Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

lol it's cool. I've been bogged down with homework lately anyways (not that I don't have time for CS...I ALWAYS have time for CS >.>)

Some family needs and other matters have really grabbed my time since Christmas, but we'll get there.

I'm a firm believer in Family First ^.^

I'm using this time to brush up and prepare for my C# classes next term anyways (I plan to know c# and OOP by the time I get into the introductory C# class,mwa ha ha)

This will be a long update.

I am working on CS Scenario #2 again, in earnest. I anticipate that I will be able to move right along now, however...

I am experiencing some major frustrations in my work.

Before I say more, let me preface by adding that I believe the following is true about Chaos Seed:

(1) This may be the most difficult English patch we have done or ever will do.
(2) This may be the best job we'll ever do on a patch.
(3) This may be the best game we have ever translated or tried to translate.
(4) This may be the most difficult game I, personally, have ever tried to play!

Now, all of us have pride and many people have difficulty admitting struggles with something they're supposed to be good at doing, but I will honestly admit the following: This game is still kicking my tail!

It's challenging enough to navigate through numerous files and put a game story together while playing the game - even when everything goes smoothly. Most of the games we do have text or script blocks that run through chapters and scenes in fairly sequential order. And some of the basic storyline scenes in CS do indeed fall in logical string order. But CS is by far the most randomized game I have yet written. Bits and pieces of scenario scenes call strings from all over creation! I'm keeping a log of which blocks I've worked inside and what the subject matter of a given block is, but oftentimes when I back up in my game to check what I've written and continue the rewrite/polish process, I end up pulling a different scene and sequence of strings - even from inside a different block on occasion.

Also, a player may build a cave in an infinite variety of configurations. Depending on what the cave builder does or doesn't do, The Senju will talk to the hero and make suggestions - pulling strings from a variety of blocks - making it clear that some of what I'm polishing in scenario #2 may very well pop up again in all future scenarios. On top of that, the script is massive.

Finally, while I was working on building my fourth of fifth cave room in scenario #2 - a number of different times last week - humans invaded the rooms and wiped me slick before I could hardly strike a counter-blow! The hero possesses probably a dozen offensive movements in this action RPG. Even though I'm using a real SNES game pad converted to USB and have super control, concentrating on the "buttonology" while trying to remember and look up all of the Feng Shui intricacies, along with trying to craft the story is just flat overloading and frustrating my brain and fingers! I was really proceeding well toward the "egg scenario" yesterday - almost to finding Dragon Furnace room - when the humans invaded, wiped me slick, and caused me to lose all I had built! When I started the scenario over, events took a different course with different strings being called up. I got bogged down writing yet another alternative set of scenes, then the humans invaded once more and wiped me out again!

Yet, I am making good progress because I took the opportunity to completely polish and fix a few blocks, whether or not I saw all of its strings during game play. The biggest glitches I have seen in the story strings thus far is omission of [newl] codes. This causes following lines to concatenate with previous lines and run off the edge of dialogue boxes. My job would be much easier if Bongo` would rewrite the code to treat all typed-in (natural) line breaks as [newl], as he has done in most insertion systems other than CS and Aretha-II.

So, here is what I'm proposing to the team. Unless someone can write me a cheat that makes my character invincible to attack without crashing certain parts of the game, I plan to take a new approach to my job and just start working on blocks in the blind without playing the game as I go along. Then, I will pass my text/script files progress back to Draken and the beta team and let them clean up the formatting, typos, and the other customary glitches.

I haven't touched the misc files, but many of the battle messages, room god's, and other messages that flash up from time to time are glitched in ZSNES. Maybe they work fine in BSNES, etc., but I don't know that for a fact.

I'll try to build a few more dungeons, but unless I can figure out why my character who I thought was fairly leveled up from Scenario #1 is so weak, I won't be driving away the humans successfully. They hit me really hard before I can barely get anyone assembled from the Summoning Room!

