I said I probably wouldn’t start on the second draft until after this 3-day weekend… but yeah, right. I did some light work on it while doing real life work too. As it stands, I’ve finished up 11 blocks out of 1001.
That might not sound like much, but the early blocks are where most of the text is. There’s also a bit of repeated text, and a lot of later maps don’t have any text at all. Also, many of these early blocks contain extra-long tutorial text. Some blocks can contain 100+ lines, while other blocks contain 0 lines. In any case, as time goes on, you’ll see the block count increase faster and faster. You’ll see 😉 My plan is to do a manageable # of blocks each day and then on the weekends, do a whole bunch.
My fix yesterday to allow a bajillion letters per line with the main script wound up having a weird effect on the flyover text and other similar text in the game. Fixing it seemed tough, but yet again, after some sleep the fix was real simple. Hurray, sleep!
This doesn’t make me feel very welcome 😐
Oh cool I love this world
Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, Draft 2 time! Like I mentioned before, this isn’t that exciting a process so updates may get boring and scarce, but that’s probably a good thing. I’ll still post regular progress reports and info and stuff though. Some details about script stuff below.
Technical blah blah stuff, ignore if you don’t care!
In the last update just a few hours ago, I mentioned I probably wasn’t going to do the 210-letter hack thing because things were too complicated. Indeed, moving the final strings in RAM would be like doing brain surgery with a chainsaw, but this morning I re-realized something — since we’re only using 2 of the 40 glyph buffer structs, who says we need to use the first 2 of those 40?
The strings come directly before the buffer stuff, so by moving the buffers we use to further ahead, that would mean tons of free RAM without having to move the strings at all. I calculated it and I think theoretically we could fit 2146 or so letters on screen this way 😯 But rather than try to push things too far, I made the limit 512-ish. I could get more if we need it, but already we’re in the realm of incredible luxury. 256 letters per line is already like winning the lottery twice 😛
Here is what it looks like with 210 lowercase “l”s on the screen at once. This new hack allows for 256 letters per LINE — which is way way more than can even fit on the screen. The original game only allowed 22 letters per line.
Hey there, dudes and dudettes! Yet another daily update 😯
First, here’s a video of the text hacks working now. Note that it’s all ugly, horrible first draft text that’s not formatted to the new standards/limits, and most of the lines are random things that were just nearby in the save states I had. Also didn’t really want to spoil any story stuff. Most of the text in the game is far more interesting, honest 😛
After much, much more work than it should have taken, I’ve finally fixed the issue with the various text speeds and the thing that would happen if the text was set to Fast and there was an odd number of letters on a line, followed by a newline character. In total (including some time last week), probably took 20+ hours of work. Arghhhhh I’m probably not going to heaven after the things I said while fixing this thing
Anyway, it’s hard to show this in action with pictures, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say the text speed stuff works now, and that these pics were with the speed set to Fast.
Really pushing hard to get this main script hacking moving, but it’s going to be slow-going for a while I think, it’s that complicated and it’s very time-consuming.
Luckily though, I did manage to make some good progress. Remember the mystery of the missing letters from the earlier update? Well, I finally figured it out and fixed it. Spent maybe 8 hours total and the hack turned out to be a one byte change. Commence excessively violent watermelon-smashing… now.
Hey folks, just a quick blog update (unrelated to the translation itself): I’ve highlighted author posts so it’ll be easier for you guys to pick Mato’s comments out, since he uses the commenting system as a mini-blog sometimes, heh.
I’m going to be upgrading our WordPress installation soon, probably tonight. Everything will be backed up, but there’s a slim possibility that it will act a little weird or possibly be down for a short while. Also, ROFISH and I are thinking about using this site for a beta test of the new Fangamer forum software we’ve written. Let me know what you guys think, since these blog comments aren’t always conducive to easy-to-follow conversations ;D
Well, the battle against the big bad main script programming is on, and although it’s only been a little bit of progress, that last update exploded into hundreds of replies in only a few hours, so here it is for people who didn’t watch the mini-updates in real-time 😛
The main script hacking issue is actually like a huge collection of lots of different things, so it’s not something that will be suddenly done in a day. In a way, it really is kind of like the final boss of a game, what with all of the different forms you have to defeat. For now, I’ve been working on fixing one of the main issues — the game only has enough memory for 40 letters on the screen at once. Go over that and it’s glitchy crashland. So I’ve been working on a simple fix for that, which is to make it use RAM for only two letters and then just have it reuse that memory over and over.
It went surprisingly well right off the bat. But because of how the programmer implemented the various different text speed settings, things can mess up on Fast right now if there’s an odd # of letters on the first line of text and then a newline code is encountered.
Blah blah blah, anyway, regardless, things are going well, and the programming actually hasn’t been nearly as insane as the menu programming. It’s been pretty nice and straightforward. Here are some pics for your enjoyment.
After all of the hard work we’ve been doing, and with the impending doom of the main dialogue bug, I decided to tackle and take down one of the miscellaneous items on the to-do list:
Insert some sort of intro screen/disclaimer screen thing.
In addition to inserting an intro screen of our own, we also changed the health warning screen into English. This was a pretty straight-forward hack, and didn’t require any actual assembly code hacking, aside from the fact that we moved the blinking “Press a button” text up a few notches.
Before
After
Back to our new intro screen now. We inserted it between the health screen and the Gameboy Player logo. Check it out after the break, along with some other details.
Finished off the last remaining battle hack now — had to write a VWF routine for the final battle. Wasn’t too bad, was able to use a lot of code we already wrote. Obviously I won’t post pics of it in action here, but man oh man does stuff look good now.
We can now fully cross off everything on the battle hack list! I’m sure there might be little tiny things here and there we might run across during detailed testing, but we’ve already done lots of testing so I don’t think we’ll see many problems with battles anymore.
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.
