Help with editing text in game's script? (Skies of Arcadia Legends)

[purr]

Greetings.

I am working on touching up the translation and correcting spelling mistakes for a GC game. This is just a personal project of mine.

However, the text is in .sct files and while I can open them, the text is a mix of words and symbols, so it seems I cannot edit them directly with just a simple text editor.

While there is a tool here for download on this site especially made for editing this game, I cannot fit all the text I would like in a few of the dialogue boxes since there is a character limit for each dialogue box.  I would think more characters can fit, since these certain dialogue boxes have a lot more characters in the Japanese version than the English version.  I thought maybe this was some limit of the editing tool and not the game itself.

So, I thought maybe I could edit the script files directly instead, but was wondering if there is a special tool for that.

Thank you for reading and I would appreciate any assistance.

[Jorpho]

While there is a tool here for download on this site especially made for editing this game

Why don't you just tell us the name of the game you are working on? ".sct" is not very meaningful.

[purr]

My apologies about that.

The .sct files are Windows Script Components and the game is Skies of Arcadia Legends.

I have been using the SOALeditor that is available on this site to edit the dialogue.

It seems the limit on the number of characters is coded in the script file itself because if I use the  script file from the Japanese version, the number of characters that can fit in the dialogue boxes is different. (While I was able to get all the text I wanted in the two boxes I was having the short limit on by using the Japanese script file, a few other boxes ended up having a smaller limit than the English version. )

I only really need to increase the character limit on only two message boxes in only one script. I was hoping there was some way to increase the limit or edit the words by editing the script file directly.

[Jorpho]

The .sct files are Windows Script Components and the game is Skies of Arcadia Legends.

I have been using the SOALeditor that is available on this site to edit the dialogue.

I think whoever wrote SOALEditor just decided that ".sct" was a convenient three-letter extension and did not care that ".sct" was also used for Windows Script Components already.  (That sort of thing happens all the time.)

Unfortunately that's just about all I can tell you.  Maybe you can edit your thread title to mention Skies of Arcadia Legends.

[purr]

Oh, I am not too knowledgeable on file types and such. Although, they are as ."sct" when extracted directly from the game itself.

Thanks for the assistance, though. I was hoping this was not going to be a complicated thing, but I guess all games are different. This is the first time I tried to alter a game's files, so I was not sure how difficult it would be to approach.

[edale]

For this, you're probably going to want to try and contact Maeson, he did the Skies of Arcadia Maeson mod: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2859/

IIRC from reading the readme, he said that SOALEditor introduced a LOT of bugs and problems to the game, so he found it much easier to edit everything directly with a hex editor; apparently the ROM is formatted in such a way that it's relatively simple to find everything via hex editor. He did quite a bit of text editing in the game (mostly item descriptions), so he should be more than capable of pointing you in the right direction.

[purr]

Greetings.

I tried to use a hex editor (Thank you for the assistance), but, it displays the dialogue in the same vein as opening it with wordpad : broken words mixed with random characters. I do not find how it could possibly be modified directly in this manner, especially since the dialogue is not displayed (formatted/structured) how it is shown in game.

If I use the Japanese version of the dialogue file for that specific scene, I can somewhat comfortably fit what I need, since it allots more character space than the English version (not being able to change the name tags from Japanese to English a minor inconvenience). However, after editing it with the SOALEditor, it breaks the scene while in the game.

The editor also makes a few other issues to the dialogue files throughout (rarely adding characters where there should not be or completely replacing words. This only shows up in game and not in the editor).

I have been in contact with the author of the SOALEditor. They did manage to modify the English script file to allow more characters where I required. However, it makes that scene break. They are currently not able to understand the reason. I have brought the other concerns to their attention and they have been assisting me when they can, but they appear to be busy with other matters at the moment and I do not wish to burden them any further.

Maeson is on vacation? I do not wish to burden them.
I do not believe they would be able to assist, though. They modified gameplay related data that is in the Start.dol (where none of the game's story dialogue is stored). Only text related to items, spells, discoveries, journal and other menu-based elements are in there. It appeared easy to read and modify (unlike the story dialogue). They also used specially configured tools that target the Start.dol.

I am frustrated. I revised the entire English script, but I cannot implement it properly in the game. This kind of work is never easy, I suppose. I never modified a game before, so perhaps it is also my inexperience.

I hope I do not appear ungrateful, I am truly thankful for everyone's assistance and the tools provided here. I am merely upset with myself, I wish I was not so technically declined.

[Jorpho]

I tried to use a hex editor (Thank you for the assistance), but, it displays the dialogue in the same vein as opening it with wordpad : broken words mixed with random characters. I do not find how it could possibly be modified directly in this manner, especially since the dialogue is not displayed (formatted/structured) how it is shown in game.

The characters aren't "random" – each of the characters probably has its own specific function, like a line break, or introducing a delay, or indicating the end of a section.  The big advantage to using a hex editor is that you can see all of the bytes in the file, including those that don't have normal ASCII representations (and would be completely invisible in WordPad).  Unfortunately, there's no way to find out what each of the "random characters" does except for trial and error.

Often, ROMs for other consoles use a "pointer table" for their text: a list of offsets within the ROM where each piece of dialog starts.  In cases like that, making dialog sections shorter or longer is (usually) just a matter of editing the pointer table.  But for a big disc-based game like Skies of Arcadia, there are probably many different ways of laying out the dialog.

[purr]

Thank you for the explanation. I had thought they represented specific characters and the like, but I could not find a pattern. I do not know anything about hex editing, so it was confusing for me.

[Jorpho]

Now that I read your post again, it's also quite possible that the script has undergone some kind of compression, in which case a hex editor won't help you at all.  It's not clear from Maeson's readme if he edited the game's script that way.

[purr]

Greetings. The dialogue is shown as this:

https://s9.postimg.org/9ga9kpf9r/002a.jpg

If it is compressed, is it possible to uncompress it?