Lots of Pics
I was looking through the preview page and so much of it was really old, ugly, out-of-date stuff, so I spiffed it up with new pics using the latest build. So go have a look-see if you’re bored.
Script, Enemies, Music
A couple things of note today.
First is that we started looking into the main script problem, because it’s just a pain in the butt and we gotta do it someday. As you might recall from this video, the problem was that the game was for some reason ignoring [BREAK] control codes after 33 letters for some reason. Even the super hackers were like, “Huh?” after staring at megs upon megs of disassembly logs.
Anyway, after looking into it some more myself, I was left as puzzled as the others. Then, when I described the problem in more detail to the team, Jeffman was like, “Oh, that’s easy. I had that same problem with the map location name routine.” So he goes and fixes that in like half an hour 😯
Before fix 
After fix
Battle Video and Other Tidbits
Been a few days since the last update, and not too much has happened, though admittedly all the recent Smash Bros. Brawl news and videos and such has been really distracting 😉 Man, I can’t wait.
Anyway, on a lark, I recorded a very quick video of a battle. We haven’t focused too much on battle stuff, as that’s its own huge problem child of its own, but at least with this video, we can see how things stand. It’s not too bad, given that we’ve done very little work on it. It can only go up from here 😀
It’s short and ugly and not very exciting, but check it out if you’re interested anyway.
Names, Names, Names
Not so much done in the last couple days. I really should just keep translating the various enemy descriptions and other files, but it always feels like there’s no progress (or at least any progress to show) when there’s this whoooooooole huge bunch of hacking left to do. So I did a very tiny bit of hacking, while Jeffman did a good amount of poking and prodding the game’s smelly programming code.
One of the main things he did was look into an annoying and mystifying bug that was on the naming screen. It turns out it was caused by another of our hacks, so that assembly hack needs to be redone. In the meantime, he managed to fix the naming screen problem AND make things look really nice and VWF-y as you’re typing your names in. Here are some examples.
Updated To-Do List
Mostly a bunch of little cosmetic things done in the last day. Here’s an example. It’s like those things they have in newspapers — see if you can spot all four differences 😛
Before 
After
Simple stuff like that is what’s happened in the last day.
Names and Menus
A lot of little updates lately, huh?
A couple more things done since the last update. The biggest thing is probably that Jeffman finished hacking the in-battle name boxes so that the names will center properly. They now look kick-ass and professional 😀
Uh oh, Flint’s in trouble 
Even 4 names center correctly,
including 8-letter names
Various Hacking
Just a quick, short, nice little update for now.
I forget where we last left off, but the 8×8 font was looking nicer and thanks to some helpful reminding from people here, I got it looking even better. I also got the abbreviated names working for the battle memory menu, while everything else uses the full names. I tried the same trick with item names, but alas, no luck. Expanding the item names is going to be hellish.
Abbreviated name here 
Full name here
Battle Memories
Not too much done this time, but I want to at least talk about it/show stuff before I get too busy that I forget about it.
Jeffman kicks butt and hacked a VWF for the enemy list screen. He deserves way more credit than me for most of the hacking stuff done in the last month or two. He takes on the more complicated stuff while I sit here fiddling with text insertion tools and simple hacks. So he rocks!
Anyway, I think this might be the last font routine that needs a VWF hack. Luckily, it doesn’t involve sprite text or any ugly stuff like that.
As you can see on the picture on the left, even with the VWF, there’s no way these long enemy names are going to fit, so I did a quick test based on a suggestion from Gemini last month and tried using a modified EarthBound font to try to get a little more space, since it has slimmer letters. I quickly made an 8×8 font based on the EB font and tried it out. That’s what the picture on the right is. The text does look nicer, but there’s still no way the long names will fit on the left menu.
Insert Title Here
Still recovering and still playing catch-up with real life work, but some ever-so-tiny progress.
New Year
Nothing much in this update, just wanted to let people know that yes, we’re still alive, and yeah, things are still progressing. I got sick and now have a ton of real life work to catch up on, Jeffman’s been out of the country until a few days ago, and I think everyone else has been enjoying the holidays.
