April Fools' Day tends to be pretty annoying. So, in spite of the rest of the Internet, and that we've even put up a horrible joke in the past, I'm posting a real news update on the front page today. It's been a little while and the Tales of Destiny announcement is ancient by this point, and frankly, it's bothering me every time I load this page.
I've been talking about it on front page updates for awhile, so it's about time I finally get that long overdue Tales of Phantasia update out of the way, for those who don't bother reading the news forum. Before I talk about it though, why don't I post some new screenshots? Hot off the press; not even forum readers have seen them. Dialogue screenshots even, based on the in-progress third pass of the script edit. Nearly all previous dialogue screens released publicly were from before any serious editing began.
These are all from the first few hours of the game. As usual, all text is still subject to change by the time it's finally released. When the script truly reaches its final stages, I will be doing a bit more manual formatting of the text to help make some of it look a little better.
[ Crapton of images
http://www.tales-cless.org/ ]
The main focus of this year and last year has been script work. The translation was finished last year in late July. Nusakan0 joined the team as main script editor in the same month. Nusakan0 began submitting edits to the script in September and finished the first draft in December. He finished the second draft in February.
After reviewing and approving the second draft, I started testing it in-game, with the goal of ensuring the script is a smooth, natural read. Some things include catching any flow problems and previously undetected translation issues, and some general rewriting to make things more believable in English. This whole process has been a lot larger than I anticipated, and I've actually found myself rewriting countless lines of dialogue; I'm pretty sure I've rewritten around 50% of the lines I've come across. I'm still working on it at the moment, and I'm around 70% through it. I've done far more than I expected, and now consider this to be the third editing pass even though I'm not the main editor. That said, Nusakan0 asked me to provide him a copy of my third pass as I had it at around 50% complete, so he has been getting a head start on the fourth.
I really like how the script is turning out. I'd like to believe it's nearing completion, but we continually get new ideas every time we go over it. A fun fact is that with our edits considered, the script has so far become nearly 10% larger than it was since it was translated. The script was very dry and fairly awkward before we started editing it. A lot of it didn't even make sense if you put a bit of extra thought into it. With all this considered, I hope the final turns out well enough to stand up there with the best the fan translation scene has to offer.
The skit subtitle script is also being edited quite a bit, though it hasn't received as much work as the main script yet. Nusakan0 completed the first edit pass back on New Year's Day. I believe he has done some work on the second. Several months ago I posted a video with a bunch of skit subs in action. Since it's old (and was also made before Nusakan0's first edit pass), quite a few of the more poorly-written lines have since been fixed.
The battle voice clips have been translated and subtitles for them have been inserted. Many of them are in need of editing and double-checking though, as quite a few of them are pretty awkward and might be victims of no context and/or have been misheard.
Habilain's been pretty busy lately, but has provided quite a few assembly hacks since the last front page update:
* GROOVY Arche minigame improvements: Text is variable-width, some layout cleanups, and a very minor bug (that affects the original game) was fixed with the RATE display
* World Map menu enhancement: All the shop and town names were originally represented with graphics in the World Map menu. This presented several problems (annoying to update if we wanted to change the name of something, limited palette, 12 pixel height limitation, one shop name is an arte name which couldn't be affected by the arte name selector). I wanted to use the dialogue font in these places, but said problems made it difficult to have it look good (height limitation forced us to cut off outlines, limited palette forced an ugly brown outline and no gradient). Habilain did a very extensive hack to change this to REAL text, rendered by the game's actual text routine, eliminating every single problem we had. Because it deserves mentioning, Habilain fought very hard with this hack to get it working on real systems. The problem was a real bastard to track down and it took five major code revisions to get it working properly--ouch!
* Five lines a in a textbox: An increase from four lines, the extra line has made a huge difference for the script. With four lines, countless dialogue pages had to be split into two pages in order to fit. With five lines, only *one* page in the entire game needs to be split. In addition, the vertical space between the lines has been decreased by 3 pixels (down to 13 pixels from 16) as the font we're using doesn't really call for that much vertical space anyway. With that, the text box only had to have its height increased by 4 pixels to the fit the fifth line in comfortably. The text box at the top of the screen was moved up four pixels so that the added height doesn't obstruct the intended viewing area. Another option would have been to use a thinner font, but I don't think a thin dialogue font suits this game very well.
Habilain also created a tool which made it much easier to insert the skit script.
I implemented a couple things myself:
* I applied the 13px height to the menu text routine as well, which affects all other text in the game, including voice subtitles. I redid some description window cosmetics because the big version of the item name and such can now fit there again. The inverted arte name (i.e. showing the romanized name if you're in localized arte name mode) no longer appears in artes menu descriptions. It just seemed pointless with the arte name selector (it was mainly only there as a reference).
* Remember those crazy difficulty modes I added to the game (for second playthroughs and above)? Well, I decided that it would be best to make them a little more rewarding and less cumbersome. For your trouble, winning a battle in the added "Unknown" difficulty adds a 5x experience earned multiplier. A battle won in "God" difficulty earns 10x experience. The battles tend to drag on since the enemies have so much HP in these modes, and the 1x EXP rate just makes it feel like they're not worth the trouble trying to play. The original three difficulties do not have added EXP multipliers or any other bonuses; they function as they do in the original game. Regardless, the new modes are still beyond difficult with this addition...
On the technical front, this is what remains to be done:
* One skit is currently impossible to subtitle, because the game locks up if you add any new scripting commands to it. Added scripting commands are necessary so that it can be subtitled properly. I think Habilain has an idea of how to work around it, but he hasn't had the time to implement it yet.
* Adding subtitles to the little voice clips scattered around on map events (with no accompanying text box), and also for GROOVY Arche. Habilain isn't too sure how easy or difficult it will be to add them to these yet, though. If he finds it too annoying, they may not make it in.
* Update to the prologue battle subs hack (nothing that really matters to the players; just a hack that'll let us include the battle subtitles text into the main voice subtitles text block)
* Text centering in dialogue windows, without using silly work-arounds.
* Automatic text formatting in game code. An external software text formatter is currently being used, but in-game code can be more dynamic and will work better with variable-length words (like character names. External formatter can only parse them as the maximum possible length without causing display problems).
* A couple more text commands that can improve grammar in dynamic strings.
Aside from the skit issue, the rest of these are just gravy, and not completely necessary. Some of the others may not make it into the final. It'd be great if they could, though!
A few non-dialogue screens representative of current progress:
[ even more screens ]
So, aside from the few technical things that need finished, it's really just about getting the scripts to a level we're all completely satisfied with. I still haven't received edits to the menu text yet, either. With some luck, it won't be too much longer until they're submitted. I'll continue pushing for this project to conclude within THIS half of the year.
