New Thracia 776 translation

[Celice]

If you're interested in learning or know someone who already knows a bit of the basics, you can check out this thread for some example VWF code and see about adapting/building off them.

http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=16072.0

[bookofholsety]

while we're at it, there's also this article by byuu from a few years ago if you're so inclined

i swear i'm not trying to be pushy i just thought it was interesting reading

[js394]

You know, I've thought about it and I think I'm going to try it. The tutorial on the Mother 3 translation blog actually explained it pretty well.

On another note, I have all of the character names in the rom, so it shouldn't be long before they're done. BUT I somehow messed up the pointers so now almost every enemy unit has the wrong name :( (but at least all of the players units are correct) I guess I'll have a lot of work to do with that.

Also, could someone tell me which units cause the game to crash when you hover the cursor over them in the Shaya patch?

[MP2E]

I'd like to have weapon names along with the type. That looks pretty good! If we decided to statically render all of the 2 glyph combinations we would still have enough room to translate the games, but I'd rather not do that.

If you want to go with static glyphs, it would be better to glyph each word itself. It would use less space and you could reuse words like Iron. Finally, it would allow for proper kerning.

Of course, why bother when variable width fonts can be implemented? It might be needed for a few edge cases where the game insists that we use 8 glyphs, but the general cases will be handled, like dialogue.

Variable width font encoding is something I understand the concept of but I haven't looked deeply into 65816 assembly yet nor as to what subroutine needs to be replaced. It doesn't seem too complicated, more tedious with a lot of consulting a table.

I'd be very greatful if you got a variable width font engine working, joesteve. It'd be one less roadblock to deal with :P I would recommend using bass, written by byuu to compile the assembly. The current dictionary coding routine is found in the j2e source under asm/, it's not in the correct syntax for bass but may help a bit.

For debugging/disassembly I can only recommend Loki. Loki is bsnes' debugger and it isn't on byuu's webpage but if you check his forums you can find it. Or maybe no$snes, that debugger probably costs money, though.

EDIT: I checked it out, no$sns is actually what it is called and better yet, the debugger is free. It looks fully featured, and loki is only in beta... So maybe no$sns would be better?

Link

Edited April 27, 2014 by MP2E

[Celice]

If memory serves, the FE3 translation has a VWF implemented for its dialogue text. Years ago I was making a small hack of it, and I remember editing its table for the new font to align properly. I don't know if it was implemented by RPGuy96 or if it is natively in the game (and so was adapted to English lettering for the patch), but at least you can try and reference its method, as an example.

[Quirino]

If memory serves, the FE3 translation has a VWF implemented for its dialogue text. Years ago I was making a small hack of it, and I remember editing its table for the new font to align properly. I don't know if it was implemented by RPGuy96 or if it is natively in the game (and so was adapted to English lettering for the patch), but at least you can try and reference its method, as an example.

It's natively in the game, as well as in FE5 (and probably FE4, though haven't checked that one). RPGuy96 didn't implement it though, but I think that's what Twilkitri and Shaya used for their FE4 and FE5 patches as well, since the dialogue in those games is VWF. Thing is, there is no such routine for weapons/items etcetera. It would probably be hell to implement that, VWF is one of the most difficult hacks to perform as far as I've heard.

[js394]

I've looked into it, and yes implementing a VWF will be very difficult. So for now I'm going to hold off on that until summer time when I have more free time. At the moment I'm looking for a font to use in the menu for my patch. You'll notice in the screenshot I posted a few days ago that it uses the same font as the Shaya patch. I really dislike that one so that's just a placeholder. Does anyone have any suggestions for fonts? I'm no expert in typography so I could use help here.

Edit- You know, I decided I'll wait for the FE4 patch and use that font, just to keep it consistent. I know you probably haven't decided yet, but do you know if you're going to keep the old font or use a new one, MP2E?

