I bet you were expecting to see ‘butter’ up there in the headline because you know, molasses doesn’t churn very well! Unfortunately, that’s about how quickly things here at TransCorp have been churning in recent months. Real life has really been whipping me hard. I know you’ve all heard that one before, but it really piled up all at once. I think you might get some amusement from the tale.
There was a string of natural disasters at my home to clean up from over the course of many weeks (my house is OK thankfully). Since spring there’s been a tornado, earthquake, and record winter storm causing mass tree destruction around my property (I have a wooded area and several very mature trees). That last one also caused a several day power outage. There was hospitalization of close family members, which was unfortunately followed by two deaths. Back on the work front, I had a several week spout of overtime putting out some hot fires at work.
Now, right before all of that, I had started an insulation project at home and finished ripped out all the old stuff, and of course got derailed from the earlier mentioned misfortunes at the worst time. Now winter is fast approaching and I’m throwing heat away with no insulation! In addition to that, my wife and I had also started a room renovation project we were derailed from. Lastly, to top it all off I came down with a cold, that led to a sinus infection, that led to lower respiratory problems. That took a month to recover from. Did I mention my car failed to start the other day? No, I don’t believe I did. Well, it did. I’ve got car issues on my plate too.
FINALLY, I have grieved my loved ones, gone back to a normal schedule at work, cleaned up my property, and am back to getting insulation in my house and finishing the room renovation! It’s been an absolutely insane past couple of months the likes of which I’ve never seen in my life. It’s unsustainable, right? It can’t continue like this, right? Think positive! Wait a minute. I’m on TransCorp and not blogspot? Oops! Let’s move on to TransCorp happenings over the past few months. There have been some developments.
Most of my time for TransCorp over the past few months has been spent developing TextAngel. It has come a long way since it’s humble beginnings and recently went in an entirely new direction. As the feature list became ever longer, it naturally evolved into a full project oriented utility.
What that means is the utility uses a project and string oriented approach. Start a new project, add all the files you need. Then, add the necessary pointer tables, string blocks, etc. Now you can go to work and translate them right in the utility, or you can dump to full Atlas compliant text output, or even export to XML! It is now capable of handling many different types of text and pointer structures and can hopefully handle most needs for your entire project from the dialog to the item lists. Flexibility is achieved by allowing you to ‘build’ your script structures consisting of individual strings, blocks of strings, pointer tables, and pointer trees. When completed, it should be on of the most advanced dumpers on the market.
To see early screenshots, the feature list, and more information, check out the link below!
Progress has been a roller coaster ride as translation support has come, gone, come, and possibly gone again. The momentum which led to insertion of some translated scripts from the last update have slowed down and stalled out. After declaring Heart permanently missing in action, we enlisted the services of another qualified translator named Rob. He started at the beginning and was going through Heracles III material and all item lists for Heracles IV for consistency and new translation efforts. However, it has now been a few months with no word and no response to my recent e-mails. So, we may have lost another. You’re guess is as good as mine. Let’s hope for the best!
With the tedious HDMA menu system, DaMarsMan and myself being preoccupied with other life developments, and loss of translation support, the project has cooled down and will likely be on the back burner for a little while.
A new draft was issued in June. In August, all remaining outstanding business was wrapped up and the standard should now be feature complete. Unfortunately, I have not yet had time to issue a new draft containing the final feature set. So, I would refrain from looking through the current draft as a number of items are now different.
When I finish the next draft, it will be subject to editing changes only. I hope to have interested parties that contributed to it’s development sign off on it and give it a public release so anyone interested in using it can start doing so. So far, it will tentatively be used in a future version of Atlas, TableLib, Cartographer, and my own TextAngl utility. All combined we should have a nice little evolutionary step forward in translation tools. I look forward to the day!
Follow the Table File Standard on the message board.
-Nightcrawler
It’s amazing how quickly time flies by. I meant to post a quick update a few months ago. I got swept away in the tides of life again with large home renovation project, building a new computer, and on-going medical issues. Oh yeah, I also found myself with extended hours at that pesky life interruption they call ‘work’! I *think* I have found my way back to shore again and can continue on! I’d love to start using these updates as an entertaining blog of my personal life, but I don’t want to scare away the dozens and dozens of TransCorp fans! So, I guess I’ll move on to actual TransCorp news! :)
Earlier in the year, we had some great momentum on Heracles IV. The screen shots exemplify several bits of progress. First, numerous hacks were done to the dialog to add in those formatting control codes we needed. The in-game auto formatter was fleshed out to handle the new control codes, and work out several bugs and issues to produce what you see now. Lastly, I made some extensions to TextAngel to handle insertion for all of the main dialog. Along the way I discovered several new banks of text for various text from menus to letters in your inventory. This always seems to happen to me. Every time I think I found all the text, I discover some more, in some new format, having nothing at all to do with the text I already found. Fantastic, right? This my friends is why so many ROM hacking projects race away to 90+%, and then somehow the remaining 10% takes longer than the rest of the entire project! I got a little luckier this time as this new text does follow a similar format. So, it wasn’t all that hard to get some working insertion for this text as well. It is much more text for the translator though.
