Another late night update. As you can see, Draft 2 stands at 42.61% now. We’re in the 40s, hopefully we’ll be in the 50s in a few days. Unlike before, there wasn’t much duplicate text this time around, so it’s been very exhausting work. But slowly we’re moving away from the text used in the central areas and branching out to interesting new areas. Lots of cut scenes and text-heavy lines too, so the % change doesn’t reflect the amount of work done very well.
By the way, for those following along with the map viewer, this latest batch covered maps 36-65.
Some more random pics from the latest batch of Draft 2 progress.
Ordinary status update. Been hard at work on Draft 2. Currently at 36.41%, as you can see. It’s crazy to think I’ve gotten a few thousand lines done already. Not sure how that happened. Between 30% and about 60% always feels kind of depressing though, it feels like, “Man, already a lot of progress, but so much more work left to do, ugh.” At least that’s how it felt last year with Draft 1.
Anyway, for those following with the map viewer, it’s been maps 15-35. A lot of tedious stuff, some of these blocks have text from 4 or 5 different chapters, it’d definitely have been insane to try translating this without knowing any context first. Anyway, aside from those tedious blocks, some really fun and some really memorable text in this latest batch.
Here are some random screens from the latest batch of Draft 2 text.
Reminds me of that guy in Fourside
He’s a connoisseur
If you choose not to save your game
I hate when random baldness attacks
Anyway, past the 1/3 mark with this draft now. Woot and all that.
Been real busy with real life stuff, but also been working hard on Draft 2 and other things whenever possible.
First, the whole thing about text “blocks” seems to confuse people, so I figure I’ll try to give progress with an approximate # of lines done. There are 7658 lines total, and as of right now, I’ve finished 498. So the second draft is like 6.5% done. For those following with the map viewer, the latest stuff was maps 11-14.
But, like I mentioned before, there’s a lot of re-used text, and counting all that + other special cases, Draft 2 is now technically closer to the 25% mark. For some reason, each hot spring map includes the text for every other hot spring too, so that’s the biggest reason for the sudden jump.
Anyway, here are some pics from the latest stuff. These are just for fun, please don’t over-analyze them, especially since they’re going to be looked at again by fresh eyes soon enough anyway
Hot spring haiku
The stuff this cow says will so be used for immature jokes
I said I probably wouldn’t start on the second draft until after this 3-day weekend… but yeah, right. I did some light work on it while doing real life work too. As it stands, I’ve finished up 11 blocks out of 1001.
That might not sound like much, but the early blocks are where most of the text is. There’s also a bit of repeated text, and a lot of later maps don’t have any text at all. Also, many of these early blocks contain extra-long tutorial text. Some blocks can contain 100+ lines, while other blocks contain 0 lines. In any case, as time goes on, you’ll see the block count increase faster and faster. You’ll see My plan is to do a manageable # of blocks each day and then on the weekends, do a whole bunch.
My fix yesterday to allow a bajillion letters per line with the main script wound up having a weird effect on the flyover text and other similar text in the game. Fixing it seemed tough, but yet again, after some sleep the fix was real simple. Hurray, sleep!
This doesn’t make me feel very welcome
Oh cool I love this world
Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, Draft 2 time! Like I mentioned before, this isn’t that exciting a process so updates may get boring and scarce, but that’s probably a good thing. I’ll still post regular progress reports and info and stuff though. Some details about script stuff below.
Technical blah blah stuff, ignore if you don’t care!
In the last update just a few hours ago, I mentioned I probably wasn’t going to do the 210-letter hack thing because things were too complicated. Indeed, moving the final strings in RAM would be like doing brain surgery with a chainsaw, but this morning I re-realized something — since we’re only using 2 of the 40 glyph buffer structs, who says we need to use the first 2 of those 40?
The strings come directly before the buffer stuff, so by moving the buffers we use to further ahead, that would mean tons of free RAM without having to move the strings at all. I calculated it and I think theoretically we could fit 2146 or so letters on screen this way But rather than try to push things too far, I made the limit 512-ish. I could get more if we need it, but already we’re in the realm of incredible luxury. 256 letters per line is already like winning the lottery twice
Here is what it looks like with 210 lowercase “l”s on the screen at once. This new hack allows for 256 letters per LINE — which is way way more than can even fit on the screen. The original game only allowed 22 letters per line.
Hey there, dudes and dudettes! Yet another daily update
First, here’s a video of the text hacks working now. Note that it’s all ugly, horrible first draft text that’s not formatted to the new standards/limits, and most of the lines are random things that were just nearby in the save states I had. Also didn’t really want to spoil any story stuff. Most of the text in the game is far more interesting, honest
After much, much more work than it should have taken, I’ve finally fixed the issue with the various text speeds and the thing that would happen if the text was set to Fast and there was an odd number of letters on a line, followed by a newline character. In total (including some time last week), probably took 20+ hours of work. Arghhhhh I’m probably not going to heaven after the things I said while fixing this thing
Anyway, it’s hard to show this in action with pictures, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say the text speed stuff works now, and that these pics were with the speed set to Fast.
Really pushing hard to get this main script hacking moving, but it’s going to be slow-going for a while I think, it’s that complicated and it’s very time-consuming.
Luckily though, I did manage to make some good progress. Remember the mystery of the missing letters from the earlier update? Well, I finally figured it out and fixed it. Spent maybe 8 hours total and the hack turned out to be a one byte change. Commence excessively violent watermelon-smashing… now.
Hey folks, just a quick blog update (unrelated to the translation itself): I’ve highlighted author posts so it’ll be easier for you guys to pick Mato’s comments out, since he uses the commenting system as a mini-blog sometimes, heh.
I’m going to be upgrading our Wordpress installation soon, probably tonight. Everything will be backed up, but there’s a slim possibility that it will act a little weird or possibly be down for a short while. Also, ROFISH and I are thinking about using this site for a beta test of the new Fangamer forum software we’ve written. Let me know what you guys think, since these blog comments aren’t always conducive to easy-to-follow conversations ;D
MOTHER 3 is the sequel to MOTHER 2 (also called EarthBound). It is a GBA RPG that was released in Japan in April 2006. Nintendo has made it clear that they do not intend to translate the game, so we, the fans, have begun our own translation.
Another late night update. As you can see, Draft 2 stands at 42.61% now. We’re in the 40s, hopefully we’ll be in the 50s in a few days. Unlike before, there wasn’t much duplicate text this time around, so it’s been very exhausting work. But slowly we’re moving away from the text used in the central areas and branching out to interesting new areas. Lots of cut scenes and text-heavy lines too, so the % change doesn’t reflect the amount of work done very well.
Ordinary status update. Been hard at work on Draft 2. Currently at 36.41%, as you can see. It’s crazy to think I’ve gotten a few thousand lines done already. Not sure how that happened. Between 30% and about 60% always feels kind of depressing though, it feels like, “Man, already a lot of progress, but so much more work left to do, ugh.” At least that’s how it felt last year with Draft 1.
My plan is to do a manageable # of blocks each day and then on the weekends, do a whole bunch.
But rather than try to push things too far, I made the limit 512-ish. I could get more if we need it, but already we’re in the realm of incredible luxury. 256 letters per line is already like winning the lottery twice 
