Chapter titles and other stuff
(Man, the hardest thing about updating anymore is coming up with a good title)
Pretty decent, steady progress this past week. Nothing too major to show for it, though I’ll show some stuff anyway 😛
First main thing is that after some annoying assembly tracing, Jeff figured out some important stuff. Remember how we’re doing those chapter titles? Turns out that our new titles took up more space than the original titles (the graphics for them are compressed in the ROM) so we had no choice but to relocate the graphics. Had to find the pointer to the graphics though, and that was bleh because the programming sort of invented the address out of thin air, but Jeff finally found it, along with some extra data that’s useful. So now the chapter titles are moved and nearly done. Hooray! Here’s a before and after of that Chapter 3 title.
Don’t worry about spoilers, I chose to show this chapter title BECAUSE it’s pretty unspoilery compared to the others. Don’t worry, it’s not this kind of suspicious peddler. Honest.
Should mention that reid and Jeff worked pretty hard on the title graphics, and a bunch of us went through a whole bunch of fonts until we found one that we all liked. I love it when progress is made so quickly 🙂
Second main thing is we converted the script insertor to use harmony’s text mapping, while still using byuu’s control code format. A very important step. Unfortunately, that doesn’t address the overflow issues and other problems, but already things are much cooler-looking. Talking to people will crash the games badly sometimes though. But I think it’s probably just a data alignment issue.
I’m slowly trying to modify and add sblur’s old hacks onto our current work. It’s kind of like if you built something out of legos, but weren’t satisfied with it, took it apart, and rebuilt it better. That’s what we’re doing right now.
Incidentally, here’s a quick look at the quick little organizational tool I cooked up a while back.
This makes it easy for anyone on the team to build the current version of the translation from a fresh ROM. Before, we had tons of patches and ROM versions flying around, and it was hard to tell who had done what to which. The thing byuu is working on is a MUCH better version of this (as it’s actually an assembler first) but this is a good early version. I wrote something like this for my EB0 remake hack a while back. It’s pretty handy to have.
Anyway, that’s the main stuff that’s gone on in the past few days. I guess it’s not too exciting or anything, but oh well. These things take time 😛
For those curious, there’ve been about 2000 menu patch downloads and about 7200 people have signed up for e-mail notification. Dunno how we’re gonna send those emails out, that’s already a huge number, and it’s only gonna get bigger. Oh well, back to worko!
Keep up the good work guys! I still look forward to your updates, and check back here every day! =)
Wow, that title looks tons better. Keep it up, you guys have at least 8,000 strong rooting for you!
Love the updates, and great progress. now all your mods are just copy and paste into a text file.
i like the font you chose
Good font choice.
Hahahahah that peddler thing was great
For the emails, I suggest that you just whip up a program that takes the list of emails and starts to rapidly send out responses and maybe even the patch along with the emails. You know, like one of those bots that people make do stuff rapidly like answering multiple choice surveys, sending friend requests on myspace, and sending out emails.
Yay, pretty chapter titles. I hated that chapter playing in Japanese too… everything I did seemed to be wrong.
Here’s hopin’ for super happy funtime (relatively) soon! Go, team, go!
This place is *awesome*. You say that progress is slow but sure… well, I don’t think I’ve seen another hack go as quickly as you guys. Then again, it may just seem faster because you people are actually keeping Joe Q. Public up-to-date with your progress!
Anyways, I’ve got a stupid question that I didn’t want to bother one of the hackers with, and hope somebody can answer. Will the patch increase the size of the ROM past 256 megabits?
Nah, GBA ROMs can’t be any bigger than 256Mb/32MB for technical reasons (though if you have Star Trek like knowledge you can probably invert the phase shift and use the deflector array to figure a way to make ROMs bigger). That’s one of the main reasons the project’s been slow, there’s no way to expand the ROM, and that’s a very common practice in ROM translations.
Long story short, the translated ROM will be the same size as the original ROM. It HAS to be.
I agree with El_CJ: You keep updating, keeping us up-to-date with the project, not like other people who only update a year after the last update. :/ So keep updating, no matter whaaat! 😀
Not only do you guys keep updating, you actually RESPONDED to my question! And in NO time at all! I just wish this place had a discussion forum/community.
But yes, thanks!
Do you think you can give us a relative percentage of the hacking progress? Also, how’s the second revision of the draft going?
