Gray (or Grey) Matter
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:
I know the question mark
is missing 😉
Looks much more professional, and no longer will the especially long names have gray boxes that reach around the screen 😛
So that’s another thing off the to-do list, “Make the gray box fit the name correctly. It currently assumes each letter is 8 pixels, so it extends too far out.” And actually, that completely finishes all the gray name box hacks 😀 These things that seemed like they’d be tough just a month or two ago are getting done so quickly now. I think it’s because both me and Jeff have really leveled up our skills so quickly. Let’s hope the final bosses coming up won’t be too tough now 😉
first 🙂
Awesome! You guys are doing a great service to the community.
Also, frequent updates are frequent.
Keep up the great work!!!
Sweet! It looks great. I love your attention to detail. It’s lovely to know that you are viewing these screenshots and previews as closely as we are, and are taking everything into consideration. Y’all deserve a medal.
First time commentor! Awesome work Mato and Co. BTW, now that the gray name box is done, what will you be hacking now?
Tomato, its official: you have no life 🙂 but well done all the same! Been keeping track of this for months and it’s great to see it all coming together.
Obviously you have it working (somewhat) on an emu already, how much in the way of crashes are you getting lately? It seems like you are more simply getting garbage printed more than anything else.
“I think it’s because both me and Jeff have really leveled up our skills so quickly. Let’s hope the final bosses coming up won’t be too tough now”
Wow you guys are dorks 😀 Just kidding you guys are awesome, keep up the high quality work ‘ol boys.
Yes no more problems with the gray box.
I can’t keep up with these updates!
And I like it. Keep up the great work!
at this rate it’ll be done when I get home
W00t! Kumatora is “Ahh”-ing in relief again! XD
Holy Crap! I don’t log on for a day and there are 3 updates!!!! This is so exciting! You guys are brilliant!
I’m not sure if you noticed, but Kumatora’s is a bit longer than it ideally should be. Other than that, superb work! You guys are going so fast, I think this might end up getting released during May! 😉
How do you divide something by 8) ? No wonder Mother 3 hacking is so crazy… 😉
Er, I mean her grey box is a bit longer. D: In case my phrasing had you confused.
3 updates in less than 24 hours? Crazy! You guys are seriously amazing me today.
Ban the ‘first’ posters!
Oh, and good work.
Oh Biiaru, the reason that the Kumatora one looks a bit too long would likely be because of the bit about the remainder that Mato had mentioned. Remember, if there’s a remainder then it extends it by 1 space which would make it not exactly perfect but most certainly good enough.
WOW!! u are The Flash Mato!! xD
Bennysarus-Rex: Wow dont you think thats cruel to say? perhaps you dont know that maybe YOU dont have a life… and besides he’s (Mato) might have College to deal with 1st. So please remember that this is a Good Matters Zone.
i’m getting really excited now haha. keep up the great work
AHHHH!
Considering how Nintendo snubbed us of the EB masterpiece in Brawl, this project is the only related content I have any anticipation for anymore. Earthbound on VC? I’ll believe it when I see it.
Urgh!
Awesome! I finally play Brawl ( totally freakin’ awesome) and come home to find a new update!
Plus he has a lady friend to tend to, as mentioned in his Walmart response. By that standard I’m certain he has more of a life than most of us.
I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I consider not having a life to be a blessing. 😉 To get a life, keep it and maintain it, that’s hard work and requires more dedication than I’d like.
Tomato, you like to work hard just like your mother, but I don’t think it’s good to work so hard. *click*
Lots of updates! I’m glad to see that you are making some good progress. It’s lookin’ great! Thanks for sharing it with us! 🙂
This is great! I’m loving all these updates. But now it’s gonna feel weird when theres only one update every 2 days or so.
yeah, really
WHOA! I said, “hey, why not check the translation blog..maybe they updated it a third time today!”
my friends thought I was crazy. We see now who’s crazy…..we do indeed..
nah but seriously, looking good!
is all thats left for you guys to do purely cosmetic? what do you think are the final bosses (or even the very hardest thing?)? sry if thats obvious but i dont get most of the stuff on that list ;/ not a computer person.
Bennysaurus-Rex: It’s official only now? 😯 Anyway, the only things that cause problems is the main script, which is why there’s still stuff on the to-do list about that, and item descriptions will still crash the game of course. That problem seems to be one of two things, or possibly two of two things.
Biiaru: The game does things in 16-pixel blocks, so some names will have extra space sometimes; the same happens with the original game. See the screens here, for example. That’s why I mentioned that I was hoping to go for perfect pixel accuracy, but the amount of work just isn’t worth it, so I used the game’s original method, modified to take our VWF stuff into account.
MentallyAbstract: Yeah, “First!” posts are lame and I usually delete them most of the time.
GIANTSTEP: Nah, I graduated a while back. I wish I was in college — this would be getting done a lot faster that way 😛
Unsavory Maggot: Yeah, I live the life of a boring responsible adult nowadays. The only reason I can be up at such crazy hours and spend so much time on the project is because I work freelance and can rearrange my work schedule easily. If I had a normal 9 to 5 job, uhh, I think we’d be stuck where we were back in July 😛
Guiness Mickman: See the to-do list for yourself, but the answer to your question is a huge no. Most of the stuff that’s left is very evil and 101% necessary. The game *will* crash and die often until most of the main script stuff and menu stuff is done.
Guiness: This is from way back in October, but see this. See the way the game prints main script stuff all garbagey? That’s one thing that we still need to fix. And the part where item descriptions cause that crazy evil death sound? That still needs to be fixed too. We know WHAT needs to be done, but both fixes will be very complicated.
Oh, oops.
SAM-E-BOI: Not sure yet. The easier the better right now. I don’t really WANT to work on the rest of the main battle text hack, after all that insanity a few weeks ago. Kind of like if you ate pizza for 3 weeks straight, you wouldn’t want to eat pizza again for a loooooong time. But maybe I’ll just say screw this and do it anyway. Or maybe I’ll continue to look at that menu text stuff that I started on yesterday.
