I’m dead tired, but I want to get this update up so I can forget about it 😛
Been working on the battle text system hacking some more. A lot more. Unlike previous hacks, which were small hacks usually meant to replace short snippets of code only, this hack (and a few of the remaining ones) is of a MUCH bigger scale and infinitely more complicated. If you want just an inkling of how complicated, here’s a trace I started to do earlier today but gave up after about 4 hours on it. I’m not trying to brag here or anything — that’s seriously like only one TINY bit of the whole battle text system, I’d say maybe just 1/50th of it. Hacking this thing SUCKS. Even Exophase politely declined my request for him to take a stab at this, citing something like, “No way am I touching that code.” He’s definitely a smart man 😛
Anyway, all that whining out of the way, I did make decent progress with the battle text stuff.
(more possibly boring blah-blah technical talk in here, beware)
It’s been a few days, and those who’ve been following the comments have seen my mini-updates there, but since I won’t have much time this weekend, I figure it’s best to make a front page update to bring people up to date.
As you probably know, I’ve been working on hacking MOTHER 3’s battle text routine. And I made some big advancements the past week or two, as seen in previous updates. I’m very close to finishing the battle text hack, but there are some last things that are being stubborn.
Technical blah-blah talk ahead, ignore if that’s not your stuff
Managed to get a little bit of time last night, so I messed with the battle text routine some more. Fixed a few bugs, then got newline stuff working sort of. But then I realized I could do things much better and more streamlined, thanks to how the original programmers decided to erase battle text. So now the hack is much better and easier to work with 😀
Like I mentioned earlier in the comments of the previous update, I’m pretty busy at the moment, so nothing too big here. But while I’m busy, Jeffman’s been working really hard on trying to tackle some of the other remaining things on the To-Do List. He rocks big-time 🙂
It sounds like he’s nearly finished with Gray Name Box #6, “Hack it so the name box can print 8-letter player names correctly. It currently barfs and prints crazy stuff in such cases.” And we’ve already started discussing and investigating many of the other stuff that’s left. Hopefully later in the week I’ll get time to get back on the hacking wagon.
Another thing Mr. Jeffman got done was Main Script Hacking #5, “Make scrolly text display fully.” When we were messing with this stuff back last August or September, this was very closely related to the main script problems, but for some reason there are no problems with the “scrolly” text anymore, so we simply upped the total # of letters per line from 22 to 50 and it works just fine, as far as we can tell. So that’s another thing off the list, woohoo!
It lives! It needs rewriting, but it lives!
From “Deep Thoughts”. I just *had* to do this for a test 😛
Some small things done in the last day or so. But first, since a couple big strides have been made since the last battle video, I thought I’d make another short one to show the improvements. You can check it out here:
Keep in mind that the current build still uses really old and not-that-greatly translated battle text from before the project merge. The battle text was recently re-translated from scratch (thanks Chewy!) and just needs some reformatting and stuff. So the final battle text WILL be better. Honest.
Did some more work on the battle text routine (see previous post for more info) and knocked out a few more bugs. It’s looking mighty nice now 🙂 There are still some issues left to tackle; I especially need to fix it so it newline feeds and scrolling-up text doesn’t vomit. But stuff that’s on a single line looks absolutely great at the moment, so I thought I’d share some shots of it in action. They definitely have that EarthBound vibe to them 😀 Enjoy!
Worked all weekend (and I mean allllllll weekend 😯 ) trying to tackle one of the toughest hacking problems of all – getting the battle text to have a better VWF and allow for as many letters per line as we need and fix the auto-wrap thing. Finally, after much time, I’m starting to see some results 😀
First, it turns out we missed a graphical thing that needed editing, so Jeffman was awesome and did that. Compressed graphics editing isn’t my thing, but Jeffman rocks at it. So we make a good team.
Next, I found another instance where the gray box positioning needed fixing. What weird programming. That was an easy one-byte fix. Please don’t let there be any more 😯
Looked more into how to make the gray box fit the text better. The programming is crazier than I thought, but today’s hacking session is VERY similar, so I should be able to make it work without too much trouble and without doing lots of major work. So soon that’ll be off the list too.
I say this nearly every time, but since updates are every few days, it’s to be expected 😉 Only just a little more progress done, but it’s still worth mentioning anyway.
First, work on the enemy descriptions is still going, but it’s slow like I always mention. I’d like to try to finish them this week, just need lots of time and caffeine 😛
Next, I did a quick little hack to make the text-centering routine used by the sound player work correctly. It actually turns out this routine is used by other stuff, notably by the battle programming. Every time I hack the sound player, the more and more clear it is that the battle programmer(s) did the sound player programming too. Anyway, because of this shared routine business, I had to do a workaround to not make battles lock up. So now things look and act nicely.
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.
