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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Tue Mar 26, 2013 10:26 pm
by Agrajag
Decooooo you're back we missed youuuuu but not quite as much as throttlekittyyyyyyyyyyy.

Ahem.

It's kinda weird that they decided that was the lone time in which the loading image should be doubled in resolution. The double-size loading image is still only 256x256, it's not like people are going to have it take up the whole screen or something.

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Sat Mar 30, 2013 2:33 pm
by AlphawingEX
Hey Agra, is there some kind of agenda you go by, or do you just do whatever when you are putting content into the offline patch. If you do go by some agenda, do you mind telling us what you've done and what you still have to do? You've said in the past that you don't know when exactly you'll be done because a problem may vary between a few minutes to a week to fix. Knowing how much you've done or how much you need to do will make all of us feel a little less impatient. I don't want to sound like I'm jumping the gun but I've been itching to play PSU again when I was going through old recordings of JP PSU. Keep up the good work!

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Sat Mar 30, 2013 4:08 pm
by essen
AlphawingEX wrote:keep us satisfied or we'll annoy you all the time

This kind of behavior isn't really helping things get faster. It can actually be quite discouraging.

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Sat Mar 30, 2013 5:33 pm
by KanameChidori
essen wrote:
AlphawingEX wrote:keep us satisfied or we'll annoy you all the time

This kind of behavior isn't really helping things get faster. It can actually be quite discouraging.

Agreed.

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Sun Mar 31, 2013 5:46 am
by Rikku
Where have you been Deco? <3

Love rikku

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Mon Apr 01, 2013 1:33 am
by shade
@Deco Bryl : Ah ! I see. Thanks for the explanations.
As a person who still plays in 5:4 or 4:3 aspect ratio resolution, never I'd figure by myself why there were 2 loading screens and 2 main menu screens per language.
And the PSU:AotI Trial didn't supported the 1280 x 720 :
Image
That's why only the b66249d6b692a98a02b98e54c939f58f file was present, and contained the PSU:AotI loading screen (the file uploaded by error came from the full version of the game).

And, in fact, I never expected it to become a "(so) big thing". I never intended to tease on it too. It was unintentional, and was done only because of the wrong file uploaded by my fault. I just always found it way better than what we got in the final version, and I wanted to drop it here in case anyone wanted to use it, or if Agrajag wanted to redistribute it with his expansion. I understand his irritation, and I wanted to present my apologies for that.


I'm also here to shout that I love tedious thing :mrgreen:
And to ask help... But ! But it'd be beneficial to everyone.
Thanks to some acquaintances, and some luck, I'm able to rewrite Story Mission dialogues and, more important, to bring back the japanese dubbing.

If you have the JP version of PSU:AotI, the modified CRC and one of the modified PsuIlluminus.exe (excepted the "14.30" one), you can see (and hear) this by yourself on a short demo. Juste make a save of your "dd3a140a3cc3ec26f99dc209a356a4a9" file, and replace it by the following one :
http://speedy.sh/UMMXV/dd3a140a3cc3ec26f99dc209a356a4a9
Then launch the Story Mission "The Mask 1" in C. You can have set your game in J, AE, F or G, it'll work.
In fact, you'll hear the "intro." dubbed, then the 1st scene (when Minna introduce you to Laia, etc...) wil be buggy (black screen, etc...) but I profit of this to show that text can be freely edited.

What causes the bug is I don't know how to rebuild *.nbl that contain something more than the *.bin files (like *.rel file). If anyone (Agrajag ?) can give me tool to rebuild it, or explain me how to do, though I'm not sure at all to understand something (in fact, I can't explain what I'm actualy doing because I don't understand exactly myself what I do with tools supplied), I can let people who want to rephrase dialogues in AE and G (I can handle the F version) do that and then re-implement it with voices in the gamedata. I just need to be able to rebuild every *.nbl in a way that don't make the game crash...

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Mon Apr 01, 2013 4:33 am
by Agrajag
shade wrote:And, in fact, I never expected it to become a "(so) big thing". I never intended to tease on it too. It was unintentional, and was done only because of the wrong file uploaded by my fault. I just always found it way better than what we got in the final version, and I wanted to drop it here in case anyone wanted to use it, or if Agrajag wanted to redistribute it with his expansion. I understand his irritation, and I wanted to present my apologies for that.

I don't know where you got the idea I was annoyed about it. I don't really care one way or the other (if I use a custom loading screen, it'd likely be a snazzy new logo, if not, I won't touch it).

shade wrote:What causes the bug is I don't know how to rebuild *.nbl that contain something more than the *.bin files (like *.rel file). If anyone (Agrajag ?) can give me tool to rebuild it, or explain me how to do, though I'm not sure at all to understand something (in fact, I can't explain what I'm actualy doing because I don't understand exactly myself what I do with tools supplied), I can let people who want to rephrase dialogues in AE and G (I can handle the F version) do that and then re-implement it with voices in the gamedata. I just need to be able to rebuild every *.nbl in a way that don't make the game crash...