Wow. Freelance sounds pretty nice. It sounds like just the thing for people like myself who still want the freedom to enjoy everything there is to enjoy. Makes me glad to still have the freedom to decide what comes next in life. 😀
You know, with how fast you work, it might give some the off-impression that you might end up finishing before the unofficial estimates. 😉 Whether or not you do is undoubtably irrelevant; because yes, as some have said, we’ve waited years for Mother 3. Waiting months for a patch is a picnic, especially since now it’s just within the horizon. Even if you can hardly see it, we know it’ll be within our reach, as long as we keep on going. Of course, there are better analogies than “the long hike”. 😉
ok i am completley hammered but as i was eating my chicken sandwich form BK and reading this at 2:30 am i was thinking eye of the tiger the whole time. i dont know why but its there, the dev team has the eye of the tiger and they wont let anything stop them.
Mato just divide all the remaining hacks up and write them on slips of paper. Then just draw one out of a hat at the beginning of every week.
Awesome!
4 updates in 2 days!
Mato, have you decided to have my kids yet? Awww, come on! But seriously, all of these updates are great!
I am abuzz with excitement!
Man, at this rate, the translation should be near done in no time!
xD I have like four friends asking me if I can mount the completed project on some gba carts for them…
That’s the power of Mother 3 I guess! xD
What with the following the translation has accumulated, Nintendo will be sorry they didn’t get on this first. You should put a download counter on the download page once this is done, just to sort of throw it in NoA’s faces some more.
Also, are you guys planning on adding any more cool little things like the stars on the enemy list to the game? Things like that really make translations shine; making an awesome game even better. (If being awesomer is even possible with M3… xD)
Okay, so, uh..
I dunno if anyone’s found this out yet or not…
But any Brawl players should NOT use Snake’s secret taunt while Lucas is around.
Ever. x.x Major, major, major spoilers.
Wow, this stuff is really coming along! However, it seems like you’re a bit nitpicky over small graphical glitches. It seems to me that most of the game text is already translated and displays well enough to be readable, so why not do beta releases for those of us who don’t mind minor graphical glitches and just want to play the game in English? I can understand stuff like word wrapping and variable width fonts but I wouldn’t mind imperfection!
tim, a group doesn’t release a ‘beta release’ until it’s actually in a stage that they’re ready for the world to see. The graphical glitches (assuming they still look mostly like the ones in the video a few months back) are worse than what I’d call minor, and aren’t they still crashing the game at times? Item descriptions haven’t been hacked in, and playing the game such that 2 or 3 words are printed on a line doesn’t sound very fun at all.
In summary, just hold on to your britches
Icheck this site atleast 10 times a day (during my brawl brakes) and it still amazes me how great of a job you guys are doing bringing the final installment of the best game series to us dumb americans. Good job on everything you guys have done you are all amazing.
4 updates in 2 days, very nice!!!
Like cruznik said, I also check the site at least 10 times a day, (when my PC is turned on) and I must say that things are happening really fast(in a good way of course). Keep going!
Ha! I can’t even figure out Snake’s secret taunt. Sad, I know. I can’t even get Samus’ up-down-up taunt to work. Do you think the classic controller has something to do with that?
ok, now, this may be just my opinion, but it all feels a little too tight… The one that looks best in the screenshots above is Kumatora’s gray box, which I assume is one where the /8 division had a remainder, and one additional block length was added. In all honesty, that one looks like a caption, the others look like buttons of some sort.
My suggestion would be that instead of rounding up one block if there’s a remainder, you should disregard the remainder and always add one:
numBlocks = roundDown(nameWidth/8) + 1
instead of the current:
numBlocks = roundUp(nameWidth/8)
This would make it so that the gray box always has an extra breather space which I feel could be more aesthetic.
that’s up to you though 🙂
umm, cant say inzoum is wrong 😮
GAAHH! Can… not… wait!!
freaking awesome. its actually exciting now, to check the site for updates. the game is so close to being done.
Man, I’ve just finished Magicant in my “play through EarthBound before the Mother 3 translation is done” replay. I’m gonna be finished too soon, but it’s impossible to stop playing! AAaaaargh!
This is amazing O_O
Mato, you and Jeffman have really come a long way on this project. Hard to believe that a lot of this is almost done.
I kind of feel that NOA stinks for neglecting the EarthBound trilogy. “lengthy”…”too hard to translate”…LOL! Yeah right!
I bet Nintendo had this planned all along not to translate
M3. The original coding says it all. They obviously don’t want this game series to go outside of Japan ever again. That, and Nintendo is bullying the Mother crowd by including spoilers about Mother 3, but not bringing the game over here so people can play. Mato, you are a hero for translating this game 😀
Yeah!!! Seeing this whole section crossed off the to do list totally rocks!
It’s really encouraging, keep it up!
And thanks for the 5836th time! ^^
cruznik71450: only 10 times?:D
MATO YOU ROCK, GET SOME SLEEP, PLAY BRAWL! But please don’t stop 😉
Charles: There aren’t any plans for anything else, at least not now. I can’t think of anything else right now, anyway, and we don’t wanna go ruining the original experience. When I’m working on the script drafts in hopefully a few months, Jeff’ll probably be messing with that stuff + some of the stuff on the misc. hacking list I assume, so we’ll know more later.
I also don’t want to put a public download counter up, but we already have a private counter. I’m hoping when the patch is released, most people will get the patch from here so we can get a good, accurate count. I’m hoping we can eventually top the 6-digit mark, we’ll see. 14,000+ are already signed up just to get notified via e-mail 😯 Also, yesterday the menu patch got 92 downloads. That’s crazy when I think about it, it doesn’t even translate any of the main text or battle text. But multiply that by ~7 days or so and 😯 @ how many people a week are willing to play the game in such a crappy form.
Tim: I’ll be honest here, when I did this update, I absolutely KNEW someone would make a reply like yours. The last time I did some similar work on gray boxes, someone showed up and started swearing and saying how we should just release what we got since it’s obviously ready and we’re just being stupid now. The current version is NOT playable, and there will NOT be a beta patch. There are still major crashing and freezing and dying bugs, and whole sections that need hacking still haven’t even been touched. You’ll just have to be patient, sorry.
