Progress ~ SRW Gaiden - Technicals Mostly Resolved
Super Robot Wars Gaiden
# Posted on Oct. 4, 2007, 1:28 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

Just dropping a quick note to say that most of the technical issues in SRW Gaiden have been resolved. There are still some bad strings and/or crashes, occasionally, and the menu system needs quite a lot of textual work, but none of it should prove very challenging. The biggest "issue" is that speaker portraits garble when a unit gets destroyed. Not sure why, just yet.

Here are some snaps of working battle sequence text.

Progress ~ Super Robot Wars Gaiden - Script Inserted, Kinda
Super Robot Wars Gaiden
# Posted on Sept. 27, 2007, 8:54 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

It still has a lot of technical problems, but the really good news is that all of the necessary pointer writes have been added to SRW Gaiden's script. It's... big, of course - roughly 800K of text, all of which is going to need to be edited. The font routine is also only semi-functional, but the stuff that IS working looks pretty good. Unfortunately, the stuff that IS working isn't a lot of it.

Here are some snaps.

Progress ~ Danzarb Enters Playtesting
Dragon Squadron: Danzarb
# Posted on May 15, 2007, 11:59 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Just dropping a quick note to say that Danzarb's playtest has begun. Unlike the Metal Max test, which is turning up a lot more issues than I'd initially anticipated, it should be a fairly routine job. Look for both this and Metal Max soon.

Progress ~ Danzarb Nearly Ready for Beta (Also, RSS)
Dragon Squadron: Danzarb
# Posted on May 13, 2007, 8:58 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Just as the headline says, I'm probably a few hours' work away from being able to launch a Danzarb playtest. Necessary fixes will include window overruns, menu expansion, and a dual-line item name hack. I've added 25 screenshots of the current build to the project's page, as well.

Also, thanks again to Datschge, the website has once again improved! First, if you use Live Bookmarks or an RSS tracker to keep tabs on websites, you can now do so for AGTP: our news has its own RSS feed. Check the bottom of the page to subscribe. Secondly, Old News is now navigable. Like the front page, it's limited to ten items per page, so once the news starts piling up (and it will soon) it'll be a bit easier to manage.

Here are a few Danzarb shots:

Progress ~ Ancient Magic's Script is Translated
Ancient Magic
# Posted on May 2, 2007, 8:55 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Eien ni Hen turned in Ancient Magic's completed text translation a few days ago. I've just now inserted the first of five major text blocks; they all need some formatting insofar as screenspace constraints are concerned, and they're an absolute nightmare of control codes, but there should be relatively little truly difficult about putting them back in. Just a lot of boring grunt work, sigh.

Have a screenshot or two. This guy's name is Feyr, by the way. Haven't gotten around to putting that particular text chunk back into the game yet.

Progress ~ Lagrange Point: Script (kind of) Inserted
Lagrange Point
# Posted on May 1, 2007, 7:40 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Lagrange Point has been updated with seven totally new screenshots. The translation is still Tomato's, but the hacking work is now mine and Guest's entirely. I've scrapped the eight-lines-per-window thing in favor of a more-readable four lines, although I have shifted the text over to grant more characters per line than the game originally allowed. The main dialogue script is now fully inserted, minus a few untranslated strings and some cutscenes. It's also now loading relatively-uncompressed text from ROM, by which I mean it's still got DTE and Dictionary support to shrink the scripts to roughly 45% of their original heft. They fit but I haven't added any control codes or anything, so I can't guarantee they'll stay that way. The scripts also need a good going-over, as the writing is a little flat on the whole.

To sum up, it's a lot closer than it used to be, but it's still a while off. Go see the new screenshots and be happy. More to come as I edit and format it.

Progress ~ Tactics Ogre not crashing... nearly as often
Tactics Ogre ~ Let Us Cling Together
# Posted on April 4, 2007, 8:51 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

About an hour's worth of detective work tonight discovered the nature of what appear to be the remainder of Tactics Ogre's dialogue crashes. It's still not exactly performing to spec; if you try to save, the game basically explodes, and it's still displaying memory card messages as an artifact from the PSX release. Might have to get that block retranslated... but eh. I otherwise played through three scenarios with no major problems (although I did hit a few minor ones.)

Here are some images.

Progress ~ New Fire Emblem screenshots.
# Posted on April 2, 2007, 10:15 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

I've added sixteen new screenshots to Fire Emblem's project page. These completely replace the old screenshots (all two of them) and are indicative of the project's current status. A lot of rewriting still needs to be done - I've done maybe 7 chapters of 45 or more - but it's getting places, slowly but surely.

Progress ~ Dark Law enters playtesting.
Dark Law ~ Meaning of Death
# Posted on March 22, 2007, 8:43 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Dark Law ~ Meaning of Death has entered playtesting. It's not without issues; there's still some rather nasty problems with the auto-center routines, especially when item descriptions or number variables factor into the equation, but it's looking mighty fine enough already.

Currently, the patch is 360K. I've hacked thirteen font routines for this sucker - 8 variable-width ones, two 8x16 fixed routines, and three 8x8s. The amount of code that's gone into this is mind boggling!

I expect to release the patch on Wednesday, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the game's original release.

Progress ~ Dark Law is nearly done.
Dark Law ~ Meaning of Death
# Posted on March 19, 2007, 6:18 p.m. by Gideon Zhi

Here are a few statistics:

Assembly code (so far) in Dark Law: 102KB. Number of variable-width font hacks: 6 (so far - it probably needs at least two more.) Amount of raw text: 232,112 bytes. Number of advils taken: 10 (best guess.)

Here are some of the features you can expect to see in the final version:
--Fully variable-width menus
--Expanded list files for enemies, spells, and items. Originally fixed at 8 characters max, I now have as much screen and romspace as necessary.
--Expanded names for NPC characters - originally 6 characters max, "Antoniana" now fits.
--Expanded names for scenarios and locales - originally 8 characters max, I now have 256 pixels of space available for both.
--Expanded names for jobs (originally fixed at three characters on the subscreen, should be able to fit up to seven 16x16 tiles.

I've updated the screenshots slideshow on the project page to reflect the new progress. It's hires, so be sure to click the slideshow to bring up full-resolution screenshots. Here are a few samples: