Merry Christmas

December 24, 2007

Merry Christmas everyone!

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.

Official Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart Project Thread

Posted by KaioShin at 6:43pm
6 Comments »

More Dragon Quest News

December 13, 2007

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.

Posted by KaioShin at 11:40pm
12 Comments »

Good news

December 05, 2007

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

Posted by KaioShin at 11:36am
6 Comments »