Slow But Sure Progress
Not much progress (yeah I say that every time 😛 ) but things have picked up a tiny bit, so that’s good.
First, a neat little organizational tool’s been made. It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but it should make things easier for us. Given that there are so many people involved, things can get disorganized pretty quick.
Anyway, first order of the day was to test out harmony’s old findings, using the above tool. It worked really well, thanks to his super smartness and his really detailed documentation, and I think rather than use our work as a base and combine his, it might be better to use his work as a base and build our stuff up around that. As you can see, one of the main benefits of this is that we have letter hooks working now 🙂 Hurray, people can stop complaining about that finally 😉
reid and Jeffman have been working on the chapter title graphics a bit, trying to find just the right font and trying to make sure it fits in the space allotted and all that. The pics in the previous update used smelly old Arial, aka the basic default Windows font for tons of stuff.
Since we were dealing with compressed graphics anyway, we went and changed some other stuff. Can’t talk about it or show it here, since it’d spoil the fun for people. I think people will enjoy the level of detail the team’s putting into stuff like this though 🙂
Probably next week some time, after I’ve caught my breath, I’ll finally get started on getting through Draft #2. I got hundreds and hundreds of screenshots to help with that too. I think it’ll be fun.
Was testing some stuff and was like what the heck, I’ll take some more battle VWF screenshots. We haven’t had too many of those, so here’s a couple!
They look pretty cool, especially compared to what’s shown in the old videos. But like all things, there are still many issues with getting this to work right, so there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area. The problems are really similar to other problems, especially the outside item description boxes, so if we’re lucky, solving one problem might make solving the other one easier.
Well, that’s all for now, but I’m pretty pumped now that we have a bunch of stuff happening again, even if it is little stuff 🙂
Awesome news, keep up the great work people. Its much appreciated
Awesome, Tomato. It’s really great to see these screenshots and hear the optimism on the project. Just want you to know I, and so many others, appreciate your and everyone else’s hard work more than you’ll ever understand!
I bet you’ve gotten more familiar with this game than you ever imagined. Hope it’s not affecting your daily life, haha.
Looking good! I’ll be waiting patiently, no matter how slow the progress is 😀
Seeing these screenshots in English is really cool. I loved the game in Japanese, so it’s real neat seeing Mother 3 in my own language. Keep up the great (albeit exhausting) work.
You guys are doing great! Take your time, I can stay spoiler-free until it’s finished. (But if you do take a lot longer than necessary, you’ll have no excuses for the quality… ;P)
I really agree that its better to use harmony’s work as a base and build the teams stuff up around that because he had detailed documentation and its already solved the the hooks problem and will solve more in the future,also its good you guys made a organizational tool because things can get very disorganized when doing major project with lots of people,anyway things are looking great and the new screen shots look great.
Looking better all the time!
Letter hooks… So beautiful… and battle screenshots!
Such a super-happy team with such fine work.
Glad you guys are taking the time to do it right, rather than soon. Looks awesome so far. :3
I’m so happy every time i see your progressing. 🙂
Good Luck, most of us are waiting patiently, at least i am. 😛
I love almost-semi-daily updates. :3 It keeps me wanting to keep on coming back and back to the site. I finished Mother 2 yester-night, too! 😀
The work you guys are doing is amazing! I just want you to know that I and everyone else who keeps checking back really appreciate everything you and the team are doing. Keep up the good work!
lol ostrelephant
Yesssss an update 😀
— i just thought i’d try my luck and visit this site before i get down to writing a lab report…. and….. YESSss.. an update 🙂
excellent progress,
great work team, and thanks again for doing this for everyone
and good update-writing Tomato, its always a pleasure to read **does the hat-tipping gesture (i dont have a hat on right now)**
.. (as im already pretending to wear stuff that i’m not wearing, *** raises my medieval Knights face visor**)
*does high kick*
I know you guys can do it… keep pressing forward! We’re thinking about you everyday and rooting you on all the while.
Screenshots look great, but don’t spoil too much! I had no clue that there were enemies like that!
Enemies and other stuff that appeared on Itoi’s Welcome to MOTHER 3 World site we consider non-spoilers.
