Been a few days since the last update, and not too much has happened, though admittedly all the recent Smash Bros. Brawl news and videos and such has been really distracting 😉 Man, I can’t wait.
Anyway, on a lark, I recorded a very quick video of a battle. We haven’t focused too much on battle stuff, as that’s its own huge problem child of its own, but at least with this video, we can see how things stand. It’s not too bad, given that we’ve done very little work on it. It can only go up from here 😀
It’s short and ugly and not very exciting, but check it out if you’re interested anyway.
Not so much done in the last couple days. I really should just keep translating the various enemy descriptions and other files, but it always feels like there’s no progress (or at least any progress to show) when there’s this whoooooooole huge bunch of hacking left to do. So I did a very tiny bit of hacking, while Jeffman did a good amount of poking and prodding the game’s smelly programming code.
One of the main things he did was look into an annoying and mystifying bug that was on the naming screen. It turns out it was caused by another of our hacks, so that assembly hack needs to be redone. In the meantime, he managed to fix the naming screen problem AND make things look really nice and VWF-y as you’re typing your names in. Here are some examples.
Mostly a bunch of little cosmetic things done in the last day. Here’s an example. It’s like those things they have in newspapers — see if you can spot all four differences 😛
Before
After
Simple stuff like that is what’s happened in the last day.
A couple more things done since the last update. The biggest thing is probably that Jeffman finished hacking the in-battle name boxes so that the names will center properly. They now look kick-ass and professional 😀
Uh oh, Flint’s in trouble
Even 4 names center correctly, including 8-letter names
I forget where we last left off, but the 8×8 font was looking nicer and thanks to some helpful reminding from people here, I got it looking even better. I also got the abbreviated names working for the battle memory menu, while everything else uses the full names. I tried the same trick with item names, but alas, no luck. Expanding the item names is going to be hellish.
Not too much done this time, but I want to at least talk about it/show stuff before I get too busy that I forget about it.
Jeffman kicks butt and hacked a VWF for the enemy list screen. He deserves way more credit than me for most of the hacking stuff done in the last month or two. He takes on the more complicated stuff while I sit here fiddling with text insertion tools and simple hacks. So he rocks!
Anyway, I think this might be the last font routine that needs a VWF hack. Luckily, it doesn’t involve sprite text or any ugly stuff like that.
As you can see on the picture on the left, even with the VWF, there’s no way these long enemy names are going to fit, so I did a quick test based on a suggestion from Gemini last month and tried using a modified EarthBound font to try to get a little more space, since it has slimmer letters. I quickly made an 8×8 font based on the EB font and tried it out. That’s what the picture on the right is. The text does look nicer, but there’s still no way the long names will fit on the left menu.
Nothing much in this update, just wanted to let people know that yes, we’re still alive, and yeah, things are still progressing. I got sick and now have a ton of real life work to catch up on, Jeffman’s been out of the country until a few days ago, and I think everyone else has been enjoying the holidays.
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.
