天下制覇

Doubling down on useless.

Last time on this series:
Battle Moon Wars SDK
Galaxy Angel/Moonlit Lovers SDK

Daibanchou – Big Bang Age Scripts/Tools

This edition will, I suspect, be especially useless for anything but as a historical curiosity since these tools were… Not Good™, and far better ones have been developed since I worked on this. Like with GA, I eschewed the image stuff, although to be totally frank, I'm also not entirely sure where it's gotten off to. Oh well.

There's only really two kinds of files here. The main scripts are in the xmls, and the eagle-eyed among you will quickly see that there's a ton that's not translated. I mentioned this on the now defunct forum's translation notes, but there are both a ton of dummied out files/strings, as well as a lot of scripts that simply are never called. The way I worked through the scripts is by playing through the game, jotting down a distinguishing string from a scene with a note as to what scene it was, and collecting a bunch of those before going through them. Scripts are grouped, broadly speaking (ie All of Marine's scripts are clustered together), so once you have an entry point, you can generally do a character's entire set of events. The inserter will also handle linebreaks automatically… mostly. If font size gets changed (can't be seen in the scripts), that'll screw it up, but linebreaks can be added manually too. There was also a tool specifically for working on these scripts which may or may not be in that package. At this point, I feel comfortable admitting that I hated it and almost never used it.

The big pitfall in the scripts is that the speaker tags are not to be trusted. The first instance of a new speaker is usually accurate, but after that, there's some kind of internal control that's not reflected in the xml files. It doesn't usually come up, but there are large scenes where it becomes especially problematic because everything is mislabeled. The big place it totally falls apart are the inter-combat quotes triggered by specific pairs of characters. The speakers for those are always wrong, and to make matters worse, each character's entire set of lines is in a single file. In other words, every in-battle exchange Rouga can trigger is all in one file, with nothing marking where one exchange ends and the next one starts, let alone who's talking. Thankfully, there was a Japanese fansite that listed a ton of them, and I could use that to fill in the vast majority, and left ones that I had no idea the context in hopes that people would report them, which worked pretty well, but I know of at least a few obscure ones that ended up missed in the final patch.

The other nutso thing is that virtually every random string, all the location names, event names, random in-scene choices, etc, is all in Strings.xml, along with about a billion debug and internal things. The extra wacky thing there is that event strings are all stretched to fill the text box for god only knows what reason. I guess it maybe looks less awful in the Japanese. In English though, it looks horrendous. The workaround for that is that every one of those is padded out with extra spaces. See "Inspect: Hell Hole" above in that image there? It's actually "Inspect: Hell Hole            ".

The only other semi-interesting thing is the names file. It's what's used for all the character names, as well as to generate all the random names. It consists of a buttload of surnames and given names that it then randomly slaps together for all the generics. The Arabian, Western, and monsters also have their own set of strings, but are also part of that same names.txt. You'll also notice the blank space between each lines, which is where the furigana went. Some of the Japanese names did end up needing to be shortened due to string size limits, especially when pairing two names together. If you wanted to add yourself as a generic to the game, there's where you'd do it, and most of the staff who worked on the project are immortalized as possible monster names.

Next week, Eternal Lovers.