More progress on SRWJ! Hacking continues smoothly, with one of the last outstanding vwf bugs being fixed today. Kingcom also found another hidden debug menu, which will make testing the game easier than we would ever have wished for. How does reducing every enemies’ HP to 10 sound? Just destroy the small fry automagically right away? Or rewarding yourself with unlimited experience? This stuff *could* have been cheated too, but where’s the fun in that?
I’d also like to point you to a new subpage on the site. The Help Needed page lists potential projects that we need translation help for. If you’re a Japanese -> English translator, interested in translating a game for us, head over to that page right away! Grab a sample script and get going.
We really hope that someone will step up and help us with these projects.
After the busy months before Caravan Heart’s release, Kingcom and I didn’t stop working off our asses. No indeed, one could say we both have been never this busy with stuff. We continued working on new projects behind the scenes, so that you guys will get to play more forgotten games denied to us due to stupid publisher decisions.
Our cooperation works so well that we decided to pool our resources permanently. Together, under a new banner, we launch The Romhacking Aerie. This place will continue to be our base of operations. So keep visiting the site for project news and updates.
So, what does this mean for you?
First off, together we can work on more projects than we could on our own. It’s been very productive so far to share opinions and thoughts about our hacking work back and forth. Caravan Heart wouldn’t have been quite the same without Kingcom’s influence on the hacking decisions. That relationship, of course, works both ways.
I believe that we can create more and better translations together.
From now on, we’ll release our work under the label of “The Romhacking Aerie”. It’s more convenient to refer to our work as a group than to each person individually. Maybe this way people will also get in their heads that our translations are a result of several people’s work and not just mine.
As the first order of business I’m proud to announce another new project:
Super Robot Wars: Judgement
The project hasn’t been that secret so far, there is already a lengthy Project Thread at RHDN.
What has been done already:
Data decompression/recompression
Menu and Dialogue VWFs (still a bug or two left)
95% of all menues have been hacked (see below for an example). This game has a LOT of menues.
Translation Progress: 15% out of 3MB
Translation will take a while since there is such a hell of a lot of text. After translation is finished, there will also be an extended editing period in which the script will be polished up to the level you expect from us.
The translator for this project is Tyria, currently it’s planned that Gideon Zhi from aeon-genesis will handle the editing later on.
A project page for SRWJ and the two Devil Children games will come when I get my ass up from the couch.
We hope that you are still enjoying Caravan Heart to the fullest. We were extremely pleased with the feedback, and really happy you guys were so enthusiastic about it. Translating it was tough, and at times I really suffered quite a bit and even thought about quitting translating games after Caravan Heart (stopping before was never a possibility though!) was finished. But your feedback convinced me to go on!
We found some very minor details with the patch that were wrong (not even a dozen lines really), so we might release a small update sometime to fix those, for the people coming late to the party. Yes, I admit it, despite of what it stated in the release notes, slow and fast textspeed ARE switched around. I promise that one will be fixed too.
Last but not least, I forgot to mention a contributor in the release notes. I’m really sorry! Killa B - thank you for helping with the title screen. In the updated patch the mistake will be rectified.
So, what has the future in stock for us? There are actually quite a few projects going on in the background, together with Kingcom again. Our cooperation works so well in fact, that there’ll be other news about that topic too sometime soon. In the meanwhile, I’d like to introduce two of our next projects officially to you:
Devil Children - Ice Book
and
Devil Children - Flame Book
They are sequels to Light and Dark book, which were released officially in English by Atlus. Both games are for the GBA too. The biggest hacking obstacles are also out of the way already too, basically we’re waiting for the script translation now. Master translator Tom is working on this project too, so expect a high quality translation more news about script progress soon too.
As a small appetizer of what’s to come, here is a small video! I really think it speaks for itself.
After 2 years of dedicated work, we’re proud to present the complete English translation of Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart.
I’d like to thank everyone on the team and everyone who contributed over the years for their support. I’d also like to thank all of the fans who left encouraging comments for us and who believed in this project until the end.
Please read the release notes bundled with the patch. They don’t just contain ‘boring’ technical information but also lots of background information about the game and the translation as well as some notes from our translator.
There was also a huge website update. I’ve created a Project Page for the game, where you can find many nice surprises. Make sure to check it out! I know though that you all just want the patch for now. Have fun!
Finally, after 2 years of work, the project reached Beta!
