Tales of Destiny 2 progress thread (was "Still progressing")

[Cheetah]

Very exciting to hear Cless

[Cless]

After slacking for a little too long, I finally finished all the main coding for the ToD2 patcher. Only have some small, easy and minor things left to do.

Just to let people know though, execution time is VERY LONG. As it is, it takes 15 1/2 minutes to complete its course on my machine. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to speed this up. Although my hard disk isn't OMG amazing, I don't really consider it slow. If you have a 5400rpm laptop drive or any 7200rpm desktop drive models that are over a year old and under 500GB, it'll most likely take even longer.

I haven't added file verification yet, which will probably add another 1 1/2 to 2 minutes of execution time.

12GB of free hard disk space is mandatory if you choose to keep the Japanese ISO, and 9GB if you overwrite it.

[ForceCube]

15 minutes doesn't seem that long to me... I mean, we've been waiting for this for years, waiting some minutes to patch the ISO is nothing

What I'm a bit worried about is the free space needed, though. I have a 40GB HD (lol, I'm too lazy and I use a lot of DVDs so never really needed more than that) but it's a bit... full right now... I'll have to do some cleaning when the patch is released x_x

[Cheetah]

Yeah I'm really not to worried about how long it takes to patch it. The harddrive space is a bummer, but not much you can do about it.

[Cless]

Actually, I HAVE thought of a way to theoretically improve execution time by an estimated 25-30%. What makes it so slow in the first place is that it has to do around 21GB worth of hard disk read/write operations. The idea I have in mind could shave off about 6GB worth, but... currently I'm not sure I feel like spending several hours of effort to improve it when what I already have works fine, and could be easily ported to possible future PS2 projects with minimal effort.

That said, I have a report from an internal beta tester that the patching process took very nearly 20 minutes on a desktop PC that's typically a generation older than mine hardware-wise. My tests all bench between 14.8 and 16.7 minutes. Not sure why there's such a wide margin of difference, but the average is still in the 15.5-16 minute range.

[Cless]

...scratch it.

We're not using this patch format. We're using Xdelta instead. It's MAGIC. All you need is disk space for the output ISO. Patches in 3 minutes on my machine, too!

[Wildwurger]

No kidding. Well, this is good news. I raise my glass to you, Sir Cless.

[Kevassa]

Beta patcher? Is the Menu patch nearly finished? o.o to have a beta tester you need some data to play with, am I mistaken?

[ForceCube]

...scratch it.

We're not using this patch format. We're using Xdelta instead. It's MAGIC. All you need is disk space for the output ISO. Patches in 3 minutes on my machine, too!

...what the hell. lol

That's great news. I hope we get an opportunity to use it and see for ourselves soon

[Cless]

I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT



EDIT: oh god it is awesome isn't it YES IT IS



horrible before image:



EDIT 2: The control mode selector is now normalized too.

[Cless]

Well. It sure seems I have a handle on most font sizes all around the game. I pretty quickly found the font size controller for description text in the game, and reduced the height by 1/3.

Before:



After:



Not only do I think the font actually looks more aesthetically pleasing that way, but our descriptions can now be a line or two longer!

I know some corners were cut when we translated some of the descriptions in order to fit the original screen space limit, we should now be able to restore the cut stuff if necessary.

[Cless]

...I guess things aren't all rosey.



Well, uh... all along I had been assuming that the font size for the kanji techs would be affected by the same problem as the spells. i.e. no half width support. I mean, intuition tells you those kinda things. So I never bothered to test an actual English insertion of them in the past. In a nutshell, half width has been supported in the kanji tech names all along... just not the spells.

So as you can see, the letters in the English tech names are half the size of the spell names. While it may be barely readable on a computer monitor/HDTV, it's more than likely going to be impossible to read on an SDTV.

I can NOT fix this. The problem is... both the spell and tech names share the same font size data (half-width support for each must be declared elsewhere). So it's either... over-sized spell names and normal-sized tech names, or normal-sized spell names and under-sized tech names. Personally, I lean on undersized tech names and normal sized spell names, as pictured in the above screen. I prefer less clutter, and you can still read the tech name at a readable size if you have the description window open.

This would probably be an elementary-level fix if there was a PS2 debugger that was worth a damn. But alas, I know of none (and no-- PCSX2's needs a LOT more work).

[Leiw]

something useful HERE ?


by the way, I am happy to see that for every "problem" that comes up, you guys always seem to find a solution

[Kevassa]

THIS IS AMAZING YAY! XD! THREE CHEERS FOR CLESS *Cheers cless alone* HIP HIP! HURRAH! :DDDDD
That is awesome cless, but I got a question, does this work for EVERY font or just techs?

[Nae]

Ya-Yatta!

[Cless]

I have extended my finding to the Status menu. On top of that, I even managed to reposition a few things!

Before:


After:


I am assuming the resistance stuff never reaches +100 or -100 here.

If I totally had my way this menu, I would eliminate most of the centering stuff.

Anyway, this is turning out much better than I thought without any tracing/debugging tools at my disposal. But it's mostly luck...

something useful HERE ?

I have no idea how to use that..

but I got a question, does this work for EVERY font or just techs?

Now that I'm familiar with the data format, it's not that hard to hack the font size for most things now.