Here’s the English version of that site: http://starmen.net/mother3/mother3world/
Great work! The game is really starting to look good now. I think the translation in the first two screens might need some revision.
rofl, the first screen isn’t a real line in the game, it’s showing off the new hacking 😛
about fonts, i’m quite versed in typography, so i think i can help with the chapter font issue.
the game used a weird non-standard sans-serif, almost comic-style font. the strange thing is that numbers show a slightly bigger inclination on its vertical strokes (sorry, i don’t know the english word) than normal characters (kana and stuff) the numbers look slightly out of place, or so to speak. plus, the ‘END?’ screen uses a really different font. right now i haven’t got asian character support on my computer, and i have no means to install it, finding the exact japanese font (or something similar) would be fantastic. i would however appreciate screenshots from all the chapter intros, as i’m trying to guess all of this from a badly compressed youtube video.
anyway, i do however think that the chapter font looks kind of out of place in the original game, looks like something out of a nintendo 64 game, looks late 90ish. personally, i would stick to the in-game font for the chapter subtitles, and would look for something like the ‘END?’ font for the ‘Chapter X’ title, mainly for consistency reasons.
if everything goes wrong, stick to helvetica or univers. arial shouldn’t be an option.
keep up the good work!
an oversized version of the font used on the promo materials (such as this: http://www.1101.com/MOTHER3/images/mother_01_1900.jpg and the “Welcome to the MOTHER 3 world” posters) would look quite nice. i did a ttf version of that font a year ago, i’ll try to do a mockup screen tomorrow.
atari baby: the problem, though, is that there’s no actual font for the chapter titles. The game just contains whatever necessary letters it needed, and nothing more (no romaji alphabet whatsoever). reid’s got some awesome stuff coming along though, so it’s gonna look great in the end regardless. 🙂
Thanks for the update. The decision to use harmony’s base is great and i appreciate the team’s efforts to reapply their hacks onto his hacks. This should come out great!
I’m really grateful for the frequent updates to keep us all, well, updated. I play with the menu patch and it REALLY helps. 😀 Thanks for all the time and work you guys have been putting into this. :thumbup:
I am a HUGE fan of documentation. The extent to which it has helped me with projects in the past has made me a documentation fanboy. Glad that has paid off for you guys.
I’m a little sad that I can’t mention the messed up g’s and y’s anymore. It’s the end of an era.
Anyway, great job as usual!
i am so impressed with the dedication and work you guys are putting into this, i cant thank you enough
Everything looks great! I love you guys so much! It’s awesome to see my dream of playing Mother 3 moving closer and closer. I can’t wait. Keep up the awesome jobs, guys!
H-HA! gotcha! — you changed “tower of love and peace” to “tower of peace and love”
the latter sounds a lot better 🙂
We’re extremely grateful with the amount of devotion you guys are putting into this project! The news of the “hook” problem being solved is amazing – The text looks great now.
Heh, actually that was just a test string, meaning I basically inserted that line manually to get that pic. I had an inkling I messed them up, oops 😛
Wow, this is one of the best updates I’ve seen. Thanks, Mr. Mato. (And thanks for the “slow period” updates, too. Very much appreciated.) Having a firm foundation is incredibly important in any grand composition, and I’m glad you guys have that now. I believe the morning sun is always gonna shine again (well, until God ends the space-time continuum as we know it once and for all of course). Nevertheless, I believe in silver linings, and that’s why I believe in you! $;^ ]
Oh, and hey, you know the screenshots that hang out on the right side of the webpage all the time? Yeah. You may’ve noticed, ~shrug~ but I gotta tell ya, the g’s and y’s ar–*BOOT TO THE FACE*
Disorganized project? I’m surprised you guys aren’t working with a subversion server. It’s like impossible to be disorganized with multi-person projects using subversion.
Great to see that you guys fixed the text problems 😀
I am looking forward to this patch being released!
Keep up the good work!
Well, a lot of it stems from the fact that three different groups have merged into one, and all their stuff is sorta incompatible with each other. So trying to smooth all that is is a big part of this.
thanks mato, you guys rock. i just got home from my first smashing pumpkins concert and i’m more excited about this update!
you should switch your teams name to “team awesome”.
Awesome work Mato + company,
I am interested in this tool you all created – can I e-mail someone with questions about it? Looking to implement/use something that sounds similar.
hey, i was just wondering if the ROM i got off of *search engine here* would work with the patch, because the game running with the emulator without the patch is kinda skippy, will this fix that, or just the text, or will it not work at all?
