It's been a long road, getting from there to here...
Topic: Watercrown News

It's been a long time...aaaaand you know the rest. ^_^

(Man, I love that song.)

Crimony, it's been almost two weeks since my last less-than-regular progress update. Don't worry, people: it's been time well spent. I've been working on cleaning up the hard-coded text in the game's graphics. Here's a small taste of what I've accomplished:



The Status Screen is now wholly in English. This, believe it or not, took a lot of trial-and-error to accomplish...I had to expand the whitespace to accomodate the English text, which is now printed instead of hardcoded. Neat, huh?

I've also been working on the Seeds and Furniture screens, and I've done half of the credits already. The title screen is going to be a bother...I drew up one a long time ago, but it doesn't quite seem to fit anymore, especially now that I know there's an official English logo to begin with. The subtitle will be the bigger pain: "Otogi no Kuni no Pendant" doesn't seem to sound right as anything but the fairly kludgy "The Pendant of Fairyland", and completely nixing it doesn't sound right, either. Any suggestions?

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Better Late Than Never.
Topic: Watercrown News

As of this post, every last single bug in my VWF has either been crushed or spot-welded into submission. The shop and furniture list menus work completely now. All is well. Translation will continue.

On a thoroughly unrelated side note, if you're even remotely into gaming, you've probably heard the news about Nintendo's much-vaunted Revolution console. For reasons best said by Nintendo themselves, the Revolution's official name will be the "Wii", pronounced "we".

It's a name that's either patently ridiculous or endearingly quirky depending on your mood and/or state of mind. When I first heard of it, I immediately wondered if the people responsible for the name had any idea what they had done: the first thing that came to mind was the baby-talk word for urine. -_-;

Now, about 24 hours after the revelation, I've somewhat cooled down on the topic. "Wii" has its fair share of drawbacks, but as long as I think of it as a play on "we" with two "i"s representing a pair of those funky remote-style controllers, it makes a strange sort of sense. Or perhaps I've been playing with digital Sylvanians for too long.

I'll still miss "Revolution", but all things considered, "Wii" is probably a better name for a system than "Dolphin"...and if they make Mother 1, Starfox 2 and/or Castlevania: Rondo of Blood available through the much-ballyhooed Virtual Console, I'd buy it even if they called it the Nintendo Pheeceez.

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Dance, Watercrown, Dance!
Topic: Watercrown News

Time for my sorta-weekly progress report. This week, I have...

Holy cow! No progress to report! ^_^;

Yeah, this has been kinda a sidetracky week for me...lot of irons in the fire and the dawning realization that I'm gonna get scorched if I don't do something with them.

But at least I made up for my screenshot backlog, didn't I?

Anyways. The bug in the VWF seems to affect, of all things, only the furniture-related menues: the fairies' shop is in working order again, but it seems that from time to time it'll make the subsequent cutscene where Aster wakes up glitch a little (the first tile of the picture turns into a blank space and the first line of text is misaligned). The furniture menu, oddly, doesn't suffer any bugs if you have enough furniture to make the list take up more than one screen, but if it all fits on one, then the little "unused furniture" icon vanishes and the menu prompt gets misaligned. It's all very puzzling, but now that I've finally gotten up off my butt and noticed the connection, perhaps there's something I can do about it now. My best guess is that there's a case where my VWF code doesn't reset the width value properly...

If I have any progress to report, you'll be the first to know. (On a side note, you don't need to register for anything to comment...heck, you don't even need to leave an e-mail! Just come up with a snappy unique username and you're all set...)

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He's Back, And He's Got A New Trick!
Topic: Watercrown News

Well, not really. But I do have...screenshots!



Apologies for, yes, the untranslated text in that last screenshot. It says "Furniture List" and it will be in English when the finished patch rolls out.

Thanks again to Margie for providing the catalogues and information about the three houses present in the game. Oddly enough, however, it doesn't seem that the game uses the entire list I've found: perhaps there is some way to unlock more that I haven't discovered (doubtful, though), but of the catalog of 45 items (including the houses) listed in the game's script, only 22 are actually available for purchase.

Seems I still have a couple of annoying bugs in the VWF to work out...but otherwise, work is progressing smoothly. A third block has been fully completed, and a fourth is nearing completion. These things take time, people, and most romhackers don't update nearly this often. Until next time, ladies, germs and Sylvanians!