After the game has been thoroughly tested and everything has been fixed, it’ll be time for the public release. Don’t ask how long beta testing will take though, it can take pretty long since this game is huge and so random. There is still some work left ahead of us.
Also, testers have already been selected, so don’t ask to be part of the beta please.
Wish us luck and that everything goes well. This will propably be the last post before release, unless there will be significant delays.
A little surprise gift for all of you - a preview video of the game! It will give you an impression on how the game looks, how reforming monsters works and about the amount of translation work already done. Sorry for the asynch sound, youtube apparently did that during conversion. I’m sure you’ll love it anyway. (No spoilers of any sort of course!)
By the way, did you continue visiting the project thread over at RHDN? KC and I have been releasing screenshots and progress updates there daily! It’s worth taking a look if you haven’t already.To give you an overview:
Many many more menus done
Formatting revised up to Chapter 5 of the game
Many bugs fixed
Awesome character naming screen, thanks to Djinn
Modified title screen is inserted into the game, thanks to tomaitheous
Lots of behind the scenes stuff you wouldn’t understand anway
I hope you started nicely into the new year. For me the end of the last year was pure hell on earth, so it couldn’t get any worse. Considering that, I’m sure 2008 will be a nice year. Propably.
Anyway, above you’ll see the official English title screen of Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart. I was a colaboration effort of many people from Romhacking.net, and I’m really happy with the result. I hope you like it too.
Thanks to:
Ryusui,
ReBirFh,
Killa B,
FlashPV and
Crysta!
It isn’t inserted into the ROM yet, that’ll be pretty tricky. And currently I’m not in the mood for tricky stuff. On the contrary I’m pretty burned out on working on the game. I spend the whole day fixing up menu screens, which is really stupid and bothersome work. Well, at least there has been quite a bit of progress. KC also contributed quite a few little hacks and a tool that saved me a few days of work to the bunch, so be sure to include him in your evening prayers too.
I hope you’ll all find lot’s of presents under your Christmas trees.
As a little Christmas present I have some really awesome news for you:
Formatting is finally complete!
Thanks to the efforts of KC and myself the whole 2MB beast is now formatted and already inserted into the game too. I’m currently working on the numerous menu screens of the game. There is a ton of them, so it’ll take a while. After that there will be an internal testing phase to purge the worst formatting problems.
As a bonus, there is now also a project thread on Romhacking.net, with many screenshots and general information. Be sure to pay it a visit and keep an eye on it in the future. Updates I consider too small for this site I’ll most likely post there first.
Formatting is coming along pretty nice thanks to KC’s help. Yesterday I talked to Aerdan on #romhacking.net about the formatting and he offered me to try to write an auto formatter. You propably remember that I said it would be pretty much impossible to write one. Well, it IS pretty much impossible to write one which will have a complete file perfectly finished with one click. It’s very possible though to do at least some partly formatting automatically, reducing the time needed to finish a file immensely.
He actually went right to work too and greeted me today with a first test version. There are some small issues to be ironed out, but it’s already very helpful as it is. I think this will accelerate formatting a good deal further.
Moreover, I started working on another aspect of the translation. The pictures. There are chapter titlescreens in the game, which needed some attention. I located and extracted the pictures in the ROM and put them up on Romhacking.net for editing. Unfortunately I suck at image editing of any kind myself. But as always, you can count on the fine people over at RHDN. Ryusui edited the pictures for me and did a very fine job with it. Here is the first chapter’s title as a little teaser.
I still have to rewrite some code to ensure they all work in the game correctly. The game uses one tilemap to display all chapter title’s while my edited ones will have different tilemaps each. So I have to change the code so it loads the correct tilemap at a time. Nothing big, but it isn’t really interesting either. Anyway, progress is progress.
Until next time, I hope to have more good news for you before Christmas.
I have some good news for you, the project just got a good boost in the right direction.
KC from SoR-GTs translations will be joining me with the remaining formatting and most likely later on with the testing. This means that together we can progress with the formatting twice as fast as if I’d do it alone. Since he is a fellow romhacker I also don’t have to spend most of my time with teaching him how to do it, like I had to the last time I asked others for help with the formatting. Our cooperation already led to some interesting technical discussions. He made me aware of a flaw in my formatting style so far. I’ll have to go back through the files I already formatted and redo a few things, but the translation will look much nicer in the end.
It looks like it’ll be a busy december.
On other news, I currently have a cold and university sucks >_> I’m already spending so much time at home again instead of going to university I wonder if I’ll make any finals this year T_T