Edited April 28, 2014 by joesteve1914

[MP2E]

I've looked into it, and yes implementing a VWF will be very difficult. So for now I'm going to hold off on that until summer time when I have more free time. At the moment I'm looking for a font to use in the menu for my patch. You'll notice in the screenshot I posted a few days ago that it uses the same font as the Shaya patch. I really dislike that one so that's just a placeholder. Does anyone have any suggestions for fonts? I'm no expert in typography so I could use help here.

Edit- You know, I decided I'll wait for the FE4 patch and use that font, just to keep it consistent. I know you probably haven't decided yet, but do you know if you're going to keep the old font or use a new one, MP2E?

The font and mock-up screen shot were both provided by bookofholsety. He used the Mother 3 font as a base, I believe, but there are changes to fit FE's style a little better.

The mock-up isn't *exactly* what it will look like in the final product, but it's a good reference. I think it looks really good.

Note this is for dialogue, not sure what is going to be done with the character/weapons/other stuff font(if anything)

EDIT: Slightly funny story. If you notice I've updated the table file to decode text ~7 times. I managed to find the actual font table inside of the ROM and map it to the corresponding glyphs so that I could fix all of the messed up parts, yet every time the table would break again. It turns out git was automatically changing the line endings, which in turn changed the position of all of the glyphs in the file...

In other words, every time I would push a fixed table file to the internet, it would break again. Kind of maddening. It's fixed now, though :V

Edited April 28, 2014 by MP2E

[sirmola]

The mother 3 font is from the SNES game "earthbound". Three earthbound fonts(normal, intro, and Mr Saturn) are downloadable from romhacking.net, complete with .tbl files:

Normal: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/13/

Intro: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/16/

Mr Saturn: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/14/

This page also has essentially every earthbound font (there are like 8 total) and the fixed width but simaler looking font from the nes prequel "earthbound zero", most of which are in true type format:

http://earthboundcentral.com/2009/11/ultimate-earthbound-font-pack/

[bookofholsety]

for the record, the only real "change" was slightly altering the lower-case s because it struck me as slightly odd-looking; other than that it was just slapping on an outline to better match the japanese font. bear in mind i'm no typographer and i had no idea what i was doing :P

have i mentioned how much i love earthbound's font lately? seriously i have an unhealthy tendency to gravitate toward using it for everything

[sirmola]

for the record, the only real "change" was slightly altering the lower-case s because it struck me as slightly odd-looking; other than that it was just slapping on an outline to better match the japanese font. bear in mind i'm no typographer and i had no idea what i was doing :P

have i mentioned how much i love earthbound's font lately? seriously i have an unhealthy tendency to gravitate toward using it for everything

You're right. It does look slightly odd. Also, a shadow is a good idea, and would probably have been in the original font, if it had not been white on a black background. You could do what the mother 3 translation team did and just change the color to black, but these games have dark, Ornate backgrounds as opposed to the mother series's simple style. Truthfully, I think that the standard snes/ps1 Squaresoft font would work better in this situation as it is designed for an interface that does not have the simplistic aesthetic of the the mother series: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/124/ It also comes in a no drop shadow version: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/17/ and a fixed width version: http://www.romhacking.net/fonts/18/

However, note that it is wider(the menu version appears to be the standard 8x8, which is the same size as the menu font in the fan translation), and might not be as good for long item names.

Edit: never mind. The earthbound font would probably work better. The menu font would make a good placeholder though.

Edited April 29, 2014 by sirmola

[js394]

The font and mock-up screen shot were both provided by bookofholsety. He used the Mother 3 font as a base, I believe, but there are changes to fit FE's style a little better.

The mock-up isn't *exactly* what it will look like in the final product, but it's a good reference. I think it looks really good.

Note this is for dialogue, not sure what is going to be done with the character/weapons/other stuff font(if anything)

Hmm, at first I thought using an EarthBound font in Fire Emblem would look out of place, but that actually looks really nice!

I don't know if there's anyone here familiar with FE5 hacking, but I'm having a problem with the status screen text (The Atk, Crit, Hit, etc.). I'd like to get it to something like this-

But it seems to be compressed in some way. This menu patch translates them, but I've compared it to the regular rom and I can't figure out how they did it. Does anyone here know how to edit them? I've tried contacting Pukachi, the person who created the patch from the screenshot above, but she seems to have disappeared.