I don’t know. You can try the test patch if you’d like. But I think the real problem is likely your computer and/or emulator settings. It sounds like you’re trying to run the emulator on an older system, or that you might need to change settings on your emulator to make things work better. Mother 3 emulation’s pretty intense, so choppiness and audio-video desynch is to be expected unless you got a really good computer. Just another reason to get the real cart if you’re going to try playing it in Japanese.
EBfan:
If it’s the sound that keeps skipping, try decreasing the sound quality.
You know, considering you’ve still got a lot to do, these screens look amazing already. But that may be the happy hooks talking. I’m very much looking forward to the final release! 😀
Has the DNS for this site been crazy as of late, or was it my ISP? Sometimes, DNS lookups would return NXDOMAIN (“that website isn’t down, it doesn’t even exist”) for all fobby.net subdomains which just isn’t right. Then I’d occasionally (and intermittently) get a lookup and the IP would always resolve to starmen.net. But they’re using vhosts or something so I couldn’t get to this site by using just the IP while my DNS wasn’t resolving.
Anyhow, glad to hear things are going well! Probably better not to use Arial, I know that while I have Arial Unicode MS set to my default font everywhere (because it contains most of the Unicode characters and that allows me to see most foreign sites correctly), it looks horribly ugly on this site unless I forcibly increase the font site to a normal size. I suspect there’s a +1 or something deep in the CSS that’s telling my browser to use an abnormal font size (e.g. 13 pt instead of 12 or 14), but that’s my fault for using Arial like this to begin with.
HOLY CRAP THOSE ARE HIGH LEVELS!!!!! By the way, is lucas the most most powerful, or is he the most balanced charatcter? and will you come up with a way of making it so Kumatora can have full name?
Hey, great work with the ‘g’ and ‘y’ problem. I love the pics. I wonder why Itoi didn’t include “Forest of the Chimera” as the subtitle for this one, too, considering, you know, that so many of the enemies are chimeras. Good luck with all the other bugs.
Crack them nuts, hackers! Crack, I say!
A Fan: We’ve gotten another report of similar problems, but it seems to be a very isolated problem that seems to be more of a DNS server issue than an issue on our part. But the cool tech people are looking into it anyway.
Roan: Yeah, I think I set everyone to really high levels for test purposes. I dunno how to answer your other question though. Everyone has their good points and bad points. I liked the balance the game had.
Also, it’s possible we’ll be able to let her have her full name, since everything will be stored in 8-bit instead of 16-bit, meaning possibly twice as long names. But there are other issues involved so it’s too early to say for absolute sure. But longer names are definitely a possibility.
Mato: When you did that play-through with the first draft of the script inserted, was the ROM hacked to give you high levels from the beginning so you could just blow through the game quickly? It makes sense to do that when all you want to do is see all the text appear.
“Cattlesnake”…
That’s witty.
Were certain signs in a certain location the subject of your graphical fiddling?
Wow, that’s way too general. But I think you know what I’m getting at.
Any progress like that is big progress.
You guys are amazing! I tell every single English speaking person I know about this project.
Thank you so much!!!!!
Zinco: Not sure if we’ll change those or not yet. I’m starting to lean toward no lately though.
Steve: Yeah, I set all my levels really high. The Japanese developers left a debug room in the game, so it’s really handy for stuff like that 😛
By any chance are harmony’s ROM hacking findings publicly available anywhere? I’d love to read them out of pure curiosity. I have a feeling they might remind me of Lance’s old class 🙂
Will you guys translate the Debug menu?
A Fan: I think so, but I don’t wanna give the link out here since it has a spoiler screenshot.
Roan: I already translated the debug menu, but right now due to technical problems most of the debug room will crash. Hopefully that’ll be fixed at some point.
YES. I had been waiting for the letter hooks to be repaired.
The game seems to be coming along beautifully, from the screenshots here. Fantastic job, and I can’t wait for more images to be released.
Every time I see screen shots I still can’t get over how vibrant this game is. I’ve popped it into my DS a few times with no intention to play very far just to ogle the beautiful graphics and surprisingly awesome sound.
Not really a nitpick, more of a rambling comment – How someone mentioned above about the Tower of Peace and Love, in the screenshot above. In my mind, I tend to prefer the words in the order Love and Peace (not here, just anywhere in general), but I have a feeling that Trigun is to blame for that, what with Vash the Stampede yelling out LOVE AND PEACE! LOVE AND PEACE! LOVE AND PEACE! LOVE AND PEACE! And that sort of stuck in my head ever since. =P
And that’s all I was writing in for. Just to mention how I subconsciously hear LOVE AND PEACE! every time I see those words.
