'll deal with that later. OK, now what's the purpose of that really you might ask? Well, it was actually a compromise position I took. I was caught in the middle of deciding whether or not I wanted to go shareware with this patch. Very late in December, I was very tempted to end all the freebies I have been giving out for all these years, and go shareware to recover some of the financial losses that I have incurred doing this. Add to the fact that when I honestly looked at the Felghana patch I had created, in all my amazement and astonishment of it, it felt utterly stupid to just hand it out for free. It is that valuable and professional - which you'll agree with when it goes public... I guess it actually has to be explained that making a patch like this or others like it in the past is NOT free nor easy. Warez butt pirates may think so, but that's actually not the case. Somebody pays for it, and guess what, it's mostly me through my labor which is worth a lot more to an employer than it is for this. (In my case specifically, there's a laundry list of irresponsible decision after irresponsible decision to even being doing this, but I'll spare the details.) It's not just my labor of course that I rely on, but that which is donated by other interested parties. Deuce, essentially donates a translated script for me. In the past, when translators were hard to come by, I had considered hiring someone for that, but I never had to as he and a few others before him came along. Hacking work: either it's me or I have to rely on someone for it. I once offered Neill Corlett a $250 flat fee to help me finish the "Ys IV: Dawn of Ys" project, to hack the font and to write the recompression code based on the decompression code he had already uncovered. I knew given his SD3 work that he never got shit for it and I gave that figure not wanting to insult him. He turned me down cause he was busy and later regretted it, but Dave Shadoff came along and in time, together, we were able to hack the font ourselves and he was able to write the recompression code himself. The server space itself here, a friend helped me get it. It itself is a donation, too. With that said, my point is simply that I think the work in this patch has moved beyond the working-out-of-the-garage level, and given that I've sacrificed an untold amount of time, research, work, etc. for it, I wanted to arrange some kind of way to encourage more donations. The alternative was to simply charge for the patch, but it would've taken a lot longer to get to that point. Radical changes would need to be made; I'd have to set up an automated system to automatically respond to paypal transactions, rather than manually doing it as I do now through email for example. I'd also have to take the time to design a lock/unlock key type of system for anti-theft enforcement, etc. and use something commercially available for exe encryption myself. So, it just wasn't feasible right now because my time was very limited to begin with. Thus, I came up with a compromise, where donators get early access to BETA work and would eventually obtain access to the final copy of the patch before it went public. So I saved a lot of time by going with a "trust-based" system instead, but trust is something very lacking these days as I later found. It was also a way to kill two birds with one stone where it would serve as a closed BETA testing period. It seems though that certain individuals believe early access to my Felghana patch for $5 is a scam, it's greedy, and so forth, which basically amounts to nothing more than you buying me a beer or two, a whopper meal, etc. in a show of appreciation for work you're enjoying. To them I say, a) go fuck yourself and b) stay the fuck off my site! Now they say this, in part, to justify what they did (which I won't specifically address at this point in time), and to feel guilt-free about it. So, while their claim irritates me that my work isn't even worth $5 (it's a real budget-buster to a butt pirate, I realize) for such a spectacular patch (which will be proven to be true), what also irritates me is a claim that nobody has a right to charge for their labor if they create a fan translation patch to begin with, no matter how much time is spent, no matter how much it has cost them, no matter how advanced it becomes, etc. Apparently, there is some kind of an unwritten rule, no doubt beloved and forwarded by the something-for-nothing-at-all-costs butt pirate variety, that patches of this nature must be free! Surprise surprise. Isn't that their position for pretty much everything that is digital and can be downloaded? It's a sense I get from another individual who indicated that I don't even deserve a dime for my work, all the while boasting of his enjoyment of it. This is a segment of the Ys fanbase, upfront, uncensored, and it is a detestable segment I don't wish to serve. There is no more proper, accurate way to describe what I feel against this segment other than utter, shear, detest. *If* I ignored the rest of you who've shown your support over the years, and I only thought of these bottom-feeders getting to enjoy my work, all the while flipping me the bird, I'd have to quit right now - A thought which has crossed my mind recently in all seriousness. So, with that background, I thought I'd discuss my tentative future plans. The future will be much, much different; all patches will be radically redesigned to deal with certain issues and specific individuals. Aside from my plans to retire for a bit and return, you can add that much more development time for anything in the future. Things will slow down here a great deal. If I continue with the Ys VI project, it will also go through an early access donation period then go freeware. However, that will be the last freebie. A patch for Ys Origins is a possibility, but it won't be free from the get-go which will be enforced without mercy against those that would try their luck to fuck with it. I gave the "fanbase" freebies for years and years. I gave Ys I Complete, no strings; I gave Ys II Complete, no strings; I gave Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys, no strings; I gave a lot for this fanbase, but I cannot ignore that portion that is there, however small or perhaps the majority, the spoiled juvenile/infantile brat portion, ready to reap all the benefits of my work/dedication, and then simultaneously go so far as to try to intentionally hurt me financially for what I thought was a fairly modest system to generate donations before the official release, something I did to avoid going shareware in the first place. That all went out the window, which unfortunately easily could've been avoided had I spent more development time to secure the patch and easily blacklist those that betrayed my trust. Anyway, I'll get into specifics after the patch goes public at which point I'll be offering rewards to track down certain individuals. by NightWolve, Feb. 10, 2007, 04:57:11 PM [ Read all ] Announcements If you're banned and your IP is found on the APNIC 3 