Looking for help in finding out where Cyber Sleuth for Steam stores its text

[Kazari]

Hello all! I'm Kazari and you probably have never heard of me, but I sort of maybe kind of might have worked on translating a certain Digimon game in the past. Or something like that.

Anyway, the reason I'm here is that Cyber Sleuth is now out on Steam! The game is one I do truly love very much, having played it since it was out in Japanese, but, uh...well, I cannot quite say the same about the official localization, which, as many of you probably know already, is riddled with typos, questionable translation choices, inconsistency, and generally a lot of other problems that make the quality of the overall game take a large hit. The game being out on Steam means that an idea sort of floated into my head about seeing how possible it might be to play around with the text to make it a little less...difficult to read. Or at least, you know, absent a few "Bakemon" namedrops.

Now, I'm not making any promises about how much I intend to actually go through with this, given that I don't have as much time as I used to these days, but I at least am interested in seeing how doable this would be in a theoretical sense. But I don't really know the slightest bit about game modding, and when I look at the files right now most of the data seems to be in a bunch of compressed files that I can't make heads or tails of...so I was wondering if maybe I could find someone out there with the game who might know more about these things than me 😅 Would anyone happen to be able to figure out where the English game text is stored, and how it might be extracted?

It's just a random thought, so any help at all is appreciated!

[Theigno]

It's possible to extract the game's archive but at least so far I haven't found a tool that repacks those mvgl files again...

The text is stored in .mbe script files with no additional encoding:



as you can see all languages are stored side by side (I am unsure, if the part in Kanji is the original Japanese text or the Chinese translation).

If you could simply change the lines isn't something I can answer right now. If the game locates the text by some sort of absolute offset within the file, changing the length of the text would cause problems, but I'm not sure if that is the case.

[Kazari]

It's possible to extract the game's archive but at least so far I haven't found a tool that repacks those mvgl files again...

The text is stored in .mbe script files with no additional encoding:



as you can see all languages are stored side by side (I am unsure, if the part in Kanji is the original Japanese text or the Chinese translation).

If you could simply change the lines isn't something I can answer right now. If the game locates the text by some sort of absolute offset within the file, changing the length of the text would cause problems, but I'm not sure if that is the case.

If you wouldn't mind me asking, how did you get that out of the mvgl file? That's much further than I got 😅

That seems to be Chinese text (the game's Japanese version isn't on PC).

[BladeSabre]

(the game's Japanese version isn't on PC).

It's not? Is this info on the Steam page wrong then?

[Kazari]

(the game's Japanese version isn't on PC).

It's not? Is this info on the Steam page wrong then?

Sadly it is indeed incorrect. I contacted Bandai Namco and they gave me a response saying they're looking into this, but it's an error.

[Kiri Sweets]

I can't be any help figuring out more about how to get modding set up, but I also really wanted to figure out how to edit the text to fix stuff, so if you'd like any help working on fixing the localization once modding is figured out I'd be happy to offer assistance, even if it's just doing the grunt work of fixing the messed up item data lol

[Shigeru82]

I've done my best to find a program to re-compile the changed data back into the needed file, but it seems it's not as easy as one thinks, by what I've looked over.

[SydMontague]

Should probably also mention it here that I'm working on a tool to extract and rebuild the game archives, I just have to polish my proof of concept version up for general use.

[RyudoGaming]

So I have been looking into this myself today, and the MVGL files are encrypted, they're also archives used on the PSvita. There does seem to be a way in them using a tool called PSVPFSTOOL but I haven't looked into that a whole lot, so I am not sure ho to get said decryption key. but once the files are decrypted you can use Chaosrings III BMS file to extract the data.

Should probably also mention it here that I'm working on a tool to extract and rebuild the game archives, I just have to polish my proof of concept version up for general use.

How is this coming along?

It's possible to extract the game's archive but at least so far I haven't found a tool that repacks those mvgl files again...

The text is stored in .mbe script files with no additional encoding:




as you can see all languages are stored side by side (I am unsure, if the part in Kanji is the original Japanese text or the Chinese translation).

If you could simply change the lines isn't something I can answer right now. If the game locates the text by some sort of absolute offset within the file, changing the length of the text would cause problems, but I'm not sure if that is the case.

As someone who is currently translating a game from Japanese you're correct, you're better off using some type of Hex editor than Notepad ++.
The strings can be the same size or smaller, any bigger, and they will break.

In a hex editor it will look "Something" like this. Here you can see "tags" where the game pulls the text from and the text that is used. (Using another game as an example)

[SydMontague]

Oh yeah sorry, forgot to post it here. My tool is working and can decrypt, encrypt, extract and repack the game files now.

-> https://github.com/SydMontague/DSCSTools

I'm currently working on reading/converting the table files (.mbe) that also store the text for the game. It should come out as simple CSV file once I'm done.