Inzoum: The box length routine doesn’t work the way you think it does, so your idea wouldn’t do what you think it does. If it was that easy, we would’ve had it hacked many months ago. Welcome to the world of MOTHER 3 😉
Can0fMean: I just did 😉
yeah the list is so long i figured there must be major stuff on there. you have nice shiny screenshots & stuff now tho it looks like you have your work cut out for you still.
Mato: Oh? After a while, are you still planning to go to college?
Huh? I already did 😯
Okay how about working on the main script next? Only a random suggestion, but hey , it’s there. Again, awesome work. What you have is true dedication and selflessness.
Umm might be a personal question, but wanted to ask when I saw giantstep’s question. How old are you Mato?
Umm, if you think it’s too private you dont have to answer 😮
HOLY SHIZ! Three updates in one day?
Is this your way of saying “I love you, Aphrodine?” Or… dare I say it–a proposal? If so then my answer is “YES! I WILL be your lawfully wedded wife, Mato.” Of course, I don’t know if your girlfriend would be ok with this spontaneous proclamation of love. I’m sure that we’ll work it out somehow.
Mato in the start of mother 3 when you select the names of the characters and click ok what does that sound say and will that sound clip be translated to english?
No more gray box problems? Yay! now to fix more annoying things….
Man this is all turning into Stalker Time 😯 I don’t know why exactly you’d want to know my age, but I’m in my 20s. What’s next, my weight or my favorite color? Yeesh 😛
Anyway, the menu text ordering stuff is SUCH a pain. So I decided to try to mess with the battle text ordering instead for now. It was pretty easy to get it working nicely, and it means various battle text will now sound like good English. The Japanese version ALWAYS puts the enemies name first there, bleh. But then I hit a snag — the game won’t print the main enemy’s name if you encounter more than one enemy. Bah, so close, too. Not sure how to get around this just yet, I hope it won’t be too tough 😐
I really need to work on real life work now, so probably no updates this weekend, or maybe the next few days.
EDIT: TheReaper: No, that voice clip will be unchanged. The voice is of Shigesato Itoi, saying, “OK (de)suka?” which means, “OK?” or “Is that OK?” If you’ve played EarthBound, you likely heard this when naming your characters there too.
Oh ok and yeah I remember hearing that same voice clip in earthbound and guessing that it meant ok but up to now that you told be I was not sure what it meant.
On closer look, multiple enemies DO work, it’s just if you get a red or green swirl that the names not appear. Blah.
> Kind of like if you ate pizza for 3 weeks straight, you wouldn’t want to eat pizza again for a loooooong time.
You’re talking to someone who has eaten pizza almost every day for some years now … 🙂
Anyhow, good going! It’s nice to see steady progress being made. Unlike watching that Laplace no Ma translation that’s been at “95%” for… over a year now?
Yeah, that Laplace game‘s been stuck a while, but work HAS been going on behind the scenes there apparently. But projects (particularly RPGs) that span 5+ years are probably the norm I’d say. I remember when me and Gideon started that translation, only mere hours after we learned of the game’s existence did we begin. Lots of hacking and script stuff was done, but I guess the more difficult hacking proved evil. But I think he’s fixed almost all of that and since he’s an aspiring novelist now, he’s been rewriting my bland script to be much better. Man I look forward to that game, and I only played about 10 minutes of it before :X
Anyway, I think I know how to fix the problem I posted above. Basically, we’ll remove the game’s original name control code and create our own control code system. We need to do this anyway to solve the he/she/it/the/a/an/some/his/her/its/cohort/cohorts stuff. And thanks to a nice Japanese cheat code page, it’s really easy to check to see what the main enemy is. Though it’ll still be a bit of work to tell what the currently acting enemy is maybe.
This is awesome. (I disappear for a week or two, and come back to so many updates of such awesome, dedicated work! “Do-It-Yourself Devotion” indeed.)
I’m looking forward to the day.
hey mato, everything is looking great! im just curious, how is the progress on the enemy descriptions? i remember you saying that you have tons of work to do on that…. did you decide to give it its own entry on the to do list?
I consider it minor enough to either not be listed by itself or be included with the script editing stuff. I don’t want to work on it any more until the sprite text welding stuff is done, as that may or may not affect the # of letters we can have total per description.
Yeah, that does look evil. The game can’t seem to get over that “A blank snuck up from behind!” format. 😉
Why nintendo spends more time on cheesy franchises like Pokemon and none on possible star franchises is beyond me. That certainly isn’t going to help with everyone calling them a child’s plaything.
Admittedly, I downloaded the menu patch and forgot all about it when I got Mother 3 in the mail. 😉
by the way mato, just to be a jerk….
…what’s your favorite color? XD
“ok i am completley hammered but as i was eating my chicken sandwich form BK and reading this at 2:30 am i was thinking eye of the tiger the whole time. i dont know why but its there, the dev team has the eye of the tiger and they wont let anything stop them.”
bunz – you are awesome. 😀
This may have been asked before, but how long is Mother 3’s script? Is it longer or shorter than Mother 2’s?
I guess it is. Actually it’s one of the reasons that Nintendo didn’t want to translate it to english.
It’s hard to put an actual number on the script, because ROM hackers and translators tend to use the size of script dumps rather than raw byte dumps. I’d say it’s about twice as much text as Star Ocean was, which itself was considered a monster of a script for a Super Nintendo game. So it’s definitely a lot of text, but not anything incredibly crazy for nowadays. I can’t find a raw script dump, but adding in that and all the other stuff would probably be about a meg and a half of text at least.
Here is the SO script printed out, btw. So maybe double that stack of paper there I guess. Maybe more, since M3 has more text per page I bet.
Holy bejeezus!
Heh heh. Judging by the frequency of all these updates it’s only a matter of time before there’s a live stream of Mato working on Mother 3. 😛
Mato: Oh Ok then
I demand a live stream of mato working on the translation.
Hey, Mato, I was wondering if perhaps you’d release the first draft of the script separately in some sort of document or something. That would be awesome so we could play the game untranslated but with a script on the side. Unless you don’t want to.