Like I mentioned up above, that screenshot was from a manually-inserted line, meaning that I had to retype the line from memory, and I think I wrote “peace and love” because I thought the line was originally in the opposite order that Trigun had. Turns out I was wrong 😛
Anyway we got the script converted to use the newer format so here’s a more accurate screenshot, using what the script has:
http://tomato.fobby.net/junk/loveypeacy.png
Any chance you could email me the link then? I wouldn’t mind taking a peek at it, just for fun.
I just checked now and it looks like he took down all his documentation 😐 Maybe he’ll post it after the project is done.
Pity. I was hoping there was something I could take a look at just so I could better understand just how crazy it is. Well, okay, I guess I could just play with the memory viewer & disassembler in VBA, but from what you guys have said, that’d be confusing as hell 🙂
Gah! Now it’s even worse! All I can hear in my head is LOVE AND PEACE! LOVE AND PEACE! =P
I have a feeling that’s going to be stuck in my head for years and years though, whenever I see that line anywhere. And every now and then, I get an urge to shout out NEEDLENOGGIN! God, I need help.
after mother3 ill pay you guys to translate cowboy bebop for ps2.. i hope you guys accept wulongs though.
More Screenshots = Happy
THANKS!
You guy’s truly rock!
oooo draft two cant wait to hear updates about how that went
Hahah, I thought those were the real lines from the game on the first and second screen shots. Good thing I read the comments or i’d be “WTF happened to that Peace and Love tower part?” 😀
Hey Mato, I just wanted to drop by and give my thanks and respect to the group for this ambitious project. Y’all have translated some of my favorite games between y’all (Live-A-Live, FF5, Seiken Densestu 3, etc), and it probably doesn’t mean much, but just wanted to give my props, can’t wait to finally be able to play this in English!!
Heh, happy hooks. That reminds me of something, though I’m not sure of what right now… 😀
Anyways, what kind of hardware did you use to dump the ROM in the first place? Now that I have a legit copy, I might want to go ahead and dump a ROM for myself instead of relying on someone’s potentially no-good dump.
Silver Streak: I haven’t heard of people dloading bad dumps of M3, so it’s probably okay not to dump your own copy. There’ve been about 2000 downloads of the menu patch and I haven’t heard a single peep of there being a bad ROM out there, so it’s probably nothing to worry about.
Kind of off topic, but I just thought I’d let you guys know that Shigesato Itoi was a judge on Iron Chef http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSHpQXDC2wo .
Wow, Mr. Itoi has a Mohawk in there! 😛 I’ve imagined him as a business-type person. 😛
what tool was used this time?
For what?
It’s nice reseeing everything, especially when you can actually understand it.
Haha. Tower of Peace and Love. It’s funny because it wants you to go away.
Just out of curiousity, what is the literal translation of the Ostrelephant and Cattlesnake?
Ostrelephant’s Japanese name is literally just “ostrich” and “elephant” combined. Same with Cattlesnake, it’s literally just “cow” and “snake” as one word. Not too interesting in Japanese, but pretty neat in English translation.
you guys rock
“CowSnake” sounds awesome! XD
Slug.. thanks a lot man, i’ve read of that episode on the internet somewhere, and about him saying “i think the bell peppers are feeling happy”… ive searched for it but never found it, so thanks for posting that. On the same note, does anyone know where i can find a really detailed biography of Shigesato Itoi? i’ve read a lot about him, about how he went from having to sleep in the corner of a room in his friend’s house (he had no home) to working for nintendo… which is pretty inspiring.. but i still haven’t found a good detailed biography
Mato.. i gotta tell ya…. that names like “cattlesnake” is really earthbound-like
but now im wondering since you said that the japanese translation is just “cow” and “snake”, does Shigesato Itoi get more creative with other Japanese enemy names?
It was actually PoeTrader at starmen.net who thought up the name Cattlesnake. Like a year or more ago a bunch of us were trying to come up with good names for many of the enemies, so most of these names are old to us now 😛
In actuality, many of the names of enemies are pretty meh in MOTHER 2 too. We all love the New Age Retro Hippie’s name, but it’s just something like “Guy” in the Japanese version.
I like “Peace and Love” better than “Love and Peace” because the latter keeps reminding me of that hymn “Come, ye Children of the Lord” and then that song gets stuck in my head. By the way, I’ve never seen Trigun. Heard good things, though.