There's so much stuff happening behind the scenes in a game; it's easy to take it for granted.
For the most part, the Playstation's processor requires that data be "aligned". Since the processor is a 32bits (aka 4 bytes), being "aligned" means that most data in the game starts at a multiple of 4 bytes. The original Japanese text in BGE was aligned like this and always started at a multiple of 4bytes, but my changes for loading English enabled the game to read text that wasn't "aligned".
It's been working fine until I moved the Castle names together in a non-aligned block. A castle's name pops up and hovers beneath the castle when you move the cursor over that castle. Some of my non-aligned castle names were popping up in the wrong place.
The reason being, the video we see when we play a game is actually a series of 2D images flashed in rapid succession; text is drawn as an overlay on the 2D image at specified coordinates. For something like game menu text, the "start location" coordinate doesn't change and is "hard coded" into the game data. But since the world map scrolls, the text's draw coordinates have to be calculated depending on where the castle currently is on screen.
Brigandine's process for calculating the Castle-name draw coordinates expected the text to be aligned and my non-aligned names were generating bad draw-start locations. I could take the time to change the coordinate-calculating routine so that it can come with misaligned reads, but it's easier to just align the castle names since this issue only affects text that doesn't have a fixed start location.
Incidentally, SoM game menus work the same way and can be rearranged by changing draw-start coordinates.
For the most part, the Playstation's processor requires that data be "aligned". Since the processor is a 32bits (aka 4 bytes), being "aligned" means that most data in the game starts at a multiple of 4 bytes. The original Japanese text in BGE was aligned like this and always started at a multiple of 4bytes, but my changes for loading English enabled the game to read text that wasn't "aligned".
It's been working fine until I moved the Castle names together in a non-aligned block. A castle's name pops up and hovers beneath the castle when you move the cursor over that castle. Some of my non-aligned castle names were popping up in the wrong place.
The reason being, the video we see when we play a game is actually a series of 2D images flashed in rapid succession; text is drawn as an overlay on the 2D image at specified coordinates. For something like game menu text, the "start location" coordinate doesn't change and is "hard coded" into the game data. But since the world map scrolls, the text's draw coordinates have to be calculated depending on where the castle currently is on screen.
Brigandine's process for calculating the Castle-name draw coordinates expected the text to be aligned and my non-aligned names were generating bad draw-start locations. I could take the time to change the coordinate-calculating routine so that it can come with misaligned reads, but it's easier to just align the castle names since this issue only affects text that doesn't have a fixed start location.
Incidentally, SoM game menus work the same way and can be rearranged by changing draw-start coordinates.