Digimon World 1 Twitch Stream

This Friday at 9:00 PM German time, we will be hosting our second Twitch stream, in which Romsstar will show off the abilities of the tool that he and Ze0nx have been working on for the last five years.  We may also talk some about our Decode project, though that is hampered by our lack of a 3DS video card.

As with the last stream, since timezone math is complicated, we have put a countdown timer on the right side of the main page. Consult it on Friday to get a better idea of when we will be streaming where you live.

Stream Announcement Time

As promised in the previous post, we are setting an official time for our next stream now.  Unfortunately, due to a scheduling issue, I won’t be appearing on this one, but we plan on making these streams regularly from now on.

The stream will occur at 8 PM in Germany, and rather than make a list, I set up a countdown clock on the right side of the page.

Once again, the URL for the stream is http://www.twitch.tv/OpDecoded, hopefully we’ll see you there.

1.1 Patch Release

We do apologize to our PSP users, the batch of bugs that caused problems crept in very late in the process.  Fortunately, they were relatively easy to fix.

We recommend that everyone update to the 1.1 version.  You can do so by either pressing the “Check for Updates” Button in the Patcher, or simply Download the provided Link here.
Both variants work, but since the Update Patch Data are on a Server with limited traffic I urge you not to exploit it.

In addition to the bug fixes, we have corrected some typos that users were helpful enough to point out to us.  To do that, you’ll need to work from a clean ISO, you can’t update an ISO with the 1.0 patch applied.  You can either download the patcher from the links below, or use the update function in the patcher you already have.

Thanks for being patient with us, and sorry for any inconvenience.

DWRD Patch 1.1 (Direct Download)

Additionally, in keeping with the way the game was released in Japan, we have decided to release a few of the new passwords every week in our updates.  We’re putting out the first batch today:

Tamer Starter Kit:

Giant Claw (Greymon Digivolution Item): i73pqhqy
Dreadful Horn (GeoGreymon Digiviolution Item): 1v7ixp5s
Meat × 10: wgy3so2s
Portable Potty × 10: rk633pd0
Autopilot × 10: 2heqtq3p
Restore Floppy × 5: y406r33p
Offense Chip × 3: jaotcnpf
Storage Card α (Sashenka): 0fpwatdq
Colosseum Fight (Pirate B-Wargreymon) : hy1gn9ne
Colosseum Fight (Luckyman) : i94fo2bn

Additionally, as our regular commenters have likely heard before, we have worked on adding some additional features to the game.  The timeline for that is still relatively vague, but given the recent influx of readers, I thought it’s worth mentioning.

Lastly, Romsstar mentioned a few posts back that he and another programmer have been working for some time on a tool to reverse engineer the original Digimon World for the PS1.  Some time soon, he plans on explaining the progress they have made so far, and what his plans for it are.

Caution:
Don’t use the Pirate B-Wargreymon password unless you are strong enough to actually defeat it. The Colosseum will only be unlocked again after you defeated it.
We hope this Passwords will provide some help to Beginner Tamers that want to get that Greymon, or just need more Offense to defeat that “tenacious” Gabumon :D

Update: May 18, 2015

As it’s been a few weeks, I thought it was time for an update.  I am quite pleased to announce that, for the first time, we are ready to create an internal build with 100% of the game translated and inserted.  As such, although we began having a few people test the patch about two weeks ago, we are now ready to have the entire team begin testing the game and looking for any remaining bugs or typos.

All of the text is still subject to change, and we may find places that need to be rewritten as we play through.  As such, we are still not prepared to give an exact release date.

2/22 Update: Mea Culpa

Well, it’s been longer than I usually try to go between updates.  At this point we’re clearly stretching the definition of “soon” and I’m sorry about that.  That’s partly unavoidable and partly my fault.  The Colosseum has turned out to need considerably more work that I had estimated, at the time of the last post I hadn’t looked closely at those files, since we had planned on saving them for last, as they’re mostly not as important as the story or the NPCs and side quests.

The Colosseum files are structured differently than all of the game’s other files.  Where most conversations look like you’d imagine they would, a string where one person’s dialogue shows up is followed by either that person’s next line, or a line spoken by someone else, with a speaker ID in the metadata, the Colosseum files are not like that at all.  The Speaker ID data is calculated completely different from any other text file we encountered. To make it short: We can’t really find the Speaker ID at this point. In the mean time, we are working on those files, but it’s a lot slower to need to open up the game, have a save file with all of the Colosseum battles available, and see who says what where.  A fair number of them seem pretty straight forward, they’re basically filler there to add some content, so the dialogue doesn’t get very involved, but some of them, particularly the sidequests that happen in the Colosseum are more complicated.

Also unavoidable was the limitations on our time.  I took three months off of school at the end of last year for reasons I won’t get in to here, and that gave me a lot more time to work on this project, and we made a lot of progress during that time.  Fortunately for my eventual career, but unfortunately for this project, I went back to school a few days after I made the last post, and Romsstar started his Master’s degree program.  In a few weeks I’ll be done with this term and will need to transfer to a different university, where I won’t be able to start classes until the fall, so I’ll once again have several months in which I’ll have lots of time to work on translation projects, which I’m looking forward to.