Are you willing to do all 10 of the episode 2 missions? If so, I can hook you up with what I use for that, I'd be happy to have the dubbing back, but it's way too much tedium for me. Otherwise, as I've mentioned before, my program for it is still unstable and rather user-unfriendly, so I'd prefer a bit more time to polish it up.

AlphawingEX wrote:Hey Agra, is there some kind of agenda you go by, or do you just do whatever when you are putting content into the offline patch. If you do go by some agenda, do you mind telling us what you've done and what you still have to do? You've said in the past that you don't know when exactly you'll be done because a problem may vary between a few minutes to a week to fix. Knowing how much you've done or how much you need to do will make all of us feel a little less impatient. I don't want to sound like I'm jumping the gun but I've been itching to play PSU again when I was going through old recordings of JP PSU. Keep up the good work!

Wrote out a changelog on a whim a few days ago. It depressed me. It'd probably depress you too. Past month or so has been pretty unproductive, too.

I don't really plan out what's getting done when. There's a list of things that are done already and a list of things that need to be done, and I tend to just end up working on whatever strikes me as the most interesting at the time. Unfortunately, there are a couple very large very tedious tasks that are in the future, so they tend to be postponed.

I know recently there hasn't been much news. I can't promise much more in the way of transparency, but I can assure you there is still work being done.

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Mon Apr 01, 2013 5:22 am
by shade
Agrajag wrote:I don't know where you got the idea I was annoyed about it.
From the :
"Kinda torn between thinking that it's kinda cool to have it all fancy like that and thinking that it's a bit over the top."
And it'd be totally understandable to be annoyed about it. I may imagine when you see a new reply you're waiting something... substantial.
Agrajag wrote:Are you willing to do all 10 of the episode 2 missions?
In fact... They're all already done. Very poorly, but they're done. Maybe the Ep.2 Ch.10 Act.1 is buggy 'cause I had to change text editor because of appearance of char. encoded in an unsuported text format by my 1st text editor (UTF-16 LE w/ BOM), and by default it had stupid setting (automatic copy selection to clipboard, multiple clipboard....) which may have influenced what I tried to copy/paste...
This excepted, and on a technical point of view, the poor work done on dialogue should be ok. I've just bring back voices without correcting/formatting text.

But there is some works to do. Because of some technical limitations (like the fact that text should be displayed correctly in 640x480 without occupy 3/4 of the screen...), the game was poorly translated (in AE and F, translators have never written more than 30 characters per line and 3 lines per bubble...). I think it's something that need to be changed. Other thing : in AE/F/G, the game wasn't dubbed, so the translators could write what they wanted. But with the dubbing back, there must be some sence between the text displayed and the dubbing played. It is essentially tasks to work on. And despite the appearance, it requires lot of work.

Edit :
Woops, posted too fastly.

But yeah, they're still an unknown capital thing : the ability to build *.nbl and *.afs compatible with PSU, which function correctly. If no one can't do that, everything else is useless.

So far, I've just been able to test the Ep.2 Ch.10 "voices", to be sure that the character encoding is not an issue.

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:44 am
by the SEGA shop
shade wrote:What causes the bug is I don't know how to rebuild *.nbl that contain something more than the *.bin files (like *.rel file)


What tools are you currently using? Can i get these tools to have a poke around? :D


EDIT: whoops, just checked my inbox.. THANK YOU ESSEN :D

Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

PostPosted: Tue Apr 02, 2013 3:53 am
by Agrajag
shade wrote:But yeah, they're still an unknown capital thing : the ability to build *.nbl and *.afs compatible with PSU, which function correctly. If no one can't do that, everything else is useless.

Silly question. If it wasn't possible, I wouldn't have been able to release any new missions, ever.

(You were using a different definition for "torn" from what I was, incidentally. I meant "conflicted", not "angry".)

Offer's still open. If you believe you're willing to do all of the story missions, I can give you early access to the current version of my PSU data file editor. A "yes" or "no" will suffice.

-----

For anyone interested in seeing how the data files work, essen wrote a suite of commandline tools to extract them. They're available here. I'll release my own set of editors when they're ready, but that's likely to be a ways out--they're rather unstable (when I first add a given feature, they tend to go through a period of "corrupting all the data files" because of how NBLs work) and are currently lacking some key pieces of functionality (like anything dealing with missions--currently using a batch processing thing that won't be released because I'm not convinced anyone will need to modify the "return to lobby" value for 1500 missions at the same time).

A large part of the time I spend is on sorting out data formats. It's most of why the current changelog is so sad, I only include actual modifications in it, not (for instance) "spent a day figuring out shadoog bullets work" or "implemented a texture editor" or "traced through all the possible mission acceptance criteria".

(Or anything that turns out to be a dead end, or my time spent writing long posts rather than actually accomplishing something useful... ehhhhhh)