Status and stuff (October 8th, 2008)

[Cless]

I just put the finishing touches on the unrevised dialogue script, and now the whole thing's in Nusakan0's hands. Nusakan0's nearly done with the draft of the 80% script I sent him earlier. So, really, the edit's getting close to being finished.

Habilain's kinda busy for at least another week. There's a few things still on his plate that hopefully won't take too long to implement once he gets back.

As stated in the other thread (not sure if it got much visibility), I also implemented EXP multipliers for the bonus difficulty modes I added to the game (5x for Unknown mode, 10x for God mode) as an attempt to make them a little more "fair." The original modes have no such things.

I sent off a technical beta patch to someone to make sure the hack is bug-free. I also completed a quick playthrough without any problems.

Now that the full script is inserted, it seems that the patch download will be around 3.5MB.

[Holy Knight603]

Hello, I've been watching the threads for the past year or so and only recently made an account. Although, I don't keep up with this as much as I'd like, heh. Anywho, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate all the work you guys are putting into this and I'm looking forward to playing it. Out of curiosity I was wondering if you were gonna subtitle the intro FMV. It's nothing major, I was just curious as to the lyrics of the song. I'm not even sure if subtitling FMV's like this can be easily done if at all.

[Demon000]

I was just curious as to the lyrics of the song.

If you're curious about the lyrics -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJZEsKe6a0Y

[Holy Knight603]

Heh, well that's the one place I didn't think to look. Thanks. Still a subtitled intro for the game would still be nice, just throwing that out there.

[Cless]

A hard sub would:

1. Obscure the artwork
2. Make the already bad video quality even worse due to re-encoding
3. Make the patch too large to distribute via website (bittorrent is NOT an option)

Soft-subbing into the borders would be ideal, however:

1. The dialogue font--the font we'd ideally use for the subtitles--is not loaded into VRAM at the opening sequence. I don't know what it would take to copy it there.
2. I'm not sure how we'd implement timing for each subtitle. Theoretically the current video frame number might be stored somewhere in RAM and you could use that, but a theory's a theory.
3. We don't have a song translation, and I'm not in favor of plagiarizing one from the Internet.

It doesn't really seem to be worth spending time trying to figure out how to implement it. We'd also have to do it for the ending, as well...

[Holy Knight603]

Well, at least I know how difficult something like that would be. The Soft-Subbing was actually what I was thinking about; also, I wasn't aware that there was one for the ending too. I'll have to look that up on youtube as well when I finish the game. It's been so long since I've played Tales of Phantasia that I no longer remember the ending.

[kyon]

holy s**t , awsome cless... can,t wait... it,s gonna be released this month right

[pedrocasilva]

I'd say mid november or december, at best.

Anyway, I'm sure they won't rush it out of the door after so many years in the works.

[Leiw]

we will have a nice xmas present I think ^^

[Cheetah]

Looking good.

[Cless]

Got the next the 40% of Nusakan's draft of the main script edit. Only 20% left!

The skit formatting tool from Habilain is also here, so inserting most skit scripts will be a snap now!

Finally, looking into some other small enhancements, like adding another line of text to dialogue windows. It'll be quite handy.

[Cheetah]

Thanks for the update Cless.

[Cless]

Well, still making some incremental progress. Might as well mention that I've been editing the skit script as much as I can. Trying to correct consistency errors, correct possible translation errors, and add contextual notes for the final edit of the skit script. But the main issue is that the skit translation was REALLY dry so I'm trying to do what I can to make each one sound more like a normal conversation. I've only got 30 or so more edit (out 258). Then it'll be ready for Nusakan to put his magical touches on.

Habilain's new skit insertion tool is awesome, by the way. It's even more intelligent than I was expecting/hoping it would be. It can reformat skit layouts and split long subitles into multiple text strings automatically. This has DRASTICALLY reduced the number of skits that need to have their event scripts edited manually. Big props there!

Also, a bug was found in the skit subtitling hack, and was fixed within 24 hours.

[Cless]

All skits subtitles are now inserted (aside from one really pesky one that needs to be further reverse engineered)! The skit script has been handed off to Nusakan for the final edit.

I put a lot of work into editing the text myself. Not to mention in a number of places I needed to edit some skit's scripting so I could break up long lines into multiple shorter ones. I did not want the subtitles to use more than two lines on-screen at a time. Retiming broken up lines properly is a big pain in the ass; it's all trial and error, and each trial takes at least 1-2 minutes. Sometimes you want to try timing a new subtitle to sync up to the speaking after a slight pause.

Habilain had to deal with a number of bug reports that slowed down technical progress, but those have mostly been dealt with.

Now, hopefully gogs will soon show up with the menu text that I gave him last year to edit, because I can really use that. *nudge* *nudge*

[pedrocasilva]

Awesome

[Italian accent] Where's gogs? someone from the Phantasian Productions mafia grab him and drag him here to the godfather cless, NOW.[/Italian accent]