“I’ve reached the LZ! Where’s that chopper!”

A number of weeks ago, I had said that I had joined the staff of the ef full game translation project in the position of translator-editor and translator mentor. Since then, the project had gone under way, and then all sorts of the proverbial you know what hit the fan.

So, without much in the way of noise, I have faded from the project for a number of weeks, and finally decided to disappear entirely. It’s somewhat an unfortunate turn of events that I do hold staff credit for the ef demo project I worked on ages ago, but those two projects have smushed into a single page. Even right now, a number of people listed as staff there aren’t even related to the current full-game project.

As for reasons, I suppose there are some.

I never particularly agreed with the distribution method that was chosen for the project. From all sorts of angles, it was an untenable position. That whole mess was what prompted that bit I scribbled up about copyright a while ago. Being a hands-off sort of person, I had held out hope that once technical hurdles were cleared, a proper patch could be made and the whole sordid affair would be thrown out with trash. Since I was interested in training a new translator, I decided the developers had plenty of time hack their way into the code and fix the issue while we worked.

The other major reason was that I had signed on as an advisor specifically because I’m busy with other projects. As such, when I had time, I’d look at the raw translated scripts, make copious comments, I think every 3rd-4th line had a comment on usage, style, and sometimes accuracy. However, they were ultimately only requests for rewrites, not ‘use this line’, since that’s not what editors are supposed to do except in emergencies towards the end. It’s also pointless if I was the one doing all the ‘translating’ for the game anyways. I never thought ef was worth my effort translating.

Well, moving on, in eye-spinning project management, there were a number of other editors with vastly different styles. On top of that, there’s dealing with the translator. I’ve been told I run much tighter ships when I manage projects, and long story short, I tore up about 400 lines of ef script, then needed to work on Narci2 for a deep breath of air.

By the time I came back, there had apparently been some staff-wide emails about something else going on that I never saw (‘staff-wide’, funny that). Also, no one complained if I was busy doing my other work, so I took it as a sign that I can fade out with little fuss. Jump forward to today, and since Narci2 development is getting much more demanding again, it seemed a good idea to just clear my plate off.

Since I’ve dropped out of sight long ago, I’ve heard peeps that something was going on, but I haven’t concerned myself about the details. Whatever it is, I’m sure that my few pages of comments will have been ‘edited’ into oblivion anyways. So one could say that my effect on the project never existed to begin with.