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No, I'm Still Alive.
Topic: Watercrown News

Since you've all probably been wondering where I've been and what I've been doing, I thought I'd pipe up before the consensus became "pushing up daisies".

As it happens, I've been battling some bugs, and not just in the game. Some infernal little freeloaders of the viral persuasion moved into my sinus cavities and stole my good humor, and as such I'vre spent my free time this past week keeping warm, drinking plenty of fluids, and slashing my way through the Dungeons of Doom in NetHack (my all-time best run thus far is 24077 points, ending on the eleventh floor at the feet of a mighty mumak. "That only counts as one!").

Every time I think I've got everything working, I turn around and something else has broken (this time it's the menu for buying furniture). Everything is interrelated in ways that are less-than-obvious, and it doesn't help matters that I keep accidentally having my considerably-enlarged scripts overwrite each other upon insertion.

In conclusion: Epoch's programmers are all genius madmen. Oh, wait. I came to that conclusion long ago. Nevermind.

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I See What You Did There.
Topic: Watercrown News

So The Do-It-Yourself Corner bombed. Maybe I should've given it more than three tries, but crimony, nobody even read my blog when I put those posts up.

If anybody wants to see more of The Do-It-Yourself Corner, I'll gladly provide, but I'm not going to waste my time writing something nobody's gonna read.

That time is better spent working on my translation. ^_^

Anyway. I had my first really big freak-out in a while just recently: I discovered that the Cleanup minigame inexplicably crashed if you made a mistake and restarted. As it happened, I missed a pair of jump instructions in a part of the script that I had absolutely no freakin' idea affected it. So the glitch is fixed and the translation continues.

Oddly enough, there are a few bugs in the game that aren't my fault at all.

1. There is a sign near the easternmost road up to the mountain that doesn't say anything. Press A in front of it all you want; this is the only sign I've found that doesn't give you a message of any sort.

2. After a certain point in the game, holes open up near your house that you can use to "teleport" to other areas in Sylvania. However, if you use the one that gets you across the river, the Drum Bridge rhythm minigame develops an odd bug. Seems that the flag that tells the script which side of the bridge you're on isn't set if you warp, and as a result you'll have to cross the bridge (by minigame or otherwise) twice to actually get to the other side.

There are probably more, but these are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Another oddball glitch, introduced by my VWF, is that the icon for furniture that's not currently in your room (a tiny circle, as opposed to the large circle for furniture that is) vanishes if you select anything to bring up the "Move/Put Away" options. Seeing how it doesn't affect the other icons and its absence pretty much serves the same purpose, I may just remove the icon altogether...

Please read, please comment, and if you have a good reason not to do either, comment anyway and voice your grievances. I miss my readers...

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We Return You Now To Your Regularly Scheduled Progress Update...
Topic: Watercrown News

Three whole days and no comments for my big self-expose? I'm crushed. Well, not really. Still: if you have any reason whatsoever to read this, even if that reason is pure boredom, it wouldn't hurt you to post a comment or two. No spam or cursing, please.

Anyways. If this post looks a little different from the usual, that's because I decided to try Lycos' new Qumana blogging tool. The verdict's still out on whether Qumana's more trouble than it's worth, but I kinda like it thus far. ^_^

And now the progress update. Out of 14 text blocks (that I know of), 2 are 95% translated (although one has yet to be reformatted for my VWF), 8 overall have been converted for re-insertion, and 13 have been dumped (gotta get to work on that last one). Sorry if those numbers seem small. Translation itself is only about 20% of the job: 75% is setting up the scripts so that they re-insert without glitches, and the remaining 5% is research.

Ah, research. The three big hurdles I've yet to surmount in this translation are all research-based. In order from smallest hurdle to largest:

1. The "Hanauranai Jiten", or "Encyclopedia of Flower Meanings". Once you give Emma Furbanks the flower she asks for, she'll give you this book: enter your birthdate and it gives you your flower, its meaning and a little fortune. Since there are 365 days in a year (you know, I never thought to check if the game supports leap years), that's 365 fortunes to translate and just as many flower names to identify. This is more a matter of scale rather than outright difficulty: there's probably more text devoted to the Encyclopedia than there is in the first four Legend of Zelda games combined. Not to mention all the flower names I'll have to work on. (If it puts things into perspective, two of those 14 text blocks are devoted entirely to the Encyclopedia. That's a seventh of the game's text.)


