September 2019 Patch Release [Patch #18]

As promised, I'm back with the goods today! Undoubtedly this has been one of the most frustrating parts of the translation. While it may not seem that difficult at first, translating the simple title screen logo took somewhere around 200 hours between reverse engineering formats, making custom rendering & utility tools, and actually translating it! It feels amazing to be mostly done with the logo. I do want to move the e+ & TM text to the left, but I just didn't have the time to finish that up today.

I apologize but the title translation and a few bugfixes are the only content present in the patch this month. As you all know, this isn't par for the course. I set a hard deadline of translating the title screen by this month's patch, and I stuck to it. It just took the majority of the translation time I have for the month to do it. With that said, I'd like to go into detail about just why this seemingly simple job took months of planning and work. Feel free to skip the explanation as it's going to be quite technical! The change log is below!

Planning the Translation

The first step in translating the title screen was to envision what I wanted the final product to be. After a few hours of thought, I wanted a logo that was somewhere between Animal Crossing's and e+'s. That way there's a feeling of familiarity while also keeping true to the original. I settled on having Animal Forest in the same font as Animal Crossing's title (Fink Heavy), while also keeping the stroked font found in e+'s title. Make sure to give a huge thanks to Brackenhawk. She created the logo based on the specifications I gave her, and it turned out absolutely stunning! Anyways, now that I had the logo we actually have to go quite a few months back in time -- to December 2018!

Trouble with Relocatable Modules

Relocatable Modules, better known as REL files, are a proprietary file type created by Nintendo for their games starting in the GameCube era. The files contain game code, game data, and information on how each relocatable module links up to another. The problem that I encountered early on was that I had no way to add data to the relocatable module -- I could only change it. Relocatable Modules have a section in them called the Relocation Table. This section is used to reference code and data that are present in another section of the module, or in another Relocatable Module! The problem presented is that it uses a relative offset from the section containing the referenced item, meaning if I inserted data into any section, those offsets would get thrown off! That would break the linking process and would cause the game to certainly crash (Note: I actually did this before I understood what REL files were and broke the game...)

So, how was I going to go about inserting a new logo into the game? Well that's why we've gone back to December 2018! Around that time I decided that I was going to write a program that would allow me to resize any given section in a REL file, while also correcting the Relocation Table offsets! This took a few months, and I didn't have a working version until well into 2019! This was the first utility I needed to implement the logo. Now that I had the tool to insert the new logo into the game files, I needed a way to work on the logo graphics itself.

Shoddy Emulation

The GameCube Animal Crossing titles are quite unique. They aren't actually GameCube games -- well they are, but their graphics and sounds are not. Nintendo must have decided it'd be easier to create an N64 graphics emulator and an N64 sound emulator rather than convert the tens of thousands of assets to the GameCube's format. The code is compiled for the GameCube, but they didn't recompile the assets. Now this would've been simple if the emulator was accurate. As we've come to expect from Nintendo, that isn't the case. The emulator is a very early version and has numerous hacks and differences from real N64 hardware. They had to go so far as to completely modify the graphics format! The Animal Crossing titles use a modified version of the N64 graphics format F3DZEX (Fast 3D Zelda Extended), which I like to call F3DAC (Fast 3D Animal Crossing). I had to completely reverse engineer the format, which was a huge undertaking. To facilitate efficient model editing for the logo and other purposes I have a working model renderer for F3DAC encoded 3D models! It's still a work in progress, but it can render things accurately:

This program took well over 100 hours of work to create! It's been a real struggle. This was the last piece I needed to begin implementation of the title screen!

Finally Implementing It

With all the programs out of the way I needed to use for development and to actually implement the translation, I got underway on it. I started off by trying to reprogram the whole thing to use a bounce logo similar to Animal Crossing's title screen. As I progressed on that, I realized it would be too difficult to do in a timely manner, so I scrapped that and decided to go with e+'s stock logo animation. Finally, I began implementing it. However, soon after I hit another snag -- resizing images vertically wasn't working! I was extremely confused. I was certain I correctly documented where image size is set for models and I had modified it to be correct! After some hours of trial and error, I realized the issue was that the emulator is so poorly made, it ignores the height of the image. It simply uses the width and then scales it vertically to the polygon it's textured onto. After realizing that, I spent another ten hours working on getting it implemented and debugging it! After almost a year of planning and well over 9 months of work, it's finally been done! This is a huge goal, and something I wanted to finish before I released the next progress video. I also didn't want to release a patch to the public without a properly translated title screen. It's a huge relief to be done (mostly) with the title screen! 

Now onto the small changelog for this month!

Changes

• The title screen is finally translated! It will get some adjustments in the coming months!
• A bug was fixed that could cause a crash when setting the date and time.
• A few text misspellings and invalid message tags were fixed.

Next Month's Plan

I plan on finishing up the loose ends for villager quest dialog next month. After that, there'll only be around 5,000 dialogs left to translate! The light at the end of the tunnel is finally visible! I don't think I'll be able to finish by the end of December, so a public pre-release patch will probably be released, but I think I can finish it before New Horizons is released! Thank you all so much for your patience and support this month! I hope you enjoy the translated title screen as much as I do! See you all again in November!