Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

I wish that were the case but translation supporthas been all but lost for this one. I am of course assuming because I have not heard from the person that was handling the translation.

Thanks for keeping us updated guys... Wildbill already made it to the half, awesome job man!

This game has 2,5M, but seems to be one of the best Snes graphics...
How many hours long is this game?

By the pictures and movies this translation will be a masterpiece!!!

Thank you guys for spending time to make us happier

It's really difficult for me to gauge how long it would take... The game is divided into several chapters that each have multiple endings, so it could take LOADS of time just testing out all possibilities in the story. On top of that, you have the cave building portion of each chapter, wherein you build a "dungeon" and defend it from invaders. It's definitely NOT easy at times (especially in the beginning). I can't really imagine getting through all of them without using save states or cheats

So, how long is the game? No idea... But it's long It's not your normal SNES RPG that you can just fly through at breakneck speed.

I was wondering the same thing myself, about length. My initial impression is that a person could spend 50 to 300 hours plus on this game. The reason is dozens of convoluted multiple scenario endings that can trigger ripple effects and consequences through all of the scenarios, both up and down.

The bonus dungeon, Scenario 10, appears to be almost unlimited in scope. Anyone who's played Taloon's Great Adventure bonus dungeon maybe has a rough idea of what I mean. The minimal 50-hour play would be one ending in one scenario from 1-to-9. The thing is, you can pile on plays in most scenarios and receive "game credit" for them. In other words, you may achieve as many as a half dozen or more endings in some scenarios, and your "save" screen will record how many plays you've finished in each scenario. I believe you must have credit for every single ending to unlock the bonus dungeon, as many as twenty or so credits, but you don't get "credit" for "beating" Scenario 10. You just play it and play it and play it until your CS obsession wanes!

Dag, Draken, and ChronoMoogle know much more about these permutations than I.

So, I am thinking about releasing another teaser clip for Scenario 5 to help get folks interested in CS again. I realize that practically nothing is known about this game outside of Japan. That includes me who is trying to write the polished story. Without Draken's pre-work, this could have taken me 10 years! Shoot, I guess I'm almost halfway there anyway! At any rate, I can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel if only I can quit overloading the VRAM with story bytes sporadically. You said this game is 2.5 M. Well, I wish we could expand it to 3.0 and point all of this dialogue somewhere else! I may have just exposed my technical naivete here, though. It could be that I'm overloading just certain strings with script that are crashing the game in a way that expansion wouldn't help. I tried reducing the font size, but my current VRAM corruption in late Scenario 5 is still crashing the game, regardless, and right now I don't know where to cut bytes to fix it.

Regarding this game's fit in the hierarchy of potential best games, I made a comment inside the group recently that CS might "out-chrono" Chrono Trigger once we finish and release it. That's up for you players to decide, but I've played CT several times, and will say it's special - one of my favorites. I prefer turn-based, which CT is; and CS is action-based, but I already like the CS story much better that the Secret of Mana and Zelda action-RPG games. CS has a really deep story for an action play. You all will see, eventually... If only I can get past the technical problems and keep moving.

We will need beta testers soon - serious committed hardcore players who like to learn every secret buried in the games they play - because we will need to find every unrefined niche in the variable stories that I haven't uncovered yet. To do a tale my best, I must run every small scene multiple times - to fine tune the flow - often 20 or more plays each.

Maybe is there a dialogue size limit? I'm translating some games where the size limit for each dialogue is 256 bytes (or something like that), and if the translated string is larger than the limit, the results are unpredictable. Maybe the dialogue routines don't check the size, so it's crashing the game in some way. If this is the case your inserter could check these limits, or I think Bongo could "easily" rewrite these routines to allow an unlimited dialogue size, maybe adding some new control bytes, etc.
I think that expanding to 3M only gives you more space, and isn't related to crashes, unless your script is already very large and is beginning to overlap other data.

Sorry if I'm talking some nonsense, because I don't know the details about this game and I don't have as much romhacking experience as you guys.

Your theory makes perfect sense to me. We had a similar problem in Burning Heroes, at first, but ROM expansion and other alterations to the routines seemed to fix it. 256 bytes rings a bell, but it may have been a game other than BH.

Also, in CS, we seem to have a glitch when we add continuation screens to a string. Generally, Bongo` and Drakee have forewarned me not to add continuation screens, but to work within a 4-line screen that offers great flexibility through auto-formatting the dialogue box's size.

