ARM Backup/Ar tonelico 2 retranslation/Misc TODOs

This page lists miscelleneous things we'd like to do or research for the project.
The idea of this page is to be a general catch-all for tasks and ideas which don't have a better page (yet). The things listed on this page may be moved to more appropriate pages later.
You may also be interested in these pages:
*Bugs - technical issues we want to solve for this project
*Style Guide - names and terms to be updated during the retranslation
And here are the various things we want to look into at some point:
*User-friendly frontends for the utilities
-> And/or some batch files to automate things
* Utilities for dumping and restoring in-game choices
-> "Only thing I can see that's not reasonably handled on the scripts now is when the game presents you a list of choices. That text is in a different part of the file (specifically the end), so it doesn't appear in the output of Asmodean's extractor or mine. I don't know if it's worth it to try and cadge detection for that into the main script tools. It might be just as easy to handle any files where that needs to be changed individually" - Morgan
* Utilities for dumping and restoring .erx files
-> It sounds like Morgan is busy working on this.
->* Morgan is in fact fairly stumped on this, and would appreciate input from someone with a better understanding of PS2 disassembly.
->* TerraBreaker suggested that Morgan works with Cless on this, who has a dumper for PS2 elf files.
* Utility for "real" lzr compression
-> Probably not needed, since we already have the FakeLZR utility
* Free utlities for handling TIM and TIM2 files.
-> It would be nice not to have to use OPTPiX iMageStudio
* Editing of large SFD movies
-> TerraBreaker is busy researching this
* Better documentation for the utilities
* Creation of end-user patcher utility
-> Utility for taking the user's US version of AT2, and applying our updates.
 It sounds like TerraBreaker will be working on this.
 
 Ayulsa also suggested adding a variety of patches, depending on what the user wanted:
 
 "Would it be possible, when this is all said and done, to release a variety of patches to add things back into the game that people might want? For example, just the text translation and bugfix, restored Japanese audio and videos, etc.? (I know there's already a patch out for the bugfix and one for the audio; will these all be compatible with ours? Might we want to make a big post linking to all of them when all this is done, and/or possibly mirror them in one place?)"
* Distribution of end-user patcher utility and data
-> For larger data ("undub", movie patches, etc), we'll probably use bittorrent.
* Add English subtitles to the movies
-> So that players can watch the movies with Japanese audio.
* Find where the game stores "rectangles" for tim and tim2 sub-images
-> This would be very useful for editing text found in image files. See this page for a list of text found in images
* Use Japanese cosmosphere vids, with English subtitles
-> We want to use "Jakuri" instead of "Jaqli".
 For the "outro" cosmosphere vids, it is very hard to edit "Jacqli" in the scrolling text, so it has
 been proposed that we use the Japanese "outro" vids, and add English subtitles below with the
 correct spelling. Furthermore we should do this for all the Reyvateil videos for consistency.
 wizzardx wrote a tool to help with this, but we still need to make nice-looking
 English subtitle images to scroll along the bottom of the cosmosphere outro vids.
* Let fans download game graphics
-> "Entirely randomly, and apologies if you've answered this elsewhere, but: at any point in the project (or after the project) will we be making some of the graphics downloadable for fans? For example, your Infel sprite I assume was pulled from the game, and a collection of sprites would be lovely to have. It's just one of those "nice option" things, obviously not an essential (and we have bigger fish to fry), but it'd be neat for it to exist." - Ayulsa
* Undub
-> We want fans to be able to play the game with the original Japanese voices. Also because the NA version had a lot of dialogue removed.
 We will probably be using an existing AT2 "undub" for reference when making our patches.
 It looks like Morgan is working on this. More info [| here].