Hacking I am currently translating "Wizardry Empire 3: Ancestry Of The Emperor" for PSP. Pics inside.

[Julio Sotomayor]

Done so far:
- half of all the game items
- a third of the spells + their descriptions
- about one third of all game "feedback" text (ex. "Pass item to whom?"; "Enemy encounter"; etc)
- game script is being human-translated and... it'll take a while so I have plenty of time.

Below are some very, very "first draft" pictures:

 

[Julio Sotomayor]

question:

the game does not accept latin characters in way shape or form... they appear as white circles in-game. it does accept FW chars that are ascii symbolic for english. but that doesn't help...

what can i do to make the words fit inside the boxes aside from shortening them?

 

[AttackOtter]

question:

the game does not accept latin characters in way shape or form... they appear as white circles in-game. it does accept FW chars that are ascii symbolic for english. but that doesn't help...

what can i do to make the words fit inside the boxes aside from shortening them?

You'll need someone who knows ASM hacking to be able to fix the letter spacing issues. Otherwise the game will look ugly and have horribly shorted words for every command.

 

[flame1234]

Is your system Windows XP? Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Can your system run PPSSPP? Anyway, do a shot of the GE Debugger text draw in PPSSPP at least. First is to figure out if "single draw" or "multiple draw." Single draws the letters one at a time; multiple draws a whole bunch at once.
I really gotta make the PSP text graphics asm tutorial. I kinda pieced it together from JamRules "tutorial" and various other info I pieced together from around the 'net.
Most games need font mods; there's very few that don't.

 

[Julio Sotomayor]

It would certainly have abbreviations, certainly. how would i make the boxes bigger?

does the game run some line(s) of code that dictate which boxes are spawned with what dimensions, and if so, can i change it? i would assume such code would either be in the eboot.bin or the data.bin of the game. (the eboot.bin references the data.bin for all font creation calls).

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doing that right now flame... will post with answer to your question. am googling this stuff as well.

 

[Julio Sotomayor]

SORRY best i can do right now is post some pics of the GE Debugger targeting the boxes and/or targeting translated text. i am not able right now to know how to answer your question.

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however due to how it behaved inside the ge debugger i would guess that the game draws the textures (i.e. and the letters inside the rectangles) in _BUNCHES_, i did not see it draw "Longsword" letter by letter once. however that may be simply how the ge debugger works.

seems like the game uses a rudimentary system of drawing a rectangle, "one size fits all" type rectangle and then changes its dimensions depending on what is calling it. i could try finding where that that code is in the game bins and seeing if i can change the values.

 

[flame1234]

リルンの酒場 - That one is canned. You can change it if you figure out the texture format and change the texture where it's stored.
"The massive one w/ 90 letters drawn" - This one draws using display list. You see the VADDR there? Go there and see how the memory looks. It's a list of vertices, 180 of them. Each pair of vertices draws one rectangle. Each one vertex has a texture position and a draw position. "u16 texcoords" mean texture positions are 16 bits (2 bytes) and "s16 positions" means the same thing.

1) Go to VADDR
2) Set memory write breakpoint
3) Done. You've found the routine that builds the display list.
Use save/load state to make this easier.

Now you need to:
1) Add/change instructions to modify the spacing
Optional, more complicated (for VWF):
2) Find where the texture is
3) Modify the texture so each letter is left-aligned

For monospaced, you don't need to do 2 and 3.

 

[Julio Sotomayor]

HEHE thanks a ton man i'm on it...

edit: i never knew how awesome memory viewing was. is there anything similar to GE debugger but for windows PC games? i am 75% finished translating the first of these games, wizardry empire 1, but the windows PC version (better graphics plus no spacing/text issues AND the pc version also accepts latin chars...)

however if i could use a tool similar to the ppsspp ge debugger it would save me a lot of time trying things while i type in the translated game script... (that's the part where i'm at right now on the 1st game; i.e. absolutely everything else is in english). man psp translation is really difficult compared to windows pc...

 

[mccrackey]

Any update on this? I was just scouring the web for such a patch.