Sprite Text Progress
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.
These are all with our original VWF hacks turned off, meaning the VWFs are now being done at the lowest level possible. The reason this is important can be read about here.
There’s still a good deal of work left to do with this hack, but the hard part is over, it’s mostly tweaking stuff and making the game work better with the hack. It’ll still be a few days until I can get that all done though, very busy with real life work for the next week or so.
One thing you might not notice right away is that the sprite text welding worked flawlessly with different-colored text — you can see that the light gray text remains light gray (or grey, or whatever) when it needs to be. Nice 🙂
You may notice that non-sprite text is strangely missing from those screenshots. This is actually a good thing — it turns out the non-sprite text goes through the same glyph buffer that sprite text does, and even shares much of the same code. So messing with this sprite text stuff also wound up messing with the other text we were going to need to fix later. The text isn’t showing up here because things need to be initialized elsewhere. Once the sprite text is done, I’ll move on to the non-sprite menu text, and when it’s done, that’ll let us be able to display extra-long item names. So this sprite text hacking is almost like 1.5 birds with one stone 😀
What’s coolest of all though is that the main script text ALSO seems to use this same glyph buffer, and main script buffer overflow is probably the biggest, ugliest, and scariest thing to fix of all. So this is already fixing it a lot. Once the main script buffer stuff is fixed fully, main script text will always appear correctly and won’t cause any crashing, freezing, etc.
So in summary, this sprite text hack stuff is turning out to do way more than we originally hoped for. It’s going to make things a good deal easier, which means less time needed to hack them.
Anyway, as I make more progress on the sprite text front, I’ll post more mini-updates in the comments. Meanwhile, it sounds like Jeffman’s hard at work finishing up naming screen stuff, so hopefully we can cross that off the to-do list soon. In fact, he’s doing such a detailed job with it that he even found an honest-to-goodness bug in the original game. And I think reid mentioned having re-rerecorded the voice clips I needed, so we may see the voice thing getting crossed off the to-do list soon, too.
So it seems even when things are really busy offline, the project’s still moving quite quickly somehow 😀
Awesome work! I can’t wait for the complete game!
Your posts always make my day.
Good show, gentlemen.
You sir, are amazing.
Nice cant wait
Awesome.
Hey,
thanks for sticking it out and continuing work on the project.. the prospect of the patch being complete fills me w/ delicious joy–in the midst of my mundane routine!
Yippee!!!!
also, this is the best place in comments i’ve ever gotten (SEVENTH)!
Even if it’s not a significant update, it still means that you guys are one step closer to completion. Great work!
Yay! I have to say, people should donate money to you guys, you guys are amazing. I loved the game, even not knowing what some signs and people said. Your patch allowed me to go through the game, allowing me to see where I am in reference to names. I thank you for this, and I thank you for what will come. You guys are definitely awesome, and deserve a giant award by Itoi. I don’t think Itoi would be angered by this, I think he would laugh, thinking, “What crazy fans I have in America!” Great job!
You guys are progressing rather nicely, I believe this will be finished by at MOST the end of August if everything is going as fast as it is
Keep up the great de-coding
Great work!
What was the bug that Jeffman found, if you don’t mind me asking?
So…close…
Don’t you guys dare to stop now.
i am still amazed to see how many other people check here often enough to leave a comment within the first 30 min after posting
“What was the bug that Jeffman found, if you don’t mind me asking?”
I was just about to ask that myself.
But anyways…
This all seems to be shaping up rather quickly, even when you guys are passively working on it. Keep up the fantastic work, seriously.
Habiib: Go to the top-right most letter in the naming screen. Press up, and it should go to where “OK” is (or the Japanese equivalent). Then press right. It *should* go to “Don’t Care” but it doesn’t. I’m impressed he found it and recognized it as a bug with the original game while he was hacking the English version 🙂
That’s funny… I was going to check this site a half hour ago when this was posted, but I checked two other sites, first.
Damn non-tabbed Opera Wii browser.
Anyway, that’s really awesome, and I love reading this blog no matter how little is done. Although it seems thing are going well, anyway. Hope these next few days go better than you expected.
And thanks for the new post, refreshing the comments. It’s insane how popular this is. Perhaps even more daily posts than Starmen.net?
I’m not sure if this was asked, but would sprite-welding mess with the display of the individual letters? Like, how in EarthBound when someone was talking, it shows up one letter at a time. Would this sprite-welding result in the display of the letters block-by-block, like a “B” and half of an “o” at a time, instead of the by-letter method?