Does Japanese have definite/indefinite articles? IIRC, EarthBound uses “the” with regard to enemies. i.e., “The New Age Retro Hippie attacked!” I see you’ve got “You encountered a Cattlesnake” there, are you be keeping the “a” out of preference or is it a technical thing that prevents you using “the”? Also, nitpickiest question ever. I really don’t mind either way, it just piqued my curiosity.
lol i always thought the sound from eartbound was OK Scott! 🙂 man i cant wait to here that clip again….It’s cool your keeping the original…BTW mato is the way you get attacked like Earthbound Zero or Earthbound One…?
Hey, Mato, I looked it up, starmen.net has their own wikipedia article LOL
I FINALLY GOT THE WII AND BRAWL!!
So who from here wrote the article?
Rcade: ha, that’d be funny, but I don’t think it’d be very interesting at all. Hacking is very boring, it’d be more fun to watch a dentist at work.
Negi: I’m not sure I follow. First, the first draft is ugly and smelly, and it’s also in pretty much no logical order. Stuff from the end of the game is at the beginning, stuff from the middle is at the end, etc. etc. in a big jumble of crazy. And besides, what you’re asking for is already available on GameFAQs, check some of the walkthroughs, they do exactly what you want.
Vague Rant: They don’t have articles at all. They also don’t have singular and plurals, it’s all the same. They also don’t have verb conjugations. Japanese grammar is very nice in many ways 😀
Anyway, to answer your question, if you check the to-do list, you’ll see we’re planning to hack stuff so that each enemy will have the proper article and pronoun and all that stuff. Cattlesnakes are normal enemies you find in several places, so I feel “a” better suited that pic. If there’s a special boss or a special case, I’d have it use “the”. Of course, we’re still working on the hack for this to happen automatically.
Failedlegend: You see enemies on the screen, just like in EB.
Heh, cheat codes are helpful? Too bad there aren’t romhack cheat codes, like “infinite free time” or “max hacking speed” 🙂
As for Japanese grammar, while there’s no grammatical plural, I thought there were a few constructs that indicated it, like ‘hito’ = person, ‘hitobito’ = people? (Everyone else wondering: that’s a doubling of the kanji for ‘hito’, it just gets voiced [h -> b] because it becomes a kanji compound and some of them do that). And the -tachi suffix-type-thing that indicates someone’s group (e.g. watashi = I, watashi-tachi ~ we; and that ‘i’ before -tachi isn’t really pronounced).
Oh, and it’s good to know that there’s progress on Laplace no Ma, even if I’m not seeing it. I have its page bookmarked, and I check it every few weeks to see if I can play it yet 🙂 I’m definitely grateful to all our friendly ROM hackers & translators, even if I’m sometimes impatient 🙂
If you want to specify a # for something, there’s a way to do it, sadly that part *is* complicated. But in your example, hitobito doesn’t mean “people” in quite the way you think, it’s more often used in the sense of “the people” or “peoples”.
———
Anyway, I know this pic doesn’t look like much but it’s the first step toward our custom control code system.
My first custom control code inserts the string “hi ” wherever you put the value 0xEF00. So that’s what that is. But this will also require hacking the initial string length value so that the game will allocate the right amount of space beforehand, that’s why the line doesn’t display fully there. It’s not hard, just a pain, and it’ll probably wind up needing a near-duplicate of the custom control code hack. So where to go from this first step is difficult to decide. I can have the hacked counting code already pre-parse the string in RAM, then have the game copy from there, but that’d be dangerous. What a pain. For now, sleep. And tomorrow, lots of real life work.
I wasn’t the first and I won’t be the last to repeat this, but dang! Those screenshots get more and more beautiful everytime I see them! The more I see your work, the more flawed the japanese version looks. I mean, just look at the t in “Nintendo” on the title screen. Nasty! …and the new lines start at alot of weird places during the battles. 🙁 It may just be my imagination speaking, though.
Hey, sorry for the last post about “go ahead and release it”. It’s cool to see the level of craftsmanship and dedication you’re putting into a hobby. My eagerness to play the game shouldn’t degrade your steady efforts. Great job so far and I’m looking forward to the finished product as are many of my friends who wouldn’t be bothered to actually post here.
May for the completion of the hacking, or project altogether? Just curious. 😀
About the gray name box length: damn code :P, but really, if you can inflate the box a few pixels wider so it’s not so much a tight fight, it would look cleaner… In the meantime, this is 1100% better than the wacky sizes you used to get 🙂
Regarding the project in general, I’d be curious to know what the modified code / original code ratio is… because sometimes it sounds like you need to flip a few bytes around somewhere and WHAM, everything falls into place, and at other times, it feels like you need to re-write everything from near-scratch… Just thinking of those “Man has 95% DNA in common with chimps” comments, like how a few small changes here and there will end up having a huge impact on how that creature looks…
Hey Mato, just out of curiosity, who do you prefer using in brawl: Ness or Lucas? Also, do you think the *certain boss battle* in the *certain Mother related-level* was a good tribute to the real thing(if you’ve gotten that far)?
Inzoum: Adding a few pixels isn’t possible, and for especially long names, the extra space at the end will only get bigger anyway. The way they coded these boxes was really weird. I’m honestly surprised they work as good as they do now, it exceeded my expectations and that’s good enough for me 🙂
As for how much new code there is, after simplifying things last week, I was able to take out a LOT of our old hacks. I’d say there’s maybe 1KB of new code in all.
SAM-E-BOI: Ness was my main guy in Melee and the original Smash Bros., but this time around I do seem to do better with Lucas. His up-smash is killer and he finally makes PK Thunder actually useful. I haven’t played much of the game so I dunno if there’s more past where you’re talking about or not, so uhh, oh well. Also, Lucas’ voice sounds pretty cool.
I use Lucas and Ness,too, yeah, but not because of Mother. Is there anyone else who used them BEFORE they played Earthbound or found out about this translation? Cuz I’m sure that like 99.9% of everyone here uses them.
If it means anything, the # of unique visits and total visits doubled since last week, and menu patch dloads are more than double now. So I think that’s probably the case for many people here, but only a very small handful post comments.
doubled in the one week since brawl came out? did I interpret that right?
mato the world is counting on you.
and you’re exceeding our every expectation!
baxter: Yeah. I figure it’ll only be temporary though and it’ll eventually fall back to more normalness soon.