Its good that the chapter titles are nearly done and I like the font that was used and already 2000 menu patch downloads and about 7200 people have signed up for e-mail notification,that just shows how many people love this game and your teams work.
Abadd: I really can’t give a percentage, it’s too hard to say. The main things holding us back are about 3 or so big hacking problems, as seen in that bug video. If we could get past those, the rest of the project would be a piece of cake.
As for the 2nd draft, I’d already started on it a while back, but just barely. Gonna try to get major work done on it starting this week with any luck.
I dunno, I’ve played through Mother 3 and I could see “the suspicious peddler” on one of those.
Keep up the good work guys, we all have faith in you!
I really, REALLY love the chapter font. It’s totally reminiscent of the EarthBound title font which I’m assuming was intentional 🙂
Really cool!
I absolutely love the new Chapter font. As for the organizational tool, awesome. Sucks that you can’t romextend though. At least you have a good organizational tool.
As for “pointers appearing out of thin air”… sounds like those stories you hear about on the Internet about super-optimized hand-tuned ASM code that’s ridiculously hard to debug. It always starts out with pointers appearing out of thin air, then self-modifying code, followed shortly by shotgun debugging and insanity.
looks quite nice.
Cool. I love it when you guys provide pictures of the programming process itself (i.e. the notepad log thing there)
Epic. I’m finally glad a group of people are tough enough to take on the Mother 3 Translation so confidently. If I could, I’d love to help. (Programming wise of course) If not, oh well, playing Mother 3 translated would good enough for me.
Always a pleasure to see all the little victories you guys have had while working on this patch.
i’m glad you guys are making progress on the patch,but even more so i’m hoping the sieges will be effective on getting an official release because its been my experience that the sound on gba emulators suck pretty bad.And,from what i’ve come to understand,the music on mother three plays an integral role in the combat system.either way i’m completely stoked to play this game,so keep on truckin'(and rockin’).
You guys picked out a great font, it looks fantastic.
For the record, the font is called ‘The Sans’ and it is, indeed, ultra lovable. So is Photoshop’s optical kerning, which prevented hours and hours of metric-induced pain.
Keep up the great work guys!!! Like the others said, just think about the fact that you’ve got 8k+ people rooting for you! =)
good work guys ! raaaaaaah !!! ^^
You Rock! (do not use tooth brush please)
Great work!
mother 1 music in ssbb, check out the dojo
It’s weird to be excited about, but I really like the font as well! Maybe because that’s what chapter I’m on – who knows!
Frankly, I’m kind of surprised it’s ONLY 8k on the email list. Maybe it’s because of all the people left who love Mother, but just don’t know it yet. 😀
As far as email solutions, one of my friends is an email marketer by day – I’ll get some advice on free mailing tools you guys can use. I don’t know too much about it, but I don’t think Dogmeat’s idea is the way to go because that is 1) illegal and 2) could be flagged as spam and damage the reputation of the IP from which you’re sending mail.
So there are those issues and other things, but as I’ve said in the past (along with many, many others) I’d love to help in any way I can.
Keep up the great work!
7ucky: The signup list has actually progressed faster than any of our starmen.net petitions in the past. And we’re not even actively promoting it, like we would with the petitions. Not to mention there are lots of people who don’t need to sign up since they’ll find out right away anyway.
And yeah, definitely don’t wanna just fire all the e-mails off with a regular web app or bot or anything. Most of them would wind up getting flagged as spam. Most email signupees use hotmail, yahoo, or gmail, and they’d probably notice the sudden influx of the same mail from the same IP.
Most of the spam filters in place today care more about how well your mail filter works and that the email isn’t being sent from some random DSL line. You’ll probably get some non-final rejections, but if your server is compliant (i.e. not some spamming /bulk email tool) it’ll go through eventually. I don’t recommend attaching any files, though. Just don’t address it to too many people at once, though. Some mail servers reject you for too many recipients.
I’d batch them out into groups of a few unsorted recipients (sorting it only makes it look more like spam), would NOT include a link or any other weird formatting, and wouldn’t worry too much if a few emails don’t go through or bounce.
Most fans are probably reading this page obsessively, anyhow 🙂
Very nice, guys. It’s really nice to see how you guys are getting along.
