hmsong, yes, I think you should consider changing any Neko that's even remotely near an identical shop. I don't know if anyone ever buys his stuff, just uses him as a save point, so trying to give his shop value seems worthwhile to me.
There's no exhaustive document naming each map; what's in the Bank08 disassembly text file is the best I'm aware of.
budtzcbs, when you use the patcher and apply the patch, it outputs a "SoM Turbo.######.ini" file. If you make the INI file match the filename of the ZPS file, it'll use the settings in the INI file.
So, if you had say, "SoM Turbo.200401.zps" and got settings how you wanted, and then applied the patch, you'd have a "SoM Turbo.200401.ini" file. Then if you downloaded "SoM Turbo.200408.zps", before opening the patcher, if you rename "SoM Turbo.200401.ini" to "SoM Turbo.200408.ini" and then open the patcher and load "SoM Turbo.200408.zps" it'll load the same settings you set for that previous patch (new features added will be at their defaults).
The other option is to rename the ZPS file to remove the date before you use the patch (for example, rename "SoM Turbo.200408.zps" to "SoM Turbo.zps"), so that your INI file is always just "SoM Turbo.ini".
hmsong made most, if not all, of the balance changes you happened to name. For anything I did / do, my changes are always in the name of fun: I consider this game incredibly easy, and there's no silver bullet to make it challenging and not tedious (and even when it is made tedious, I don't find it challenging), so I tend to focus on changes that reduce degenerate gameplay (simple examples of degenerate gameplay are spamming spells to lock down a boss or using the weapon overcharge glitch: both cause you to spend lots of time in menus when playing a game that is designed for you to be actively driving a little dude around swinging a weapon).
StarWyvwern, I suspect that file hosting site isn't doing that maliciously, but just having trouble, either on their end, or in their site functioning on your choice of browser. I found another file host I'll try for a bit. I'll update the download links soon after I post this.
reconstructingmana, great, whew, glad that message got through.
1) I can work with whatever format for the data you go with. Data processing isn't exactly my strong suit, but I'll manage. When I read about what you'd done, I just really didn't want the effort to go to waste if possible.
2) D'oh, well I'm in no hurry; I've been working on this Turbo project for over a year and haven't run out of steam yet.
3) Here's a dump of the 3D remake's English text:
https://filebin.net/7spaiz2xfys6b2i1/SoM18.textdump.zipAs far as I know, that's every bit of text that's not baked into an image.
As for what next step to take, it depends on what you feel up to: whether you want to use the second spreadsheet, or find the original, how much you want to rewrite, how much text from the remake you want to match up with the original (I have no idea how the text you were working off of was organized, and the remake textdump doesn't look especially organized to me)...
Questions:
- Do you want to stick with the vanilla fixed-width font? It allows for 28 characters per line (and 3 simultaneous lines), which is easy to plan for when formatting text for the game's textboxes.
- Do you want to use a variable-width font (VWF)? This requires either the creation of a specialized tool to handle previewing the text outside of the game for formatting purposes (of finding a pre-existing one that can be adapted for SoM), or in-game testing (which can vary from minorly to majorly intensive).
I bring that choice up because I would need / expect the text formatting to be done by you (or anyone working on the text), since it has an impact on how readable the result is and is best adjusted by the person writing it. I would prefer VWF, but that will require more work on your end formatting the text to fit in the game's textboxes (at least if we want it to look nice).
The next step for me is to move forward with "script insertion" prep, which I'm committing to since you got in touch. I need to essentially parse vanilla and Relocalized events into the format expected by this ZPS format (currently the latter is just a blob of raw bytes) and get that patching in byte-for-byte identical to how it is now.
Getting me an example formatted in your preference of data format (spreadsheet, text file, word document, fuzzy images of a cellphone screen, etc.) sooner rather than later would let me start figuring out how I'm going to process your new text for insertion.