In case you didn’t know, Lucas is generally considered pretty close to the top range of characters, whereas Ness is around the bottom. I play Lucas myself, he’s great. 🙂
Ness has had a rather bad time of gradually getting worse with each game, though…
Mato, I don’t want to alarm you but…
…I think you’ve become some kind of hacking/updating/commenting MACHINE.
Great work, things are coming along great.
I dont have brawl yet, but are you guys saying he is a bad character to play or just a hard one?
Nope, Lucas is like the best
THANK YOU GUYS SOO MUCH! YOU’RE DOING AN AWESOME JOB! 😀
I play Ness and Lucas alternately online and it seems like for Lucas its easy to smash people out with either his twig bat or his smash up and its easy to get the smash ball since his PK thunder doesn’t disappear in one hit.
With Ness you really need to use the PK fire and bat technique to smash anyone out or you have to jump up and do an A backwards for his smash kick or use the smash ball to knock people out. I play both Characters but in my opinion I like Ness more because of his PK fire though if they are really really percentage they can get out of it easily. Another good thing about Ness is that his PK fire goes diagonally so you can get someone thats on the ground and stun them enough to land back on the ground.
Don’t forget about hitting yourself with PK thunders they can kill people at around 100% with Ness, but for Lucas its multiples of hits so its just for damaging them I have yet to kill anyone with Lucas’. Also if you don’t want big spoilers with Lucas don’t use Snakes Codec with Lucas around, I learned that the hard way.
You really think it’ll be a “few months” before your done with the coding and on to the script? At the rate your going I don’t see how you wouldn’t be on to it by April. Is there really something left in the coding that’s going to take months?
YOU’RE*
Wow! Keep it up, guys! Now that I played Brawl, I’m more excited about Mother 3 than ever! Right now, this is #1 on my list of games I’m looking forward to playing.
I will not go to bed until I beat the game when the translation is released.
kevin: No, he’s a very good character to use. I always liked the way Ness played in the other games, but Lucas is like that but improved, at least for my style.
Zaraji: I’ve used Lucas’ PK Thunder many times to knock people out. Especially good is if you got someone sort of by the edge of the screen, then zap them, make the bolt follow them, zap them again, then do that one more time. Maybe it doesn’t work so well against non-CPU opponents but that’s been surprisingly effective.
FERNANDO PANDO: There’s still a lot to do, and I still need to work on real life stuff so I can earn a living 😛 I chose May for a personal goal to finish the hacking because it seemed the most plausible. But who knows, maybe it’ll take less time. Or maybe more.
Rozgabound: 🙁 The last thing I want people to do is rush through the game at breakneck speed. It took Itoi years to create the game, and it’s taking us a really long time to do all this stuff, too. To have all that work = gameplay for one or two days is pretty depressing 🙁
I agree. And Lucas PK Thunder can KO humans, I do it all th time
I know this probaly dosent belong here but does anyone know a program used to dump the text from a gba game.Also 101 responses wow
Mato, I think this blog has done wonders for the hack/translation community in showing everyone what exactly people go through to make these translations. People who don’t know think it’s as easy as slapping on subtitles on a video file. It’s also nice to see behind the scenes just in general. You’ve already inspired at least one blog like yours in the Persona 2 translation project, http://tsumi.wordpress.com and I hope it becomes common.
cant wait: every game stores its text at different spots in the code, so you can’t make a program to cover all games in general. You have to know how to look in the hexcode of the game and figure out where the text is. After you’ve figured it all out (which is not a walk in the park if you’ve never done it before), only then you can use one of the many dumpers such as Atlas or UHR (or write your own).
cant wait: Unless you know what you’re doing, you generally would need to write a custom program for each different game to extract the text, and even then, you need to know what you’re doing 😛
mazoboom: Whoa, so that’s what Gemini’s been up to 😯 It’s too bad he decided not to help out with this project, he’d be able to fix some of these last things on the to-do list really easily I’m sure, like the sprite text welding, the main font welding, etc. But oh well. Cool to see I’ve helped to start a new trend in ROM hacking that’s actually cool, unlike my Sexy Beam thing from a few years back heheh.
mato don’t worry about me not taking in the full effect of the game. Earthbound was my favorite game of all time. I still play it. And I have a feeling that Mother 3 will follow suite.
You do realize “Sexy Beam” is an actual attack of Etna from Disgaia 2? The description on it reads, “It’s powerful, but is it sexy?”
Anyway, I’m pleased to see so many updates in such a short time. I’ve been playing as Lucas, and I’m dying to know more about his story. Thanks again for your hard work.
Good work on the patch. I would never have the dedication to go this far. I think I’m going to play through EarthBound again, maybe try to come up with a challenge, anyone got some good ones?
Also, I very much like the whole sexy beam thing. Kudos on that. Shame it didn’t catch on.
Mato, you know Koi no Dance Site is in Ouendan for the DS, right? I’ve never heard SEXY BEAM in there before, but I can appreciate sexy beams thanks to Disgaea and its silly useless sexy beam.
Also, Ness is not just hard to use, he’s just plain BAD. Assuming a maximum level of skill at every character, he’s in the bottom 4, where Lucas is in the top 8 or so.
The reasoning is that Lucas knocks people around WAY too well compared to Ness, plus his range and priority is better than Ness, I believe.
Awesome progress!!! Keep it up.
On the subject of Brawl, I agree, I like Lucas more then Ness, but taking in all the characters, Zelda is my favourite (I don’t transform into Sheik though).
I’m not a fan on Lucas and Ness’s final smash though. It’s too easy to dodge.
Just curious, when this awesome patch does come out, roughly how long can i look forward to playing it? Longer or shorter then EarthBound? (I hope I’m not breaking the gameplay question rule here)
When I first played it, and keep in mind I talked to characters maybe half the time and didn’t explore too much, it took about 30 hours. People who play without talking to people clock in between 20-30, and people who do stuff, talk to people, explore, etc. are often past 30 hours. There are also a few very short sidequesty things, and the star hack thing we’re adding in should help with the replay value somewhat. Then there are the rare items too, though they’re not as rare as in EB luckily (or not).
LoL, “live stream of Mato working on Mother 3”. That just cracks me right up.
^Do Want^
I prefer Lucas for use in brawls, but I like Ness better for the boss fights, as his PK thunder does more damage per hit.
