Wepgen Free Download For Windows 7
Jason Ramgel
It's been slow going the last few weeks due to that nuisance I call real life. However, I've managed to get the entire first level formatted and inserted. I'm trying to capture the writing style of Spider-man comics of the early-to-mid 90's, so that this feels like a real Spider-man game. As such this will probably be the most time consuming part of the project. There's also a few more things I've found that still need to be translated, but those are minor and I'll deal with them once the script is finished.
I got the small issue plaguing the kerning algorithm sorted out and everything is ready for script insertion. The only problem is, my old script dumps are so messy that I'm gonna have to redump the original Japanese script and transplant the translation into the new dump. Otherwise, I'm gonna spend hours pulling my hair out trying to figure out where I messed up the original dump. This is just gonna be a little tedious, but once I get this figured out, I can start inserting the script and testing. I'm actually getting kind of excited about this. It's only been 2 years since I've released anything. Stay tuned for more in the coming days.
As I said in my last post, the VWF was more or less finished. I worked through the last of the bugs over the past week. Yesterday, I spent some time tweaking the kerning of the font I'm using so that everything really pops. There's a few very minor bugs I need to squash, but I should be able to start prepping the script for insertion soon. With any luck this patch should be ready for testing by month's end or early August. My goal is to get this released before classes start in late August. Now for a couple pictures.
I've spent the last two weekends getting Spider-man: Lethal Foes ready for script insertion and I'm close. The VWF is in and more or less working. I need to do a little more investigation into how the original code works and make a few changes so everything gels. Then there's some palette hackery that I need to do so that (Comix Zone's) font looks right. It's gonna be sweet. Stay tuned!
I started looking at Surging Aura last night with the intent of fixing the bug in the VWF routine. It took a bit of time to get back in the correct mindset to tackling (really bad) assembly code, but I did it and it's awesome. Here, have some video!
As for what is next, I'm not sure. There's a lot of TLC that this project needs so that it's not a pain to deal with. That mostly means cleaning up my tools and notes and such. I need to look up Ruairc and see if he is still interested in translating this. If not, I'll need to start looking for someone else.
Unfortunately I don't have much to report yet. I've been trying to use my meager amount of free time to pick back up some of my staff responsibilities at Romhacking.net and get in a little game time. I've started looking back into my projects to see what is far enough along and/or most interesting.
Right now, Surging Aura has my attention. I've started digging back through my notes and my existing code to see what shape it's in and I'm not too happy with it. It's really messy and just embarrassing to look at. Even worse, it's hard to figure out what's going on. So my first task is to work on cleaning this mess up. My next task is gonna be updating the VWF code to output one character at a time rather than an entire tile at at a time. The next thing will be seeing how the translation is coming along since I haven't talked to Ruairc in probably a year.
I still want to work on the assembly hacks for Spider-man, but Surging Aura is just more interesting to me at the moment. I'd also still love to set up a WordPress blog and revamp this site. Alas, I have too many ideas and not enough time. Classes start next week, so I'm gonna try to get a little something done before then. Work, school, women and romhacking do not mix well together.
I've been extremely busy since December with school, work and other fun real life stuff. On the one hand I've learned a lot about web development and I'm anxious to learn more, and on the other hand I've been so busy learning new things for work that I haven't had time to work on any of my own projects. I did spend a few days getting my machine set up so I can continue working on SEKAS. I'm gonna work on switching the build system to CMake so I can hopefully make it platform independent. I've grown to hate doing development work of any kind on a Windows box.
Things will hopefully start picking up around here while I'm out of school for summer, but we'll see. The first thing I'm gonna tackle is SEKAS then either Spider-man: Lethal Foes or dig up my old notes on Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan since I finally found a translator thanks to the guys at Sega-16. I might look into redesigning this site while I'm at it. I'm really getting sick of editing html files by hand.
So it's been quite a while since the last update and unfortunately I don't have much in the way of news to report. I've been disgustingly busy with school for the past 4 months and finally have a chance to rest for a few weeks. On the plus side, studying so much has paid off immensely, and I actually learned a lot of things that I can apply to my own projects.
