jamesb2147 wrote:so slowbeef, i hope you'll forgive me for asking but i was wondering why you decided to take on this project and especially when you did.
also,
happy square root day everyone!!!
It sorta fell into my lap, I guess. Marc gave me the script for the Prologue for the Let's Play and I didn't wanna bother him by asking for Act 1 right away, so I decided to bide my time and see just what the deal was with ROM hacking Policenauts. I noticed a trick about two weeks later you could do to double the amount of text in the same space, and with some help from friends, I managed to pull it off and show Marc. He thought it was pretty cool, so he and Artemio introduced me to the old programmer.
The double-text trick really didn't work at all (Policenauts actually already did it, so you didn't even need a trick), but after talking with the old programmer I realized exactly what the problem was (all the text pointers were in a compiled byte-code script, and therefore, really really hard to programmatically change.) I'm one of those people who can't leave puzzles unsolved and it was killing me so in a bathroom of a service area of the New Jersey Turnpike, it suddenly hit me that I needed text pointers and couldn't get around that. Maybe I could make my own new ones? But where would I store them... ...aha!
So the hack I came up with actually leaves the old text pointers alone and uses them to reference new ones so we can fit all the English however we want.
The old programmer agreed it was a sound idea and about a month later, I'd written all the assembly for it. This makes me sound smart, but in reality, I think Junker HQ just needed a fresh set of eyes. Anyway, after that, I invited Scarboy in, Artemio fired up his coding ... gloves, I guess - and with Marc on translation, etc. we were off to the races.
Back in July when I was doing the Let's Play - since I am a programmer after all - I did think at one point, "Could I ROM hack Policenauts?" and immediately afterwards, "God no, I don't know the first thing about ROM hacking."
But hey, some months later, here we are. 14 bugs to beta.
In all honesty, I think we're going into beta pretty solid. We've identified some really obscure bugs (in fact, our most severe bug is actually in the original game, so I'm going to see if I can fix Konami's mistake - admittedly it's a hard one to catch), so I'm hoping beta will go smoothly, but ya never know I suppose. This game has surprised me over and over and over with how complex (and to be completely frank with you, ridiculously overcomplicated for no good reason) it is.