Hi, I played your translation and ended up finding the second game. I was wondering if the tools you used to translation this game could be used to translate the second game or to atleast get it into a stage where you can edit the strings. Let me know if you're interested and we maybe we could go over the tools in Discord or something.
Viewing post in Raiders Sphere 3rd Translation Project comments
Unfortunately not, at least not in a convenient way. All of RS2's mission data is bundled together in one big binary, so you'd have to either find a way to unpack it or hex edit the entire script (constrained by the Japanese line lengths), and I just don't have either of those in me.
Using something like Textractor to pull and live translate the text in another window should be enough to know what you're doing at least, though the story is pretty much mangled in the process.
That's a pity it is not as staight forward as 3rd. I am able to follow along using my knowledge of the UI from the 3rd and 4th game. I am most grateful for your mod of the third, would not have found so many of the game and missions in this series if not!
I found the 1st game and am trying to play around with some of the custom missions, I only found the "RaidersSphere Other missions 2" though, do you know if there's any others online?
Other Missions 2 is the only set I could ever find either, I believe Other Missions 1 may have only seen physical distribution or was taken down long ago for one reason or another. (I heard something about one of the community campaigns in it having some controversial political subject matter, but that's all hearsay.)
If you're interested in more games like these, Project ICKX made multiple using RS3's engine, and most of those are on DLSite as well. They actually have listings on Steam; those were put up back in 2022 and haven't released yet so I wasn't sure if they were ever happening, but SteamDB says they've had changes on the backend as recently as this May, and PLAYISM was added as a publisher in April 2025. So maybe those'll come out eventually after all? They aren't immediately visible on Steam in the US, but have English as a listed language, so I assume PLAYISM is providing a localization like they often do.
That said, if the official multiplayer scenarios for RS3 still exist anywhere, I'd be very interested in those. Those servers were always hosted by Rectangle as far as I know, but it doesn't seem like there was anything in particular that would stop anyone else from doing so, given the files.
Thanks for the tip, I found Project ICKX's games on DL Site and they show some promise, especially "EFFY". I see also now they are all on steam too, hopefully sometime will get an offical release + translation.
Since they appear to be created using RS3 engine, does that mean the tools you used to translate RS3 can work on them?
I'd love to have a crack at it, even if it's just translating the UI elements so the player can make informed decisions during the loadout phase.
You could translate the Project ICKX games in a similar way, but they structure some of the data a little differently, so you may have to dig around a bit to find where the strings are. They mentioned on Twitter once that they'd rather not have fan translations floating around though, I assume because they reasonably want everyone to go for the official ones once those exist.
I saw your readme after posting and managed to find the strings for dialogue, briefing and weapon descriptions.
I am having a tough time finding the strings for the menu items, like options items and Start Mission from the loadout screen. Do you know what file type you had to edit for RS3? I have a bad feeling they are in some .dpd files that on the install.
Thanks for the heads up on them not liking fan translations, I'm sure mine will be vastly inferior to what they have working, I'll have to consider if I want to post it prominently if I do.
Strings not dictated by other assets (like mission metadata and aircraft/weapon entries) were all baked into the executable, I had to go in and hex edit all of those manually. But I remember that executable being more or less identical between games using the engine, so you should be able to just drop the patched one into the other games' directories and use that.
Thanks I've tried it on all the Project ICXK games and the options all seem to be translated.
I sure feel like a dope now having struggled with the menu items when the solution was right in front of me.
Translation work is going well, thanks to your work the challenge is mostly my workflow and making sure the text makes sense.
I was curious about ICKX's other works and noticed they have games not available digitally, I'm considering using one of those buy from Japan services to obtain them and see if I can translate them.
You're translation has awakened a dangerous rabbit hole for me lol =).