You guys are coming a long way in what seems like a short time. I greatly appreciate your efforts in getting MOTHER 3 into English, so we Westerners can appreciate it in full~
Ahh, that’s great news! I’m also curious about that bug Jeffman found… ^^;
This is so awesome Im going to do a backflip
It’s been asked a lot. It’s still not clear if it’ll matter with the main script. My hunch is that it won’t matter because it looks like the game already does it letter by letter rather than all at once. But we’ll mess with that and figure out all that when we get to the main script in a few weeks.
So, in short, you found the glyph buffer that all the text routines use, thus facilitating you fixing both sprite text, item text, and other glitchy text? Wow.
I see that the sprite text hack doesn’t handle newlines just yet. Still, progress is progress, especially when it makes previously hard stuff easy to fix.
Hahaha, I love it when you say “busy with real life work”. I don’t love that you’re busy, but:
1) I can relate! Reading this blog has been a most welcome distraction. 😀
2) Do you consider this your “fake life”? 😀
No answered, needed Mato – just posing a rhetorical question. Keep up the brilliant work as always!
Wow, horrendous spelling and grammar:
*No answer needed, Mato.
Uh so…I can’t wait. How long have you been a Mother fan?
GREAT PROGRESS
“No answered,” needed Mato. 😉
Will you be fixing the naming screen bug, or just leaving it alone because it’s really minor and/or hard to fix, out of curiosity?
Its updates and unexpected breakthroughs like these that make me doubt that this project will take as much time as people say it will. in that case, i better start making that pie soon…
I’m curious… has this affected Battle Text at all?
Battle text is done completely differently. There isn’t even a buffer, the letter graphics go straight from the ROM to video memory. So battle text is completely unaffected.
im guessing thats a good thing then?
Is there any way of tracing the menu designer? He seems to have caused so much trouble…
Thanks for the response to my other thing Mato, cool that I pretty much had it right, and also cool that you listed the things you could do with it 😀 Feels good to not be dumb! 🙂
Cool that you’ve made so much progress just from here and there 🙂
One thing I’ve just noticed is when there’s a decent amount of sprite text on the screen, the game will slow down, this is particularly so with the naming screens. It’s because the game draws and redraws and redraws constantly to OBJ memory until the screen changes or something happens. It’s really lame and annoying, so hopefully we’ll be able to tell it to stop pointlessly redrawing that text when it doesn’t need to be redrawn. Some flag settins and flag checks should do the trick, but it’s figuring out how to do it that’ll be the unfun part.
Too awesome. Keep it up! We all appreciate your hard work. 🙂
WOOOOOOO! almost there….
I know you’re busy, but this blog is now one of my daily habits… and yes, you don’t update every day, of course 🙂 but reading every new article is like the latest progress towards technological evolution 8)
blah blah blah. I love this blog, exciting :3
i agree, it seems as if every new update, however small it may seem to you, is huge for me(and probably a lot of other people too!)
Can’t wait for the next installment!
This marks significant, objective progress.
I too have incorporated this blog into some of my habits. I check whenever I’m just sick of whatever I’m doing (like in the middle of one of my classes today 🙂 ) and I know that I’ll have 10-15 minutes of reading. Of course, an update is even better. I feel like when I’m playing this game I’ll keep watching the text and thinking “It came out really well.” Who needs immersion?
Glad to see that this is progressing so well! Hopefully, this will soon allow you to cross out major portions of the list and get things down to where all you need to worry about is the translation.
It will be great once the only thing you have to worry about is whether the script has any typos in it 🙂
Whats the reason for making the Menu text blue?
Drkirby: “Here are some ugly WIP pics. The text is blue for debugging purposes.”
Awesome work, gentlemen. Keep it up! Sometimes I think of how busy I can be with work, and how lazy I can be when I’m not doing “real life” work, and then I think of you guys who are busy with “real life” work and are managing a whole game translation and hacking operation in addition to keeping this blog up to date! It just makes me realize my work ethic is shit.
I need to play this so badly …
You people are the light in the dark room, the bright ray of sunshine at the end of the tunnel. Fine show friends, top notch and what not. You really make my day, congrats on all your hard work!
Keep on truckin’! I sincerely wish that I could learn all this code stuff fast enough to help you, but I’m kinda struggling myself with learning RUBY. And by learning, I mean that I have absolutely no idea what the heck I’m doing. So yeah, thanks for the updates!
