You better appreciate this

Ok, the update I promised days ago is finally here. And it’s pretty big.

First off, for those who don’t keep in touch, don’t read forums–be they the JS ones or GameFAQs–and generally stumble through life like a blind, deaf mute, Der Langrisser is back on schedule for a public release.

Now I know everyone and their f–king dog is going to mail me and ask me why this is. Save yourself the embarrassment of ending up on the Hall of Shame page and save me the trouble of coming and breaking your kneecaps, Misery style.

What does it matter? It’s happening anyway and all asking will do is annoy me.

This doesn’t mean you should expect to see anything any time soon. The game is still having programming work done, and we’ve recently unearthed a slew of bugs when running it on a real SNES. Por ejemplo, battles of the letter people and OMFG LEON AM HEIN TEH LEVAL 10 WIZARD JKL!

Bugs aside, the scripts still aren’t done. Moon Knight/No-Life will be helping us play test and context edit while I work on getting the last scenarios translated and byuu handles the programming.

The game is undergoing many changes and improvements from the Japanese version. Aside from now having VWF 8×16 and 8×8, menu colours have been tweaked to a lighter shade of blue for better visibility, virtually every menu has been resized and repositioned for easier navigation and text displays faster than in the original game–at least on a real SNES.

We hope to add multiple fonts so monsters will speak in a spooky font, and there will be a heavily stylized font for incantation text. We’ve also debated colour-coding key terms, but that’s still up in the air. Your opinions on colour coding are welcome.

For the sake of crowd control, please direct any Der Langrisser related inquiries to The Clouds of El Sallia BBS.

Next up, the awaited release of FEIDIAN is here–and it has been completely rewritten since the November 30 release.

The program now works with absolutely any font width and height, and can dump to as many rows and columns of a chart as you’d like. As for functionality, ChrisRPG used it to re-dump his font for Slayers, and also to dump all the fonts in a GBA game–no idea if it’s an RPGOne project or something for someone else.

He seemed to find it fairly straightforward and able to handle what most tile editors die on. Feature wise, it goes from bitplane< -->bitmap in seconds. I recommend saving your files in Microsoft Paintbrush, because Adobe likes eating bitmap headers.

One of the other nice features is the ability to build a dual-letter font of full-width tiles using a half-width bitmap font. I you were hacking a PSX or Saturn game, or anything where assembler isn’t an option, you can make a histogram of all two-letter combinations in your English script, write that out to a text file, then feed FEIDIAN the text file and a half-width bitmap font. It will produce a new full-width font for you. Very handy!

That rounds off this update. Don’t expect to see such a large one for a long time.