Here’s the part that’s all my fault though. I shouldn’t have made a public prediction about our release schedule.  It seemed reasonable enough at the time that I made those predictions, and I did go out of my way to say they weren’t guaranteed, but it was still foolish of me.  We’re still going to release, and there’s still a comparatively small amount of work left to do, but I can’t promise we’ll make the kind of progress we’d like to until I finish out the term in mid March, and given what happened last time, I’m not going to make any public predictions about a release date again, though we’ll keep you informed of the progress we make as we make it.  I apologize to anyone who has been upset at our lack of progress, and while I can’t promise slow downs won’t happen in the future, I will try to be better about not promising things I am not 100% certain can be delivered.  The vast majority of people have been extremely patient and kind, and I think I speak for everyone on the team when I say that we appreciate it.

Progress Report, January 6th

Hey everyone, it’s been about two weeks since we posted our Decode video, so I thought you would want a report on how we’re doing with the original Re: Digitize.  As unfortunate as the delay was, we didn’t lose any progress, we just weren’t able to work as quickly as we thought we would last month.  We’re down to a fairly small list of things to work on:

There’s one last section of File Island to edit and insert, the Night Canyon, which I will likely finish before I go to sleep.  When that is done, all of the story, and nearly all of the NPCs you can talk to will be done.  File City has some work left.  For whatever reason, the designers had two large files with most of the text for the city in them, and dozens of smaller files containing segments of the two large ones, almost all completely identical to the strings in the large files.  CompCom helpfully made us a tool to transfer those identical strings automatically, which we’ll be doing in the next day or two.  There’s a good chance that there will be some small parts of those files to finish manually, but it’s not clear exactly how much yet.  Likely not more than a day’s work.

Then there’s the Colosseum.  Work has been coming along on that, probably about four or five days worth of work is left there, perhaps a week.  Unfortunately, there is an aspect I haven’t covered in the recent updates, because I forgot about it.  The trading card minigame has 176 cards, each of which has a few lines of text.  That shouldn’t take more than a few days to take care of though, I’m just kicking myself for forgetting about it.  Then there’s testing and miscellaneous cleanup of any typos or what have you that we find during that time.

Barring a show stopping bug, I see no reason we won’t be able to release soon, but I’ve learned my lesson about setting an exact date, so, soon is best estimate I feel comfortable giving.

Lastly, I’d like to mention that our regular commenter Rai has graciously agreed to help moderate the comment threads as necessary.

Progress Report: November 27th, 2014

Hello again, as requested, we’ll be making more regular progress reports.  In the last couple of reports I’ve talked about the .pack files that we’re working with as we finish making the patch.  There are 294 of them in total, and they break down into two general categories.  87 of them are either related to the story, or have the text of the various NPCs you meet on File Island, and most files that have the text from cut scenes also have some NPCs in them.  The remaining 207 are all used in the Colosseum, and are individually pretty short, but in aggregate rather a lot of text.  With that said, here’s the break down.

Of the 87 story and NPC packs, we have 46 done, which puts us at ~53%.

The Colosseum has not been a high priority at this point, but there are 7 of them done, which is ~3%.  I think we can take care of these in about a week once the other packs are done though.

There are also a few odds and ends to take care of once these files are done, like the emails and news stories you recieve over the course of the game.  I don’t have an exact number on those right at the moment, but Romsstar tells me they shouldn’t take terribly long.  We’ll also need a week or so to test for bugs and such before we release the patch.  If things go well, I think it should be possible to release around Christmas time, but as I noted in my last update, it’s possible we will have to wait until some time in January.

For our American readers, happy Thanksgiving, and for everyone else, happy Thursday.

Stardate: November, 14.1th

By popular request, here’s an update.  Things are progressing well, we have been making the last round of edits as we insert the text into the game’s packs.  As mentioned in the last update, there are 294 of these .pack files, and quite of few of them for some reason are largely or entirely copies of sections from other packs.  At the moment, we have 45 of them completely finished, including the game’s three largest packs.  That puts us at 15% of the total, but we’ve been editing the largest packs first, so it’s actually more than that, but I’m not going to bother coming up with a metric to measure the actual percentage.

In other news, we ran into a show stopping bug where the game would freeze and then crash any time the items menu was opened.  We found that last night, and I can now report that CompCom has already fixed it by rewriting the pertinent sections of the insertion tool that Roxas from the GBATemp forum made.

We are still hoping to release before the end of the year, but I want to be entirely clear that it’s possible we won’t be done until January.  Either way, we’re very close to the finish line.

Update, October 18th, 2014

Hello everyone!  I’m Sporky McForkinspoon, the project’s editor/translation checker.  It’s been a while, so I thought you all deserved an update on our progress.  Things are going pretty well, and I think we’re on track to finish by the end of the year.

Here’s where we stand now:

Story:
The second round of story editing is basically done.

Translation: 100%

First Edit: 100%

Second Edit: 99%

NPCs:
Translation: 100%

First Edit:  35%

Second Edit: 35%

ASM:

100%, still no bugs discovered.

We’re at a fairly exciting point.  Now that the story edit is done, we are inserting the translated text into the game.  There are 294 .pack files in the ISO which contain all the text in the game, both the story and the NPCs, and they vary in size from a single line of text to several thousand words.  On average, they take a couple hours each to insert, make any last wording changes we like, and make sure that all of the text fits in the box.  To speed things up, I have started inserting text into the .pack files as I edit them the NPC text.  Right now, we have 18 of them completely finished and ready for release.  That means we’re about 6% done with that process, which is the most important number to watch right now.  When we finish inserting the text, all that will be left is testing and checking for any spelling or grammar errors that we didn’t spot before.

As always, thanks a lot for your support.