2013-08-23, 01:02 PM
I ran in to a rather obnoxious problem in the translation. Obnoxious in that it was rather complicated to fix yet it only makes a tiny difference in the grand scheme of things. There are a few places in Brigandine where pop up messages are assembled in RAM from multiple pieces before being drawn on screen as a single sentence. For example a message like "Battle of Logres" is assembled from two parts "Battle of" and "Logres".
The problem in this process was happening during the "[Creature Name] has gained experience/leveled up" messages. Even though the creature names are in English, they are encoded in Japanese Shift JIS (ShiftJIS supports the English alphabet). Well Brigandine uses two completely different text routines to draw Japanese and English, so it can not draw a "compound" sentence with both Japanese and English. These "level up" messages were showing up blank after the creature's name.
The fix required detecting when one of these compound messages was being assembled, and if it contained a creature name, converting that name to regular ASCII English encoding. It took about 3 days worth of my free time to get the fix working 
Hopefully there won't be any more things like this!
The problem in this process was happening during the "[Creature Name] has gained experience/leveled up" messages. Even though the creature names are in English, they are encoded in Japanese Shift JIS (ShiftJIS supports the English alphabet). Well Brigandine uses two completely different text routines to draw Japanese and English, so it can not draw a "compound" sentence with both Japanese and English. These "level up" messages were showing up blank after the creature's name.
The fix required detecting when one of these compound messages was being assembled, and if it contained a creature name, converting that name to regular ASCII English encoding. It took about 3 days worth of my free time to get the fix working
Hopefully there won't be any more things like this!