Stuff still moving quickly (August 29th, 2007)

[Cless]

Habilain appears to be working double-overtime. He's fixed the issues with DTE and also the last nagging, unexpected bug with dialogue where text on the second line disappeared in some places for whatever reason. He's now working on getting the battle DTE implemented which should not be difficult at all.

I guess if you've been shaking your head over this "DTE" business I guess I'll explain it. Basically, it's a simple compression that allows us to fit two text characters into the space of one byte, therefore greatly increasing the amount of space available to us to fit text into the game. The original space is inadequate for English, and this is the easiest way to increase available text space without making any drastic changes to the internal structure of the game.

If Skeud doesn't get to it, Habilain will start trying to hack the Auto-controlled character's tech lists after the battle DTE.

Unofficially, the script is about 40% translated by the "backup team", at least with the files I have in hand. It will need to be looked over by Shinhoshi before I can start calling it "official." Thanks goes to _Bnu and Cyllya for the "unofficial" translations.

As for me, I'm currently tying up some smaller loose ends. I've also done *some* work with the battle menu cosmetics but I'm not finished. I'm waiting on battle DTE before I continue because it's a bit annoying trying to work around all the gibberish text. I did at least pretty much finish the player character's battle tech menu, though. The other menus aren't a big deal, except possibly the Auto-controlled member's tech menus (those also need to be reduced to two columns).

I don't have any new screens to show, but I won't be receiving Habilain's new hacks for a few more days or so because he also wants to implement new functions into his assembler before sending it to me.

But it's all great news. The technical part of this is soooooooo close to being finished. Just a couple little things left! Aside from subtitling skits/prologue battle, that is, which is a pretty big undertaking. Gemini, the hacking god responsible for the work on the alternate project (which has nothing to do with us), has considered lending the code he's going to write for it to us as well.

[Cyllya]

Unofficially, the script is about 40% translated by the "backup team", at least with the files I have in hand. It will need to be looked over by Shinhoshi before I can start calling it "official." Thanks goes to _Bnu and Cyllya for the "unofficial" translations.

I recently realized I accidentally left a chunk (or rather two chunks, but they have the same text, for whatever reason) in one of the files in Japanese. o_o; Yeah, I said I proof-read it, but I didn't say I was good at proof-reading... I'll send you a fixed copy when I send you the other files I'm formatting/editing. Unless you have need of now?

[Demon000]

Even if it's not official is good to know about the actual script translation. I was recently tempted to create a thread to ask about the translation progress.

I also wanted to thank and express my support to all the people involved in this project.
Thanks Guys!!

[Cless]

I recently realized I accidentally left a chunk (or rather two chunks, but they have the same text, for whatever reason) in one of the files in Japanese. o_o; Yeah, I said I proof-read it, but I didn't say I was good at proof-reading... I'll send you a fixed copy when I send you the other files I'm formatting/editing. Unless you have need of now?

Just keep going at your pace.

Anyway, may as well post this thing:



Was afraid that could've been too long.

[habilain]

As people are posting progress reports; here's mine.

I hate the programmer who wrote the battle text routines. Currently Battle DTE is quite literally 50% effective (i.e. you get one character and then a blank). I tried a different approach, but it a) didn't work and b) made Chester disappear from the field of battle altogether.

[DemonFang]

Looks good, but what's with the non-PSP version character sprites? I don't think it's too long.

[Cless]

Well, that's one loose end tied up! But I guess it looks trivial to you.

I kept getting sidetracked so it took forever to finally finish. But I'll make you appreciate it.

Anyway, the "Throw away item" text normally joins two text strings. Conformed to Japanese grammar, it was <item name> <will be thrown away.>. Of course, with just Yes and No as choices, that sounds pretty awkward. You could add more text to make Yes and No sound okay as choices, but that's clumsy and you also run out of screen space to display the longer item names.

If you reword the the throwaway text, you can swap the order of the two strings (so the item name comes after the throw away text) by reversing the code to read the strings. Sounds great right? Except wait... where'd the punctuation go?

You can't just add a question mark to every item name so... that's right, you have to create a third string that doesn't already exist in the game to join together! After spending somewhere between 30-60 minutes reverse engineering the code that sets up the arguments for the text printing routine for the original strings, it became pretty easy to copy that code and make the appropriate mods to append the question mark to the sentence.

So there you have it. Code changes tend to be taken for granted, now you see what it takes just for something as dumb and boring as a question mark to your throw away item text.

[Cyllya]

Heh, good job.

You had a similar issue with cooking, right? Or was that one of the other games?

[habilain]

I've just finished the hacking for Battle DTE (yay!) and the assembler part of the Tech menu screen. It's quite possible that there will be some new screenshots soon, although in my opinion they'd be quite uninteresting.

Hacking resumes after my brain has recovered.

[Cless]

I've got Habilain's new hacks (albeit, not hardcoded into the game yet), and they're fantastic. He also fixed the Auto character tech screen to two columns as well. Not going to post screens yet.

The never dying dream...

[Cless]

Dare to compare: Three columns vs. Two





More is better? Nah... Yes, the 3 column shot says Demon Fang Fang...

Lunge was a stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid mega stupid, point-missing translation in the GBA version for Kuukanshoun'i. Reverted back to what Shinhoshi translated it as before it existed and combined it for the ougi.

[Leiw]

nice it looks cleaner
If all of these hacks also work on a real ps1 then this is definately very well done


btw I can read the small text lol

[LenaAndreia]

 Woooow--all of this is looking great, Cless and Haliban!

[Cless]

Battle Tech menus for Auto characters are now displayed in two columns as well.



However, the hack isn't complete yet because the cursor is annoying.

I've never shown this menu off before, but here it is:


This is far from final. Although I just wanted to align the letters to the boxes, there's just too much unused space in the letter selection column. I just got a very nice idea to make it have much less emptiness, though. It might be implemented pretty soon, as well...

[habilain]

As an update to the last post, I've just finished fixing the cursor for the battle technique screen. I'm not sure,  but that might be one of the longest hacks I've had to do. Definitely the one which required the most code to be analysed...

Next stop: Battle Item Menu realignment (one of the item names is too long).

[Cless]

As an addendum to Habilain's previous post, battle DTE is working on real hardware (it wasn't at first), so again, our hack runs on real PlayStations... at least, barring obscure bugs we've yet to find, if they exist.