2. The furniture list. Sylvanian Families is first and foremost a toyline, and what better advertising could there be than to feature all the furniture you can collect in the game itself? (Side note on that: the "Room" menu option is now "Furniture", as it was in the original Japanese version. Amazing what a little VWF can do.) Counting the three different houses, you have 69 collectibles to buy with your hard-earned Dream Points, and all of them no doubt have different names in the Western world. So that's 69 names for me to hunt down. If anybody has anything akin to a catalogue with pictures and names for all the Sylvanian Families furniture ever released outside of Japan, I desperately need it.


3. The intro monologue. I've gotten tantalizing hints that there is an official English version used somewhere in the world, but all the facts I've recieved thus far say there's no such creature. This is by far the most important piece of information I have yet to obtain for my translation. This monologue is featured in four out of the five games I've looked at and it can be found on sylvanian-families.jp, the official website. (The link to the page is http://sylvanian-families.jp/info/map.html.) If there is an official English version, omitting it or using my own translation would be...well, stupid.

I repeat: I can probably handle the Encyclopedia of Flower Meanings on my own, but I have to have the furniture catalog and opening monologue. If you can provide any help with those, please comment. Even if you can't provide any help with those, comment anyway. I'm happy to do this project just for myself, but it'd be nice if I knew someone else was interested...

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The Sad, Sad Tale Of Chickenfoot. Wait...
Topic: Watercrown News
In response to my first and only comment, and in celebration of this respected holiday, I've decided to tell the tale that, up until now, I have said would be "best left for another time."

The story is thus:

My name is Desty Nova. I eat flan and I perform horrible, gruesome experiments on human test subjects. My dream is to take over the world MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!...

Happy April Fools' Day. There, I've gotten it out of my system.

No, really, the actual tale begins, oh, several years ago. Before I get really started, I will warn you that this tale has actually precious little to do with the Sylvanian Families franchise but absolutely everything to do with why I'm doing the game.

Back then, Gundam was big in the States and I was just learning what else Japan had to offer. The thing that surprised me, though, was the strange feelings of nostalgia and deja vu that sometimes accompanied my anime viewing. A random comment about the old Unico movie that aired years and years ago on the Disney Channel set me off on a fact-finding mission: the movie, as I remembered it, turned out to actually be a pair of movies, and while the name Osamu Tezuka meant nothing to me at the time, the fact that the movies were ultimately Japanese in origin struck a chord. Slowly, I began to realize just where my feelings of nostalgia and deja vu came from: in the late 80's and early 90's, I couldn't get enough of the Nick Jr. lineup on Nickelodeon, which further Internet searching revealed to be comprised mainly of localized import series from Japan.

I was raised on anime and didn't even realize it.

So. My cause celebre for a time was a series called Maple Town, or "Maple Town Story" (a trifling difference, but back then, I was the Internet equivalent of a monkey with a revolver; using the "inferior" American name around me would inevitably provoke torrents of page-long rants), for the sole reason that I remembered nothing of it except the names "Patty Rabbit" and "Bobby Bear" and maybe 5 seconds' worth of material. It took me a long time, during which I lost interest twice and annoyed the dickens out of possibly as many message boards (if I met my younger n00b self on the Internet, I'd probably beat the intellectual @#$% out of him), but I eventually accumulated enough knowledge about the series that I felt my quest was at an end. I even managed to score the Japanese soundtrack and VHS tapes.

However, my searches also unearthed information about another (then) complete unknown: a franchise called "Sylvanian Families". Back then, I wasn't sure of the relation (although I think I held something of a preconception that it was an "inferior" rival series...yes, my views were disturbingly black-and-white back then), and I assumed that like Maple Town, the franchise had vanished into the dust of history sometime in that strange twilight era of the late 80's/early 90's. So it was to my great surprise when, on GameFAQs' board for the game Tail Concerto, somebody posted a link to screenshots of a game called WanWan Meitantei that bore a passing resemblance to Tail Concerto's characters. It wasn't WanWan Meitantei that surprised me, though. It was the other game featured prominently on the linked page, the game I address now as "Sylvanian Families 5".

