Obligatory update

Figured it was about long enough since my last update to post here again, so here we go...

For those that care (all two of you), I was continuing to work on Final Fire Pro since my last post, but stopped half-way through October, at least partially due to the Phillies playoff run ("World FUCKING Champions", says Chase Utley), and didn't get back into it completely for months (though I did mess with it sporadically), between working on other projects and (gasp) actually playing other games.

That brings us to the first week of April, when I decided to get away from the FPC and ZOMG for a bit, and not surprisingly, I got working on the FFP translation again. Really, it seems just like in 'real life', I get far more done if I'm away from my friends, as frankly, I'll get NO work done otherwise, because I just tend to goof around instead...

Of course, now the problem is there's a new distraction. My birthday was last week, and between gifts and birthday money to put towards purchases of my own, the end result is me now having a new medium-sized LCD TV for my bedroom (where I usually play video games) to replace my crappy 20 year old set, a component cable for the PS2 (holy shit, what a difference in picture clarity that makes compared to composite), Venture Bros. Season 3 DVD set, and (wait for it) King of Colosseum II. Yes, after all these years, JB finally has a KOC.

So I've spent most of my free time this past week with KOC2, between playing and messing around in edit mode, so I don't know how long it'll take me to touch FFPW again...

Anyway, as far as Final Fire Pro progress goes, I translated a few more graphical menus (there can't be more than a handful of those left to do at this point), and have been doing more general text translation work which hasn't actually been implemented in the game yet. The reason for that being that I realized shortly after I restarted this project that the length of the MOR messages didn't necessarily have to be limited to the amount of lines the original Japanese text used.

Like, say the default text was only two lines; before I would have tried to fit the English translation into two lines, which a lot of the time is fine, but sometimes, you have to cut a good deal out of an ideal sentence/paragraph to make it fit and it would help to have that third line (or even more, if you're dealing with 'multi-page' messages). I think it will be easier to do all the pointer work after all the text has been decided upon ahead of time (especially since I'm changing the number of lines in many messages), so I'm holding off on actually implementing the text until I'm fully done translating each section.

The only other thing I'm having any sort of trouble with is my font replacement idea I mentioned a while back, which is more of a 'tedious' problem than a difficult one. I would have to write a program to render the final output, as I really don't want to do more than 3000 characters manually, but even then I need to at least type in the code for each individual letter/number/symbol that I'm going to use. I also drew up other letters for foreign languages (accented vowels and the like), but I don't know how I'd want to put them in, as there wouldn't be enough room to do the double-letter character thing with them and I don't think I can just replace the original single-letter roman characters, because I may need to keep those in the game. I've probably got plenty of time to figure that out, though.

Eh, guess that's more than enough for now...