Finally, to Red Soul: The four manual pages look fantastic. I guess we need to leave the fonts small to fit the info. My only suggestion thus far is to standardize the room names with the game. I believe we call metal "Gold" and the Digging Room an "Excavation" Room. Just double check all of those - if you will. Also, I haven't seen but a few of the possible room upgrades. It would be good to check those upgrade names in the manual against their counterparts in one of the misc lists - or wherever the game calls them from.

Now that I've returned to game production work on a regular basis, I'll mention here that I'm also working on Burning Heroes whenever Ritchie sends new blocks, and I've allotted about 20% of my writing time daily to Aretha-II. With A-II, I've progressed to about a V0.12 beta, and I already have a small A-II bug report (in my head) for Bongo`'s edification.

I agree with Wildbill on all counts of the analysis he's made, CS is an unforgiving game in a lot of ways, especially in my case due to the building time (and hence the full turns, so to speak) is awfully short, unless there is a way to extend said time, it seems next to impossible to build a coherent, energy efficient Enchanted Cave.

The variety of moves the Hero can utilize reminds me of an Enix game called Terrainigma (one of my favorites on the Snes), as Ark really has a plethora of abilities to dispose of the baddies; something the CS character also does have, but again due to Recount Time constraints, its pretty difficulty to brawl with brains.

I've noticed no glitches whatsoever playing CS on SnesGT 230 beta 7 (latest, jan 2011) so what you experienced, Bill, may be a Zsnes only affair. As for the manual, everything is easily modifiable and I am, of course all in favor of standardization, the first phase of the manual composition was mostly just to get everything in place, I'll make a text only pass later on to correct inconsistencies although I do hope we'll be eventually able to change Gold into Metal in game for the sake of accuracy, if the technical restraints are eventually surmmounted.

@WB: Geez... That was a LONG post... As far as using [newl], it's pretty much out of the question. We tried this back in the beginning, and it would cause problems when dialog bubbles were being called. Sometimes we would get totally random dialog strings being called, and sometimes we would get the dialog bubble "popping up" over the wrong character, or it would be the "wrong" color. You are totally limited in how much dialog you can insert at any given time (not too bad... keeps things from getting overly long-winded ).

Cheats... I could have sworn I sent you some forever ago? Did you lose them? I will resend them.

It's been since around Christmas 2010. Heh, you gave me codes for unlimited Sentan, EN, CP, or whatever, but I don't recall invincibility for the hero. That's what I need to concentrate on interpreting the most scintillating story possible! Plus, I'm stealing time from a million distractions, but I'm hungry now, and all of the other tasks must suffer so the games may go forward. You know that when I get caught up full thrust in a fantasy tale, my technical expertise get's muddled! Anyway, CS's crazy coding engine has already killed my long-winded mode, hee-hee...!!

I can't help but wonder if Taito were pushing the capabilities of the Snes when they made CS so it became way too code-sensitive or if they were just rushing things and it became a jumbled mess in the whole.
All in all we'll need some of Bongo's magic to get this done properly that's for sure.
Now I'm speaking strictly as a newbie on this, but maybe expanding the rom would give us more room for pointers and whatnot
and conseqiently accomodate text better?
One such example that I recall is one of the two FF3 (Nes) patches, the end rom was expanded to better accomodate a more fleshed out dialogue and non truncated item names.

I'm pretty sure that the NES FF3 translation didn't do the expansion correctly. IIRC, the game uses mapper 4, which can't natively support 1MB PRG-ROM and thus won't work on any accurate emulator like Nestopia etc. However MMC5 can support 1MB so it's definitely possible.

BTW, with the noise I was hearing about from Burning Heroes I was beginning to think that someone was neglecting Chaos Seed. Would it unreasonable to assume that if Ritchie were to finish all the remaining blocks for BH, a certain someone would drop everything for Chaos Seed to work on the game?

Whooooooooo... meeeeeee......? Naaaahhhhh, never...!! (Someone cover Draken's eyes.) If someone will make me an invincibility cheat, I will attack CS like a terd of hurtles, I mean... buffalo! Seriously, hee-hee, Block CSeed_175.rtf is on my screen as I type. BTW, how is TnD 2011 upgrade doin'?