Hi everyone!
I know it's been a while since my last update, but that's only because the team and I have been working
EXTREMELY HARD at further progressing this translation patch! While the translators and editors have been toiling away at the 13,000-or-so lines of dialog, I've been hacking away, writing several hundred lines of new SH4 assembly to finally pull off the font-width modification that this amazing game deserves! Since the time of my last post, I'd estimate I've spent no fewer than 200 hours working on this hack.
While I don't have much time to write out a detailed explanation of everything I've done (it would take days to write it, and hours to read it), I want to take a moment to thank VincentNL. He's spent time experimenting with combining Cheat Engine and Demul to perfect what he likes to call the "poke and peek" method, where RAM can be inspected and modified on-the-fly during gameplay. Combining this with other tools like lxdream-nitro's debugger and Ghidra, the Dreamcast romhacking scene has turned a corner in terms of what's possible.
In essence, the game had to be modified to draw each font tile at a horizontal distance of 11px from the previous tile, whereas by default the game utilized a tile width of 22px. Each dialog line had to be increased from 26 characters to 52, and each dialog box's maximum character count had to be increased from 78 to 156. This, of course, meant that a whole new font sheet had to be drawn up, too!
As simple as that may seem, there are several dozen functions in Nakoruru that affect on-screen text in some form or another (nearly 40). Several of them are redundant, and I've tried to refactor/optimize the code where I could. Furthermore, things like choice lists for in-game player responses, menu/system messages, and the history view, all approached text rendering in their own unique way (i.e., different from the regular dialog boxes). In fact, the history view is still an open item as of writing this post, and the v1.0 release of this patch may feature a partially broken implementation of it. However, rest assured that
it's not a game-breaking bug, and in my opinion, doesn't take away from the incredible amount of polish and perfection seen everywhere else.
All of that being said, it was an incredible challenge to wrestle with all of the disparate parts of this game that were trying so hard to keep me from performing the desired modifications!
And so, without further ado, I proudly present to you the fruit of my labor... Nakoruru's brand new, beautiful, narrow font...