Secret of Mana, Turbo - Beta 230822

[hmsong]

So far, he has provided invaluable analysis into 21% of the script,

Okay, I can't help but notice that was oddly specific percentage number.

[reconstructingmana]

Okay, I can't help but notice that was oddly specific percentage number.

Take what he's done, and divide by the total amount of lines

[hmsong]

No, what I meant was that typically, people would say, "about 20%" or "almost a quarter" something.  Don't get me wrong though.  I like the specific number.

[reconstructingmana]

Yeah.  It was like 20.99%.  Too beautiful to round!

[nosynose]

There hasn't been much discussion about the Script Augmentation Project, so I'll talk.

I may not understand what exactly the Script Augmentation Project is, but I love passionate projects like this and surely hope for its speedy completion

[Queue]

Version 2020-05-17:
https://filebin.net/7spaiz2xfys6b2i1/SoM_Turbo.200517.zip

Changes:
- Event_Fixes covers 4 more mistakes in the vanilla text

This was just a maintenance release while I work on the Script Augmentation Project.



Mr X, I'll look into it. A preliminary check showed no changes to how it functions (when you name the girl and sprite is when it sets their default element levels, and it looks like the code that does so should be functioning), so it'll require I dig deeper. It's especially weird that it seemed to partially work.

reconstructingmana, I got all of the Vanilla (Woolsey) corrections into the spreadsheet and can now download the spreadsheet (as a .tsv file) and feed it to the integration script successfully without having to apply any fixups to the file first. My next objective will be to get something usable to you, but give me a few days, as I've suddenly found myself swamped.

[hmsong]

Beautiful.  Gotta say, I'm rather looking forward to the reconstructingmana's new translation.  Specifically, all the new lores and stuff.  It would refresh the mana image and everything.

[Thirteen 1355]

Someone is retranslating the game? Woah, that's worth following.

[hmsong]

@Thirteen 1355

There are actually multiple retranslations.  There's already Relocalization, and obviously, reconstructingmana is working on his new translation.  And the last time I checked, kethinov was working on another translation.

[Mr X]

Version 2020-05-17:
https://filebin.net/7spaiz2xfys6b2i1/SoM_Turbo.200517.zip

Changes:
- Event_Fixes covers 4 more mistakes in the vanilla text

This was just a maintenance release while I work on the Script Augmentation Project.



Mr X, I'll look into it. A preliminary check showed no changes to how it functions (when you name the girl and sprite is when it sets their default element levels, and it looks like the code that does so should be functioning), so it'll require I dig deeper. It's especially weird that it seemed to partially work.

This update seem to work for both so far, just got gnome and as inteded both the Girl and Sprite got him at level 1.

[reconstructingmana]

@Thirteen 1355

There are actually multiple retranslations.  There's already Relocalization, and obviously, reconstructingmana is working on his new translation.  And the last time I checked, kethinov was working on another translation.

I don't believe the Relocalization was a retranslation... 

Is kethinov aware of our work?

[kethinov]

My work is just copyediting Ted Woolsey's original translation to make it less terrible. So while my project makes surgical changes, yours is more a total overhaul like VWF and Relocalized. My view is that there is room in the world for many different script replacements and people will all have different preferences as to which they prefer, as each approach has pros and cons. Also as an aside, you should use the same technique I'm planning to use for extended dialog and I can share with you my approach when you're ready to begin encoding your work into a hack. Since our two hacks will be mutually incompatible, you could use the same ROM space I'm planning to use. Queue alluded to it before as something I was planning to use earlier in the thread - it's an area in bank C9 that has a very large amount of dead code that can be used to create new story events or expand the length of existing story events. Queue is already using some of it for some of his hacks, but there are still large areas of it that are unclaimed that we can both use for our script edits.

[Thirteen 1355]

I felt tempted to say "Someone is retranslating the game (again)?" But then I felt unsure if the term retranslation was correct on the FuSoYa patch.

[hmsong]

It just shows that Secret of Mana is loved.  Too bad that the remake butchered it.  Well, I haven't played it, but I saw the review, and they were all quite bad.  And I saw few clips.  The voices... arghhh.

[Mr X]

Wish they would have improved SoM in terms of gameplay through the remake. Trials of Mana remake seems a lot better in terms of gameplay than the original, and none of stats/equipmemt that don't work.

The story and the voice acting tho is something else entirely, better not talk about that lol.

Really wish they would have fleshed out SoM a lot more with the remake, in every aspect, they missed the opportunity.