Honestly though, man, you have no idea how grateful I am for that menu patch. I tried playing it with just a translation, I really did, awhile back, but I couldn’t get very far. Just confused and died in battle a lot. I’m too lazy to memorize the kana for different items. u_u I got through to the middle of Chapter 1 and gave up.
Anyways, I started playing it with the menu patch on Friday afternoon and well, I’m already to the middle of Chapter 7. Heh. I sat there for a good few 5-8 hours a day playing it all weekend. I’ll probably finish and beat it over this weekend. Not the fastest I’ve beaten a game, but the fastest I’ve beaten an RPG…
Am I rambling?
Well, what I mean is…THANKS! Thanks for filling my incredibly dull, boring hours with the ability to play something incredible AND incredibly enjoyable. Man I haven’t played a game so long my eyes burned, my fingers stopped being able to bend, and I fell asleep in my chair whilst playing since I got a Wii back in February. Heh.
Has anyone been to the smash bros. site recently, there isn’t a spoiler in the past 3 or 4 updates BUT, if you look at the screenshot for the name, description, and music, it’s playing the music for snowman in mother one!
Wow! The Chapter titles are a piece of art. Crisp and bold. I like it. Did Hunter also say that there’s Mother 1 music in SSBB? I hope that’s an indication that Ness will still be in it.
By the way, I think Ness will be in Brawl, but they won’t announce it on the DOJO page. Ness will be a secret, unlockable character like he was in the original SSB. That’s just my theory, anyway.
I only know a little assembly language, and probably nothing about whatever else y’all are using. But if there’s any other way I can participate, just post it.
for the emails, if you take whatever format the list has got and change it to a CSV (comma-separated-value) table, most email clients these days can import that as a contact list, so if you make a decision about what address they’ll come from, so people can ‘not spam’ list that adress, then import the list as contact, the handy dandy ‘everyone on my contact list’ button will do the job.
We use Google Apps for all of our Starmen.Net email hosting…I have a feeling they’d probably bust our chops for sending a single email to 10,000 people, heh.
If it comes down to it, we’ll just use Campaign Monitor. It’ll cost $100, but it will be worth it to ensure that the email gets through to everyone and looks good, unless there’s some free service that we can rely on to the same degree.
Not that we’re gonna be doing it any time real soon, but its good to start thinking about ahead of time. If you’ve got ideas or suggestions, feel free to bring them up — even in 9 years of running websites, I’ve never had to send an email to this many people before, so I could use some wisdom :O
I Love You Guys!
Man…hearing numbers like this, it just hits home even harder that Nintendo of America really is clueless as to it’s audience…
*SOLUTION IN SIGHT*
Nintendo of America is moving headquarters from Seattle to the Bay Area. I’m gonna try and get a job there and work my way up until i have enough clout to punch reggie in his big fat face and get away with it. Then, it will be ON.
p.s. DAMN, has anyone heard anything about the leaked Super Mario Galaxy!? I thought it was gonna be another Mario 64 with a gimmick (water pack for sunshine, planet hopping for galaxy) but WOW, from what I’ve heard, it seems like the best mario game in years (and i LOVED New Super Mario Bros., aside from the weak bosses…what was up with that?). Cameos from every Nintendo Character you can name and seemingly tons of game icons that AREN’T owned by Nintendo. I won’t spoil anything for anyone by listing specifics but, rest assured, if you ever loved Nintendo throughout their first two generations of gaming, this game is apparently a must-have. I wasn’t excited at all before i read this stuff and now, it’s on the top of my list, nostalgia even pushing it past MOTHER 3! WOW!
Those titles are lookin’ sharp!
Keep up the wonderful work guys!
Good luck, friends. However long it takes is fine. You’re up against something I’ll never understand and it must be such a pain. We appreciate everything you’re doing!
I do appreciate these weekly updates – It’s great to hear that things are going along smoothly! Keep up the good work, and try not to stress too much over the project.
You guys are my heroes.
Ohh man….. I Cannot WAIT TO PLAY THIS !!!! — although i’m waiting veryy patiently for the kind translation.. its soooooo generous of you., team…. such a selfless act. You guys are awesome.
Do you remember how you felt when you First embarked on your mother3 journey? remember the feeling of turning on the game for the first time… knowing what was ahead of you based on mother2, and knowing how long you had waited for that moment?
that awesome feeling is exactly what you are enabling thousands of others to feel… it’s such an awesome feeling that you are sharing… Team… we love you.
