Category Archives: SRW F

Finally an update

55 Replies

A lot of time has passed since the last update. Unfortunately, not a terrible lot of progress has been made. As it’s often in life, you never seem to have as much time as you’d like to have. And the older you become, the less time you have. But I am still just as dedicated to finish all the projects!

Dragon Quest Monsters 1&2’s battle text has seen a lot of updates. We reverse engineered the format, are in the process of adding new variables for proper grammar, and have rewritten many instances of text scripts for better and more fluent readability. We hope to make the whole battle text as natural as possible, with full support for all three genders and other grammatical structures. We also just recently fixed a bug that troubled us for over a year. When you started a new game, your monster would randomly do anything except what you told it to do. In the end, a single byte was wrong. I guess that’s life.

I said that I would be disappointed if we couldn’t finish it this year… and that is true. But university has sucked up a lot of time, and when I had time after months of studying, I was so burned out that I couldn’t make much progress at all. We will still do our best… but you shouldn’t get your hopes up for this year. I have faith that you appreciate our translation and hacking quality enough to bear with the time it takes to reach the end.

Super Robot Wars F/FF’s translation has also progressed. Around 50% of the FF script is now translated. The other projects also haven’t been forgotten!

And to finish this, here is a little excerpt of japanese coding goodness I found in one of the games. The variable index can have the values 1 or 4. No others, both before and after the code. This is how they did it:

index++;
if (index == 2) index++;
if (index == 3) index++;
if (index > 4) index = 1;

Sometimes it feels like a miracle that some of these games even work at all.

Stuff

265 Replies

The last news update scored over 100 comments, so I guess you guys deserve another one. Next update will happen if this news gets over 9000 comments.

Progress has been steady on most fronts. The Project Overview page has been updated, but here is a run-down of the most important developments:

Super Robot Wars J

Editing is complete! Deets did an exceptional job in finishing the whole mammoth script in such a timely fashion. Now he moved on to work on editing images (he has a talent for that too!). Notice the “Shield Defense” graphic in the screenshots next to this. There are only very few images left to edit (and hack). This project is really close to being done now. Beta testing should commence within the next few weeks. (No we don’t need any testers, thanks).

Super Robot Wars F

Speaking of super robots, F did also make a huge leap in progress since the last time. Tyria is almost done translating, all that’s left are a few entries in the character database (Bonus content giving an overview of the characters and shows that appear in the game). Once he is done he will start to get cracking at SRW FF soon. In case you didn’t know – SRWF is only the first half of the story, F Final tells the other half. You can import your end savegame from the first game and carry over all stats, money and items to the new game. A translation of F alone would be pretty unsatisfying, but don’t worry, we will translate both.
Since the script is in such an advanced stage, Kingcom also started hacking the menues and made good progress. The project should get even more attention once J is released. By the way, Deets also signed up for editing again and already edited the first scenario! Rock on Deets!

Oriental Blue & DQM 1+2

This project is also progressing smoothly. More menues are done, what’s left are mostly minigames. Tom edited the script like 20 times in the meanwhile too, so it should be pretty polished. Speaking of Tom, the script of DQM 1 is completely translated. Kingcom also started hacking many menues. I played it for a bit already, and the first game is really quite playable already. More progress on this one is on the back-burner though until Oriental Blue is finished.

Tales of Innocence

The Tales of Innocence project is also going absolutely great. The script translation was finally completely finished a few days ago! After a massive marathon session of translating the last skit was translated well ahead of schedule. The script is being edited now. Another project that should enter beta testing very soon.

Kingcom also spend a great deal of time on his assembler called armips. While working on our projects over the years it was clear that goldroad/spasm and the other available assemblers for our target platforms were shit. So he wrote his own! After a ton of features were added he finally made a public release some weeks back, you can read about it (and download it if you like) at this thread. You can also see the feature list there and leave feedback if you like. I’m sure he’ll be glad to know if any other soul besides him uses it.

That’s it for now. There probably won’t be another news update until a release is ready (the 9000 comments thing was a joke). I’m sure though this time it won’t be another three months. Stay tuned.

Need Moar Newz

Woah, has it been three months already since the last post? Time sure flies by. We meant to write something for quite some time now, but you know how it is… there’s stuff to do, games to play and translations to finish. Despite our silence work has been steady and progress has been amazing on many fronts. I’d hope at some point you people would trust us on that instead of declaring us dead.

So what’s up?

Script translation and preliminary editing of SRW J is complete! Hackingwise the game has been very advanced for a long time already. We have a new editor on the team who is giving the whole script a second edit to make it shine as much as possible. His name is Deets and this second edit is also already well under way. I realize many of you would be happier with a raw beta release now and a polished translation later, but we decided against it. We’d like to present you with a truly professional translation that’ll make us proud and all of you happy. Please have some patience and bear with us, the end result will be worth it.

Tales of Innocence is also going excellently. The story event portion of the script has been completely translated leaving only the skits left to go. I’m damn excited myself to see this finished soon. For more information and screenshots, see Absolute Zero’s site.

In other, even greater news, I have the honour to announce three new projects to the public. Yes ladies and gentlemen, three! They have been worked on in the background quite some time already (one of them for half a year), but we feel the time is finally right to make them official. If you follow the comments and the board at romhacking.net you might have already known about some of them.

Oriental Blue
This GBA RPG is a spin-off of the famous Tengai Makyou series. Tom will be translating it and Kingcom is taking care of the hacking. It has actually quite far progressed already, with the translation progress reaching past the 50% mark.

Super Robot Wars F
After Tyria finished translating SRW J it was time for a new project of course! He’s currently translating the PSX version of SRWF. The hacking is still in early stages, but there has been great progress already. Compared to SRW J the script isn’t even that big, so maybe this one won’t take Tyria too long.

Super Robot Wars D
Another SRW? Yes, we’re totally serious. This one won’t be translated by Tyria however since he is obviously already busy. Another translator who’d like to stay anonymous at this point, is handling this script. It’s the predecessor to SRW J, so it’s not as spectacularily looking, but most people agree it has the superior storyline among the two games.

That’s all for now, rest assured there has been steady progress on all of our projects. If I didn’t mention one specifically, assume that no news is good news. Not all of our translations are as insanely fast as Tom or Tyria. We’ll bring up these projects again when they reach major milestones.