A very, very quick update this time around 😛 Late in the game, special battle boxes that have 3 lines show up. These also needed to be hacked to have a VWF. Luckily for us, it was almost another instance where I could copy-paste existing code and then tweak a few things and voila. Only took an hour, too 😯
So that pushes this item on the to-do list to 50% now:
Hack special text boxes and other important things that appear later in the game. This will be a real pain.
The only thing left to hack battle-wise is a similar text routine used at the end of the game. It’s a little bit different than the normal battle text stuff, but let’s hope the coding is basically the same. If so, some more copy-pasting-tweaking may be possible.
(sorry for no pics — this stuff all involves end-of-game spoilers)
Just a very quick late-night update. Finished the main battle VWF, finally got the “you got too many items” stuff to use a VWF too now. It was pretty easy actually, I was able to copy and paste most of my code for the main main battle text and then just a few tiny changes here and there.
Some pics of it in action.
So that means another big hurdle is crossed off the to-do list finally!
After an intense battle, we’ve finally overcome one of the bigger hacking obstacles that’s been bothering us for months now. I’ll skip all the details, but I finished hacking a big thing on the to-do list:
Allow for item names that are at LEAST 18 letters long. We’re stuck at 8 or 9 letters right now and that’s absolutely unacceptable. This also affects PSI names and skill names, so this is pretty important overall anyway.
To be more precise, it wasn’t just item names, it was all non-sprite menu text. We spent weeks on the sprite text, this time we had to also hack the non-sprite text because the original programmer had way too many limitations set in place. Short story is that originally, the game only allowed for 160 non-sprite letters on a menu screen at any one time. That’s not a lot — if you had 16 items, they could only have 10 letters in their names. After hacking, it theoretically allows for 640 letters, way more than we’ll ever need.
Menus have always been a mess, so there’s been a lack of videos of the menus in action. But now that they’re pretty much done (minus tweaking and cosmetic and various tiny bug fixes), here’s a short video. Boring, but that’s how menus are.
Kind of a small update this time around, no big news or anything. It’s nice to have things a bit nice and relaxed sometimes I think, though 8)
Shortly after the last update, I was like, “Here, I should just do those custom control codes now while I’m messing with this stuff and get it out of the way.” Within an hour or two Jeff and I had greatly improved and polished the menu text and menu hacks. Here are some random pictures of things as they are now.
The biggest news is that Jeff did some kickass work on this task on the to-do list:
Figure out how to re-order some of the things used in what we call “menus1″, so that “Nut XX DP Sell?” can be changed to something like, “Sell this Nut for XX DP?” The game hard-codes this arrangement and it’s lame in English. This will be surprisingly difficult.
This was made easier because all our weeks’ working on sprite text taught us what a few key subroutines do. So what we first expected to be a nightmare wasn’t that bad actually. Jeff got right to work on it and kicked its butt, as you can see in these before and afters.
Even though we just got done with that hellish sprite text hack, things aren’t gonna get themselves done, so Jeff and I’ve been hard at work on other hacks that need doing.
First, Jeff’s been taking a look at some of the menu messages that need fixing, reordering, repositioning, and all that stuff. This all ties in really closely with the sprite text hack, so it’s fitting that this is one of the next things we work on. He had to redo the entire routine, which is pretty impressive. Anyway, you can see the before and after here.
This sprite text stuff has been hell. But it’s now pretty much done, after several weeks. Oof, I feel like I just ran 8 marathons.
All the sprite text stuff displays correctly now, and after a few days of insanity and bug-fixing and hair-ripping, I finally got the optimization code up and running, so the game no longer stutters like a drunk old man whenever there’s some sprite text on the screen. See the video in the last update to see what I mean. Here’s a new video showing the current, faster, fixed version. This is pretty much the speed things will go at now, though some code-cleanup and other stuff might make it a little faster before the final patch.
Various news on the sprite text front. First, Jeff and I spent a @O*#TUOS amount of time trying to figure out a few bugs that our sprite text hack was causing. I won’t go into the details, but eventually we found and fixed them. They were real nasty ones, too. Very glad that that’s over. Here are some pics of the bugs now gone.
Claus doesn’t freak out now
Boney doesn’t move now
A different bug (before) (ignore the blue, that’s for testing)
after
These bugs affected a bunch of other things too, so it’s good to see them gone now.
Today is 4/20. That means different things for different people. For EarthBound fans like us, it’s the anniversary of MOTHER 3’s release in Japan. I wasn’t planning on doing any special updates or anything today actually, but a sudden wave of nostalgia hit me, so here’s a little something I guess.
This project really started sometime last June or July, and as far as ROM translations go, things have been progressing at an incredible rate. Most ROM translation projects die after a few months or take 5+ years. The short video here shows how much has been done on the hacking side of things since we started last summer, and shows some of the stuff that’s left to do. There’s really not that much left to hack when you step back and look at it like this. At least, hopefully it helps explain some of the to-do list stuff a little better.
I’ve done a good deal of work since the last update, and things are looking up. First, the main thing is that the sprite text welding hack is finally nearly done. It’s taken a lot more time than I had expected, what with real life rush jobs, unexpected craziness from the game, etc. etc. Anyways, it’s not quite done yet, a few last things need to be done, which I’ll talk about in a bit. First, here are some before and after pics.
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.
