Bongo` wrote:
Draken wrote:
Yeah, and we're talking several hours of work PER DAY! You pretty much have to test as you go.
Hey, at least with Lennus II we were able to transfer the old dumps to new dumps. Although we did run into a few issues with text not matching up and having to fix that stuff.
The Lennus II project did have a stupid insertion system though. I like that way we work now over the other stuff.
At the time, Lennus-II was cutting edge for us, but I pestered you endlessly to get Feda more user friendly to the writer. I recall you doing a complete overhaul of the Feda system at one point. You weren't even sure the new way would work, at first.
Gosh, Bongo`... Now that I'm thinking about it, I hope you never make [newl] mandatory on every single line when an (invisible) carriage return can be coded to convey that same command!
Pete, from the standpoint of a writer who is not very code savvy, I would say that no one is really an out-and-out expert because each game is coded differently and presents its own unique challenges to the team. Bongo` is indeed a coding whiz, however, and the secret for him with the toughest jobs appears to be perseverance. I believe Bongo` actually dreams in code, because I've heard him say on a given day that a game is "impossible", that he's tried every conceivable approach. Then, he will sleep on it, wake up the next morning, say a new idea just came to him that probably won't work either, but it will end up working. So, Bongo`'s secret comes down to a combination of genius (or aptitude) and very hard work.
In case he doesn't see your question, Pete, I'll answer it as best I can. Yes, we use automated, highly customized insertion systems for each individual game, and we frequently reconfigure the ROM structure to accept the English input differently than it did the Japanese - using any number of reassembly changes (such as longer or re-shaped dialogue boxes, double line item names, and variable width fonts, for example). The four key words for customization are probably decompression, expansion, re-direction (of pointers), and recompression. In this way, we can not only tailor the English story to almost unlimited size, we can oftentimes reconfigure individual string sizes, structures, and built-in limitations, giving us near-total alacrity in crafting individual story scenes (such as we needed to do in
Burning Heroes). In short, doing away with the byte by byte replacement method is like giving us a whole acreage to build a new home inside instead of just a cramped side lot.
I believe the one huge shift in the Lennus-II experience and others was when Bongo` abandoned dictionary compression. It was great in its time, but we have so much more space now using our present data manipulation techniques, ROM expansion, or both.