I’m aware it’s been a full year since my last post. I apologize for the long silence. As usual, real life and gaming studying used up a lot of the time. Also sorry for the unapproved comments, I didn’t pay attention to them for a while. Most of the progress was made on the projects covered by Absolute Zero, but the others were also not forgotten. Today I want to focus on Dragon Quest Monsters 1&2. I know that the length of the project is almost comical at this point, so I want to give some insight into what problems there were to solve and why it takes a long time, often resulting in extended stretches with little motivation to work on it.

Dragon Quest Monsters 1&2 is undoubtedly among the nastiest games I’ve worked on. It needed many major programming changes that all came with their own set of resulting issues. Some systems of the game were  just entirely unsuited to languages other than Japanese and needed a lot of manual work to get them working. Here I want to summarize a few of the things that needed to be done, some of the issues along the way, and what we still have left to do at this point.

Names

The Japanese version used 5 bytes/characters for player and monster names. This has been extended to 6 letters by compressing every letter down to 6 bit, at the cost of the size of the input alphabet. The game originally stored location names as plain text in saves, in around 10 bytes. It copied them from the text of the specific map. No compressing method would allow the longer location names to fit in there, so now instead an index gets written to the saves and a new list of location names was created to be referenced by that. Key names in part 2 were also stored as plain text, in just a handful of bytes. These couldn’t be referenced by an index due to the vast number of possible variables, so instead all the variables are encoded in a way that allows dynamically recreating the key name on demand.

Menus

The Japanese version uses tile maps to display the background and text. The screen is divided into 10×10 pixel blocks and each block can get one value assigned, ie. the graphic of a single letter. As this obviously doesn’t work well at all with proportional text, the entire system has seen a major rewrite, now dynamically drawing text, storing it in VRAM, and freeing it when it’s no longer needed. This was necessary, but it also caused a severe number of bugs. Some of them resulted from flawed logic in the original game. I’ll explain it with an example of a bug that I recently fixed, which had troubled me for a very long time.

Here you can see the status menu. Note the list on the left, which is a list of your monsters, with another option to show an overview of all your monsters at the same time. Now, when you press O you can see the ancestors of the selected monster.

And then this happens. Note the same menu on the left, now in the background. What should show “All” actually shows “24” in this case. At first it looks fine, this only happens when you press any buttons. So what happened? After a lot of debugging, I figured it out. This is the sequence of events:

• the player presses O, entering the ancestor menu
• the game draws the new foreground menus, and at the same time creates a backup copy of the background menu
• whenever the user presses a button, all menus are redrawn, including the background menu. At this point my new system frees the previously displayed text, allowing it to be overwritten by new text
• after all menus have been redrawn, the final image is created. But instead of using the newly drawn version of the background menu, the game instead uses the backup copy. As the text it displayed has long been invalidated, the result is garbage

This is just one of many examples where the game works in, let’s say, a less than intuitive way. It’s a very time consuming process to identify and fix these issues.

Battle Text

This is the single most time consuming part of the game. When the game displays battle text, it doesn’t fetch any complete sentences. It doesn’t fetch any sentences with some placeholders either. It instead pieces the sentence together bit by bit, splitting it into the small parts mirroring sentence fragments of the Japanese grammar. Here’s a simple example to illustrate this:

<Var:10><Var:30>は　<Var:20><Var:35>を　<nl>ぱふぱふした！
<Var:10><Var:30> gave <Var:20><Var:35> a puff puff!

The Japanese text is split up into three parts, the first two of which are used by hundreds of strings:

<Var:10><Var:30>は
<Var:20><Var:35>ã‚’
<nl>ぱふぱふした！

Now there is a problem – the Japanese text just puts the names of the two monsters right next to each other, but in English we need to insert an extra “gave” inbetween them. To do this we can’t just change the string. Instead, we need to add another sentence fragment and adjust the battle script to piece the sentence together in the right way. This process needs to be done with a lot of strings. Some don’t need any changes, some can be solved by slight wording changes (ie. active instead of passive, or vice versa), while many others need to have their script adjusted. It’s a time consuming and error-prone process, and every single string the game can display needs to be checked and verified for this reason.

Additionally, support for pronouns was added. The monsters in your party use their respective gender, while enemies are universally referred to as “it”.

What’s left at this point

• finish checking/fixing all battle text strings
• replace Japanese graphics, ie. the title screen or the background graphic for the appraising results
• fix remaining menu issues (most of them should be squashed by now)
• text editing (mostly to avoid ugly text formatting, currently around 1/3 through the first game)
• testing

A special thanks goes to Lord Oddeye, who joined the project after the Oriental Blue release. He continued testing just as thoroughly as before, and this time around also helped fix the issues. He brought the majority of the system text formatting up to shape and is now doing the same for the story text.

So much for today. I hope it was an interesting insight into the project, and I’ll try not to take another year for the next update.