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.
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:
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.
If you’ve been following the mini-updates I do in the comments lately, most of this is probably not-news to you, but I did make some sudden, recent progress too 🙂
Been a few days since the last update, but I often post mini-updates in the comments. The last few days have seen a LOT of stuff getting done, but most of it is stuff that can’t be seen in screenshots or the like.
Probably the biggest stuff that’s happened is that I’ve been reorganizing stuff in the ROM and simplifying things a lot more. This not only fixes stuff on the to-do list, but will also make hacking the rest of the stuff a little easier and probably mean slightly less time fixing bugs down the road. Also gave a few of our tools some good upgrades.
I still have some more organizing stuff to do, but one of the main benefits of all this is that menu message text now works fully 😀
I did a ton of work yesterday, as I mentioned in this mini-update, but I’m still not done with that stuff, so this isn’t a real update. Instead, I played a little bit of my Japanese MOTHER 3 cart last night and was like whoa. I’ve gotten so used to seeing everything either in good English now, or at least garbage English that I forgot what the game looks like in Japanese 😉
It was pretty neat, so I thought I’d show some before and after things again. We’ve come a long way in a short time!
Whew, it’s been a pretty intense day of stuff, but I’ve finally managed to get almost all of the main battle text hacked and working well — even better than the original game, in a way 😯
But before I go into the blah-blah technical talk, here’s a new video showing how things look and act now.
There’s a chance people might be like, “Huh? What did you change?” so if that’s true in your case, see that video from two days ago. I also fixed and improved some other things.
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)
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.
