FFT: Complete Main Info thread

[Vanya]

That's not really possible with the PSX version without major ASM hacking to rearrange the way it uses it's RAM and saves.
And even then there may not be enough RAM space to support the extra characters.
The best lead we ever got on that was the idea to have guest slots be used for characters, but I don't know if that ever went anywhere.

[Heian]

Cheetah, I was about to send you what I've got and I found myself working on it again -- and am on a roll here!  I had finished the Oeilvert story up to a point where Sentir comes over to criticize you, and you take a stab at him, but now I'm doing a few more of Pablo's stories.  Give me a few more days and I'll have maybe half of this done.  We can show people two different Oeilvert paths.

I'll need you to check out line lengths when you plug it in; I tried to pay attention to them, but I'm sure a few things will slip through.

Still making progress!

[Heian]

Oeilvert's about 60% done!

[Cheetah]

Oh wow great work Heian. Sorry that I missed these messages somehow, that is amazing progress. As long as you are getting the script placed in the correct places and looking generally how you want it to, I will figure out the nitty gritty stuff when I'm actually inserting stuff. This is super super exciting.

[Heian]

Cheetah, yeah, slow but steady.  I discovered a few things while doing this -- many of the [Delay] things are not actual pauses in conversation or attempts at showing the speed of speech, but rather a general rule that there's always a delay of 06 when a comma appears.

I pasted your file into Word and then changed the font color for all the markup into barely-visible pastel colors while leaving the real text in black.  Makes things much easier to manage!

[Cheetah]

Yeah they are very controlling of the flow of the text. They do that often during events as well with slowing the text for commas. Sounds like you are structuring things really intelligently, it will make the insertion much much easier. I'm really looking forward seeing this in action.

[Heian]

Cheetah, I've got another update (looks like this is becoming a once-a-month thing) -- Oeilvert is about 85-90% finished!

I've got the entire main story done except for Montesto's final speech; the eight endings are still unfinished.

Another problem is the portions where -- I think -- each character is accompanied by the sound of a typewriter key.  The code contains {0xF55C}{0xF63A} between each character.  In the opening title, I added this code once so that, instead of the seven katakana in ウィユヴェール each having a keystroke, the eight letters in 'Oeilvert' do.  Unfortunately, there's a very long passage (in 'Public Library'), meand to be quoted from a book, in which Edgar Black and his doings are described.  There will be many more English letters than Japanese characters, and I'm worried about there being too many bytes.  Maybe I could stick the keystrokes in after each word?  Though it would really look and sound better with keys after every character... are you familiar with this?  How does the main game handle this stuff; I know there are a few instances of it.

[Cheetah]

I don't think the key strokes sound is used anywhere in the main game that I can think of, definitely not any events. There is a sound associated with a character appearing, but that is hardcoded. That is a really cool effect. As for character/data limits we are going to have to ask Melonhead. But I know there is a lot and sometimes multiple pages are contained in one "entry" so I think you will be able to fit it all. For now go forward and we can adjust after hearing from Melonhead if it ends up going over, because we are going to need how long it ends up being either way.

This progress is amazing Heian. I was just thinking today to email you about this haha. I have all of December of from school so I think that will be when this project gets some major updates.

[Heian]

Heh, I'm in a similar situation -- piles of work until mid-December, including a major paper to be submitted for publication, and then I can relax.

One more quick question: until now, I've been pasting text in line-by-line, and working around the commas, delays, and line breaks.  Can I instead paste whole paragraphs in, overwriting line breaks, with you re-inserting them wherever they should go?  This would make things a lot quicker.

I could just overwrite the typewriter-sound-effect bits too, and then maybe we could re-insert them once we know if they fit or not.  The opening part really needs the typewriter, but the section in the middle seems fine without it.

[Cheetah]

I just started grad school and have a national presentation poster due Dec. 1. Damn you real life, but it is great to see that we are all getting little bits of this done at a time.

Yeah don't worry about the line breaks, those will all have to be redone anyways with the different word lengths than the Japanese. If you can leave the commas and delays that is great. The main thing is I just need to know where the page breaks are so that I can match it up with the original stuff.

Good plan for the typewriter-sound-effects. I will be able to tell where it is when I'm inserting all this and I can test it then. No need for you to slave over it now.

