[manafreak]

Hey there,

A month ago I was starting to develop an editor for the Super Nintendo game Illusion of Gaia since it is one of my favourite games. I started a blog to publish the progress of the project.
So for those of you who might be interested, here is the link:

http://gaiathecreator.blogspot.com


P.S.: I'm from germany so my english might not be the best

[VicVergil]

Good luck on this project, this is very interesting
If you could take my request, please support the English Beta version of Illusion of Gaia, since it has the Japanese intro screen, and the text is much less censored compared to the US version, and of course that travesty by Carl Moyse.
If you could decompress the graphics for that Beta version, (especially the title and the various fonts) I'd be grateful like, a lot: I'd like to use that version to begin a translation.

That aside, if you are looking for hack ideas, you could look into restoring the red color of the blood fountain in the castle just before Mu, and various other details that were graphically removed from the non-Japanese versions
The tcrf.net article for the game lists at least two NPCs with full dialogue that are inaccessible because of the position of the sprites on the map.

[Celice]

I love this game! I keep hearing now and then, over the years, how cool to would be for a fan to have a level editor for this game, like they do with Super Mario World or Final Fantasy. I've even heard that Terranigma has such an editor out somewhere on the internet...

Keep us posted here, too, of any big updates 

[TheUnderfaker]

This is so awesome! I hope this brings us many steps closer to an "Uncut" romhack of Illusion of Gaia.

[manafreak]

An uncut version of the game might be a good project for the beginning when the editor is ready And of course I will keep you up-to-date with the progress of the editor!

[KingMike]

Good luck on this project, this is very interesting
If you could take my request, please support the English Beta version of Illusion of Gaia, since it has the Japanese intro screen, and the text is much less censored compared to the US version, and of course that travesty by Carl Moyse.
If you could decompress the graphics for that Beta version, (especially the title and the various fonts) I'd be grateful like, a lot: I'd like to use that version to begin a translation.

That aside, if you are looking for hack ideas, you could look into restoring the red color of the blood fountain in the castle just before Mu, and various other details that were graphically removed from the non-Japanese versions
The tcrf.net article for the game lists at least two NPCs with full dialogue that are inaccessible because of the position of the sprites on the map.

The beta certainly has its share of Enixglish. What is the travesty of Carl Moyse? I know he worked for NoE, so I'm assuming he wouldn't be responsible for English translations (which would've likely been done in the US).
(I know NoE fixed up Lufia II, but I think in that case most of the work in the PAL EN version was simply fixing Natsume's mistakes)

[TheUnderfaker]

Here's a link I posted in the "suggest a hack" thread some time ago,
it shows a lot of the translation mistakes of Illusion of Gaia.

[VicVergil]

The beta certainly has its share of Enixglish. What is the travesty of Carl Moyse? I know he worked for NoE, so I'm assuming he wouldn't be responsible for English translations (which would've likely been done in the US).
(I know NoE fixed up Lufia II, but I think in that case most of the work in the PAL EN version was simply fixing Natsume's mistakes)

There's a page listing out translation mistakes/censorship in the English retail version compared to the Japanese. It turns out these were introduced by NOA. The the Beta, which otherwise shares mostly the same script as the final English version, has those spots pretty close to the original:
- The Japanese names are left intact in the Beta
- Karen's lie is the same as the Japanese and keeps its visual pun
- The Sky Palace boss battle: Tim finds the statue inside the corpse, this line was deleted from the NoA version
- Tim now "falls to his doom". NoA replaced it with Neil complaining about his contacts out of nowhere.
(sadly the Blood Fountain has the blood part removed even in the Beta)
there are lots of lines that are darker and more faithful to the original in the English Beta.

The beta has all of the enhancements (and incidentally, the censored graphics) introduced to the US version, but with the (translated) Japanese title screen, and not the NoA/NoE redesign.

Carl Moyse would be the German translator working for NoE. He utterly butchered everything he worked with, with stupid 80' lingo and obscure pop culture references... which wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that NONE of the original dialogue (which is the censored English script to begin with) remains whenever he feels like doing so.
Notable casualties include Link Awakening ("NEVER WITHOUT CONDOMS"), Secret of Mana, Illusion of Time (aka IoG) Terranigma...

[Revenant]

Claude, not Carl.

[manafreak]

A little update, the palettes can now be chosen:

http://gaiathecreator.blogspot.de/

[justin3009]

This is astounding really.  I'm glad this game is getting attention like this!  It definitely deserved it and has a lot to offer.

[manafreak]

Another update, the tiles can now be edited:

http://gaiathecreator.blogspot.de/

With the next update I will release a first version of the editor. It will be possible to edit tiles and write them back to the ROM.

[VicVergil]

I hope you'll manage by the first release to make it work on the (US) and (US)(Beta) versions.

If only Terranigma could get a graphic editor as well (while the exact same graphical compression is shared between Soul Blazer, Actraiser, Robotreck/Slapstick and Illusion of Gaia -you could check the wiki here for details, and it would be lovely to make the routines flexible enough to allow at least graphical edition only for those-, they changed it somehow when they made Terranigma)

Alchemic published graphical decompressors and compressors (only decompressor for Terranigma) here, you might find this useful:
https://github.com/Osteoclave/Game-Tools

[ChronoMoogle]

  Was the compression routine already implemented in TerraCraft? Transfering edited tilesets to Terranigma would be ace!

Edit: Nevermind, just realised that the compression routine for Terranigma still need to be figured out.

[gadesx]

I expect to see someday a hack of this game with enemies respawn and experience system like terranigma, btw soul blazer and terranigma have level and experience.

[RetroHelix]

Looks like you are progressing very well. What have you planned to work on after the sprite editor?

[manafreak]

I use the decompression and compression routines from Alchemic (Great work by the way  ). I just need to rewrite them in C# instead of Python. I'm working on that for the compression routine at the moment.
For the firste release I will try to make a support for the Beta ROM as well!
The next step after the release will be the implementation of a map editor 

[andrewclunn]

Awesome!  I documented the text formatting for the game a while back (like ten years ago).  I'll check to see if I still have the files somewhere.  Let me know if they'd be of any use to you.

[manafreak]

I think this might be useful for me sooner or later So I would appreciate it if you could find and share those files 

[andrewclunn]

I'm busy looking for the code (I eventually had a nifty scripts for insertion and extraction), but I'm going to have to dig through some old backup CDs to find it.  In the meantime, here's a quick reference table and the script I was working on when I was... more motivated:

http://www.terraearth.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2662&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=d42b8b10d7fbc383fd8c012e71f8df21