The
MOTHER 3 Fan Translation

July Translation Update

17 years ago by Mato

It’s been a couple weeks since the latest news on the MOTHER 3 translation, so I thought I’d throw something up here real quick. Reid is still working on the new site, he’s been bombarded by the busy bee for the last few weeks, but hopefully it’ll be up soon. For now, I’m gonna post this here, and whenever the new site gets up, I’ll move this over there. Once there, everyone on the team will be able to update, not just me, so that’ll be nice. It looks to be a sort of dev-blog type dealy, incidentally.

Anyway, progress update. Short story: things are going very well.

Work has been merged and we’re all working crazy hard. Whenever I get the chance, I’ve been working on the main script and downing my new favorite soda, Vault, to keep my brain running late into the night. Even though it’s a Game Boy Advance game, MOTHER 3 has about a meg and a half to two megs of text, which is a LOT. In easier terms, that’s about the size of a good-sized Playstation or PS2 RPG :O At the moment, I’m about 2/3 through the first draft of the main script. It’s coming along fast 🙂 If you add in the non-script stuff that Dr. Fedora and company have already done, the first draft of everything is probably closer to 70-75%.

But PLEASE don’t be fooled by these numbers. Those percentages are just for the first draft of the translation side of things. There will be at least three drafts to the translation to make sure everything is correct AND sounding natural AND formatted nicely. The first draft is by far the hardest one, naturally. Anyways, basically, the translation side of things is going really well 🙂

Also new to the project is a really awesome and useful text editor/previewer/other stuffer, written by Jeffman. It also serves as the script insertor. Speaking of scripts, the text in the main script is NOT ordered by chapter or chronological order at all. But it is ordered by map order, which can sometimes have text from 20 parts of the game all in one block. And there are like 1000 blocks. It’s crazy stuff. Incidentally, if you haven’t already, check out Goplat’s awesome Map Viewer here. It’s really neat, and really useful for me context-wise. Sadly, the maps are in no real logical order, so there’s really no way to give actual translation completion percentages for individual parts of the game.

Anyway, as for the hacking side of things, here are some pictures below. They’re not really that much different from what sblur had working before, but I thought a few more screenshots wouldn’t hurt to have. The focus of the hacking work so far has been the battles. The main dialogue does have a variable width font working, but the biggest obstacle is that the script is in 16-bit format. We need it in 8-bit format so that the script can fit into the limited space in the ROM, but that’ll require a lot of tough work to make happen. So that’s why there aren’t really any screenshots of the main game yet. There are other text-printing routines that need a VWF/8-bit conversion too, so all together, there’s still a good deal of hacking left. But what has been done so far is pretty sweet-looking 🙂

Screenshots!

(Note: These are all from a work-in-progress, so things WILL change. Usually for the better :P)

An item menu in battle. Nice.	Hey, it’s our favorite plant thing!
Main battle text still needs a VWF 😛	Get him!
These skill/tool menus work great 🙂	Gotta show off this guy!
It all looks so cool coming together.	The music player has a VWF too, yay!
A very early item menu.	A very early shop menu.

So basically, to sum it up, the project is progressing well, much faster than before. There’s still a LOT of work to do though. When will the translation be done? It’s too early to tell, sorry 🙁 I just need a few good days to finish the first draft of the translation, so in real person terms I’m expecting that to be within a week or two. The first draft is almost always the real grunt work of a translation. After that, things should hopefully move faster. And once the new translation site is up, we’ll have more regular updates about our progress and other things of interest. So keep your eyes peeled! Whatever that means, it sounds kinda gross :X

Posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 11:20 pm by Mato, filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are currently closed.