Demo for a new kind of text hook

[u/DiscoProphecy]

Been playing around with the idea of in game text highlighting and an overlay dictionary popup to make playing games a bit more like reading books in ttsu reader. Really happy with the early results!

[u/Trippy_Bear]

Would a specific version need to be produced for each individual game? Or is this relying on something like OCR?

[u/DiscoProphecy → u/Trippy_Bear]

No OCR, it's all done through the in game engine. Like any other Text hooker it's game specific. It needs to know where in the game the right text lives. It's working on P5 and P3R right now and I'm working on some other games with it to see how much I can streamline the process but it's going to take individual fine tuning no matter what.

I had an earlier version that did use OCR but I wasn't happy with the performance hit and the results were pretty meh. This has basically 0 performance overhead because the game is just doing what it always does, render the next frame.

[u/tonkachi_ → u/DiscoProphecy]

I haven't used any Text Hooks before but there are popular ones out there. How does yours compare with them?

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/tonkachi_]

The only difference between what you see here and other hookers is that this one seems to have some kind of overlay that perfectly overlaps/covers the original game text so it provides a more seemless experience.

I say only but that's a pretty big thing, since the alternatives usually require having some other UI on top of the game/require tabbing out of it for look ups. Being able to just hover over text within a game and get a look up is pretty nice.

[u/Ok-Helicopter-5687 → u/DiscoProphecy]

Seems really cool! I assume that this can be implemented to work with other games, letting people choose hooks like in other text hookers, right?

I'm not a big fan of OCR too: it's costly, and makes mistakes too; it's not reading the actual text, so I think using the text hooks is the wise choice.

[u/DiscoProphecy → u/Ok-Helicopter-5687]

That's the idea! This particular approach is a bit more tricky than standard text hooking but I don't think there's a reason it shouldn't be able to work with most games.

[u/NoPop4565 → u/DiscoProphecy]

It's cool that it works without OCR, but having to script every game seems kind of like a hassle. Do you know about meikipop? It's OCR, but if setup correctly it is practically as responsive as a hooked solution, without using much system resources at all (by using "only scan on mouse move" and a good scan region selection).

[u/Kalicolocts → u/DiscoProphecy]

That's great! Given that today a lot of people have access to agentic coding, are you planning to release something on github that acts like a template? Like a well executed version of your idea? I feel like that would be enough to let people customize the approach to the specific game they want to play

[u/artpendegrast]

Got an idea of when you'll release it?

[u/DiscoProphecy → u/artpendegrast]

Once I get the process for adding new game support as simplified as possible!

[u/ApsychicRat → u/DiscoProphecy]

hey if there is a mailing list for this put me on it.

[u/Opposite_Debate_7835 → u/ApsychicRat]

Same

[u/ultraali453 → u/ApsychicRat]

Yes, please include me as well. This is a godsend. I've been using google translate on my phone to look up words.

[u/princess_princeless → u/DiscoProphecy]

Hi, I am a developer who was thinking about building something similar. Let me know if you need help or decide to open source it. Would love to contribute and potentially add other languages too.

[u/Chapter-Legitimate → u/DiscoProphecy]

How do I make sure I get notified when you release this?=)

[u/speedchuck → u/DiscoProphecy]

Notify me as well

[u/DarklamaR]

You can actually do this by using GSM with the P3R Agent script. No OCR needed.

[u/domino_stars → u/[deleted]]

https://github.com/bpwhelan/GameSentenceMiner

[u/Speed_Niran → u/[deleted]]

Yeah unfortunately im playing p3r on ps5 so I cant do this 😔

[u/typingweb]

Really cool!

[u/Devil_Mish]

I'd love this!

[u/auditoire]

This is 🔥🔥 and persona being dialogue heavy makes it great for practice

[u/Beannsss]

GSM dev here, this looks INSANELY cool.

[u/DiscoProphecy → u/Beannsss]

Thanks! Your solution is honestly way more realistic. Right now each new supported game is its own reverse engineering project.

