Transfer of ownership

It's no secret that I haven't had much time or drive to work on this thing lately, and it's clear there is still some demand for a more "working" version of it. 

Enker/Eikigou is a buddy of mine who has done a lot of research on the game (certainly more than myself lately) and has expressed interest in turning the pile of chaotic garbage that is my source code into something more usable.

He has posting privileges here and may or may not be using this blog.

I'll still be hanging around and maybe working on some of my other projects when I have time.

And that's that :3

Projects Blog

This thing still lives, but I do have other things I work on in my spare time.  If you're curious about what else I work on (mostly romhacky type crap), I have a new ten-second blog over here: http://mopsthings.blogspot.com/

Coming soon and way overdue for me is a new computer, that will make working on all of these little things a hell of a lot easier.

Sprites

Fixed a couple things.  Some sprites look better now:

Others, uh.  Less so.

Edit: Okay, well, I think all the TILES are displaying now. Just.. some of them are paletted or positioned wrong.

Build 0213

Release notes:

  - Add support for DTE for text compression, for incoming ROMs and outgoing ROMs.  This
   saves about 20K of space in the US ROM, which is the only one NOT to use DTE in its
   original form.
 - Move offsets and other version-variable numbers out to a set of properties files,
   which in this first release grant support for the following ROM versions:
     - US Version 0
     - French Version 0
     - German Version 0
     - PAL English Version 0
   Other ROMs will not load, but support will be added later for them.
 - Write out all ROMs with version 0x0F, so the editor won't try to load them back in
   (and fail horribly)
 - Fix a couple issues in Event parsing, one of which caused the treasure chest "shaking"
   animation to disappear.
 - Don't write out SPC samples unless you changed one.  Whoops.
 - A few bosses look better now.  I still have a lot of research to do on these.
 - Partial French and German translations, and they're probably not very accurate.  For now
   this was really just a test to make sure the properties files were working correctly.  These
   will be finished/fixed soon, by .. someone who speaks those languages, as soon as I finish
   moving all my strings out to properties files.

Mostly language, font, and DTE-related stuff this time.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19968993/som/FileListing.html

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19968993/som/build%200213/somedit0213.rar

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19968993/som/release_notes.txt

French & German Dialogue

This seems to load now.

There are still other issues with at least the title screen to work out before I call these ROMs "working."

DTE

DTE for ROM output seems like it's working in the US ROM.  This allows common two-letter sequences to be encoded in a single character and reduce the space that the events occupy.

Strange thing about DTE is that while SoM has code and even tables to do it, they don't use it, and the code for the tables is even screwed up and overlapped.  The editor now patches this code and re-generates the table based on whatever dialogue you used.

The difference in event space is 109914 (original event data) bytes versus 83165 bytes with DTE.  That's a savings of like 25%.  Pretty considerable.

Also notable is that the European versions of the ROM do actually use DTE.  Maybe they couldn't figure it out in time to make the English version work, I don't know. These are still not loading correctly due to differences in title screen (it says "Nintendo" instead of "Squaresoft" in these versions and I guess that was cause for encoding it slightly differently) and font (accented characters), but support for these ROMs will be coming soon as I know a lot of you guys are German or French.

Build 0212

Release notes:

 - Add "Export to PNG" for World Map.
 - Rearrange a lot of GUI strings so translations can function better.
   This is not complete yet.
 - Fix glitch that caused walk-on events and special events to be processed
   incorrectly for a few maps.
 - Disallow loading of foreign language ROMs until they can be processed
   correctly. US ROM only for now!

This fixes an issue I just found with certain maps (like 62) ending up with a trigger incorrectly at 0,0 and throwing everything off.

Also to the guy who wanted export world map to PNG, now you've got it.  Enjoy your giant PNGs :3


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19968993/som/FileListing.html

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19968993/som/build%200212/somedit0212.rar

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19968993/som/release_notes.txt