The main translation notes will take precedence, but I put together a preview of just a few things to expect in the “Unused Content” portion of the site. You can see the preview below, but beware that there probably are spoilers!
It’s kind of rambly and there’s a lot of stuff to cover as the game is just starting, but for those who are interested, part 1 of the translation notes/commentary is up here:
If anyone has good questions for this part of the game that I haven’t covered, I still have enough energy to go add the answers into the notes. Anyway, I hope people find these notes interesting. They’re kind of like my MOTHER 2 and Earthbound comparison site, except this time it’s my own translation I’m picking apart. What an odd situation 😛
It’s been a week already??? I hope everyone’s had fun with the game since the patch was released, it’s definitely been fun seeing people’s reactions to the game 😀
We moved the blog to this new address, so I don’t know if the RSS stuff was broken in the process. Anyway, there will still be the occasional update here for various things, for those who are still interested. More on that stuff later.
First big piece of news is a little contest we cooked up the other day. The idea came to me in a dream. Basically, record yourself doing one of the crazy dances in the game. The top 3 videos (some people on the starmen.net staff will do the judging I guess) will earn their creators cool stuff, like: a boxed copy of Japanese MOTHER 3, one of those rare Mr. Saturn plushies, or an official Ultimate Chimera T-Shirt from The King of Games. See the video for details and an example! The contest ends on November 14th.
The blog has been relocated to this address.
The patch will be out at the end of this week.
Testing is very nearly done now. I have one chapter left to go through, and the other testers are finishing up, too. I actually didn’t plan on making an update until the testing was done, but people were getting pretty antsy and there were too many comments in the last update to keep up with anymore. Luckily, no new major bugs have been found, just a typo or two and a few rare battle text lines needing fixing. They were all very simple to fix, of course.
This past week was very slow-going for me with real-life work, but pretty much everyone has stepped up to the plate in one way or another to help out. The testers are awesome and trying things I probably wouldn’t have even thought of. byuu’s been kind enough to help put the final patching program together for Windows and Linux, all while very sick. sblur’s been working on the Mac version. Jeff’s been around to answer testers’ questions. Very awesome teamwork. Send all free food and booze to them 😉
Testing will probably end in the next day or two. I still want demi to look through a few key lines to make them sound better, I set him up with all the stuff he needs for that. It will probably take him an hour or two, if he can find the time. If all goes well, there’ll be two updates left, one when everything is done and one with the patch for download.
Details about stuff will come next time.
Testing continues, slowly but surely. Nothing really new to report, which is good. It’s making me want to go back and fix some tiny, tiny issues that don’t matter anyway, but I must fight the urges. I don’t have the free time for it anyway though.
At this point, it pretty much looks like the translation will work on most everything out there than can emulate/play GBA games. If you want to be really sure ahead of time, try playing the Japanese version a tiny bit and see if you have any problems. If you can save your game properly (which is a common problem for Mac GBA emulators…), then you’re probably good to go.
When the patch is released, we’ll have a detailed list of hardware and emulators you can play the translation on. Some fine folks at gbatemp have offered their help in that regard, so the list should be pretty thorough. Until then, if you’re interested in running the translation on actual hardware or on other systems, this thread may be worth a read.
I figure we’ll let the testers do their stuff a little while longer, and during the meantime I’ll do my own testing and help get a handful of key lines polished up. Since more and more people are finishing the game (and playing through again) without any new bugs, the patch could be out a bit sooner than I had thought.
Testing continues, testers are already starting to finish their first playthrough. No new bugs to report since last weekend, which is excellent news.
Jeff and I fixed the Sleep Mode text bug the other day, I fixed the Antidote text bug, and sblur and Jeff even went and fixed one of those miniscule naming screen issues that I mentioned an update or two ago.
Compare to last update:
I started my own testing yesterday, all is going well. I’ve even started writing up the readme if that’s any indication 😉 It’s still a couple weeks off, assuming no big bugs show up, but with each passing day such bugs seem less and less likely.
Testing began on Sunday, and so far, no major issues have been found at all. Excellent news.
In fact, so far, there’ve been fewer bugs than I was expecting. Only three minor things, one of which was because a fix I made in August got reverted somewhere along the line. It’s now fixed again. The other two are also pretty minor and can be seen below.
These should only take me a few hours to fix. An explanation about them is here for the curious.
Testing and polishing continues to continue, but from the sound of it, things are going awesomely 🙂
(unless crazy bugs decide to show up in the next few weeks, that is, though it’s unlikely)
After some enlightenment, I managed to fix and finish the sprite hacking routine earlier today. It now runs at a fast speed, has no weird graphical lag or distortion, and is rock-solid and 100% professional-looking. So that means we can cross the final hack off the to-do list.
Right after I fixed the sprite text, we noticed that the game would freeze during the ending. It was a pesky bug, but we finally fixed it, it was something that crept in late last night. While I was at it, I also betterfied the fix for this old bug, which is nice.
There’ve been so many pics and videos that there’s not too much more to show now, but I recorded one thing real quick showing a bunch of different systems that had to be hacked over the past year. You can see them all working in harmony together and looking nice and professional. Nothing spoilery, don’t worry.
Now that the hacking’s pretty much done (some miniscule things remain which may not be worth bothering with), that just leaves the testing phase. It’ll probably start sometime this weekend, and before people start asking, we don’t need help testing. The testing will be done internally for several weeks.
It’s also important to clarify that testing doesn’t mean “play through and have fun”, it means playing stuff over and over, trying to break things, analyzing every little detail, stuff like that. It’s NOT fun. But this way the game will be less likely to freeze/crash/act stupid when the patch is released to the public. Some last-minute polish will be going on during the testing phase too.
I don’t know how updates will be during the testing, it may just be a weekly thing saying we’re alive and well, but if we find stuff and fix it, I’ll mention that quickly.
More info and details and blah blah at a later time. For now, just know that the translation’s entered its final stage. Very very close now!
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.
It is done. See here.
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