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Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 12:17 am
by Anubis
I'm listening to Opening Title "Old L.A. 2040", and I have to say it's an amazing song. Policenauts has a fantastic soundtrack and I am anxious to see how it's represented in the game.

Thanks you all for your hard work.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 8:31 pm
by slowbeef
Summary Text proves a bigger pain in the ass than I'd realized. It's implemented (it displays in English), but we're having some issues as to what to do when there's too much English.

I guess more investigation, etc. is required. So the bug count stays at 4. But Marc gave me another translation file, so another part of the game is in English.

4 Bugs, 18 issues.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2008 10:51 am
by slowbeef
You guys deserve some good news. You know how we're at 18 issues? Well, it turns out that 16 of them count towards Disc 2 as well as Disc 1 - so the bridge from Alpha Disc 1 -> Alpha Disc 2 is going to be a lot shorter than I'd initially thought. Hooray for progress!

Count is still 4/18. I might shelve summaries for now since, although we made a bunch of good progress toward them, they're turning into a lower-priority problem than other things.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 8:20 am
by Lonheartda60
is the process of patching this game: Extracting all the japanese text, then placing all the translated english text into the game and making it all fit and look professional? sort of like a "tetris" where u put everything in its right place avoiding errors entirely?

If so I would love to help!

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 10:41 am
by Artemio
Lonheartda60 wrote:is the process of patching this game: Extracting all the japanese text, then placing all the translated english text into the game and making it all fit and look professional? sort of like a "tetris" where u put everything in its right place avoiding errors entirely?

If so I would love to help!
It is kind of that.. only that for moving the pieces you need to program stuff and play in binary.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 10:44 am
by slowbeef
Lonheartda60 wrote:is the process of patching this game: Extracting all the japanese text, then placing all the translated english text into the game and making it all fit and look professional? sort of like a "tetris" where u put everything in its right place avoiding errors entirely?

If so I would love to help!
Thanks for the offer, but it's more problematic than that.

If something doesn't fit, you can't just move it to somewhere there's free space because there's something else pointing to where it was that you need to change. So you have to take the binary file, decompose it into sectors and figure out what's for what (i.e. what part of the file is for pointing to text blocks, etc. and how to change them) Once you do this, you don't care about free-space, since you can just rewrite the thing entirely!

It gets messier though as the game is only going to have so much memory allocated for text buffers and video, so if you go over that, you get crashes... which means you gotta find a way to do it with less memory used, or reuse something else, etc. I haven't had to do this yet, fortunately - memory crashes tend to be the result of bugs in my patcher. :)

There are all separate methods for doing this for the in-game text, the voiceover cutscene subtitles, and the full-motion video titles. This really isn't easy to do manually - you start manually but then out of that you have to build a computer program or script that will do it for you.

The summaries are a nightmare because there's actually just not enough room onscreen - we've got plenty of room to store the text in memory, but just not actually print it. We can't just reduce font size without fucking up other stuff, so currently I have to figure out a way to do that. Marc suggested hacking in pagination which scares me a little as I've never tried transplanting one piece of game functionality to another part of it... However, a friend of mine gave me a good idea, so I'm currently looking displaying the summaries as flat images.

The good news is that as a Playstation game (i.e. a more modern console), there's a lot of stuff the OS takes care of in terms of memory management, etc. that I don't have to worry about. The bad news is that it means the game is more complex, so there's tons of moving parts you have to worry about.

More good news is the cinema bugs are fixed - it actually wasn't a bug at all, I was using an older version of the code. So, really Artemio had had it fixed awhile back. But we found another one in the voiceover stuff. So as far as the path to Alpha, we have:

3 bugs, 18 issues.

edit: Also Artemio beat me to it.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 11:18 am
by Ghaleon
Thanks for the update, guys. Good luck!

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 12:08 pm
by Lonheartda60
Oh i see! So are the summary pages as artful as the ones in MGS? OR is that a spoiler lol?

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 2:50 pm
by Marc
Lonheartda60 wrote:Oh i see! So are the summary pages as artful as the ones in MGS? OR is that a spoiler lol?
If memory serves me right, they're photographs related to outer space.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 3:55 pm
by slowbeef
I don't know if "stylish" is the right word. It's text overlaid on an image. (Shrug.)