This was a complete 180 from my assumption. Maple Town was long dead, and Sylvanian Families (as I knew by then) predated it: how on Earth could it still be around? With five (actually six and now seven) video games? This chance discovery merited further investigation: I obtained the fifth game and afterwards found the first and second: none of them are exactly the next Harvest Moon or Final Fantasy, but I found them much more to my liking than, say, Animal Crossing.

The final ingredient in this bizarre Goldberg-esque contraption is the fact that I've had sort of a curse for years: I've always wanted to make a game, but I always either discover I don't have the talent or I lose interest. I've completed only one project to my satisfaction; a thoroughly pathetic text adventure that is now, for the better, lost. Failing creation, I've trifled with fan translations; mostly the same result, but for whatever reason this project has been the one I've stuck with the longest. As you can guess, it's been something of a love/hate relationship: by many standards, the game is incomparably dull (the fact that the storyline involves flowers and fairies that aren't homicidal maniacs will probably keep all but the most hardcore away) and can be finished in a single evening (I've done it myself!); it's based on a toyline I really have no intention of ever collecting (although I will say that anyone who doesn't find the Sylvanians outright adorable had better check to see if there isn't a Nobody walking around with their soul), and yet it has trapped me in the most cunning and ingenious way possible: it tricked me into thinking I could translate it just as easily as I could beat it. It's a kids' game! Almost pure kana, with a smattering of kanji that could be counted on your fingers! And yet its script is a nightmare that I could only tackle by further modifying the legendary Atlas, the inserter that handled Front Mission Gunhazard! This is a project for a master romhacker, a Sisyphean effort with maximum difficulty and minimum reward...

And I have no problems whatsoever being the one who fate has chosen to do it. ^_^

On that front: thanks to bgb, I've tuned up my VWF code even further. Now it doesn't break if a particular part of the game stores the variables for the current line and number of characters printed in an odd place. GB mode is still a little glitchy, but I'm starting to suspect it's a quirk with bgb and not my code this time. A couple of script bugs have been squashed; the game now should be mostly playable again (albeit still about half in English and half in Japanese, and parts of the script haven't been reformatted to take advantage of the VWF).

As for the story of how I learned Japanese...much shorter, much less interesting, and most certainly best suited for another time.

See you, Space Samurai. Or whatever.

Update Wars Episode 3: O RLE? (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love C)
Topic: Watercrown News
The following update is the result of six days of random mental meandering. Don't worry; there's a point to this story.

Thanks to VBA-SDL-H, I've cracked my first compression routine. It took me a single evening to reverse-engineer the routine and the next two days to write a compressor for it. And I've never done anything remotely compression-like. First VWF, now compression. Holy cow. What's next?

The compression routine in question belongs to Sylvanian Families 5 for GBA, a.k.a. "Sylvanian Families: Yousei no Sutekki to Fushigi no Ki - Maron-Inu no Onna no Ko". (I'm still working on a proper subtitle for that, but the original means something like "Fairy's Stick and the Mystic Tree - Brown Dog Girl", the last part being the protagonist's non-name. Just call her "Esme Huckleberry". Everybody else does.) While it has little to do with my current project, you may rest assured that when it finally comes time for me to do the GBA games, you'll have proper English title screens to look at.

The second part of this story, and by far the more relevant one, is that while I was staring at another one of the SF1 script's nightmare-to-format case routines (the previous issue with the embedded pointers having evaporated), another crazy idea struck me. Perhaps emboldened by my recent adventures in programming, not to mention the fact that I had already done something of this sort before, I decided to modify Klarth's Atlas once again. Now internally titled "Hitoshura SF" (in honor of "Kagutsuchi", an ancient app I coded in Multimedia Fusion for pretty much the same purpose, suffixed with "SF" for obvious reasons), my modified Atlas handles the game's lists with minimal madness.

So there you have it. I'm back on track, and never again will one of the game's scripts rise up to give me pain. Or so I assume.

The Genius Madmen Strike Back.
Topic: Watercrown News
I was wondering why a couple of the text blocks seemed to have a distinct lack of pointers. Now I know why.

The pointers are embedded in the text blocks.

I haven't quit, I promise, but I've gotten sidetracked after discovering this new stumbling block. Oddly enough, Atlas seems to be having problems inserting the type of embedded pointer I need, and it might be due in no small part to my tweaks...