May 2019 Patch Release [Patch #13]

Update: Please download Patch #14 instead. This patch contains a severe bug that causes item names to become garbled.

Hey everyone! May's patch is finally here. I apologize for it's lateness, but I have resolved the space issue! I spent a ton of time coming up with a few solutions to the problem, which I will talk about later in this post. But before any of that, thank you all for being patient this month. I don't foresee this being an issue again. If you don't want to read about the technical stuff, feel free to skip ahead to the change list for this month!

Technical Info

Alright so now I'm going to get into what the issue was, and what solutions I came up with to solve it. As I stated in the previous post, the problem was that the message data file's size had increased too much and was now causing another file to no longer fit in the GameCube's secondary RAM. However, first I need to clarify a point I had wrong. I incorrectly said that there was only 8 MB available in ARAM. This is wrong, as there is actually 16 MB of ARAM. The issue was the same, regardless.

So, knowing what the issue was, I had to come up with some way to either:

A) Reduce the size of file(s) that are store in ARAM.

OR

B) Change the way files are loaded and make it fetch them from disk and into main RAM instead.

After debating on what to do and several hours of reverse engineering, I decided to go with option A. Option B is nice in the long run, but it would've taken much longer to accomplish. Now that I had an idea of what I was going to do to fix it, I had to figure out exactly how I planned on reducing file size(s).

Originally, I planned on shrinking multiple files, but I decided it would be best to try and shrink the message data file's size first. To do that, I had to remove unnecessary data. Here are the various things I considered removing or changing:

• Unnecessary newlines and spaces
• Kanji Commands
• Swapping Message Tag commands for equivalent Control Code commands

In the end, I thought that removing Kanji commands made the most sense, as they won't be used at all in our English translation. I wrote a program to automatically do it for me, and after waiting for it to complete, the results were very good. Removing the remaining Kanji commands shrunk the message data file by a whopping 10%! It actually made it smaller than the unmodified (and untranslated) message data file! This means that we shouldn't run into any further issues in the future regarding ARAM size constraints. Now lets move onto what change in this month's patch!

Changes

There were a ton of things translated in this month's patch! While I didn't touch the code to fix bugs, I did translate just about 2,000 dialogs! This means that we're over 75% of the way there! It's getting tougher now, as the only thing left are long dialog chains. Let's break down exactly what changed:

• Translated missed villager event rumor dialog
• Translated missed villager event dialog
• Translated villager game hints
• Translated villager "leaving town" dialogs (these now have options to let you cancel them leaving)
• Translated villager "look at this letter" dialogs
• Translated villager "hey do you remember X" dialogs
• Translated villager "free item" dialogs
• Translated some islander initial meeting dialogs
• Corrected a few dialogs where Japanese text was left in
• Removed a few extra dialog syntax characters "<" and ">"
• Other minor fixes
  

Once again, thank you all for your support and patience this month! If you encounter any issues due to the removal of Kanji, please let me know on Discord!