That's also kind of why it's annoying when small things like that require big development tasks.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 8:13 pm
by Marc
Anubis wrote:I'm listening to Opening Title "Old L.A. 2040", and I have to say it's an amazing song.
As good as it is, I think the remix from the Kojima Black CD is even better.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 8:50 pm
by slowbeef
Marc wrote:As good as it is, I think the remix from the Kojima Black CD is even better.
I gotta give a listen. Most I've ever fan-boyed out was "Blow Up Tricycle" in Snatcher Perfect Collection.

Also, we're at 3 bugs, 17 issues for anyone keeping score.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2008 1:57 am
by el_ash
good to hear things are slowly working out!

I can't wait to play policenauts in english, I've gotten through alot of the game...but i don't really understand a thing that has happened :mrgreen: ...but it's an amazing game still!

hey maybe you guy's will have this done by the time i finish the snatcher mod?
then i can start work on the policenauts mod...LOL!

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 1:27 am
by Ace Attorney
SOOOO CLOOOOOOOOOOOSE

I CAAAANT WAAAAAAAAAAAAIT!


Image

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 11:52 am
by DOTL
Sounds great!Thanks for keeping us informed!!
Hey ACE, nice sig btw :mrgreen:

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 12:34 pm
by 8bitsonic
Slowbeef, I thought getting rid of all the problems and getting all the text in and stuff like that was the path to beta, not alpha...? You said beta is where everything is implemented and you're just looking for bugs. Alpha is still where you add features, right?

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 12:59 pm
by slowbeef
8bitsonic wrote:Slowbeef, I thought getting rid of all the problems and getting all the text in and stuff like that was the path to beta, not alpha...? You said beta is where everything is implemented and you're just looking for bugs. Alpha is still where you add features, right?
That's correct. Alpha should have everything "critical" in there.

Long story short: Summaries are one of those things I could go either way on to say, "Does this need to be complete in order to call the project at Alpha?"

I've considered moving them as a "beta" feature since you don't need them to play the game and enjoy it, buuuuut... I dunno. You get an optional summary screen every time you load a saved game so that comes up frequently enough to say it's important. In all honesty, if we can't get summaries working by the time we reach Alpha w/r/t everything else, I'm okay with saying the Alpha is still complete and doing the official "test everything else" process, since the in-game text, cutscene stuff, etc. is far more important when it comes to enjoying the game.

If we do get summaries done though, that means ALL Japanese text was transplanted with English and that's closer to what I have in mind with my Alpha distinction.

Like I said in a previous post, "Alpha" doesn't mean a whole lot in a ROM hack project because the unpatched game itself is completely playable, and therefore, could technically be considered alpha. But of course, that still doesn't mean a thing because the unpatched game has no development towards it!

The (3,17) metric is there to give you guys some idea of where we are. It will definitely go "Alpha, Beta, Release" and we're getting closer to Alpha. The Summary Text is one of the three bugs left, and it's actually turning out to be something more on the order of a major development area than "just a bug" (like the other two, which look fairly easy to fix - Scarboy's supposed to be on top of that.)

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 9:37 pm
by manicantwait
Ive been hanging around this board a while and I thought now was a good time to post. I love the updates lately (much better than the months w/out word like before). Im started to get really amped up for this.
Thank you guys so much for this. Snatcher was a huge part of my early gaming life and I continue to play it through in cycles. If it werent for you Id never have a chance to see its sucessor and it means the world to me.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 12:23 am
by shidoni
Writhing in joy and anticipation WOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 12:56 am
by 8bitsonic
shidoni wrote:Writhing in joy and anticipation WOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Sounds more like you're writing in the middle of an ejaculation. Or maybe I'm just jealous because you seem to be having them more often than I am.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2008 5:02 pm
by slowbeef
Count is 3 and 16.

I think I'm gonna take a break from summaries (bug 1) and start working on the beta features. The other good news is that I have a theory that one of the issues will actually cascade and solve the other 2 bugs. ...So yeah.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 2:59 pm
by slowbeef
Happy Halloween! Have some pi: Count is 3 and 14.

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 3:52 pm
by DOTL
Happy Halloween to you all!
Even though we dont celebrate it here.. :-(
I wish we would, but here in Germany only a few care about it.
BTW, Nice to hear the numbers are dropping down!

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 9:08 pm
by hatebreeder209
hi im new to these forums im hatebreeder209 I have some experience coding games and translating I also know how to implement the text into the games. Slowbeef i could translate into English and Spanish and I can also help implement the english text if you would like more help on your team Ill be happy to join

Re: Current Project Status

Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2008 5:48 pm
by DarkTetsuya
damn its been ages since I checked here, looks like progress is coming along swimmingly.