Hacking Zill O'll infinite plus
- Thread starter Kitsu-neechan
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im still working on this during weekends.
its been quite a while since anything happened though, and as of this moment, im in the middle of pretty much the biggest clusterfuck of my entire life, so I've been quite busy doing things that is not hacking old niché videogames.
the project is on life support at the moment.
it's on a standstill from translation perspective until some technical work gets finished that prevents the translation from progressing, and that stuff is not progressing at the speed it should.
it's not gonna get finished anytime soon, but im not a person to give up just that easily. Zill O'll is the reason i became a romhacker and it be damned i'll let it get the best of me.
its been quite a while since anything happened though, and as of this moment, im in the middle of pretty much the biggest clusterfuck of my entire life, so I've been quite busy doing things that is not hacking old niché videogames.
the project is on life support at the moment.
it's on a standstill from translation perspective until some technical work gets finished that prevents the translation from progressing, and that stuff is not progressing at the speed it should.
it's not gonna get finished anytime soon, but im not a person to give up just that easily. Zill O'll is the reason i became a romhacker and it be damned i'll let it get the best of me.
basically whats going on with this is the following.
the game uses 16--bit addressing mode for it's text strings, which means that a single text file in the game can be no longer than 64KB in size.
there's approximately 300 or something of them in the game.
the original japanese script is not only shorter than english text and it is also byte-packed into a single-byte alphabet by a custom cipher implemented into the script format.
after stripping these out, reworking the font and making everything play nice in ascii, several of the translated files bypassed their size limits causing them not to work.
one thing to go around this would just to trunkate the text to make it fit, as only several non-critical npc dialogs would have to be shortened/cut off, and it wouldn't really be that big of a deal, but that's not really how we roll, so here's whats going on.
we rewrote the text loading routines to load the strings using 32bit addressing, giving us more or less infinite space for text, but getting this to fully work will be a bit more work than that, as there are memory layouts that need to be reworked to accomodate the larger data chunks held in memory (more than 64KB of text, double sized address tables.)
currently the scripts load, but character names (npc and pc) are still loading incorrectly, and several scripts are crashing the game for a reason thats currently in investigation.
aside from getting the text-expansion to work, basically everything else is done.
There are minor graphical cleanups that need to be made, such as making the character creation and the name input keyboards not look like hot shit, and then the translation itself.
the game uses 16--bit addressing mode for it's text strings, which means that a single text file in the game can be no longer than 64KB in size.
there's approximately 300 or something of them in the game.
the original japanese script is not only shorter than english text and it is also byte-packed into a single-byte alphabet by a custom cipher implemented into the script format.
after stripping these out, reworking the font and making everything play nice in ascii, several of the translated files bypassed their size limits causing them not to work.
one thing to go around this would just to trunkate the text to make it fit, as only several non-critical npc dialogs would have to be shortened/cut off, and it wouldn't really be that big of a deal, but that's not really how we roll, so here's whats going on.
we rewrote the text loading routines to load the strings using 32bit addressing, giving us more or less infinite space for text, but getting this to fully work will be a bit more work than that, as there are memory layouts that need to be reworked to accomodate the larger data chunks held in memory (more than 64KB of text, double sized address tables.)
currently the scripts load, but character names (npc and pc) are still loading incorrectly, and several scripts are crashing the game for a reason thats currently in investigation.
aside from getting the text-expansion to work, basically everything else is done.
There are minor graphical cleanups that need to be made, such as making the character creation and the name input keyboards not look like hot shit, and then the translation itself.
After I dont even know how long, we've finally deciphered the way Zill O'll controls its events, and are now able to fully manipulate how and where any given line of text in the game is read. No-cut translation is now possible. OH YES! #zilloll #ジルオール pic.twitter.com/g5x6IyPsrW
— Mugi (@teh_mugi) May 24, 2021
there's work to do for getting this to do what we want, but there it is.
yeah bois, it's fucking happening.
it's been a long road. Like i've said multiple times already, the time we spend on the game's code work gets less and less as the time goes by.
That said, this was the big thing that kept us from delivering what we really want to, so yes, it will now happen.
when exactly, i dont know, but this certainly got us some of that good old fashioned drive back.
That said, this was the big thing that kept us from delivering what we really want to, so yes, it will now happen.
when exactly, i dont know, but this certainly got us some of that good old fashioned drive back.
for now its literally a waiting game with the script. This game was fucking hard to hack, and getting everything done we needed to, took an eternity and then some, but now that everything is said and done, im just gonna sit back and relax a bit while i wait for the script translation to progress.
there's some minor cosmetics we're still going to fix but overall the whole thing is done and even if i would not touch the code at all anymore, the biggest issues the patch currently has is some menus looking like they could use a cleanup and a random line of text that might not be centered or goes a letter or 2 out of the text box frame. So im about ready to consider it "done" for now.
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another weekend off, another bug fixed.
the item type was removed from the status string to make it fit its text box.
the whole thing was redundant because the selected item is highlighted on the above window anyway (icon shows type, followed by name.)
next weeks target will be to work on the sidequest job system UI to try and make it less stupid looking and a bit more sensible....
not too many visual issues to go.
the item type was removed from the status string to make it fit its text box.
the whole thing was redundant because the selected item is highlighted on the above window anyway (icon shows type, followed by name.)
next weeks target will be to work on the sidequest job system UI to try and make it less stupid looking and a bit more sensible....
not too many visual issues to go.
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Any TV with your PC connected with Citra and any smartphone to use as a screen using a free play store app.+1 -
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