BTW, what exactly is the star hack thing?
Mato I got 3 questions for you about mother 3,the first question is will getting all items,weapons and doing all the side quests make the game more enjoyable.My second question is do you recommend to use a faq/walkthrough to play mother 3 the first time you play the game and my final question is which mother 3 faq/walkthrough is the best if I plan on doing all side quests and getting all the weapons and items in the game that has no spoilers.
I agree with Inzoum that the boxes should all be [Number of Letters/(8 +1)]. Kumatora’s did look the best above.
I know this isn’t exactly the place for it, but Ness is NOT bad in Brawl. I play both boys, and kick butt equally well with both, and I’m not exactly an unskilled player. Ness excels at aerial comboing ability in a way Lucas simply cannot, and has more easily placed killing moves. Lucas has nice speed for zapping foes away in order to attack with projectiles, but against anyone with decent range and aerial priority, he gets swatted around.
Sorry for the off topic … But it upsets me when I hear people claiming that Ness is bad. I played him in Melee and Brawl, and he’s received a terrific boost and is definitely not as low as some people have suggested.
Retract my last comment, I apologize for belittling how complex the world of mother 3 is! 😉
I’m not trying to say Ness is bad, only that I prefer Lucas. Ness is probably my third or fourth choice to play as.
I personally don’t think it makes a big difference whether the grey box is +1 or not. It’s not game-ruining or anything 😛
Mato, what exactly is your occupation? Just curious
On a side note, using a psp to post comments sucks!
He is a translator!
I meant more specific like oral translator, script/book translator, software translator, etc.
what happen if nintendo some how releases mother 3 in the us,
Would u guys A)continue working on the hack or Bstop working on the hack
Yeah, Ness is better for air, that’s for sure. He’s still like my third, after Lucas and Diddy. It just pisses me off that his range with his bat is shorter.
SAM-E-BOI: here
Also, to answer your star hack question, see here.
TheReaper: 1. It’d make for more replay value if you wanna try to get stuff the second time around, 2. no, 3. I don’t know, but the starmen.net M3 walkthrough will be pretty nice when it’s done, I’d recommend that one if we were in the future.
amy: we would stop immediately, as stated in the FAQ/About page and in the very first post of the blog.
Hey Mato, did you ever meet Shigesato Itoi?
The same day I met Elvis and George Washington and Godzilla at the nice cafe in town.
Best answer ever.
lol
Mato thanks for answering my questions and Mato if you ever had a chance to ask Shigesato Itoi one question what would it be ?
How long would you say this game is?
If you did everything you could do?
Arsenis: to do EVERYTHING possible, you’d have to step in every step, read every sign, own every item, and a whole bunch of other stuff that might take you forever 🙂
I already answered it just a few posts above, but to do EVERYTHING, including talking to almost all people in all situations, probably 30-40 hours. Maybe more, depends on the player and what “everything” means. But when people play EarthBound, I don’t think people are worried about the length of the game by the end. Same way with MOTHER 3 I think. It’s like a meal, it’s how tasty the meal is and not how long it lasts that really counts for most people.
WOW! That is an impressive resumé. I’ve actually watched several of those shows and I played Kingdom Hearts II. Very impressive Mato, and thank you for the direct responses. At other forums/blogs I rarely ever get a response to anything I say.
Heheh. I’m enjoying Conan the Detective… I mean, Case Closed as we speak. Neat show. 🙂
I updated a few percentages on the to-do list just now. Not that it means anything much, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that people like numbers when it comes to stuff like this 😉
That list is starting to look small.
Yeah, a few of them could be knocked out in just a few hours too, like the sound clip thing, and the stuff I’m working on now will solve two things at once. Pretty soon we’ll only have a few things left, and then that’s when the gremlins will throw wrenches at us I’m sure 😛
Incidentally, we’re already at 125 menu patch dloads today so far. Man. Back in January it was like 20 a day for a while.
Hahaha.
That is like a 6x boost from January then.
SSBB and your crazed updating recently must be helping.
Hey Mato,
Just wondering, why would you use control codes? I can understand that it would save space in the case of “cohorts”, but is there another reason? I don’t understand why you’d need a control code for “a”.
Thanks in advance.
For instance, if an enemy name started with a vowel, or if neither “a” nor “an” would be appropriate. Also, to make it say cohort when there are two enemies but cohorts when there are three. All kinds of reasons for custom control codes besides those, too.
A small update, a Brawl discovery was made recently that COULD be moving Ness up. It improves Lucas MORE though, hilariously enough.
Looks awesome, the final release is approaching ever closer…
What discovery is that? Something related to the Subspace Emissary?
Holy crap why are there so many replies to this?
Also necrosis is I believe talking about this thing you can do with Ness/Lucas where you use their side-b at the same time as their second jump and you fly up while doing PK Fire. It looks thoroughly useless and will probably be given a retarded name like “wavefiring” by the competitive community.
Actually I guess the amount of replies are more or less par for the course. For some reason I thought updates usually got closer to 50 comments.
Necrosis could be talking about the use of a GC controller and remapping special to the C-stick so you can jump and then do a special, but tilt the stick in the other direction from what you’re facing, which gives you a nice push backwards.
Wow, that is an extremely impressive resume Mato. I know you’ve probably answered this a few times in this blog before, but how did you come across those jobs? Did you simply send in your resume to the companies and hope for the best? Or do you have some kind of connection that helped you get those jobs? Nevertheless, I’ve enjoyed many of the projects you’ve worked on, and I only wish the best for you in the future. I almost feel you’re too important/famous to talk to now… hehehe 😀
Before I forget, are you allowed to tell us what main projects you are working on for your occupation Mato?
Dr. Meat: Seems to be a lot of replies this time around, but maybe only because there’s some sort of weird dialogue going through most of it this time 😛
Bologna?: Mostly just being in the right place in the right time with the right stuff on the resume. Getting started out after college was tough 😐
SAM-E-BOI: Usually not until stuff is announced/released.
——
Anyway, back on topic, I’ve been too busy to work on stuff this weekend, but I’ve already been planning like crazy in my head, so I’m hoping this control code stuff won’t take very long once I have time to sit down and work on it. It should take out two things on the to-do list, and pave the way for another thing to get done more easily.
