16 years ago by Mato
Whew, very exhausted after about two weeks of really intense real life work. Managed to finish it on time, and finish it well, and now I have some more time to spare for this here project. Trying to juggle real life and this project is tough sometimes, but having this blog helps, since if I were to disappear for just a few days people would notice and make sure I’m still on track 😉 So in a weird sense, this blog and the regular readers are pretty helpful in keeping the project going 😛
Anyway, as I mentioned in a mini-update in the comments of the last update, I’ve now got a little more time on my hands again and have started to finish up the sprite text hacking stuff. Though if you missed that mini-update, I wouldn’t blame you — there are over 300 comments in there and it turned into some kind of crazy message board there the last few days, most of the stuff very off-topic. To help make things better, please use the Starmen.Net forums if you want to talk with fellow fans about off-topic stuff and shoot the breeze and all that. Let’s keep this blog about MOTHER 3, okay? 😉
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16 years ago by JeffMan
Hey, it’s me: that other guy who’s working on the project. I heard that Tomato’s head imploded from all the sprite welding so I’ll be doing this update.
First of all, the naming screens are all done. Spick-and-span, clean, and working. 100% full power.
Remember in Earthbound when Tony would call you up and ask for YOUR name? The person holding the controller? Well, you can name yourself in MOTHER 3 as well. Later on in Earthbound you get a chance to confirm or change the name you had originally inputted. But here’s something you may not have known: in MOTHER 2, when you get asked for the second time to input your name, you’re only allowed to use English letters. As a result, you actually have two player names by the end; the English one gets shown in the credits because there simply isn’t enough room for an entire Japanese credits font.
Click onward for some juicy screenshots and programming talk!
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16 years ago by Mato
While I was busy farting around with sprite text welding and junk, Jeffman was hard at work on fixing up some naming screen re-programming. The biggest thing is that he made it so that “Don’t Care” is no longer selectable on naming screens where it isn’t an option, that was a little bug we had of our own. Also, he thought up a better letter arrangement, so here that is here:
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16 years ago by Mato
The last post is already way too big and it’d be insane to expect people to read that many comments, many of which are filled with my mini-updates. So here’s a bigger mini-update.
I’ve still been busy this week, but every once in a while I’ll find an hour or two to mess with the sprite text stuff some more. The sprite text routine isn’t done yet, but it’s getting mighty close.
Here are some ugly WIP pics. The text is blue for debugging purposes.
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16 years ago by Mato
…It was byuu!
Another short, technical update. But this one is still pretty cool.
byuu, who you may know is the author of the awesome bsnes emulator, showed up out of nowhere with two new goodies for the project 😀
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16 years ago by Mato
Very busy with real work, so progress is slowish on the sprite welding front. Since I have less time, I’ve been using what little time I have for hacking, so forgive the late/slow responses to stuff.
For now, I was going to answer a question someone asked about how the sprite VWF is actually going to do its stuff dynamically. It’s really pretty simple, but in my search for other informative graphical tutorials, I came up with nothing. So I was gonna make my own explanation real quick and figured hey, might as well make it a normal update. Again, this is technical mumbo jumbo blah blah jargon, so feel free to ignore it if you’re not into that sort of thing. But the following explains how most variable width fonts (VWFs) are implemented in ROM translations.
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16 years ago by Mato
Very shortly after the last update, I moved right on to the sprite text welding issue, something I’ve/we’ve been avoiding because of the pain it’ll be. But it’s not gonna get done if we stay scared of it, so I went right for the throat. It’s definitely going to be a tough little hack, but I don’t think it’ll be anything quite as crazy as the battle text hack from a few weeks ago.
Anyway, yesterday I managed to follow the code a bit so I could get my bearings. We already hacked two important routines related to this font stuff, one being the routine that tells the game where in the ROM the current font letter is, and the other being a routine that makes the game load 16 rows of font data rather than 10 (this is how we got that old problem with text hooks fixed). So this area of the game’s code isn’t new to us, which is a plus. The way the game does the font loading is kind of lame though, but luckily I found a bit of code that does exactly what I hoped. It was pretty big and inefficient, so I wrote it better in much less space. The freed up space will be handy for the custom code to come.
But it sounds like what exactly this “sprite text welding” stuff is is a mystery to some people, so I thought I’d do a quick explanation.
Blah blah boring technical junk follows
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16 years ago by Mato
Not a whole lot has been worked on since the last update, yet a lot HAS been done. It’s weird. Anyway, things are going to get busy for me the next few weeks, but rest assured I’ll be hacking away at this thing every spare moment I get.
Anyway, down to business, first the big-ish stuff. After fixing item descriptions, I needed to get back to work on the custom control code system for battle text. I was almost done, I just needed to do some codes for item names. Well, I sat down and did that today, it went surprisingly well. Item names can now start with vowels and not have a/an issues, and the game will use the/a/an/some as necessary, or sometimes it won’t put anything at all for special cases. Pretty nifty. You can see this in action in these screens here.
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16 years ago by Mato
Wow, just a few hours since the last update, yet I managed to fix something that’s been a huge problem since Day 1: item descriptions.
Used to be that item descriptions that were over 42 letters long would kill the game in a horrible, screechy death wail. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, check out the middle of this old video from way back in October.
Anyway, after only about an hour, I’ve managed to fix that problem. Much easier than I thought, too, given how the game swaps numbers around so much. Anyway, here are some pics! Hurray!
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16 years ago by Mato
I was pretty busy yesterday, so aside from this mini-update I didn’t get much done, but I’m almost done with the stuff I’ve been working on the past few days. Once I’m done with it, I’ll make a post or a mini-update about it, but this time I wanted to take some time real quick to show people just what’s left to do with the hacking. Stuff on the to-do list probably doesn’t make sense to most people.
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