README.md

whale-tools

This repository contains fan translation tools for Whale-based games.

Currently it supports only Tsujidou-san no Junai Road, but it shouldn't be too difficult to add support for other games - it should boil down to changing constants inside archiver and using different filenames.lst file.

Basic workflow:

• Run archiver to extract *.dat archives.
• Edit the files.
• Run archiver again to pack folders back into *.dat archives.

General repacking

• You need Python 3, preferably 3.4.3.
• To see list of options, run ./archiver --help.
• The game executables are most likely protected with Themida protector, meaning it's difficult to tamper with its binary code for stuff such as repositioning text etc. Fortunately it's not needed, since 99% of game logic resides in 100%-reversible script files.

Scripts

• The scripts are encoded with Shift-JIS of course.
• The scripts are implemented in a way that anything that starts with ASCII characters is treated as code. I haven't looked too much if you can render a text through some script routines, but I successfully changed the text when I prepended the text with a full-width space.
• This script doesn't include word wrapping. I can't think of any productive way to solve this problem so I leave it to people with more experience. Pull requests are encouraged.

Images

• The archives don't provide file names and use CRC checksums of the names (NOT checksums of contents) instead. The file names are absolutely needed to extract anything but scripts. Therefore, you need to pass --filenames=list_of_file_names.lst to archiver. I included an example file list for Tsujidou-san no Junai Road (a bit more exhaustive than asmodean's list), but it's still not complete. This means you almost surely will get "file not found" errors at some point. These can be fixed by adding the file name the game complains about to file names list and repacking the archives. Consider firing a pull request if you find such files. (There is also hash_finder that is supposed to aid brute-force based hash discovery.)
• The images are based on TLG file format. - To convert PNG back to TLG, you can use tools bundled with Kirikiri game engine (krkrtpc.exe that can be downloaded here, if the link is down, see TLWiki). - To convert TLG to PNG, you can use the tool above or arc_unpacker. krkrtpc failed to convert some of TLG files to PNG while arc_unpacker managed to do so.

Proof it works

References

• http://asmodean.reverse.net/pages/exwhaledat.html
• Carter Yagemann's scripts