Before school started, I began rewriting SEKAS from the ground up and it probably needs another 20 hours or so of work before it's ready for release. I could probably get it done in the next few weeks while I'm off, but I'm not sure if I'll work on it or not. You might be wondering why after 5 years of development, I still haven't released SEKAS. The last version (which I used for Bare Knuckle 3 and some other projects...) was basically a heavily modified version of byuu's phenomenal xkas. A lot of the modifications I made to xkas' code base to support the 68K ended up introducing a lot of really evil bugs that were difficult to track down. It's fine for hacking purposes, but as soon as I began using it for real development, I found a number of show stopping bugs and issues that would require large chunks of the code to be redesigned and recoded.
After much thought and consideration, I decided that the best thing would be to just rewrite the entire thing from the ground up. This has given me a chance to get familiar with object oriented programming and the code has been written in such a way that I can easily modify it later in the future if (when) any bugs show up. It also means that with a little tweaking I'll be able to support different assembler syntaxes without too much trouble, so hopefully it'll appeal to all of those homebrewers in the Mega Drive scene who currently use snasm68k.
Lately I've been reading up on WordPress and learning some PHP so I can play with WP and create something new for this site that will hopefully get everyone to be a little more interactive. At the very least, it'll make updating the site a hell of a lot easier. I'm still editting and uploading individual html files like it's 1997. I'm old school, yo.
Once I have enough free time to actually focus on something, I'm going to try to tackle Spider-Man: Lethal Foes and get that out of the way. I've been sitting on the translated script since December 2006. I know. I'm pathetic. I'm just too burned out to look into adding the hacks that it needs so the translation really shines. If memory serves me, the game uses an 8x8 2BPP font. In order to make the VWF for a comic book style font look smooth, it really needs to be recoded to support a 4BPP font. Those extra colors will really help smooth the italicized font out and make it look professional. At one time I entertained the idea of adding extra code and graphics so the black Spider-man costume (the Venom symbiote) could be used via a special password, but now I think that would be too much work and beyond the scope of the translation. It'd be a nice hack though if someone was interested in doing it.
As of right now the only game not being actively worked on in any fashion is Z Gundam. DarknessSavior is still slowly plugging away at DBZ2 when he as time and I still need to test the assembly code I wrote back in 2006 for it. I can't believe it's been so many years already. I'm getting old. Until next time, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone.
So after countless hours of frustration, I fixed the bug in my code AND improved the overall quality of the text rendering in F91. I just sent the beta patch out to my testers to begin picking it apart. With any luck, testing should be done within a few weeks and the patch out by month's end. We're almost there folks! I hope you're as excited as I am.
Now that F91's finished, I'm probably going to try to put some work in on Spidey. The translation's been done since December of 2006 and it's only waiting on the hacking. I know. I suck. I also have a few other projects going behind the scenes that I'm gonna try to work on, too. I'll post more about that when the time comes. I'm also considering upgrading the site to something more blog like to encourage user feedback, but we'll see how that goes.
I've spent the last few days tying up a few loose ends with Gundam F91 and we're just about ready for testing. I found a few small strings of Japanese that hadn't been translated and some Engrish that needs to be fixed, but that's it. All of the 8x8 text has been fixed (as you can see in the below screenshots). I even resized the unit info windows on the map to accomodate the longer unit names. There's one small bug left to fix in the code, which I need to look into more. It's not something anyone other than Gemini will notice, but it's a flaw in my code and it's gonna bug the hell out of me unless I fix it. I'm either a perfectionist or borderline OCD. Probably both. Anyway, here's a few screenshots of hitherto unseen English:
I've been taking summer classes and they've proven to be a lot more time consuming than I initially thought, so I haven't had much time the last few weeks to do anything. I got lucky somehow and fell into a little freetime the last day or two. I've finished up SEKAS to the point I think it's going to be. Macros and namespace are not supported at this time for a few reasons. I'm going to use SEKAS for a few things I'm working on for a few weeks or so, and then I'm planning to release it to the public so you guys can break it and make me cry.
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