Hey, there are some hardcore spoilers on the Brawl page today, just so everyone knows. 🙂
Out of curiosity, why did long names with wide letters make you decide against using your idea for making the gray boxes fit to the pixel?
Last week I had upped the maximum # of letters for names that appear in those boxes to 20, and it made the box pretty crazy with 20 Ws. The original game had 7 as the normal max, and I think one character had a few extra letters, so they never really planned for names to be so long. So rather than try to mess with code that was already messing up, I went with the path of least resistance. It turned out better than I thought, though for especially long names there’ll still be more empty space than usual.
“Necrosis could be talking about the use of a GC controller and remapping special to the C-stick so you can jump and then do a special, but tilt the stick in the other direction from what you’re facing, which gives you a nice push backwards.”
This is indeed what I was referring to. I don’t really know for sure if it’s enough to push Ness up but, to me, it seems like it is.
Congratulations on the smooth progress, everyone! I’ve been following both Starmen.net and this translation project for a long time now, and I think it’s time I tried to get a bit into the game. Kudos on completing the grey box problems! The team has come a long way from the days when the Do-It-Yourself-Devotion page made me hold my breath… Keep up the good work, and many many thanks!
There’s two Mother 3 spoilers in today’s Brawl update. X_x Thankfully, I beat the game already… but still those were like end-of-the-game spoilers!
I agree with Moulinoski, the spoilers are huge, but not all that suprising if you think aboout it. Besides, both spoilers could be revealed in SSBB even without reading trophy descriptions or playing adventture mode. Just seeing the trophies would spark enough subconsious thought to come to the conclusion that the trophies were Mother 3 related. At least Nintendo gave the series enough respeect and consideration to put in numerous trophies, stickers, and cameos.
You translated Bump n Jump for mobile, Mato?? That was the first Nintendo game I ever got! Memories…
Also, it’s great to see the hacks falling into place as they are now. I know it’s complex and difficult at times, but at your guys’ pace it seems like you’re speeding through the To-Do list! Keep up the great work! You have my support.
I see what you mean by giving the series respect, but I personally felt kind of insulted seeing Lucas in Brawl, like they were laughing at us or something. 😛
I’m not sure if people know about this one yet, but KaioShin at http://kaioshin.romhacking.net/
just released a full english translation patch for Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart after working on the thing for 2 years.
This is only the second full translation I’ve seen for the GBA (Fire Emblem 6 being the other one)
I have no idea if different GBA games code their stuff in different ways, but maybe he would have some advice for some of the tougher hacks.
Just a thought.
More like taunting us… “HAHA! THIS IS ALL OF LUCAS YOU’LL EVER SEE!”
I kinda wish they put in Poo or Jess as a playable character, and instead of having Jeff as a assisting character, make that King or Buzz Buzz. Heck, maybe a Starman Jr. could have come in and pwned.
Oh well, one can dream.
I wish they didn’t have any spoilers though, I’m avoiding reading or even looking at most trophies now. I just hit a whenever a see a trophy come on the screen and don’t really soak in whatever it was.
Well, supposedly Fire Emblem’s appearance in Melee and subsequent interest by players is what got Nintendo to start releasing FE games over here. Maybe with all the Mother3 stuff in brawl, they’ll think about revisiting that franchise over here?
Well, it’d be nice, although it probably won’t happen.
You might want to add one pixel worth of space above the names in the gray boxes. It seems as though they’re squished in there now… Otherwise, this is the sexiest translation I’ve ever seen. I could’ve sworn these were real. XD
This is looking awesome. Keep up the good work!
Boo to spam filters! My posts were constructive, grrrr
On an icredibly off-topic note, does anyone know if the earthbound battler hack was ever updated past v0.5? Also, what hacks do you recommend for me to pass the time (and enjoy it) while waiting on the patch to be finished.
Oh, BTW Mato, the menu patch does work on gpsp (gameboy advance emulator for the psp). If you need someone to beta test the patch on gpsp, I’m ready and willing.
You are VERY talented to get such an arduous task done so quickly here. Seems like you’re really learning a lot more as you go and getting better and better, both you and Jeffman! I’m happy for both of you that while you can do such a great service to the Earthbound and Starmen community, at the same time I’m extremely glad you can learn a lot and gain these useful hacking skills/knowledge! Everybody wins thanks to you both 🙂
Hmm, I’ve got an EZ-Flash IV GBA (and a Super Card SD, but who cares) if you want to test the patch with different flash carts. I’d imagine you probably have that covered though.
I don’t think they are looking for beta testers.
If you look on the to-do list, there is a section that says they will be testing on multiple platforms for compatibility. I did not know if any other posters use gpsp, so was merely throwing it out there.
The menu patch page says that it contains only minor (if any) code changes- it’s mainly just replacing text.
My guess is the real testing will only begin when the final translation patch is done.
Awww, no random picture to end this update.
Oh Well.
Well, Good progress so far! I know I couldn’t do this!
I noticed in the screenies that the ghost’s name was “nice ghost.” in the japanese version im playing(with menu patch, nice), all ghosts you can talk to are called “drunk ghosts.” Is “nice ghost” just a better translation, or what?
Yeah, it should be “nice”, not “drunk”. I translated the menu patch names pretty quickly and I guess I stupidly assumed “yoi” in that case meant the wine ghost’s drunkenness and not all the nice ghosts in general. I realized the mistake not too long after releasing 1.5, heh. But it’s just a menu patch so oh well.
Mato my man, don’t be so hard on yourself.
I have to say, Tomato, that I’m impressed that you’re still cracking at this. After Smash Bros. spoiled Mother 3, I felt a strong urge to play Mother 3 further. Then I thought “I wonder how that translation is coming along.” I was delighted to see that this page is still frequently updated and that you’re still hard at work. Keep it up!
The concept of a drunk ghost is utterly delightful to me
Maybe it’s another pun. 😉 The ghosts are nice and drunk.
just think that if you were playing an official localized version, that would be a caffeinated ghost.
Ok, I hate to say possibly mean things but, will the game actually use a (S) for things like cohorts? If so then I will not be happy at all. I would rather look at cohorts even if their’s only 1 then look at the lazy style (S). I still get a kick out of having 1 lives left though.
