Major milestone reached: Main ASM hacking is complete! (April 9, 2008)

[Cless]

Prologue battle is subtitled, battle menu labels are printed with normal text instead of graphical text (which was very horribly limiting).

We're going to look into some smaller finishing touches, like increasing the text speed since it takes longer to print text boxes in English than it does in Japanese. We also need to do some small hacks that will help debug the skits and all that too, but... everything that really matters on the hacking front is DONE. DONE!

Aside from that, it's almost exclusively script work from here on.

This is a rushed update, no pics available yet. There will be on the next site update.

[Kogahazan]

About making text speed faster. Is it in your power to hack in an instant text display like in later Tales, like when you select Text Speed 0?

[Cless]

Text speed 1 should be damn near instant if the print rates are doubled. True instant probably would probably bork those slowtext and pause commands...

[habilain]

As Cless is busy, I've made some screenshots. Note that all things about them subject to change

Battle Text Labels




Prologue Subtitles






As to text speed, I'll see what I can do. I'd probably appreciate instant speed, but if it breaks stuff then it ain't gonna happen.

[LJkAze]

Good Job, Though u came back long ago habilain I forgot to say welcome back. Continue with the good job, hopefully you guy can pull a summer release if not Autumn 

[Cless]

I guess more observant people may notice the lack of outline at the tops and bottoms of some letters in those screens. Not to worry, we've had the fix for days, but I forgot to apply it. Not a big deal at all.

And definitely, there will be changes to most of that text when I have time to work on it.

The exact limitation with the battle menu labels in graphics form was exactly 25 pixels (very odd number really). Very constraining. Using text gives us the entire screen if need be! Just for the lulz, here's a reminder of what it used to look like...

[pedrocasilva]

We're going to look into some smaller finishing touches, like increasing the text speed since it takes longer to print text boxes in English than it does in Japanese. We also need to do some small hacks that will help debug the skits and all that too, but... everything that really matters on the hacking front is DONE. DONE!

I recall bitching about this a while back, thank you guys for taking notice; of course you could and should notice that (and already knew when I pointed out but I'm still very grateful to see it in the priority list and not forgotten.

Means much to me.

Everything is looking great btw.

[Cless]

As far as I can tell, the patching utility I've been working on is now 100%!

[jajaswipo]

[Cheetah]

Very good progress.

[Cless]

News of the day: Text speeds doubled, 8x8 font gets slight enhancement

Text speed 1 is now twice as fast as it used to be. It's plenty fast and you'd have to be superhuman to keep up with it. Text speed 2 is as fast as 1 used to be, 3 as fast 2 used to be, and so on. Essentially it seemed each successive setting was in fact twice the speed of the previous one. So I guess if there was a text speed 0 setting originally, text speed 1 is as fast as that would be.

A hack was also put in place to make the 8x8 pixel font just a little nicer. Low-sitting characters such as "g" and "y" are now able to have complete shadows. Originally we couldn't fit them on the bottom of the characters.

I was gonna post of a movie of the prologue battle sub, but gogs disapproved of the script. Maybe tomorrow. I'm tired.

[Datschge]

In vein of the menu layout improvements, would it be possible to polish the battle info as well? I was thinking of moving all text to the bottom by two pixels so that the legends on the top don't touch the top border anymore (sloppy "photoshopping" follows):
->

[Cless]

I don't really have a problem with how that originally is, honestly. I think moving it down creates a really disproportionate amount of void space at the top of the window. :/


Today's progress so far: A bug just discovered from a 6-month old hack was just fixed. Not much else to say, other than I need to fix a few minor, easy problems created with the 8x8 enhancement.

[Cless]

Not much else to say, other than I need to fix a few minor, easy problems created with the 8x8 enhancement.

Fixed. Also fixed an obscure bug in the name entry menu.

Most ASM hacks from here on out will probably be bugfixes, if there are anymore bugs found. Also, everything works dandy on real hardware, so again, no worries there.

And for the curious, here's a video demo of the doubled message speed hack.

http://www.tales-cless.org/video/ToP/top_msg_speed.avi

First it shows message speed 2 (about equivalent to speed 1 originally), then the new speed 1. Hope it's fast enough.

And hey, it's the first (public) video of the project!

[Carnivol]

Also, everything works dandy on real hardware, so again, no worries there.

And may I chime in and say I just saw this in full action on both a set of PAL and NTSC PS3s?
(People, don't ask. But at least, hey, good to know that it works smoothly on a PS3 too, if you've got one that may play everything you feed it, right? )


Only "issue" was that on the PAL PS3, just like on a PAL PS2, any 60hz NTSC game will be forced to play at 50hz.
However, unlike the PS2, the PS3 at least display the screen more correctly aligned vertically and not cut-off like a PAL PS2 does to the picture output of NTSC PSX titles.


This means the game will be a tiny bit slower and it seemed like at least that on some of the longer audio clips (opening video and intro sequence) there was some minor stuttering.
I dunno if there really is any way to fix this or not. (both the screen positioning on a PAL PS2 and the lack of PAL Optimization)


On an old PSX, PSP and in emulators the 50/60hz speed thing is not an issue.

[Kajitani-Eizan]

perhaps make it even faster?

speed 2 is slightly too slow to keep ahead of where i'm reading, and while speed 1 is good, i feel like a bit faster might make it "feel" more like an instant setting. seems to me like if speed 2 is like that, speeds 4 and 5 are nigh useless anyway. maybe add a new superfast speed 1 and bump all the other speeds down one?