Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
2 months, 2 weeks ago by Mato , 89 Comments »
Still alive, never fear! Last week turned out to be a hectic one, with broken AC, storms, power outages, and lots of real life work that was also affected by such things. I did manage to get a few hours of hacking time in, though. I’ve been working on a bug related to control codes in battle, and have made some decent progress. But, as expected, the game doesn’t want to give up without a fight. I forgot that today was a holiday here in the States though, so I’m gladly taking it off to get lots of hacking time in. I’ll continue to make mini-updates in the comments.
I’m too tired to go into detail about the bugs, but if you’ve watched any of the latest preview videos, you’ve likely seen one of them in action. An example being the thing at about 6:40 into this video here (”The Flint”). This is more of a final polish fix, but the other remaining hacks are more complicated and I haven’t hacked in 2+ months, so I want to do this easier stuff first to get back into the groove.
Jeff’s been busy moving, but I asked if he could turn the script into something that can be checked by a spell/grammar-checker. That might help shave off a tiny bit of testing time later on.
Anyway, Happy September!
2 months, 4 weeks 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.
3 months 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.
3 months 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!
3 months 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.
3 months 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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3 months ago by Mato , 213 Comments »
Just a small status update. Still going through the game, fixing context issues, polishing things up to fit context/direction better, etc. etc. It’s coming along great, it’s getting pretty exciting seeing things finally coming together with so much polish.
Right now, I’m about 15 hours in, I’d say maybe I’m 3/5 of the way through the game. I think for most people, the game will last in the 20-30 hour range the first time around. I think I clocked in around 32-35 hours the very first time I played it in Japanese. It’s about as long as EarthBound I’d wager, only it doesn’t feel like it when you look back. Anyway, I hope people will take their time when the patch is finally out, it’d be no fun to rush through it
Anyway, almost no issues encountered in the last few days, nothing that kills the game either. Only two things really. The line that’s shown when an item is stolen is messed up and won’t be easy to fix (this is because it’s actually 2 separate lines and one hard-coded thing), and the other bug I’ve only gotten to happen once and can’t reproduce it however hard I try. I know what caused it, just very very very bad luck/timing. It instantly fixed itself perfectly when the text refreshed during a scroll though.
I’ll try to finish this initial playthrough this weekend, after which I’ll move on to finalizing all the non-script stuff, like items, enemies, battle text, etc. Then I go back to hacking, bleh.
Anyway, short story is so far so good 
3 months ago by Mato , 133 Comments »
I didn’t realize it until now, but updates from now on won’t be as clockwork as previous ones. Before, there was a specific # of stuff to do (lines), but now it’s back to the vague-ish stuff. So the old progress meter pics are no more.
Anyway, like I mentioned before, I still need to play through Draft 2 to fix context issues and other stuff. I’ve been doing that the past few days, and it’s coming along incredibly well. I usually can’t stand my own writing, but actually playing through the game from the start, I find myself amazed at how so much of the text is turning out. I’m usually Mr. Ultra Pickyguy too. So far, I’m about 7.5 hours into the game, been having to try to talk to everyone in every possible situation, so I’m gonna guess the clock’ll be at 30+ hours by the time I’m done. It’s coming along great, and being able to actually see everything in context is awesome, and I’m able to fix and polish things easily this way.
I’ve also come across a number of bugs and issues so far. Only one has been game-killing, and, as to be expected, it’s from a line in “Block 0″, which is one of the most annoying things left to hack. The programmers programmed this ONE, single line separately from allllllll the other lines apparently. One line. WTF. Anyway, it shouldn’t be hard to fix when I’m done with this context fixing stuff. I’m busy this weekend (that’s what happens when you work freelance ) so I’ll try to get through the playthrough next week or next weekend.
Here are some pics of bugs found, and they’ve all been fixed since. Well, except for the super garbly one, that’s the one I just mentioned that I’ll fix later.
Jeff managed to fix that last one real quickly, the others were mostly formatting/typo things. Stomping bugs and cleaning things up is always a good feeling.
Oh, almost forgot. If anyone would like to help think up names for a few enemies, see here.
Well, that’s all for now!
4 months ago by Mato , 327 Comments »
NOTE! The pic to the right represents Draft 2 only. The actual entire project itself is more like 90%
It’s been 8 or so weeks, and finally, finally, Draft 2 of the main script is done. Actually, it’s not *exactly* done, but I’ll explain that in a second. The real work of Draft 2 is done, and all lines have been copied, revised, formatted, checked, etc. etc. It’s been a real killer getting this done, glad to have it over with. Jeff’s been real cool about updating the text editor program every time I need something new, which has been a real life-saver and helped speed this stuff up a good deal. Give him donuts if you see him.
Anyway, the last batch was from pretty much the last two hours of the game, so here are some random pics from elsewhere instead. Enjoy them like celebratory candy. Yum.
Alright, so I’ll jump right into the important stuff. It’s crazy early in the morning so I’ll save the detailed details for future updates, for now, here’s a basic outline of stuff.
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4 months ago by Mato , 482 Comments »
A small status update. I squeezed in a few hours the last few days to get a couple more % done on the second draft of the script. It’s now at 93%.
I really, REALLY need to emphasize that the picture to the right does NOT indicate the progress of the entire project. Only the progress of the second draft. Once Draft 2 is done, there are a few more things left to do. These can be seen in the to-do list, but basically, there are three main things left:
- Finish Draft 2, do draft 3
- Finish misc. hacking. All the major hacking is done, but a few things are still left.
- Test, test, test. And fix any bugs we find.
I’ll go into more detail on Draft 3 in a few days, after I finish Draft 2. I’m very busy the next 3 days, so I’ll try to finish Draft 2 this weekend. I’d say that there’s at least three months left until the final patch is out.
Oh, and here are random pics from the latest tiny batch. Pics good.
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