Major Release ~ Shin Megami Tensei if... v1.00
Shin Megami Tensei: if...
# Posted on Oct. 25, 2018, 12:06 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

It's been a long road, but today AGTP releases a complete translation for Shin Megami Tensei if... on the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom. For me personally this journey has encompassed a second undergraduate degree, a cross-country move, a complete career change, multiple periods of both employment and unemployment, the licensure of one of our translation patches, and the beginnings of a family, in addition to having to deal with several project-related IRC and Discord raids, hate speech, and generalized harassment from the SMT community at large. It's done, and I *will* maintain the patch should anyone find any bugs or typos. But that's it.

I do this for the enjoyment of the process, to challenge myself to produce work of ever-higher caliber. if... hits a high enough bar at this point that I'm satisfied releasing it. I hope everyone who's been clamoring for the patch gets some enjoyment out of it; I'll let the game speak for itself.

With Majin Tensei 2 being mostly done elsewhere, don't expect any further Megami Tensei work out of AGTP. No updated patch for SMT1, no back-porting of if...'s work into SMT2, no Majin Tensei 1. I'm done. To those who were looking forward to the aforementioned, I truly apologize. Maybe focus on cleaning up your community.

And now, I'm going on vacation.

Progress ~ SMT if... - First of Three
Shin Megami Tensei: if...
# Posted on Oct. 11, 2014, 10:42 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

Hi everyone, I promised updates today, so here they are! This is the first of three: Shin Megami Tensei if...

So I streamed some of the hacking for this a couple of months ago. There hasn't really been much progress since, though all the remaining hacking is similar to what was done on-stream. That said, there isn't much left and there's an anniversary date coming up very, very soon... I'd like to have the game out for then. I'm not promising because we haven't started playtesting yet and it's going to be a bit of a push, but right now, that's the goal.

I've added six new screenshots to the end of the game's slideshow, two of which I've attached to this update. They're things you probably would have seen if you watched the stream or follow me on Twitter, but I'm adding them regardless.

Some folks may remember me remarking how similar the hacking of the game was to SMT2. It is in fact very nearly the exact same engine, but I've wanted to make improvements over the SMT2 work. The most notable are the proportional font (which has been in the screenshots since the very beginning) and the expansion of the horizontal space in menus, subscreens, and inventory spaces; where once were two columns now are one, and I'm using the extra space between each row to double up. Gets me a lot more screen real estate.

That's it for SMT if...; keep your fingers crossed for it.

But now for a bit of somewhat sad related news. I don't often do this, but today I'm announcing that I'm going to be dropping Megami Tensei 1 and Soul Hackers. I'd originally intended to roll the Megami Tensei 1 work into Kyuyaku Megami Tensei, but The Romhacking Aerie beat me to it; both Megami Tensei 1 and 2 are now playable in their SNES incarnations, and the original Megami Tensei for the NES is, well, not very good regardless. So if you want to play it, go for it! It's available, just not from here. Soul Hackers is getting dropped because it's out on the 3DS and there's not much point. If you want to play it, support Atlus and go buy it.

Progress ~ Quick progress report on if...
Shin Megami Tensei: if...
# Posted on Nov. 9, 2012, 7:32 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

Just dropping a quick head's up here that SMT if...'s text translation is done. Its hacking currently looks identical to SMT2's, but with added main dialog proportional font. I'd LIKE to clean up the hacking a bit though, and the majority of the text isn't inserted yet - in fact, I still don't actually have it. It's still on Ian's computer, and he unfortunately got smacked pretty badly by Hurricane Sandy and is currently mostly without internet access. Still no ETA.

Announcement ~ PAX East No.2: Shin Megami Tensei: if...
Shin Megami Tensei: if...
# Posted on April 14, 2012, 4:21 a.m. by Gideon Zhi

So I'm sure the big burning question on most peoples' minds is, "What took you so long?" The short version is that while most of Shin Megami Tensei: if... (hereafter SMTif) is technically identical to SMT2, one crucial part of the game is different: font storage. While SMT2 stores its font right out in the open, SMTif's is compressed. This by itself would not normally be a problem, but instead of unpacking the entire thing to RAM like some games do, SMTif unpacks individual letters - making my usual workaround for these sorts of things largely ineffective. I've had project files (including a complete script dump) for if sitting on my hard drive since 2008, but it wasn't until May of last year that we got the font stuff fully sorted out, thanks to veteran romhacker Neil_ who you may know from the Partial Translations version of Dragon Quest 5, among other things! So not only has it been a long and arduous process getting it even this far, it's been an interesting job keeping quiet about it :) I initially wanted to announce work on this much sooner, but didn't have anything to show for it until recently.

Ian Kelley returns to do the script, so stylistically it'll be similar to SMT 1 and 2. We're largely adopting official naming conventions for spells, items, demon races, etc when available. There are a few notable deviations (we're considering Fey or Fae for the yosei race due to its largely celtic membership, as opposed to Fairy) but by and large we're conforming. I also elected to go with a fully proportional font for this one; compare the screenshots below to SMT2 to see the difference. There are a few other technical improvements I'd like to look into, such as expanded item and equipment names in subscreens, that's going to come after I'm done with the rest of it.

So don't expect this immediately, or possibly even soon. It's a process, and it's not nearly done yet. But I'm hoping that despite SMTif's distant ETA, this announcement will make a lot of people happy.