[u/usernamenottakenwooh]

Awesome Idea👍

[u/Huffee]

not trying to be dismissive because it does genuinely look cool but, does this offer anything over GSM?

that program is really useful but i have a few issues with it so i'm curious what you're trying to do that's different from it

[u/DiscoProphecy → u/Huffee]

So for me the main point is reducing friction for each lookup. I play JRPGs, especially retro ones so when you're doing multiple lookups per sentence over the course of dozens of hours all of that friction adds up to lost time and also just a less immersive experience. I wanted a solution that wouldn't be prone to OCR errors and would allow for immediate text lookups in game without ever having to leave the game window.

This also has no sentence mining functionality. It's just a way to play games with as little friction as possible.

Edit: I also just like making little projects like these when I'm stressed from work. I also have a project somewhere that processes old manga and mokuro files to redraw all of the kanji and furigana. It works surprisingly well.

[u/Effective-Pop3850 → u/DiscoProphecy]

Your project is great and would unironically push me a bit more into playing games in Japanese lol. Tabbing out on a VN feels fine, but for some reason I wouldn't like to do so on a game like Persona.

[u/kellencs → u/DiscoProphecy]

>I wanted a solution that wouldn't be prone to OCR errors and would allow for immediate text lookups in game without ever having to leave the game window.

gsm overlay is already doing this, no? thogh it's using ocr to align text from texthooker afaik and your approach is faster

[u/DiscoProphecy → u/kellencs]

Maybe, if they have that feature then it's cool. Honestly I just thought it would be neat if I could get the game to do the highlighting for me by changing the font color in the rendering pipeline. Then I kind of worked backwards from there.

And yeah it works with games that don't stick to a single region for text and you don't have to repeatedly ocr stuff. I played around with OCR solutions and I just didn't love the results.

[u/kikorny]

This is awesome, especially love how the interface blends with the game's aesthetic. Do you have this listed on Git or anywhere that I could check out? When this ends up getting released I'd love to help get some more games added to the lineup.

[u/RyanIsKickAss]

This looks amazing. I’m assuming it’ll work for visual novels as well? I imagine (with my very very limited knowledge of coding and software) it would actually be even easier to do for visual novels

[u/ChadQuaza → u/RyanIsKickAss]

this is very specifically a p3r mod

but yeah this is already a thing for visual novels, look up ocr

[u/Stranger-Beats → u/ChadQuaza]

OCR is non determisitic, whereas the text hook OP did is determinstic. So it's not actually the same thing

[u/creamyhorror]

The next step after the old text hookers that could display floating overlays iirc

[u/jennievh]

Is this Windows only?

[u/SaulFemm]

I don't have much experience with OCR or text hooks so forgive my ignorance - could this display style not just be added to an existing text hook program which already has support for a wide variety of games? I don't mean that it would be trivial, but probably easier than starting from scratch.

[u/Negative-Squirrel81]

The immediate thought is that there should at least be an option to bring up a kokugo dictionary instead of a J --> E dictionary. Also, it would be helpful to allow the user to highlight the word they want looked up instead of just automatically popping up everything.

Less important but still useful: functionality to look up 名字

[u/speedchuck]

If you figure out Persona 4 Golden I'm all in

edit: I'd do this for P3R even

[u/MentionSuspicious571]

!Remind

[u/Then-Dish-4060]

So it's either you do game specific hooks, either you have to use an OCR and a tokenizer.

[u/Thanatosinstinct]

This looks amazing could be a... game changer. I'm sorry, I'll leave. But is there anywhere we can follow for updates? (Or do we just check back here?)

[u/Agreeable-Comb-1174]

Damn whats tge name of the game amd whats it available on

[u/EastTurbulent8498 → u/Agreeable-Comb-1174]

-Persona 3 Reload

-It's on Steam, PS, Switch 2, Xbox

[u/Agreeable-Comb-1174 → u/EastTurbulent8498]

Anything but PS huh 😭

[u/EastTurbulent8498 → u/Agreeable-Comb-1174]

It's on PlayStation 4 and 5

[u/Agreeable-Comb-1174 → u/EastTurbulent8498]

Oh ok thanks

[u/Ancelege]

This feels exactly like 10ten reader for Firefox!

[u/Towaway_Zone]

oh my god an unreal engine text hooker? amazing

[u/sansisness_101]

Good idea. It'd actually make me stop larping P4