BeadlyDastard, good luck with Ruby 😀 I love Ruby, it’s the RAILS I have issues with. Uy. I have no idea how to make anything from scratch in that silly framework despite spending hours doing examples and reading stuff ; ;
Hey, you can tell people are putting thought into their comments. I guess everyone doesn’t want to give the typical ‘Thank you’, ‘Amazing!’ and ‘Good job’ anymore, since your work is worth more than that.
I also think you’re a really good writer, too. Keeping things interesting, entertaining and (mostly)understandable. I think that too makes more people coming back. You know, instead of “Update: Added VWF to sprite welding. Next Update: Fixed bug where… etc.”
Oh, an I was going to add(for no purpose really) that for some reason, I hate the term “Keep on truckin'”. Don’t know why, I just think it sounds ‘ugly’. So with that, again, here’s hoping the next few days are easy on you and go well.
Hmm, does Mt. Orishimo mean anything? Or any of the other Japanese-sounding words that are location names, for that matter. Or will I find out once the final script revisions are done and the patch is released?
Awesome!
Just know that I am never disappointed with any of your updates and you need not apologize for any of them.
I just got the original Mother soundtrack in the mail yesterday. I got it from ebay. Based on the sound clips I had heard of it, I thought it was just going to be a second-rate collection of kinky 80s-style music, but I got it anyway for the nostalgia factor.
I was totally wrong. It is one of the most phenomenal, if not THE most phenomenal, video game soundtrack I have ever heard, and I own quite a few of those. Catherine Warwick blew me away as an artist. I’m sad she didn’t go far in the music world.
I believe my post is the third strongest.
I swear on my life that if I ever find your address…
I will send you a box of delicious chocolate chip cookies.
It’s funny Mato, if you look back through this blog, most of your posts contain some sort of “real busy with real life work right now but..” sentence. Not that that’s a bad thing, especially since you’re doing what you love. In fact, all it shows is your determination and dedication to make time for this project even when you don’t really have time for it. Of course, having so many comments regularly probably helps to make it an obligation, but after all this time I’m still impressed by your tenacity.
i’m tired today:
http://i28.tinypic.com/1gmbmp.png
lol Flint looks rather haggard. Nice work.
This is such a great project and i cant wait for it to be finished. A great number of thanks!
The only problem will be when this is all over and Mato takes a well-deserved vacation. Then what site will we check? As much as I like reloading the Laplace no Ma page, “95%” isn’t that interesting with no idea what’s going on behind the scenes and no idea what struggles the hackers and translators are suffering through.
That said, I guess we’ll all be playing Mother 3 for quite a while after it’s released, but you know what I mean 🙂
sweet
mitch, your stuff is really clever and terrific. keep it up.
Nothing can beat the extremely pleasing sensation of reading a new update while smoking a red marlboro, scroll thru the posts and after reading a bunch of “awesome job” “cant wait” messages find mitch´s message and watch his watch art, its such an habit now :-0!
Mitch,… thats really great work man!
……however..personally.. i’d say thats a bit too much of an accent in flint’s crotch area
Rod I am starting to worry about you!
I mean come on cowboys gotta have… equipment. Tool’s gotta be big enough for the job!
Dr. Meat: Various place names will probably be localized a little, I was actually waiting for someone to ask about that. That stuff will come much later though, for now we gotta hack this junk 🙁
mitch: flint’s never been too good with them doshgarn newfangled compyootors.
necrosis: It’ll probably stay, it’s apparently a huge hassle. But maybe Jeffman’ll mess with it when we’re all busy with the script editing stuff which’ll take a few months.
Rod: believe me, i phoned it in
/”So this sprite text hacking is almost like 1.5 birds with one stone”/
Well, Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird.
I guess that makes you third strongest.
Erm, is there a correct way to get boldface/italics here?
Let me try a few options.
[b]Hi.[/b] [i]Hi.[/i] (Square brackets)
Hi. Hi. (Angle brackets)
*Hi.* /Hi./ (BBS equivalents)
AHAH! Angle brackets!
Oh, by the way, I found a working website. Well, it doesn’t actuallly work that well. 😉
WOOOOOOO!!!
GO MATO GO MATO GO GO GO!!!!
M3 FTW!!
Can’t wait for the day the translation is done!
I don’t know jack about hacking, but I do know that it’s hard work.
Keep it up!!
is this still that welding business? or something different now?
also, people should stop getting so “OMG SO CLOZ”-ish, Mato’s already said it’s not gonna be out before the first half of the year for sure.
and “Kumatroa” has been bothering me, you should fix that.
