There is a great deal of technical whatnot which will need to be tackled... I'm afraid that my skill in that regard is very close to zero.
Some things I've observed throughout my time attempting to insert the text into the game, and other notes:
- An anonymous party has assisted me in putting a variable-width font into the game. Originally, the game used a very ugly and space-hogging fixed width font. It looks better but is largely guesswork for me to sort out exactly what text will fit in any given line. Previously, I could bank on each line having exactly 18 characters, but now I must comb through the script and basically re-do all the spacing and timing of the text, and test it, to make sure everything fits without causing issues.
- The game will softlock at SEEMINGLY random (but somewhat predictable) times, displaying a string of text that reads ィAィAィAィAィAィAィAィA into infinity. The "predictable" part of this is that it TENDS to be either A) text during certain events or B) Text strings which are called multiple times
- If I attempt to insert around more than half of the game's text into the game, it simply does not work using Mato's provided tools.
- Graphics in seemingly random areas will glitch if text is inserted. These glitches change with how much text is inserted.
- I was advised by the anonymous party mentioned earlier that the above issues may be brought on by the way that Mato's tools work, and indeed, how they don't work. I can't confirm this myself, but I was told that Mato's tools do not "overwrite" existing pointers/etc in the ROM, but rather place them wherever there is available space.
- A very minor but annoying and time-consuming thing is that in order to insert the text into the game with the currently available tools, I must remove any and all line breaks on each line of dialogue. Not a HUGE issue but it is a pain having to maintain multiple copies of my script file. The "master" version keeps the line breaks for ease of reading during my ongoing editing and revision.
In order to capture the gifs I posted earlier (and indeed, much video footage I have saved from various points in the game) I have had to make clever use of save states to continuously work around the many points at which the game crashes. I have documented those points pretty extensively which is how I worked out my current guess as to "why" crashes occur at those points.
It would take someone more skilled technically to validate the claims above about "how" Mato's tools do and don't work, but... This is all I can really say so far.
Apologies for this being more of an info dump rather than a proper response... I just felt it worth mentioning, as it may become helpful to anyone who should choose to brave this.
Topic: [JPN Translators] [GBA] Tomato Adventure (Read 8564 times)