[Arch]

I'm pretty positive that they're images.

[js394]

I don't think so because when I overwrote the font with English letters, this happened-

(It's the 'K' on the SPD bar)

[MP2E]

I don't think so because when I overwrote the font with English letters, this happened-

.. snip ..

(It's the 'K' on the SPD bar)

Wouldn't compression cause the glyphs themselves to display corrupted? A Japanese glyph is just replaced by an english one here, which is what I would expect when replacing a Japanese font.

Whether it's correct or not depends on how you reference the glyphs.

I feel like I'm missing something here, though.

Edited April 30, 2014 by MP2E

[js394]

The only thing I can think of right now is maybe they have a different encoding then the rest of the font? Although that wouldn't really make sense to do that, but I can't think of anything else.

[Celice]

If they're not compressed, you could probably do a relative search for them, if they're stored one after the other. Just number out the font, as you did when you had a K in Speed's text, and use that as a base for the search.

If we're lucky and the text is stored in order, you got a pretty good lead at the beginning of the sequence, as Strength and Magic share two of the same glyphs (so even a wildcard search could be used in this case).

My suggestion would be to just blank out the glyphs entirely, as the stats are graphically shown on the left side, but I dunno if any of the glyphs are used elsewhere such as in describing skills the top-right of the status screen.

[MP2E]

The only thing I can think of right now is maybe they have a different encoding then the rest of the font? Although that wouldn't really make sense to do that, but I can't think of anything else.

That would be consistent with your result above, and in FE4 menu text is stored as a fixed-width variant of the japanese Shift-JIS encoding. Most other things are direct references to the images.

[sirmola]

Also, could someone tell me which units cause the game to crash when you hover the cursor over them in the Shaya patch?

THe enemies that do so are the 4 heroes in the same room as glazus and liederick in chapter 24, the hero reinforcements with sleep swords in chapter 24x(which are especialy annoying as they get warped all over the map), and the hero reinforcements in the final chapter. All of them have "mercenary" as their name. Note that the pair of heroes flanking the door into the room full of dark mages with status staves in the eastern portion of chapter 24 do not have this issue, despite also having "mercenary" as their name.

Edited May 5, 2014 by sirmola

[js394]

Okay, so I think I know why the game crashes in Shaya's patch. If someone could give me a save file that includes Chapter 24 and 24x then I might release a patch to fix it. But if I'm wrong about it then I won't be fixing it since we're making a new patch and I need to focus on that.

[js394]

MP2E, just wondering, how will the injector insert text into the rom that uses the English alphabet? I know that there's no English font in the original rom, so will your it just add them into the font?

Edited May 5, 2014 by joesteve1914

[PKLucas531]

https://www.mediafire.com/?uy5gun7w8sgsljk

that save file should have a Ch 24x save, sadly I don't have one at 24

I used snes9x ver 1.53

if that doesn't work, I have a savestate I could try sending

Edited May 5, 2014 by PKLucas531

[js394]

https://www.mediafire.com/?uy5gun7w8sgsljk

that save file should have a Ch 24x save, sadly I don't have one at 24

I used snes9x ver 1.53

if that doesn't work, I have a savestate I could try sending

Thanks, it worked perfect!

Alright, so I thought the crashing was caused by a messed up pointer or a missing string terminator but after double checking these and even repointing the name of the unit, it still crashes. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

[MP2E]

MP2E, just wondering, how will the injector insert text into the rom that uses the English alphabet? I know that there's no English font in the original rom, so will your it just add them into the font?

Precisely, it will inject the font over the Japanese font and then the new English characters will be referred to when injected.

I haven't yet figured out where it's all going to go. I am probably going to look at FE4's current font and see where that gets injected.

[js394]

Precisely, it will inject the font over the Japanese font and then the new English characters will be referred to when injected.

I haven't yet figured out where it's all going to go. I am probably going to look at FE4's current font and see where that gets injected.

Okay, that makes sense.