Anyone notice that all the characters in Brawl are good or were once good? That includes Bowser. Points for figuring out when he was good. Why not some vilians too or maby I am wrong about the no vilians thing since I don’t dare too look at the brawl site.
That picture was a test. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, part of what I’m working on will make it automatically say cohort, cohorts, or nothing at all, depending on the situation.
Not only that, they’d change the wine glasses to cups of coffee. Not to mention half a dozen other things that’d be changed and possibly even skipped if this actually fell into nintendo’s hands several years ago. 😉 There’d be so much censorship that the story itself wouldn’t even have been faithful.
Today’s Nintendo though probably wouldn’t censor nearly as much.
Nintendo pretty much has a “clean” image to uphold. So of course they would change things to make it “ok” for everyone in the US. Is that ok? Sometimes. For example, I watched the first episode of Zatch Bell! in the native Japanese form and HOLY $%^! I saw something that was NOT ok. So I am happy that there were some changes made for that show. Name me 1 Mature Nintendo game that was made 1st party. Not a Rareware game like Conker’s bad fur day, not Capcom’s Resident Evil series, but a first party nintendo game. I don’t know of any game. That’s how Nintendo is, always family friendly.
You should just call them all “Friendly Ghosts”. Having a bunch of Casper’s would make the game even greater.
Seriously, though, I happen to think the grey boxes look just fine.
@Eddward: I’m pretty sure Ganondorf was a bad guy all the time.
Eddward: Eternal darkness, sanity’s requiem. It’s a pretty awesome game too.
Yeah, “friendly” does sound better. That makes it an even longer name, hopefully it’ll look okay, but I’ll probably use it anyway 🙂
Man I can’t wait ’til you get the final version, you guys just ROCK!!! keep up the good work for us Earthbound fans.
Anyway, I’m gonna mess around with the battle control code stuff some more today.
Plus, it conveys that the ghost is currently nice to you, which could otherwise change. 😉
Final bosses…
Hard in both the playing, and the hacking, of games.
>.>
That’s neat, Mato! “Friendly” is absolutely better 🙂
I started playing using mato’s guide, but had to switch to the spookychee walkthru. I find not knowing story details ruins it even more.
Ness is AWESOME in brawl. I kill more people online with him than I do with Lucas. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that they brought back some of his power from the original SSB. Not all of it, but a good deal of it. If you keep spamming people with PK Fire/side throw, you can wipe out everybody (But you won’t make any friends that way).
@the super-awesome and newly improved ghost name:
“Friendly Ghost” is AT LEAST ten million bagillion times better than “Nice Ghost.”
Man, you guys just keep the updates going, and I keep going “Wow.” It’s like some kinda vicious cycle!
Seriously though, I salute you guys for your efforts, cannot wait to see the day this is finished so I can finally see everything in Mother come full circle.
I’ve only NOW finished Earthbound Zero/Mother 1, and damn…it just makes me want to play Mother 3 even more now!
Wow, haven’t commented in a while.
Anyway, this looks great! Keep up the good work.
I don’t why I get so hyped when you post just one screenshot with a fairly minor change, but I do. It looks so cool…..
[…] quanto fatto e quanto rimane ancora da fare. Per quanto riguarda lo stato attuale, è stato appena aggiustato il piccolo menù grigio che fa da sfondo ai nomi, che ora si allunga in base al testo che deve […]
so does 212 comments set some sort of record for the blog?
This code’s been a bit peskier than I expected, but so far I’ve been making good progress on getting our custom control codes to work.
thanx for answering my question even tho it was on the Faq
Whew, okay, after much longer than I had hoped, I think I finally got the groundwork set for the custom CCs, so now I just need to go about implementing them. I already got one in there that’ll insert the name of the current enemy. Hopefully this will let me fix the “missing name” stuff from a previous mini-update. After this, it’s pretty basic stuff, so hopefully all will go well. Once it does, that’ll be 2.5 more things off the list 🙂
Keep up the good work, Mato! 2 more things off the list… just awesome! ;P
Awesome Job guys, I want to get into this kind of stuff. I am a computer engineering major so this kind of stuff is right up my alley. Can’t wait until the final product.
I’m just curious. With CCC’s being implemented now, would a “PK Hack 3” be possible in the forseeable future?
Mato, could you recommend me some fun earthbound hacks? I tried the 0.5 version of the earthbound battle but it was all buggy. Still fun though. Does anyone know iff it was updated?
More personal questions for Mato…
Favorite food?
Favorite TV show?
What do you do if a traffic light suddenly turns yellow? Speed up, or slow down and stop?
Personally, I would speed up.
Hey, first time poster, I remember checking this out a few months ago but forgot all about it for a while xD (Luckily I added my e-mail to the “To be Contacted” list when I first came) With all the Brawl hype and seeing Lucas I remembered about this and am amazed at your progress. You guys are doing a great job and I can’t wait to play Mother 3, but take all the time you guys need to make it perfect of course.
Also, quick question. In your latest post you said after you tackle a certain thing that’d mark 2 or so things off the to-do list and then you said everything else would be easy, do you think that could possibly mean a complete patch sometime soon?
Sorry if that’s a bad question, I just couldn’t help but ask. Once again, keep up the good work Mato and everybody else working on this. I and all my friends who like Mother support you 210%!
Also, if anyone’s interested in some Brawl battling here’s my Brawl FC:
2750-0787-7854
my name on their is NOSS and if you add me send me yours at Jinzomanz@yahoo.com 8D
This fills me with hope! Glad it’s coming alonf pretty good, nice work and nice day. (Or night I guess.)
I know I’ve missed many questions in the past day or two, doh. I’ll try to get to them at some point.
For now, still working on adding some more control codes in. They’re pretty easy to do, just time-consuming.
Unsavory Maggot: These custom control codes are only for certain things in battle and one or two things in the main script. Unlike EB, and like most other games, the script and game flow stuff are kept separate. As I work on this project though, I always keep the eventual hackers in mind.
NOSS: Oh, sorry, I meant that in the context of the task at hand, not the whole rest of the project. Almost all of the remaining hacks will be pretty daunting, sadly.
:O So many posts!