This sprite text stuff has been hell. But it’s now pretty much done, after several weeks. Oof, I feel like I just ran 8 marathons.
All the sprite text stuff displays correctly now, and after a few days of insanity and bug-fixing and hair-ripping, I finally got the optimization code up and running, so the game no longer stutters like a drunk old man whenever there’s some sprite text on the screen. See the video in the last update to see what I mean. Here’s a new video showing the current, faster, fixed version. This is pretty much the speed things will go at now, though some code-cleanup and other stuff might make it a little faster before the final patch.
Various news on the sprite text front. First, Jeff and I spent a @O*#TUOS amount of time trying to figure out a few bugs that our sprite text hack was causing. I won’t go into the details, but eventually we found and fixed them. They were real nasty ones, too. Very glad that that’s over. Here are some pics of the bugs now gone.
Claus doesn’t freak out now
Boney doesn’t move now
A different bug (before) (ignore the blue, that’s for testing)
after
These bugs affected a bunch of other things too, so it’s good to see them gone now.
Today is 4/20. That means different things for different people. For EarthBound fans like us, it’s the anniversary of MOTHER 3’s release in Japan. I wasn’t planning on doing any special updates or anything today actually, but a sudden wave of nostalgia hit me, so here’s a little something I guess.
This project really started sometime last June or July, and as far as ROM translations go, things have been progressing at an incredible rate. Most ROM translation projects die after a few months or take 5+ years. The short video here shows how much has been done on the hacking side of things since we started last summer, and shows some of the stuff that’s left to do. There’s really not that much left to hack when you step back and look at it like this. At least, hopefully it helps explain some of the to-do list stuff a little better.
I’ve done a good deal of work since the last update, and things are looking up. First, the main thing is that the sprite text welding hack is finally nearly done. It’s taken a lot more time than I had expected, what with real life rush jobs, unexpected craziness from the game, etc. etc. Anyways, it’s not quite done yet, a few last things need to be done, which I’ll talk about in a bit. First, here are some before and after pics.
Whew, very exhausted after about two weeks of really intense real life work. Managed to finish it on time, and finish it well, and now I have some more time to spare for this here project. Trying to juggle real life and this project is tough sometimes, but having this blog helps, since if I were to disappear for just a few days people would notice and make sure I’m still on track 😉 So in a weird sense, this blog and the regular readers are pretty helpful in keeping the project going 😛
Anyway, as I mentioned in a mini-update in the comments of the last update, I’ve now got a little more time on my hands again and have started to finish up the sprite text hacking stuff. Though if you missed that mini-update, I wouldn’t blame you — there are over 300 comments in there and it turned into some kind of crazy message board there the last few days, most of the stuff very off-topic. To help make things better, please use the Starmen.Net forums if you want to talk with fellow fans about off-topic stuff and shoot the breeze and all that. Let’s keep this blog about MOTHER 3, okay? 😉
Hey, it’s me: that other guy who’s working on the project. I heard that Tomato’s head imploded from all the sprite welding so I’ll be doing this update.
First of all, the naming screens are all done. Spick-and-span, clean, and working. 100% full power.
Remember in Earthbound when Tony would call you up and ask for YOUR name? The person holding the controller? Well, you can name yourself in MOTHER 3 as well. Later on in Earthbound you get a chance to confirm or change the name you had originally inputted. But here’s something you may not have known: in MOTHER 2, when you get asked for the second time to input your name, you’re only allowed to use English letters. As a result, you actually have two player names by the end; the English one gets shown in the credits because there simply isn’t enough room for an entire Japanese credits font.
Click onward for some juicy screenshots and programming talk!
While I was busy farting around with sprite text welding and junk, Jeffman was hard at work on fixing up some naming screen re-programming. The biggest thing is that he made it so that “Don’t Care” is no longer selectable on naming screens where it isn’t an option, that was a little bug we had of our own. Also, he thought up a better letter arrangement, so here that is here:
The last post is already way too big and it’d be insane to expect people to read that many comments, many of which are filled with my mini-updates. So here’s a bigger mini-update.
I’ve still been busy this week, but every once in a while I’ll find an hour or two to mess with the sprite text stuff some more. The sprite text routine isn’t done yet, but it’s getting mighty close.
Here are some ugly WIP pics. The text is blue for debugging purposes.
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.