Replies  Recently, I've had to ban most every IP address that originates out of China, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, India, etc. (Asia). You can blame China for this mostly; most of the problems of excessive bandwidth consumption, hitting my download counters nonstop for my patches and the Typing Tutor game have been from IP addresses out of that country. I've had snoopers from Korea looking to see if phpMyAdmin is installed on this server, I've had another guy looking to see where the donators-only Felghana patch is located even (that was from Europe, possibly the Netherlands). There is also the case of two individuals that I found to be unapologetic, self-righteous pirating punks that thought they were hard and also mistakenly thought I'd take their bullshit warez propoganda lightly. Another issue is if you're using a download accelerator to get files from this site, I'm going to consider you a spambot. Anyhow, all of that activity has resulted or will result in me banning not merely the singular IP address of the offender, but the CIDR of that network to handle the case of dynamically assigned/changing IPs. Because the server has finally been able to take a breather since the Asia ban, I have no plans to remove this global ban anytime soon. Seriously. I'm rather enjoying not seeing the server & download logs grow at exponential rates since this ban. Obviously, you're browsing with a proxy if you're reading this (as well as being human, and not a bot) and if that is the case, you could email me about it with your IP and I can add an exception for it such as I did for one individual who was caught up in the ban, apparently in Japan, that wanted to continue to visit this site. As I really don't expect to find English speakers in such countries, it really doesn't bother me to have done this. It's going to be a very small minority that would be interested in what I have to offer here (normally, and prior to DXWnd, which I'll get to below). Well, such is life. Until such countries do a better job of stopping spammers, bots, until its citizens do a better job of preventing their PCs from being infected with worms, viruses, etc. others will have to pay for it. Also, I should mention what I believe was the cause of this. I used to host a nice little utility called DXWnd. This was the utility that lets you run fullscreen DirectX applications/games in windowed-mode, when the interface doesn't otherwise support it. That is, the application/game can only run in fullscreen mode, but you need to run it in windowed mode, for whatever reason, debugging or you prefer to play games that way while being able to multi-task. Suffice to say, this utility became very popular and was the number one downloaded item on this site. Specifically, it became very popular in Asian countries and "popular" doesn't always turn out to be a good thing... I was linked to in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. forums all for the express purpose of getting this utility. Unfortunately, it became too popular, and put my site on the map for spambots, hackers, etc. in those countries. This is my suspicion of course. All my troubles seem to have begun by having made the mistake of offering up that utility... Anyway, I have since deleted it in the Downloads section and will never again share it in the future. by NightWolve, Jan. 26, 2007, 06:54:15 AM [ Read all ] Announcements An English Patch for the Ys Origin Setup/Configuration Utility 0 Replies  I took a little diversion today to work on the Ys Origin Setup Utility for some reason. In a matter of few hours Deuce and I produced a nice little patch for you, so the time spent was quite productive. Check this thread for info and lemme know how it works out for you there. by NightWolve, Jan. 23, 2007, 05:48:59 PM [ Read all ] Announcements New Ys II Complete v1.02 English Patch Goes Public! 1 Replies  This pretty much completes most of what I wanted to see happen with the Ys I & II Complete line of patches. They are now both up-to-date. A few script fixes are included, patcher fixes and image edits. Note: I deleted the old hotfix patch in the Ys II Complete section, since with this new patch, it is no longer needed. So basically, I suddenly got the urge to wrap this project up after johnnybleu finished the last image edits I wanted, namely, to remove the remaining "ETERNAL" references in the game and change them to "COMPLETE". (The image gallery for Ys II Complete shows you which ones.) Anyway, this will be pretty much the last update for the Ys II Complete patcher for a long time. I *might* someday return to the Ys I & II Complete project for one final enhancement, to enable the patchers to install from an original Japanese game disc, thus avoiding the problems of having to boot in Japanese mode, using App Locale, or installing the games manually. Other than that, both games are over with and I'm very happy about that. It's been 4 years... Clicky Here! Also, if you were one of the first 6 people who downloaded it, please download and run it again. You'll notice your title screen will still say ETERNAL if you are one of the 6 with a bad patch. Well, all my attention is now left towards Felghana. Onward I march. Oh yes, but first, the Ys II separate project page will go up tonight. Look for it here: http://www.ysutopia.net/translations/ys2c/ by NightWolve, Jan. 05, 2007, 04:40:52 AM [ Read all ] Announcements Added new image to the Ys II gallery 2 Replies  Check out how the new title screen will look with the upcoming finalized Ys II Complete patcher. Clicky Here! by NightWolve, Jan. 02, 2007, 07:01:02 PM [ Read all ] Announcements A special treat to donators and assistants! 2 Replies  Howdy folks. Merry Christmas one and all! Unfortunately... I didn't have a chance to work on the final touches to the Ys Felghana patch which I was hoping to have ready for today... However, I decided to make the mostly completed patch available to all my donators and to those have assisted me with such things as image editing, etc. I haven't really expanded the pool of BETA testers up to this point, so I figure they can serve that purpose somewhat in the meantime. As for when it'll be 100% ready for release to the general public, I would guess some time in January. I have a few text images left related to a 'mural' for a certain point in the game and some boss name description images that need fine tuning. After that, I'll only have the ReadMe to finish and possibly one programmatic change to cache all edited images since there is a slowdown that occurs when the player opens the options menu. On an unrelated note, I'd like to say RIP on behalf of James Brown [The Godfather of Soul]. He passed away today around 1:45 AM and deserves an honorable mention in my book. More related links: 'Godfather Of Soul' James Brown Dies At 73 GODFATHER OF SOUL EXITS WORLD STAGE LIKE A TRUE SHOWMAN... James Brown, civil rights icon, peacemaker by NightWolve, Dec. 25, 2006, 02:55:11 PM [ Read all ] 6 Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6