Archive for August, 2008
15 years ago by Mato , 310 Comments »
Another small update, these will be the norm from now on probably.
Finally finished the sound hacking thing on the to-do list. Two tiny sound effects needed to be changed into English. One is when you use an item that tricks enemies into turning around. It says, “Look over there!” in a goofy, 0.4 second-long clip. The other is 1.2 seconds long and plays during an unusual version of rock-paper-scissors.
The game stores this sound data as 8-bit, signed, stereo raw PCM data at 8000-ish Hz with some extra info thrown in. In normal people terms, that means it’s low quality and sounds scratchy, as you can hear from the original Japanese clips here. I’ll refrain from posting the English clips, even though I’m happy with them, because for some reason people have a kneejerk reaction to stuff like this. Had there been actual, full-fledged voice acting in this game, like if this had been a Playstation RPG, I would have definitely found a way to subtitle it (hell, that IS what I do for a living 😛 ) but these are more like two quick sound effects that would otherwise make players go “wtf was that” and we’d have to translate it for them anyway. In fact, the people who did the Japanese voices didn’t even get credited for it (or if they did, they were just in Special Thanks).
Anyway, I wrote a quick program to automate the process of converting sound files to something usable by our hack, which is good, cause it was taking me forever to do it manually. It’ll also mean translations into other languages should be able to do this sound effect translation thing pretty easily too.
Meanwhile, Jeff and I have been fixing minor bugs we see, it would actually take more time to explain them than it took us to fix them. I’m also always constantly fixing any rare typos, etc. I find.
Anyway, all this means that another thing is off the to-do list. Next, I’ll go mess with the battle control codes and hopefully fix that sometime this week.
15 years ago by Mato , 218 Comments »
Had a busy week, so only one major thing done today. Finally finished checking, formatting, blahblahblah-ing the enemy descriptions. I don’t remember the exact number off the top of my head, but there’s like 150-200 enemies, all with goofy little descriptions. I think in many cases the descriptions sound better in English, much how many of the enemy names are (such as “Cattlesnake” compared to “Cow Snake”). I think people will enjoy reading through them all.
I was also hoping to finish the sound clip hacking tonight, but don’t think I’ll be able to, so I’ll do that tomorrow probably. After that, I plan to tackle the custom control bug in battles, since it’s the easiest of the code-hacking stuff left. I tried doing some code hacking the other day and I forgot how sucky it is. I’d never wish this kind of stuff on anyone, blargh.
Anyway, the enemy descriptions file was the last text file, so it’ll pretty much be all hacking (and testing after) from here on out. I’ve updated the to-do list accordingly. Updates from now on will be small-ish and sparse-ish, since things are winding down.
15 years ago by Mato , 318 Comments »
Another short but sweet update.
First, I finished the battle text today, the old m3.org file had lots of mistakes and weird things and was very ??? in places. I started from scratch and fixed, formatted, and finalized stuff. Chewy is nearly done with the enemy descriptions, which is the last text file remaining. When she’s done, I’ll put it into the game and format it to fit on screen/within technical limitations. The enemy descriptions are all really goofy, so I think people will love that stuff. Anyway, I’ll put the “finalize all misc. text” thing on the to-do list at 95%, and once I get the file and format it (probably within a few days), I’ll cross it off.
Meanwhile, Jeffman was on a roll and took out a lot of misc bugs and issues we were having. So I crossed two hacking things off the to-do list, too. Very little remains on the list now 😯
The first pic there shows the “item got stolen” text working. It was a bug we found a week or two ago. The other pic is another bug we had, basically, custom control codes in that particular part of the game were acting wonky, but now it and all other wonky cases work perfect. Many other little fixes were made. So that’s like 2 and a half things off the list today, cool.
Anyway, I guess this means I’ll get back to hacking too now. BTW, future updates will probably be little like this, since things are starting to wind down now. Not every update can be epic 😛
Until next time!
15 years ago by Mato , 258 Comments »
Simple update today.
Finalized and formatted 20 misc. text files. That leaves only the enemy descriptions and the battle text. I’ll probably get back to hacking again this time next week if all goes well.
Jeff’s been fixing small issues here and there. sblur’s been helping out with some things too.
Not much else to say 😛 I’ve updated the to-do list.
15 years ago by Mato , 256 Comments »
Alright, finally finished the first full playthrough, the purpose being to find and fix context issues, polish stuff up in context, fix typos and grammar stuff, do a first sweep for any bugs and issues, etc. Fixing the context stuff was great, now things won’t seem bizarre or wrong. If you’ve ever played a translation and a line just seemed “off”, it was almost assuredly because of context issues. I’m sure you can think of many such cases. I can think of a few in EarthBound myself, some of which I even started to document here. The level of polish right now is pretty good too. I’ll have some of the guys on the team add in some of their own polish while they’re testing later too, but I’m happy with almost all of the script now 😀
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