[Queue]

In a literal sense, there aren't any full retranslations aside from reconstructingmana et al.'s in-progress work.

- FuSoYa's VWF Edition is an embellishment of the original Woolsey script. This isn't meant as an insult, it's still a good thing and I personally always use it over vanilla.
- Relocalized does involve some retranslation, but is focused on names of things, people and places, and mostly uses FuSoYa's script for the bulk dialog text.
- The 2018 Remake seems to lean heavily on the Woolsey text. It may actually be a retranslation, but seems unlikely to have been thorough.

kethinov, I'm already fielding the technical support for reconstructingmana's retranslation (Script Augmentation Project, SAP from here on). It's too big to fit in bank C9/CA; currently I have it writing to the same spot that VWF Edition uses (though it's larger than that, so reaches further into the expanded ROM space than VWF does). This removes any practical space constraints and will make eventual compatibility between VWF (for font / letter spacing), Relocalized (for spelling changes) and SAP a tiny bit easier.

You would laugh (or maybe gag) if you saw the script I wrote that parses the vanilla events and SAP's retranslation spreadsheet in order to merge them. It's a comical Frankenstein's monster of batch and vbscript (not unlike ZPS_Helper.bat), and incredibly anti-pretty.

[hmsong]

@Queue

Hey, a person sent me this, telling me that I should use that if I want to know more about hacking.

https://wiki.superfamicom.org/65816-reference

The problem is, I have no idea how to follow that.  It's too advanced for me.  Is there something which explains a bit more elementary stuff, in order for me to understand that?  I feel like knowing that would help me in the long run.

[Queue]

Version 2020-05-24:
https://filebin.net/7spaiz2xfys6b2i1/SoM_Turbo.200524.zip

Changes:
- theoretical bug fix for Quality_of_Life\Run_On_Trigger_Tiles
- theoretical bug fix for Bug_Fixes\Gather_Party_Fix
- added Proper-caser compatibility for Text\Weapon_Skil_TextFix
- preliminary implementation of Graphics\Better_Menu_Font; adds an outline to the menu font, currently makes menus take slightly longer to load (despite its name, it doesn't actually change the font, will likely change this feature name once I improve it)



hmsong, yeah, that's a bit much to take in without lots of prior knowledge about programming. You probably need to find an SNES assembly programming tutorial to start with.

Keep in mind that ZPS has a non-standard SNES assembly syntax, so no SNES ASM tutorial is going to look exactly like how the SNES ASM in ZPS looks. The primary differences are:
- how literal numbers are represented: #$00 vs. #00
- indexed address mnemonics: LDA $00,X vs. LDA+X $00

I don't really have any advice as to which tutorial, as that wasn't the route I took to learn SNES programming.

[hmsong]

Aw damn.  I figured it had a lot to do with ZPS syntax (I thought I saw something similar when I was going through ZPS), and that I would be able to actually use it.  Well, it seemed a bit much for my level anyways.  Damn.  I'm trying, but I'm just not being able to.  So sad.

[LightBaneX]

Recently finished the game using with this mod with my buddy. All in all, we really liked it a lot. We didn't come across any crazy bugs or glitches. Though the difficulty really ramped up towards the end there. Probably with the huge increase of armor ratings while also being unique so each characters defense was not the best. We really liked the palette color changes with new armors. Though we think there was too many pinks, and the sprites stuff didn't change too much. I assume because he's small and there's not much details to change. Maybe you can have the hair color change with wrist armor. I don't know. We really loved the little snowman that was in various places to heal you. He was pretty quickly our favorite character.

Kind of wish the defense buff had a bit more impact because dang the end game hurt. Is there any way to remove screen freezing from some of the maxed spells? We had to resort to only using spells that didn't freeze the screen towards the end there when we started getting the spirits that high of level. We had a ton of fun though, there isn't really much that held back the experience or really bothered us. Everything I mentioned was pretty minor. Oh! Does herbal boost not have a unique animation for level 8? I think that's the only spell we found that didn't have that unique animation that happens sometimes. Maybe we were just unlucky though. I do think something needs to be given to the boy though. The spell shortcuts made it really fun to play as the girl and the sprite. The boy was really lacking behind. Have him dual wield his two equipped weapons? Create throwable items that he can use with shortcuts? Maybe he can throw his second weapon straight across the entire screen every ~10 seconds for big damage? Ha, I don't know. Just some thoughts.

Anyways, We loved this mod and will definitely follow it and play it again.