April 2019 Patch Release [#12]

Hey everyone! It's that time of the month again (well, a few days late but I promise it was for good reason!)

The patch was delayed because I ran into a pretty major game crash that I had to resolve before releasing this month's patch. I apologize for the delay! Also, I'm going to go in-depth about something I've had on my mind. If you'd rather just get to the patch notes, feel free to skip down to the Changes section!

This is the twelfth patch. That means that this project has been going on officially for an entire year now. I've had an awesome time working on the game. It's been amazing seeing the massive amount of support you and the community have shown towards this project! I'm honestly grateful that I can bring this translation to everyone!

Now that that's out of the way I'd like to talk a bit about the time remaining on the project. Unfortunately I'm back to being the only translator again. SpoonMe has had other things they needed to deal with. There are somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 untranslated dialogs left. That's awesome when you consider that the game has 22,238 total dialogs! The bad news is that they're the more difficult ones so they take more time for me to translate accurately. I'm going to break down my current estimate of time left for the translation based on whats left:

• Untranslated Dialog: ~3-4 months (unless I get more translators on board)
• Title Screen Reimplementation: ~2-4 weeks
• Minor Translation Code Changes: ~1-2 weeks
• Figuring out some way to get mail & message board posts translated (Probably by expanding the save area): ??? (This is really going to take a ton of effort. If I change the save file structure I'll have to change thousands of lines of code.)
• Untranslated Images: ~1-2 weeks

Total Time: ~4-6 months + however long it takes to do the mail & message board changes.

That's just a rough estimate of course. It could be faster, or it could be slower. It depends on so many factors  —  some outside the realm of this translation. Since I can't guarantee a completion time for this project, I've been considering releasing unfinished versions to the public. I've decided against doing it at the moment, as the monthly patches are the main thanks I can give back to you guys for your support. However I've set a hard deadline. If the translation isn't near completion by the end of 2019, I will be releasing it to the public in some form.

Of course I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter. What do you think I should do? After all, you all are also a part of the community. Your opinion is just as important as mine in this matter. Leave a reply or talk to me on Discord if you have any suggestions!

Anyways, that's all I wanted to discuss on that matter. Let's get into this month's changes!

Changes

Dialog

• 1,200 newly translated dialogs!
• All villager introductions when they moved from another Memory Card have been translated.
• A ton of dialogs where villagers get mad at you for ignoring them for X time have been translated.
• More sick villager dialog was translated.
• More villager quest dialog was translated. I focused on the furniture fetch quest dialog this month.
• 20$ Patreon supporters are now all credited! Thanks for the support. I am looking to change the code behind the credits a bit to make it look better!
• Some minor misspellings & text-command bugs were fixed.

Code

• 12 AM/PM properly shows in text now. No more "It's 0:24 PM"!
• Major crash was fixed. Previously, a rare crash could occur when an item name was loaded.
  

Plans for May

• Finally fix K.K.'s request system  —  it's still using the Japanese names. It was harder to tackle than I thought.
• Finish up the majority of villager quest dialog.
• Implement the translated title screen. I've been working on it for some time now. It's been a huge process. I've had to reverse engineer the modified format used in the GC titles. I almost have a working model renderer though!
• Attempt to get the credits screen changed up  — this heavily depends on how much time I have left over (if I even have any.)

That's it for this month. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact me! Also, I've been considering implementing an option in the game settings for a true widescreen mode (16:9). Please let me know in the comments how you'd feel about that! Have a great May, and I'll see you again in June!