2014-05-29, 08:48 PM
A little translation update info. I just finished the "Retreat Quotes" section and sent it to the playtesters for approval (big thanks to them by the way).
For whatever wacky reason, BGE's developers used an entirely different system for the Retreat Quotes text. Its system assembles the "text choreography" (portrait, sound, text etc) right before the text appears on screen rather than having it pre-assembled like other text sections.
Also, I found out the hard way that BGE uses two different copies of the Retreat Quote text. One is used for the Recollection section and the other is used in actual in-game battles. There were serious space limitation for both copies so I had to do some tricky stuff to get it all to fit.
If anyone's interested in PS1 translation, this might be a useful trick. It's always hard to fit English text into the space alloted to Japanese. This is one way to get some extra space. Data is stored on a CD in sectors. A sector is just a chunk of data. On a PS1, a single sector holds 0x800 bytes of game data. If a file's data ends before that 0x800 bytes are full, the remainder is wasted (filled with unused zeros). The retreat quotes text ended some 0x200 bytes into a sector meaning that I could enlarge the file to +0x600 bytes without moving any other files on the CD. That's 600 extra letters I could fit in the previously unused space!
To change the fie size you just have to edit two numbers in the CD's table of contents (the file's size written in big-endian and also little-endian). I should clarify though, that changing file size won't make the PS1 game automatically load the extra text. The PS1 actually ignores file boundaries completely so I also had to edit BGE's "load length table" to tell it load the extra text from the CD to RAM. Editing the CD's file size is merely a way to make file extracting/inserting tools handle the enlarged file properly.
Anyways, just a neat little place to fit text that I've never heard of anyone else using.
For whatever wacky reason, BGE's developers used an entirely different system for the Retreat Quotes text. Its system assembles the "text choreography" (portrait, sound, text etc) right before the text appears on screen rather than having it pre-assembled like other text sections.
Also, I found out the hard way that BGE uses two different copies of the Retreat Quote text. One is used for the Recollection section and the other is used in actual in-game battles. There were serious space limitation for both copies so I had to do some tricky stuff to get it all to fit.
If anyone's interested in PS1 translation, this might be a useful trick. It's always hard to fit English text into the space alloted to Japanese. This is one way to get some extra space. Data is stored on a CD in sectors. A sector is just a chunk of data. On a PS1, a single sector holds 0x800 bytes of game data. If a file's data ends before that 0x800 bytes are full, the remainder is wasted (filled with unused zeros). The retreat quotes text ended some 0x200 bytes into a sector meaning that I could enlarge the file to +0x600 bytes without moving any other files on the CD. That's 600 extra letters I could fit in the previously unused space!
To change the fie size you just have to edit two numbers in the CD's table of contents (the file's size written in big-endian and also little-endian). I should clarify though, that changing file size won't make the PS1 game automatically load the extra text. The PS1 actually ignores file boundaries completely so I also had to edit BGE's "load length table" to tell it load the extra text from the CD to RAM. Editing the CD's file size is merely a way to make file extracting/inserting tools handle the enlarged file properly.
Anyways, just a neat little place to fit text that I've never heard of anyone else using.