Yup, slow but steady progress! when certain marks are reached I promise to post here.
Are any of you guys on any sort of IRC channel or the like other than the javascript chat on the translation site? I'm more than a little concerned that you may end up not having the resources to finish at this rate due to losing people on things you may not even have to do. If oil_ and I can sort out the format, the entire shortening process could be dropped in favor of putting the unrestricted script in. I really need to hear back from him before I begin the next stage of that... and there are a few other bumps I suspect you're going to hit even if you do shorten, because that's not the only length limit you're likely up against, thanks to the compression's nature. Which could force another round of really damaging editing with an extremely dubious goalposts (namely, trying to make the script compress well under this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZSS with as much self-similarity as possible.)Keep in mind that this is easily going to take another 10 weeks or so
Are any of you guys on any sort of IRC channel or the like other than the javascript chat on the translation site? I'm more than a little concerned that you may end up not having the resources to finish at this rate due to losing people on things you may not even have to do. If oil_ and I can sort out the format, the entire shortening process could be dropped in favor of putting the unrestricted script in. I really need to hear back from him before I begin the next stage of that... and there are a few other bumps I suspect you're going to hit even if you do shorten, because that's not the only length limit you're likely up against, thanks to the compression's nature. Which could force another round of really damaging editing with an extremely dubious goalposts (namely, trying to make the script compress well under this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZSS with as much self-similarity as possible.)
Side note: The ROM is already 32MB, which is max for a normal GBA ROM. And shockingly, there's only 250kb unused at the end (I suspect they dumped a lot of SCS1/2 content in there, much of which might be unused, but good luck figuring out which portions.) ...still probably plenty for a script if things are done well, though. Redoing the graphics, on the other hand, would probably be a nightmare, and that just might include changing japanese text that's stored in the form of graphics (e.g. title screen.) Not that any of that's much use until the pointers are found to move things up into that space to begin with, but it's liable to become a concern. Knowing the total size of the script blocks would give a better idea of how much of an issue it's liable to be.
There's 450 pages of content with roughly 50 lines each. Each of those ranges between 4 and 36 symbols, blank space included. It feels like the length of a standard academic essay, so 250KB should be more than enough to work with. We're just gonna continue working on the rewording process regardless though, just in case. It's amusing at times, so why not?Side note: The ROM is already 32MB, which is max for a normal GBA ROM. And shockingly, there's only 250kb unused at the end (I suspect they dumped a lot of SCS1/2 content in there, much of which might be unused, but good luck figuring out which portions.) ...still probably plenty for a script if things are done well, though. Redoing the graphics, on the other hand, would probably be a nightmare, and that just might include changing japanese text that's stored in the form of graphics (e.g. title screen.) Not that any of that's much use until the pointers are found to move things up into that space to begin with, but it's liable to become a concern. Knowing the total size of the script blocks would give a better idea of how much of an issue it's liable to be.
Keep in mind that this is easily going to take another 10 weeks or so, let alone the implementation of the script into the game which may require script revision. Why is it most likely going to take another 10 weeks? Because we don't even have 5 dedicated individuals working on the process of rewording sentences to fit them into the harsh character limits the game is throwing at us. Why do we not have more people even though this is a fairly simple job once you get into the rhythm of things? Because people give up way too easily, get overwhelmed by the occasional challenge of condensing a lengthy sentence into 30 symbols, and also tend to get reprimanded by me since I refuse to accept ignorance in terms of proper punctuation and actually writing entire words as opposed to abbreviating them arbitrarily.
That said, I am always willing to help people with their work and we can be the bestest friends as long as you don't half-ass your job like certain undisclosed job quitting individuals who didn't take this seriously.
Since you, the reader, are most likely not the target of this indirect insult towards your linguistic prowess though, I wish you a pleasant day and appreciate the time you've spent reading this~
I'm gonna need a complete reply to my previous posts before it's worthwhile to go hunting them - the answers will save a lot of needless reinventing the wheel. I have other obligations too, ya know.I looked for the compressed file pointers in several different ways, I'm almost sure they aren't uncompressed absolute pointers, so they are either compressed somewhere or they are relative pointers which would be way harder to find. Finding those pointers should be the top priority.