<_<
So, what you’re saying is that translating this game is going to be harder than just changing the Japanese data into English inside the rom?
Been reading for the past couple of weeks or so, and I have to say the same, it’s becoming a sort of a semi-daily habit of mine to check up on the latest update. The updates themselves are interesting enough, and I don’t know anything about coding (especially for videogames), but they’re so understandable and really helps put things into perspective about the ridiculous amount of work that has to be put into these things. Also, mitch’s art are always cool.
So good luck. To see such consistent progress and updates when this is just something you guys do in your spare time is both impressive and awesome to say the least.
I’m praying that my battery lives long enough in my old EZFA flash cart to keep my mother 3 saves working once this comes out! It is well past it’s 3 year life expectancy.
Great progress. I thought you were just a translator? Now you are an uber hacker!
Mato, I seriously think you (and the rest of the group translating M3) are revolutionizing fan translation. I’ve never seen a group keep its fans so updated, not to mention actually taking the time to *explain* stuff.
Actually, I think you might be spoiling us. =P
SomeGuy, I don’t think savegames will work after the patch has been applied.
Mike, why wouldn’t they?
And I think they mean that their flash cart thing has a battery save that only lasts like 3 years
ugh it’s late and i’m tired so that made no sense. I know you meant like, saves from the Japanese version. Of course those won’t work. But that’s not what they’re concerned with.
Whoa, waking up for school and checking the updates/comments with a DS homebrew browser… That’s pretty funny. I just hope I’m not too tired.
Again, I have evidence that shows this site is awesome, Mother 3 is awesome.
Awesome, it seems things are moving along nicely for you guys, good luck on the rest
The saves will work, it’s just a matter of changing the character names to the new format, something which we’re considering writing a public tool for.
who smoke more Methamphetamine?? Byuu or Mato ?
Okay, person who thinks “Name” means “Topic Title” (a.k.a. the person whose name changes from aaaaa to ok to youre great to question).
Neither of them smoke methanphetamine. The joke is getting really old. Either that, or you might actually be serious. But if you’re serious about a question like that, then mustn’t you be a meth user yourself?
But no problem! Just tell me your area code, police district, and evidence of posession, and I’ll “help you out.”
this makes me believe that there are still decent people in this world
<3
Marking my place.
This game has become all I can think about.
Let’s have some ugly pics.
Still need to do some stuff to make the 8×8 text come out right. There’s actually no special reason for using 8×8 text instead of normal text in almost all cases it seems, the text acts the same pretty much I think. We shall see though.
Status icon doesn’t mess things up too much, which is neat. Even when it’s in the middle of text it’s not TOO bad, but I still need to do some work with it later. Sometimes sprites get garbagey and sometimes weird colored boxes will appear on the screen sometimes, I’m not sure why yet.
That description works well, her name doesn’t, though. Need to look into that at some point.
This looks good actually.
I went over to Duster/Boney and this happened 😯
Anyway, I hope you enjoy those instances of ugliness, usually I only show nice-ish pics, but this is a behind-the-scenes of my insanity 😛
Probably no time to do anything for this today though, bleh 🙁
First off, I want to thank byuu for his awesome work, especially considering the new .ups patch format. Tomato, when I tried to find a .ppf patcher for Linux, I found only one or two (I know I had to compile one of the files from source with GCC, not a pretty task), but they didn’t work at all (kept getting really weird errors). Since byuu’s format already has a patcher for Linux (not to mention that anyone can create their own patcher), things will be a lot easier (hey byuu, get the Ubuntu repo maintainers to put your patcher in Multiverse! 😛 ). By the way, is there any reason why I can’t post a comment on that news story directly?
Anyways, the project in general has made tremendous leaps and bounds since I last checked. It’s too bad that NoA won’t pay attention to this feat of dedication.
Very cool, Mato. When you break things, that’s when you know it’s working~ 😀
Silver Streak: old entries are closed for comments when new ones are made, probably to keep everyone from going insane
Because it’s easier to keep on top of conversations that way, also spambots and lamers liked to mess with old entries.
Mato,
Love that your posts are full of technical detail. I had NO IDEA how the rom-hacking process went. Every time you post, i get a little better overview of how things go.
Really cool stuff, mang.
OK, got it to space 8×8 letters correctly. That was easy. But I think a few months ago it would’ve taken an hour or so. Only took 1 minute now 😛