[Vanya]

Damn, I can't wait for December for once! ^_^
Now that I am a "homemaker" I'll have tons of time on my hands, I look forward to filling some of that time with FFT:C.
In the mean time, I'll be working on a for-profit game for PC, but I'll still have tons of time on my hands to help out with whatever might come up here.

[Heian]

Cheetah, what are you studying in grad school?  I'm after a PhD in linguistics, and go down to Okinawa all the time to talk with elderly speaker of these languages that are probably going to die within a generation.

OK, I'll overwrite the line breaks when it's easier to do that, but leave all the </Entry> and <Entry> stuff where it is.

Is {0xF4} the reference for when the player has to press the 'OK' button?  I think I'll keep those intact too.

To be honest, I find myself just typing the English text over the Japanese all over again rather than pasting it from my own file.  I should get a little more done -- maybe a week until Oeilvert is done?  Should I start on Tango and the chocobo gambling after that, or the airship tale?

[Cheetah]

I'm getting my PhD in clinical psychology. I'm working a couple part time jobs too. Your research and degree sounds really interesting Heian, I'm very jealous.

Try to leave in those miscellaneous references in there so that I can tell where they probably belong later. But yeah I think F4 is a button press.

That would be amazing if you finished Oeilvert so quickly. Man I am ton between Chocobo and Airship, I love them both so much. I guess maybe Tango since he has a minigame associated with it and it would be good to have time to make sure that it all work okay with the US version.

Vanya: I need to remember to assign you some work, I think I have the perfect thing.

[Vanya]

Bring it on! ^_^

[Vanya]

A friendly neighborhood reminder to assign me some work, Cheetah! ^_^

[Heian]

Oeilvert update: up to about 85-90%!

I knew I'd have lots of downtime at work yesterday, so I e-mailed part of the text to myself so I could work on it.

It worked great -- my work e-mail application doesn't insist on maintaining all the stupid formatting of everything you paste, like MS Word does, and this time I paasted the English not from the source of my old page, but from the FF Wikia transcription (they got it from my page, originally).  My work e-mail also makes it easier to select text and paste over it -- MS Word "helps" you by forcibly selecting following punctuation and brackets and the like, so until now I'd be constantly re-inserting the { symbols that accidentally got overwritten.  This was so smooth and I barreled through it.

Does anyone out there have enough Japanese to join me in this?  I've still got two more novels to do, and then I have to translate the Enavia one from scratch.  Maybe someone could do some of the airship novel while I move to the chocobo races next?

[Cheetah]

I don't know that we have very many other Japanese speakers here. No one would have to be fluent for this part though because they are just matching up a previous translation. I may have to go on another recruiting mission soon to find you some help. Great to hear about the progress.

Vanya: All the information you need should be in the Unit.BIN file. Check LD's post on the first page that has a list of all the inconsistent sprites, then look at my master guide and replace all the "00" values with what matches with the actual character (which should match up with the portrait numbering I did on one of the early pages). Ask me questions when you run into problems.

[Heian]

Oeilvert, like Tango's chocobo, is coming down the home stretch and approaching the finish line!

99% done; all that's left is to figure out how best to get several hundred characters (in the "Public Library" section) to replace what's there now, which is several dozen characters each separated by what looks like eight bytes designating a 'typewriter key' sound.  One keypress per word, maybe?  Cheetah, I'll let you decide what works best, along with the line breaks in a few spots where I just pasted the paragraphs in without calculating where they would go.

Cheetah, I've genuinely forgotten -- did I last write to you through Gmail or Yahoo?  I use both all the time and can't remember.  I'll send you the finished script from whichever address I contacted you from last.

[Vanya]

Got it! I'll get to work on those this week. ^_^

I wish I could help with the translations, but my knowledge of Japanese is very little.
I can translate words, but not sentences.

[Heian]

Cheetah, we're done!  Oeilvert is finished!!

For the 'Public Library' section, I kept the typewriter key sound only for the title "Edgar Black"; the rest I turned into ordinary lines.

The file should be in your inbox; only the Oeilvert part is finished, but in the other three you should see a few translated parts here and there (I did some global find-and-replace), and of course I changed the colors of the {Newline}, {Delay}, etc. parts all through the document, so it should be a little easier to read.  I hope I didn't accidentally erase any of that.

You're going to like it!