Wow, guys. The progress so far is awesome! Keep up the good work 😀
I look forward to seeing more progress. 😀
Really looking forward to this 😀 Love you!
Out of curiosity, will most emulators run a ROM that’s bigger than 256 Mb? I’m not suggesting forgetting about running M3 on real hardware, I’m thinking about Mother 3’s future after the translation – it’s probably 7-8 years away at best, but I’m sure people are going to love hacking M3 once a suitable tool (jHack Advance?) is created. :p
Running a game with more than 256Mb of ROM would be impossible due to the layout of the GBA memory map — only 256Mb of ROM memory is actually mapped, and any more would likely either break something or simply be ignored by emulators and/or hardware.
Fortunately for us, all banked ROMs (like MOTHER 3) will always have nullspace that we can use, and MOTHER 3 has several hundred kilobytes of it, which is more than enough for what we need. Not including the fourteen thousand kanji that aren’t even used in the game normally. 😛
PK Hack Advance would be pretty cool, though. It’s just so weird to be dealing with a game like MOTHER 3 from scratch and having to figure out how everything is formatted for ourselves… compare that to Earthbound, which has been hacked apart and then hacked apart some more, to the point where pretty much everything can be easily and graphically edited. It’ll be a long time before that happens to MOTHER 3, that’s for sure. 😛
hey this is probably an annoying question, but what percent are you currently at on this project?
Question: Are any of the graphics going to be tweaked for localization purposes? I was wondering if perhaps the title screen might be changed to reflect that this would technically be our “Earthbound 2” (though that’s not really what this is about).
There are a few things I noticed when I played through the game that were sort of references to past games. I’m familiar with some of the changes that were made to Mother 2 when it was localized so I was able to recognize some of these references. Just wondering if you guys were going to change some of the graphics in question to make the localization more complete.
(Trying not to give any spoilers here).
Phil: I doubt Tomato and Reid (and the others) would allow that. :/ If you want to “get” the past-game references, you should play the first two Mother games (which seems to be what you did). :/
(Sorry if this comment is out-of-place…)
Still, it’s their call. If they do change something, someone else could come in and put it back in. 😛
Phil: I think Mato or Reid (they’re basically the same person, right?) said they weren’t going to change the title. In addition to it appearing in slightly varying states throughout the game (not ALL the way throughout,) there’s also the matter of the animation. One time, the logo appears with this really cool ripple effect that might be hard to reproduce, especially since frame-by-frame sprite animation excludes Photoshop without some painful tweaking.
I’m not sure what Mato might say, and I’m kind of scared of overstepping my boundaries here, but keep in mind this is a *translation* project. Changing things around to better fit a North American localization seems a bit superflous, especially taking into account the amount of effort they’re putting in already.
A release of PK Hack Advance would be awesome, though. Hopefully sometime before I attend and graduate university… To make it easy for all you, I’ll try to fail enough courses to stick around for a while.
My role in the project is very tiny, almost nonexistent outside of the chapter graphics and this blog — Tomato, Jeffman, and sblur have probably put the most time into the project so far. They’ve worked extremely hard, as have the other hackers/translators :O
As for graphical changes, they’ve actually already made some. I don’t think Tomato has said anything about it because they’re kinda spoilery. But this team is definitely dedicated to making this a professional-quality localization, so pretty much every detail is being looked after.
Most minor changes to the game/script usually go through a brief vetting process (in other words, “hey guys I’m gonna do this speak up if you have a problem with it”). The major changes (title screen, big graphical changes, main character name changes) go through an informal voting process — anyone on the team who has an opinion weighs in and we go from there.
Well, if the things they change are to make the game better, “:D”. I personally would rather be able to read names rather than make funny faces while I try pronouncing them.
Something else, Mother has a lot of humour in it, so that would be included in the changes, right? (Since there’s cultural differences between us and the Japanese in terms of humour, we might not always “get” the joke).
All humor is being replaced with excerpts of Bob Dole’s latest book.
j/k but don’t worry, you guys worry too much 😛
so what are those three major hacking issues you spoke of? (not that i’m going to understand all of it)
Pretty much most of the stuff in this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-R7kdGjYeks
Tomato,
The tool you want is MajorDomo. It makes mailing lists a breeze. I’ve not had any direct experience with mailing lists, but if you need help getting that batch email sent, contact me and i’ll start getting things set up.