However, I've encountered some strings in Scenario 5 that appear to have multiple screens formatted via the control codes. I've run with these, although they break the general mold I've followed through five previous CS scenarios. Here's an example:

;------------------------;
; Declared Pointer Label ;
;------------------------;
_Label_08EA:
.TEXTBOX.STYLE [$FD]

;#######################;
; Open Dialogue Session ;
;#######################;
.TEXT.OPEN
No, you got what was coming![newl]
No one who keeps someone[newl]
waiting that long deserves[newl]
any consideration![Keyp]
Wh-What... I'm[newl]
the bad one!?[Keyp]
Where does a some hick[newl]
redneck such as you get[newl]
off speaking to me this[newl]
way!?
.TEXT.CLOSE
.TEXTBOX.STYLE [$FD]

Typically, in every string, I am confined to 1-to-4 lines.
These are separated by the [newl] control code,
and the final line has no code.
As you can see in the example above,
three screens are formatted in a single string.
These are separated by the control code [keyp].

Now, this is all fine and dandy if the original game format replicated this exact pattern.
What I was told not to do specifically was add new screens within a string using [keyp] or it's equivalent.
In nearly all of the games we do, however, this type of story augmentation is never a major problem.

The thing is, I don't know the original game layout in these instances of dialogue that I "inherited" in Scenario 5.
I do know that I can add as little as one-byte-to-two-full-lines of text to a any given string and occasionally crash this game!
The same thing happened frequently in Mystic Ark after we altered our whole architecture to run on real hardware.

Eventually, we'll sort all of this out, but this is just one more example of the many learning curves we have experienced with CS.

I wish I had been paying closer attention and detected this crash immediately after I loaded the rewritten string that caused it.
As it stands, it could be between 1 and 400 lines of text in any one of about a dozen blocks.
All I'm fairly certain about is that it happened in the town of Doutenpuku, very late in Scenario 5,
between exiting the cave to just before the fight with General Raikan in the army HQ.

These "screen codes" like [Keyp] are very common, and I think I saw them in all Rpg games that I studied.
I don't know what problems it could generate in CS, because these controls codes usually only waits for a key and clean the text window and continue with the rest of the sentence.
The fact is that these control codes like [Keyp] are part of the dialogue, so you probably need to keep the whole dialogue size below a limit. Probably the read routines keep reading the dialogue and putting the bytes somewhere in Ram, so if the dialogue is too large it will overlap other data in Ram and the results are unpredictable, crashing the game, and this can include garbage on the screen. So may be not a Vram problem.

The dialogue routines may be reading the bytes and putting in Ram till it finds an .TEXT.CLOSE code, so the dialogue needs to be under a certain size.
Other games expects that each dialogue starts with a byte that holds the dialogue size (256 maximum), so if the dialogue is larger than 256 bytes, your inserter could generate an invalid script, and the game could crash near these dialogues.
And depending on the compression used (if you guys are using), may be a combination of factors.
But I'm just speculating.

In my opinion these "screens codes" are a necessity, otherwise you'll be limited to 4 lines, and you'll lose a good time tweaking the sentences to fit in 4 lines. With these new screens you can free your imagination and write more complex sentences.
Just saying.

Heh, being primarily a writer - a crafter of stories - (AKA localization), I couldn't have put it better! Bongo`s latest speculation is that the game could be counting tiles for all of the characters, not building pages according to VWF spacing. Whatever it is, we must all now wait for the real-world demons to let go of Mr. Bongo` for a few hours! Meanwhile, I'm zooming forward in Big Shell Monster Story (Daikaijiuu Monogatari). I don't know if we even have a board set up for BSMS at our site yet. I think I'll go look...

Chaos Seed is moving again. Bongo` has engineered a major revamp of the insertion system. Basically, as I understand it, the text was overwriting menu space. This was fairly obvious when I spotted artifacts on menus just before the game crashed! I believe he has re-directed menu data to another (unused) area of the ROM.

We have also gone back to the larger version of the font.

My save-states still work. Here are graphics of the exact spot where I was working when the game crashed. I was in the side treasure room on the right. I had just whipped the guards in that room, then I opened one of the chests. When I hit my menu (X) button to see the description of an unfamiliar item, my game unexpectedly and dramatically blew up!

Looks like smooth sailing again - for now.