CEDEC 15, or Computer Entertainment Developers Conference, was held between August 26 ~ 28 in Yokohama and one of the lectures was "Making of a 3D Adventure With A Demonstration of the Ace Attorney Script System," led by KIMOTO Masahiro (Capcom Production Studio 4 planner). Premium members of Nico Nico Douga can still see the presentation through time shift (here), but both Famitsu and hosoboso have posted a report on it, which I'll summarize here. Click on the Famitsu link for pictures.

The presentation starts with an introduction of Kimoto and the Ace Attorney series. The main topic is scripting, explained here as simple programming. With Ace Attorney, the conversaion of scenario to final product goes roughly as follows.

1) The scenario writer writes the scenario according to specific rules.
>> For example, the person speaking is always marked with a "■".

2) The scenario is converted to script by programmers to include all the correct flags/so it runs as a game.
>> At this stage, the game can be 'played', but the characters just stand there as they're talking.

3) "Stage directors" add "direction" commands.
>> From BGMs to SEs, from the text speed to the wait between lines and other effects like flashes, they're all added at this stage. This is what makes the game look like Ace Attorney. Note that "stage director" is just a term used in this presentation. In Ace Attorney, this job is done by planners.

4) Output to executable data

Up until Ace Attorney 4, the script commands were just added right next the scenario. An example is the command "w10", which stands for "show this line for 10 seconds". But this method was labor-intensive (and you had to memorize all those commands), it resulted in a lot of input mistakes and it was also a hassle whenever the scenario changed. From Ace Attorney Investigations 2 on, they basically made a Ace Attorney scenario/script editing tool based on Excel. Commands can be selected from a pull-down menu and also warns them when there's an error. The program als included a localization tool, allowing for entering English while looking at the Japanese and also capable of outputting the data for an English version.

The scenario -> script converter tool is capable of automatically adding set commands during the convertion (i.e. certain camera movements or setting the correct text speed). Because the scripts for AA games are so large, the script is split in over 500 files (making it easier to oversee/correct). Setting the correct flags for evidence/story flags etc. for each of those files would be a lot of work, so they also have preset scripts, as well as tools for taking over the "metadata" of the previous files/scenes so the files/scenes flow into each other.

From Ace Atttorney 5 on, the games became 3D, so new elements like characters coming in from the side or the background were introduced, as well as camera movements. This is also handled by the script commands. With DGS, they also had to do the eye movements of the characters.

At the end of the presentation, Kimoto demonstrated how it worked (with DGS characters), starting with a bare scenario and slowly adding things like music with script commands until he had the final scene.

Q&A (some of questions)

Q: Any command mistakes that happened during localization?
A: There are tools for converting the commands and comparing the commands across the versions. Because of the character count in English, there'll always be differences though.

Q: What if motions are added/removed? How are changes shared among the team?
A: The exact duration of each motion is set, so as long as that doesn't change, the designers can just update their data and everything will update along with it. There is a tool to search for the scenes with certain motions. When motions or commands change, it also updates automatically, so no problems there.

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Another live presentation I had to miss... Thanks for the summary, Ash. That converter sounds so cool and seems pretty straightforward to use too. After viewing the script alone for GS5, it came to 514 files. So, by "script", they're don't mean including the computer-use-only "scripts". It's just so much text... and I can imagine PLvsAA was even more so to cause that much lag on the system. Although, that lag is more of an issue with inefficient coding, and with too many things running at once, it naturally causes slowdown. DGS doesn't have the same problem.

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Wait are you telling me that the first AA game with a built in localization tool was the game with no official translation? This was a cool read though, lots of interesting facts.

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It does make sense, there were traces of localization preparation in the compiled code.

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Very interesting read, thank you.
I really hope Janest Hsu is currently using the scripting tool to do the English localization. Not that I expect it to be the case.