You love menus, don’t you?

Menus once again! I know you probably don’t care because all you want is story translation, but a RPG can’t be functional without menus. :P So here it goes with a new update on menus only! And yeah, almost 18,000 hits, which means 5,500+ hits this week. :D

Part 1: Demon/Persona analysis screen. Remember how horrible and butchered are menus in Eternal Punishment? You hated the exaggerate number of abbreviations, didn’t you? Well, they are no more! It took me a while, but stuff has been relocated and reprogrammed for good, so:

Personality/Comments table finally works and looks decent enough. First of all, the game was crashing on real hardware whenever a demon/Persona description was loaded, always thanks to the old 16 bit text encoding, which also had a limit in terms of characters per line (20 each). Now not only the descriptions have no limits, but they work totally fine too. Now the other part: it’s not really clear from this picture, but personality attributes can’t overlap each other anymore and use full words, so forget about stuff like “Glm.”, “Arg.”, “Blf.”, and whatever EP had. The routine responsible for that task now leaves 7 blank pixels after the last word, while the old routine used to leave 40 pixels no matter how long the previous word was. I also had to expand the sub-window containing “Personality” and “Comments”, and believe me on this, it wasn’t an easy task at all. X_x A massive chunk of demon/Persona descriptions comes from EP, as usual. It’s nice to see how much text is shared between the two. I also wanted to show another screen from the Item submenu, but had no time to complete it. Maybe in the next update, where I should also post the same shots applied to battle menus. Code is not share with those, so I need to redo the same thing there too. :/

Part 2: Back to something old:

The spell list, revisited. Not many changes, except for the “SP Use” part fixed (was “Use SP” in older, buggy versions). Spell descriptions need to be reworked a little for consistency with EP’s glossary, but it’s pretty much final.

Part 3: Ok, I lied. :D This is not a menu only update. This is the other nightmarish problem I had with IS: Dungeon hud!
The thing is a fucking mess of over bloated code and fixed length strings. Why did I post 2 screens for the same section of the game? Because they are not really the same thing. While they belong to the same part of the game (dungeons), they actually operate in separate and totally independent modules, so I had to do twice the work. Also, it does strange stuff, like saving a termination symbol at the end of the string to read, which is TOTALLY useless and caused the game to behave incorrectly and delete the translated strings. O_o Oh well, at least now it’s gone for good. Say hello to the new, autocentred VWF’d names for sections, locations and floor counter in dungeons!

Fortunately the ASM changes are almost at their end. There isn’t really much else to do, except for battle stuff which consists in heavy layout relocations and re-does of the same code in a different environment. I guess I will have a lot of spare time once those changes are done. Maybe it will be my chance to work on a secret project that has been going for quite a while. ;D

PS: Seems like Tom’s laptop was broken after all, that’s why he didn’t contact me at all in the last month. From what Kaioshin and KC told me, he should be back by middle April, so cross your fingers and hope he will work non stop this time. There are still soooo many dialogues that need to be translated, especially now that all text has been extracted successfully.