Speaking of the translator, while Heart was chugging away like a locomotive the end of last year, I haven’t heard from the guy since! It kind of killed most of the momentum and steam we had built up. I inserted all translated text I got from him and we ran out! I guess it came at a decent time as I did get bogged down with more real life, but I fear for project. I’ve seen the disappearing translator act many times over the years. Hopefully Heart will read this update, or decide to respond to some of my e-mails so we can get the project back on track. Otherwise, I guess we’ll be looking for a new translator and things may stall out for awhile.
DaMarsMan had done some more menu work until we hit some stumbling blocks on how to fit longer items and names on all the menu screens. The menu screens in Heracles IV make me ill. Two background layers and lots of HDMA glue smash them together to make up a difficult to edit display. We know how they work on a technical level. We’re just trying to determine the smartest and least tedious way to handle them. We’ve discussed several options and I think we know what we need to do to get it done right. However, I think we’d like to procrastinate a bit more before jumping into that! I always prefer dialog work over menu work. It just seems so much more rewarding for the time spent.
We’ll see how it all plays out. It’ll all get done. I never quit. I just take a really, really long time to get there. I will go toe to toe with that energizer bunny any day! I will OWN him! I might be looking at another minor surgery in a few more weeks, so I’ll probably be laying low for awhile after that, but I’ll come back swinging when possible! TRANSCORP IS SPARTA! RAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
-Nightcrawler
TransCorp is stronger than Heracles! Although Heracles resisted, TransCorp muscled our way to victory. Although there’s been no updates in the past several months, much progress has been made in our many endeavors. In TransCorp’s quest to show we are stronger than Greek Gods, progress has been made in: Heracles IV, the Table File Standard, and our text dumping utility (currently dubbed TextAngel). Read on for details!
The most visually impressive feat of strength in this update is conquering text insertion on Heracles IV, as exemplified by the screen shots! Muscle was flexed by decoupling the game’s universal decompression engine from the font and dialog, tweaking the VWF engine for English glory, and smashing an in-game auto formatter in for the text! Some polishing is still necessary on the script inserter, as well as adding some formatting control codes, but it’s looking nice so far!
Our translator, Heart, has made good progress translating several blocks of text. He’s provided some good material for us to insert into the game, and wet our taste buds for a new English Heracles adventure! I hope Heart has the ‘heart’ to forge through and conquer the rest of this translation!
Partnership with DaMarsMan has also proved to be fruitful as he has done a good deal of work on the menu and misc. text end of things. 2011 is shaping up to look good for Heracles IV!
The standard has seen several revisions over the past few months, strengthening with each pass. After long talks with Klarth (creator of Atlas) and Tauwasser, the standard is shaping up to be very nice. We’ve added some very nice table switching ability that can be used for quite a few applications. I’d suggest taking a peek to get a feel for what kind of new things the standard hopes to provide.
The main specification and content should now be complete. I don’t expect to make any more significant changes. It will now enter a period of final review with various interested/influential party members and move forward to a final edit and formatting revision.
With Klarth on board to update Atlas to use this standard, and my own upcoming advanced dumping utility, this standard will enter the lives of many ROM hackers. So, if you haven’t taken any interest in this project before, I urge you to take a look and voice any suggestions you may have, so we can move forward with the best standard possible! Otherwise, you’ll just have to trust our judgment and deal with it! :P
I’m currently calling it TextAngel, but I’ve been known to change my mind on titles, so it may change again before release. It’s seen much progress over the past few months and is quickly on track to be the most advanced dumper ever publicly released in our community.
Most of the main features were mentioned last update, but I just keep adding more and more possible modes and capabilities. I even started adding some insertion ability (in addition to Atlas compatibility). I’ve already put it to good use on Heracles IV, and will use it on Tenshi No Uta as well.
It’s going to be quite awhile yet before this utility is released for a few reasons. First, it uses the new table standard, which has been a work in progress. Second, I will need to start writing a small test suite for it due to difficulty in adequately testing all of it’s various capabilities effectively. Lastly, I’ve never been the greatest at user interface design, and it has undergone a few revamps, and I anticipate it will continue to change with some feedback from others.
Nonetheless, it’s really shaping up to be nice and I expect it will be the most advanced dumper available upon it’s release. I’m sure it won’t be the be all, end all, but it should be a great tool for ROM hackers. I look forward to seeing how it might be further improved after it’s in field use. In the meantime, I will certainly be using it on my projects! I expect to have an update focusing on this project sometime soon with further screen shots of what you can expect. So, stay tuned!
