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Watercrown Productions DevBlog
Friday, 16 June 2006
Reporting For Duty, Sir.
Topic: Watercrown News

Well, I've spent the last two weeks hacking and slashing a VWF into Sylvanian Families 4 just for future reference. After bringing it about 80% to fruition, I came to a conclusion:

Implementing a VWF in SF4 without a metric buttload of kludgy hacks will probably require me to rip out the guts of the original print routine entirely.

Right now I've got a hook positioned right where the original print routine checked to see if it was done copying a tile to memory, but it's not quite cutting it. One important factor I'm having to wage war with here is that SF4's print routine works nothing like the one in SF1. I've gotten VWF working; better yet, I've gotten it looking good in two out of three places where it's used and semi-functional in the third, but there are enough fidgety details I'll have to round up and shoot to keep it from working as well as I'd like. (Especially considering that the third place happens to be every single freakin' dialogue box in the game.)

So, I'm back where I probably should have been: working on Sylvanian Families 1. Hacky solutions being my area of expertise, I've fixed the intro bug I may or may not have mentioned before (the "blank tile" for one scene was being inexplicably overwritten with gibberish by my VWF; just tweaked the tilemap a bit and it's running fine again)...with all the known glitches out of my way, exactly three tasks remain.

1. Title screen hacking. The game displays "New Game" and "Continue" in English and nothing else. The subtitle, which I still have yet to invent an appropriate English equivalent for (why the hell is the "Legend of Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban" Satellaview game being called "Ancient Stone Tablet"? I'd call it "The Ancient Stone(s)" myself), is still glaringly in Japanese, and until you clear the game once, so is the Sylvanian Families title...which, directly romanized, is "Sylvania Family", explaining why GameFAQs has the title of the series messed up. (After you've cleared the game once, the official English Sylvanian Families logo is displayed.)

2. The rest of the game's text. Not counting the Flower Dictionary, it's probably about 90% done...and counting the Flower Dictionary, I've got another six months to a year's worth of research to do.

3. The famous "Midori no yama wo ikutsu mo koete" monologue. This counts as its own very special problem due to its disproportionate importance. I can translate adjectives, look up flower names and render pithy personality type "descriptions" into appropriately flowery fortunes for that pesky Flower Dictionary, but I'm reluctant to try my hand at inventing my own English version of the opening dialogue (which you can now find here, the original link having died in the last site update; a translation is given in the first post in my DevBlog here) and risk omitting any perfectly-usable official English version there may be. I've plastered it all over certain corners of the Internet in the vain hope of finding that translation, or failing that, someone willing to pen a suitably memorable replacement. I may very well release a version of my translation patch without the Flower Dictionary translated, but there's no way in hell, heaven, purgatory or other I'm letting my patch out the door without a version of that dialogue to rival SMT3's "Call it what you will".

See you in a week or two. Maybe. (And comment!)

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Posted by Ryusui at 10:52 PM PDT

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