MOTHER 3 English Translation v1.0 Released
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Testing Finishes, Patch This Week
The patch will be out at the end of this week.
Testing is Swamp Bicycle
Testing is very nearly done now. I have one chapter left to go through, and the other testers are finishing up, too. I actually didn’t plan on making an update until the testing was done, but people were getting pretty antsy and there were too many comments in the last update to keep up with anymore. Luckily, no new major bugs have been found, just a typo or two and a few rare battle text lines needing fixing. They were all very simple to fix, of course.
This past week was very slow-going for me with real-life work, but pretty much everyone has stepped up to the plate in one way or another to help out. The testers are awesome and trying things I probably wouldn’t have even thought of. byuu’s been kind enough to help put the final patching program together for Windows and Linux, all while very sick. sblur’s been working on the Mac version. Jeff’s been around to answer testers’ questions. Very awesome teamwork. Send all free food and booze to them 
Testing will probably end in the next day or two. I still want demi to look through a few key lines to make them sound better, I set him up with all the stuff he needs for that. It will probably take him an hour or two, if he can find the time. If all goes well, there’ll be two updates left, one when everything is done and one with the patch for download.
Details about stuff will come next time.
Testing is Magic Cake
Testing continues, slowly but surely. Nothing really new to report, which is good. It’s making me want to go back and fix some tiny, tiny issues that don’t matter anyway, but I must fight the urges. I don’t have the free time for it anyway though.
At this point, it pretty much looks like the translation will work on most everything out there than can emulate/play GBA games. If you want to be really sure ahead of time, try playing the Japanese version a tiny bit and see if you have any problems. If you can save your game properly (which is a common problem for Mac GBA emulators…), then you’re probably good to go.
When the patch is released, we’ll have a detailed list of hardware and emulators you can play the translation on. Some fine folks at gbatemp have offered their help in that regard, so the list should be pretty thorough. Until then, if you’re interested in running the translation on actual hardware or on other systems, this thread may be worth a read.
I figure we’ll let the testers do their stuff a little while longer, and during the meantime I’ll do my own testing and help get a handful of key lines polished up. Since more and more people are finishing the game (and playing through again) without any new bugs, the patch could be out a bit sooner than I had thought.
Testing is Giant Step
Testing continues, testers are already starting to finish their first playthrough. No new bugs to report since last weekend, which is excellent news.
Jeff and I fixed the Sleep Mode text bug the other day, I fixed the Antidote text bug, and sblur and Jeff even went and fixed one of those miniscule naming screen issues that I mentioned an update or two ago.
Compare to last update:
I started my own testing yesterday, all is going well. I’ve even started writing up the readme if that’s any indication It’s still a couple weeks off, assuming no big bugs show up, but with each passing day such bugs seem less and less likely.
Testing is Afoot
Testing began on Sunday, and so far, no major issues have been found at all. Excellent news.
In fact, so far, there’ve been fewer bugs than I was expecting. Only three minor things, one of which was because a fix I made in August got reverted somewhere along the line. It’s now fixed again. The other two are also pretty minor and can be seen below.
These should only take me a few hours to fix. An explanation about them is here for the curious.
Testing and polishing continues to continue, but from the sound of it, things are going awesomely 
All Hacking Complete
(unless crazy bugs decide to show up in the next few weeks, that is, though it’s unlikely)
After some enlightenment, I managed to fix and finish the sprite hacking routine earlier today. It now runs at a fast speed, has no weird graphical lag or distortion, and is rock-solid and 100% professional-looking. So that means we can cross the final hack off the to-do list.
Right after I fixed the sprite text, we noticed that the game would freeze during the ending. It was a pesky bug, but we finally fixed it, it was something that crept in late last night. While I was at it, I also betterfied the fix for this old bug, which is nice.
There’ve been so many pics and videos that there’s not too much more to show now, but I recorded one thing real quick showing a bunch of different systems that had to be hacked over the past year. You can see them all working in harmony together and looking nice and professional. Nothing spoilery, don’t worry.
Now that the hacking’s pretty much done (some miniscule things remain which may not be worth bothering with), that just leaves the testing phase. It’ll probably start sometime this weekend, and before people start asking, we don’t need help testing. The testing will be done internally for several weeks.
It’s also important to clarify that testing doesn’t mean “play through and have fun”, it means playing stuff over and over, trying to break things, analyzing every little detail, stuff like that. It’s NOT fun. But this way the game will be less likely to freeze/crash/act stupid when the patch is released to the public. Some last-minute polish will be going on during the testing phase too.
I don’t know how updates will be during the testing, it may just be a weekly thing saying we’re alive and well, but if we find stuff and fix it, I’ll mention that quickly.
More info and details and blah blah at a later time. For now, just know that the translation’s entered its final stage. Very very close now!
Finishing Sprite Text
This is more of a mini-update than anything really.
Anyway, I’ve been working on the sprite text problem this week. Good news is that I figured out what the cause of the ugly flashing/morphing was and I’ve fixed it. But I still need to tinker with things, because in certain rare cases text at the end of a string or right before a newline will sometimes (not always, which is the kicker) not display and instead use old graphical data. The fix won’t be hard exactly, just very very annoying to figure out. I swear, this sprite text stuff = (insert swear word adjective) (insert noun) (insert body part)
Here are current pics to demonstrate what needs to be fixed before hacking is done.
Once I fix this, we *should* be able to cross this final hack off the to-do list and move to the final testing stage.
Progress on the Last Hack
Didn’t get as much free time last week as I had hoped, so only a few things were accomplished these past few days.
Thanks to help from sblur, we ran the main script through a spell-checker. I had already done major spelling and grammar checking a few weeks ago, but I decided to run it through a program too. Out of hundreds of pages, it only turned up maybe 20 actual misspellings, so that’s pretty good. Any outstanding spelling/grammar issues will likely be caught during testing.
I also fixed up a couple little bugs and did some other mundane stuff. I also started working on the sprite text morphing problem. The sprite text routine is so incredibly ugly and complicated though. Regular visitors may remember the month or more we spent on that. Ugh. The start of the sprite text nightmare began around here for those who care to see how difficult this text routine turned out to be.
I’m still hoping that I’ll be able to finish this last hack by the end of the month, at which time we’ll move to the final testing and polishing, which should take a few weeks (4-ish is my guess) if all goes well.
Incidentally, another prominent fan translation will be out very soon: Persona 2 Innocent Sin. I also hear the Policenauts fan translation has suddenly burst back to life. Awesome.
Lingering Bug Fixed
Very short update, but wanted to mention that I did indeed kill that bug I discovered yesterday. It was actually pretty simple, but it was again related to the fact that for some reason there are 9890710.3 different routines that all do the exact same thing. So annoying. Anywhere, here is before and after.
Meanwhile, I also started to run the scrubbed script through a grammar/spell checker just because there’s a chance there might be lines we’ll miss during testing. Out of the first 25% of the script, it only picked up 2 real typos, not bad.
Anyway, I’ll do a tiny bit more of that and also get started on fixing the sprite text morphing. This week doesn’t look like it will be too too busy, so I might find some time to make good progress. I’m hoping we can finish all the hacking this month.
