Site Update - Back on track (January 8th, 2008)

[Cless]

And Phantasian Productions ages another year! And the year starts off well.

First and foremost, the Tales of Phantasia script translation is back on track! Who might this "new" translator be? Well... once upon a time, our Tales of Phantasia PSX translation was in fact a collaborative effort between another well-known group within the 'ol ROM hacking scene. The group translated various SNES anime series-based RPGs, but is probably most famous for the translation of Seiken Densetsu 3. Remember Lina`chan, Nuku-Nuku and Filia (LNF) Translations? So... what am I getting at? It's been six years... but Lina`chan heard of our plight and has returned! She has volunteered to complete the rest of the main script and skit script! She says it all looks quite simple, so hopefully it won't be long until we have 100% translated scripts. Let's all wish a huge welcome back to her!

What else is new? I'm attempting to write a script formatter myself since Klarth is unable to do so himself. It's pretty tricky for a novice programmer like me. I've got all the file parsing done. But I still have to figure out how to create an actual, intelligent formatting algorithm. I've got a general idea on how it would work, I'm just having a bit of trouble putting it into C code. Once it's done though, I'm sure new dialogue screenshots will be right around the corner!

[Cheetah]

Good to hear that the translation is getting on track again. Your continued drive to get this project completed is very impressive Cless.

[Cless]

I may have some new dialogue screens by tonight or so. I believe I have enough ideas down to make a functioning formatting algorithm from them. Working on it now.

The screens made will be far from the final ones, though. None of the script has had any editing yet.

[Frogacuda]

Oh wow, Lina-chan? What a turn of events. This will be great.

[Cless]

FINALLY. After much, much, much more pain than I expected, the script formatter is pretty much complete, sans a few minor bugs.

Unfortunately, I need something small ASM hacked in the game before I can get new screens up without any dumb work-arounds...

[Cheetah]

Glad this is coming along. I think people are missing this topic, this is exciting stuff, where are the comments.

[Cless]

I lied. There were a couple text boxes that came out as intended despite the current issues. These lines are exactly as my formatter output them.



What I can say is that I've decided to ditch using quotes in the spoken text in favor of indenting the dialogue lines. That way quotes can be used in the dialogue text themselves where needed.

Well, time to sleep.

[Cheetah]

I like it. The spacing works really well for the name of the speaker to be well distinguished without getting it mixed up with the text. This looks much better than using quotes, which is way to repetitive and unnecessary.

[LenaAndreia]

I've been away for a while! Dude, you're getting really close. I can't wait for this to be done! ^___^

[habilain]

The ASM has been hacked successfully. I think.

Onto... other things! I had written a fair amount of code previously (before my exams) towards 2 out of the 3 remaining things which need doing (and that I know about). Hopefully I'll finish the hacking relatively soon.

[Cless]

More pictures! Display problems are all worked out.




Bonus: Menu hacks I did several weeks ago, but didn't show off because I was sick of showing more and more menu screens without something more exciting (i.e. dialogue screens).


Nine Techs displayed in the selection column instead of six. Chester and Suzu's full lists fit without a need for scrolling.

Notes: I'm well aware that dimensional is spelled wrong. And I believe a few of Cless' techs received updated translations in Abyss. I haven't bothered to do much more menu text editing since it's currently being QCed by gogs.


Same idea. Added two more rows of techs to the Auto member list.


Same idea applied to the battle techs. Thanks to a nifty utility by Habilain I was able to do these. The battle tech menus are a bit more difficult to hack than the main menu ones.


Battle items: Increased the number of items visible on a page. All battle items are now visible on a single page, so you will never have to scroll it.


Equipment/Strategy/Formation/Customize instead of Equip/Tactics/Party/Custom. There were a bunch of reasons why we had them the way we did, but those aren't an issue anymore (or in some cases, will not be an issue anymore). Anyway, looks better and highlights the centering a bit more. It's also more consistent with ToD2.

[gogs]

Nix one of the "in there"s while you're at it.

All battle items are now visible on a single page

YES.

[Kajitani-Eizan]

Battle items: Increased the number of items visible on a page. All battle items are now visible on a single page, so you will never have to scroll it.

sweet! you should also hack star ocean to be less retarded...

[pedrocasilva]

It's looking good.

I have a question though; seeing those dialogs I seem to remember ToP PSone was painfully slow in them, meaning, in the message speed options you could only put 1 to 5 regarding speed, being that 1 was still slow, and stuff implemented in the newer games, like pressing a extra key to accelerate the text or unfold all of it and skip it don't work... and there isn't a "0" speed option...

Isn't possible to implement that in here? Since you guys are doing lot's of mods and adaptations, I find it the area where ToP shows it's age more. Fixing that would really make the game better, at least for me.

[Cless]

Well, I thought the message speed was fine in Japanese.

But I actually have considered hacking it for the English version. There are more characters to render in English so it takes longer to fill most textboxes. I find speed 1 tolerable, but the rest are so slow I can't imagine anyone wanting to use them ever.

I'm going to look into doubling the printing rates for each option. Hopefully, there won't be any problems.

Nix one of the "in there"s while you're at it.

Done.

[pedrocasilva]

Well, I thought the message speed was fine in Japanese.

But I actually have considered hacking it for the English version. There are more characters to render in English so it takes longer to fill most textboxes. I find speed 1 tolerable, but the rest are so slow I can't imagine anyone wanting to use them ever.

I'm going to look into doubling the printing rates for each option. Hopefully, there won't be any problems.

That makes sense, so I take it if the speed is regulated by each character popping up... in English with a bigger amount of characters... it'll be even slower?

*shivers*

In Japanese it was a minor complaint, not having the extra button press or the 0 option; from memory... I'd say it was about the speed of the english Link's Awakening, (I actually use the speed "1" in most tales games who allow me to skip it, just so when I press A/X the rest of the text appears), but in english... it could prove to be a nightmare then.

I hope there's a easy enough solution to do then. And thanks for listening to my plea.