-Nightcrawler
The storm is upon us… the storm of activity, that is! Conditions improved enough for me start working again. I have certainly taken advantage of it! It’s funny how one thing leads to another. Shortly after returning to work on Tenshi No Uta, I was met with some additional non dialog text to dump. None was stored in a similar manner to any other text in the game. I grew a bit frustrated that I lacked some reliable generic tools to handle some of these text formats. So, I decided to take some time and start developing a better dumper, which led to my Generic Dumper project, which will likely be released to the community in some form. Read below for more details. While I started developing this project, I was beefing up my table file library. I realized we don’t have any official standard on table files and their features. So, work ignited on creating a rough draft for standardization of table files for myself and the community. Details can be found below. Next, the additional activity prompted Mattias to contact me regarding applying UVWF (Universal VWF project) to Terranigma and doing the text reformatting work. And thus one thing lead to another and another until a flurry of activity began! Now, on with the status updates!
For years, ROM hackers have had to deal with countless incompatibilities amongst table file uses for various utilities. Even when developing my own utilities, I didn’t have a clear definition of the features supported in the table file format. I decided to do something about it for myself, and hopefully the benefit of the entire community. The document’s purpose is to document and standardize the table file format in hopes that ROM hackers can progress forward with compatible utilities, clear indication of format, and standardized features.
I have already written a first draft. The draft was created by reviewing documentation and features of various utilities throughout ROM hacking history, reviewing their relevance to the primary purpose of a table file, and update them to meet current needs. Basically; collect, improve, and standardize what we’ve been doing while touching on some tough issues such as UTF-8 encoding.
Obviously, for this to be of any use outside of myself, it needs to be adopted and accepted by others. I urge you to read the document, make some suggestions, present some ideas, and comment. It is my hope that we can start having compatible utilities, standard features, and pave the way for advancement!
I’ve been working on a GUI based flexible, generic dumping (and hopefully insertion) program in recent weeks that would be able to do most everything that Cartographer can do and then some. I’m trying to eliminate the need for a custom dumper in as many cases as possible. I thought Cartographer and Atlas made some good progress in that direction, but lacked simplicity and ease of use.
Implemented Features so far:
- Follows Table File Format 1.0 Draft for supported features.
- Raw Dumping
- Pointer Table Support
- Variable Pointer Sizes (up to 32-bit Big and Little Endian)
- Odd Pointer Spacing
- Relative Pointers
- Fixed Length Strings
- Fixed Length Lines
- Atlas Compatibility
During development of UVWF, I threw around the idea of Terranigma as a nice test case for useful implementation in a game other than Tenshi No Uta. I wasn’t big on doing the script reformatting work to make a project out of it. As a result, it didn’t go very far. Recently, Mattias (of Terranigma Swedish Translation fame) contacted me about doing the grunt work. He has the experience necessary, so I started taking a look at this.
Terranigma uses sprites for the intro text and some of the routine is shared with the standard dialog and menu text. It also takes advantage of color manipulation. The UVWF is not yet mature enough to handle these more complex situations. I do find it an interesting case to continue to look at for study and potential support for continued development of UVWF.
I think I may have to draw the line somewhere on the extents this project will be able to cover and what would require a custom VWF. As I’ve seen before, the more flexible I make it, the slower it becomes for time sensitive implementations. I’ve been playing with the idea of handling some cases like this in a modular fashion where various versions of a ‘RenderChar’ function would exist and you would use the appropriate one for the job. However, that complicates the work involved in implementing it and adds significant size. Originally, I had hoped it would be able to be implemented with very little assembly work by the user.
I will continue to try and adapt my design to meet my needs with these situations and see where it goes. It’s really just been one big experiment to take this concept for a ride and see what I could do with it. Certainly limitations and out of scope cases are going to exist. I just need to try and define what that is going to be. We’ll see where it goes from here!
I have a bad habit of underestimating the amount of misc. text/menu work to be done in my projects. I suppose that’s probably because it’s my least favorite part of the project. I found several sets of misc. and/or menu text that needs to be dumped in various formats. I grew pretty frustrated that I didn’t have tools to handle all of them. That spurred my Generic Dumper project. I did a little bit of work on dumping some of the needed text as test cases for the program. I have gotten off on a tangent with some other work mentioned in this news update, but expect to get back to Tenshi as soon as my Generic Dumper progresses.
You know how these things go in the world of hobbyist work. Things don’t always go according to plan, time lines are thrown out the window, and surprises lurk around every corner! I certainly didn’t expect to be working on the things I am now. It has been a nice change of pace and some fresh air around here now that I’ve been back to more active work. I’m hoping conditions will allow me to continue this nice pace of activity!
-Nightcrawler