…It was byuu!
Another short, technical update. But this one is still pretty cool.
byuu, who you may know is the author of the awesome bsnes emulator, showed up out of nowhere with two new goodies for the project 😀
Very busy with real work, so progress is slowish on the sprite welding front. Since I have less time, I’ve been using what little time I have for hacking, so forgive the late/slow responses to stuff.
For now, I was going to answer a question someone asked about how the sprite VWF is actually going to do its stuff dynamically. It’s really pretty simple, but in my search for other informative graphical tutorials, I came up with nothing. So I was gonna make my own explanation real quick and figured hey, might as well make it a normal update. Again, this is technical mumbo jumbo blah blah jargon, so feel free to ignore it if you’re not into that sort of thing. But the following explains how most variable width fonts (VWFs) are implemented in ROM translations.
Very shortly after the last update, I moved right on to the sprite text welding issue, something I’ve/we’ve been avoiding because of the pain it’ll be. But it’s not gonna get done if we stay scared of it, so I went right for the throat. It’s definitely going to be a tough little hack, but I don’t think it’ll be anything quite as crazy as the battle text hack from a few weeks ago.
Anyway, yesterday I managed to follow the code a bit so I could get my bearings. We already hacked two important routines related to this font stuff, one being the routine that tells the game where in the ROM the current font letter is, and the other being a routine that makes the game load 16 rows of font data rather than 10 (this is how we got that old problem with text hooks fixed). So this area of the game’s code isn’t new to us, which is a plus. The way the game does the font loading is kind of lame though, but luckily I found a bit of code that does exactly what I hoped. It was pretty big and inefficient, so I wrote it better in much less space. The freed up space will be handy for the custom code to come.
But it sounds like what exactly this “sprite text welding” stuff is is a mystery to some people, so I thought I’d do a quick explanation.
Blah blah boring technical junk follows
Not a whole lot has been worked on since the last update, yet a lot HAS been done. It’s weird. Anyway, things are going to get busy for me the next few weeks, but rest assured I’ll be hacking away at this thing every spare moment I get.
Anyway, down to business, first the big-ish stuff. After fixing item descriptions, I needed to get back to work on the custom control code system for battle text. I was almost done, I just needed to do some codes for item names. Well, I sat down and did that today, it went surprisingly well. Item names can now start with vowels and not have a/an issues, and the game will use the/a/an/some as necessary, or sometimes it won’t put anything at all for special cases. Pretty nifty. You can see this in action in these screens here.
Wow, just a few hours since the last update, yet I managed to fix something that’s been a huge problem since Day 1: item descriptions.
Used to be that item descriptions that were over 42 letters long would kill the game in a horrible, screechy death wail. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, check out the middle of this old video from way back in October.
Anyway, after only about an hour, I’ve managed to fix that problem. Much easier than I thought, too, given how the game swaps numbers around so much. Anyway, here are some pics! Hurray!
I was pretty busy yesterday, so aside from this mini-update I didn’t get much done, but I’m almost done with the stuff I’ve been working on the past few days. Once I’m done with it, I’ll make a post or a mini-update about it, but this time I wanted to take some time real quick to show people just what’s left to do with the hacking. Stuff on the to-do list probably doesn’t make sense to most people.
Spent a few hours tinkering with stuff from yesterday and improving things. Got pretty much most of the rest of the custom battle control code stuff done, but still need to do some grunt work and also implement a code for items. This item work will cross over and help out with stuff we’re gonna need to do with the main script, so that’ll be good.
I’ve been working on the hacking the last few days when I’ve had the time, but there were getting to be too many mini-updates and that last post was already filled to the brim with comments, so this is like a big-mini-update so we can start fresh 😛
Basically, see this to see what problems I was having the other day with battle text. Fixing this basically required a special custom control code to be put in place, and luckily that was one of the things we were planning to do anyway, so that sort of combined two things on the to-do list into one.
Anyway, after a lot of blah blah technical stuff, I managed to get the groundwork laid for battle text custom control codes. Many lines of text are stuck in Japanese word order, which doesn’t always work well in English, so this custom control code system will give us the flexibility we need to make the text sound like normal English. Anyway blah blah, here’s a before and after pic, for example.
The updates keep on rollin’ in!
Long story short, the gray name box length thing has been hacked to look nice. The game originally assumed every letter in the box was 8 pixels wide, but since we got a VWF in there, that threw everything out of order and the game would make extra-long boxes for names that were pretty short in VWF form. I had an idea on how to make it super-awesomely nice and fit to the pixel, but after seeing how big names with 20 wide letters can be, I went the easier route and tricked the game by doing (total width of name / 8 ) and then add one if there’s a remainder. The results are as you can see:
Another update 😯
Like I mentioned in the last update, sblur had already done some research into the max lengths of things you can name. Jeffman and I both wound up looking into that stuff at exactly the same time, though he wound up winning that race 😛
Making the fixes was really easy, it was just a bunch of single-byte changes, and it was amazing that it affected not only the name length check as you’re typing stuff in, but also the initial # of dots. Sometimes the game offers happy and easy surprises. Anyway, first, here are some pics.
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.
It is done. See here.
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