TODO list for patch 1.07

[Mark Pay]

I'm taking some holiday next month, and will have time to work on another small patch.

Please list any required bug-fixes here, especially translation related ones.

- Charcter names need to be read from the additional text file, not hard coded.

[Spolygmar]

If you don't mind, Mark, I would like to remind you of some translation issues I have already told you before (hope you haven't finished 1.07 yet!):

-CHAPTER 4: "Decline/Accept" (before fighting against Urtat Underval or playing games in Porto Vale, if I remember correctly);
-CH.5: "Retreat/Fight" (just before fighting against the Cloud Child);
-CH.6: "No thanks/Alright" (when refusing or accepting Leonard Petrarch's reward);
-CH.7: "Sludge Barrier" + "Barrier Health" when fighting against Animated Sludges;
-Options Menu: in the Italian version, the title appears as "Opzio..." rather than "Opzioni".

I also wrote something about "Reinforcements", "Send in the Cavalry" and "Hold the Line" long ago: they surely belong to Chapter 9, but I haven't checked if these have been fixed yet (I'm still working on Chapter 8, but I'm going to finish translating it in a couple of days).

Another thing I noticed (but I don't know if you have already fixed it): if you skip all of the dialogues with the Admiral and his secretary, and then run on your right, you may notice the secretary walking backwards.

OK, that's all for the moment. Keep up the good work!

[Phenomen]

So.. Mark, any news on 1.07? Cant wait to start translating :]

[Mark Pay]

Sorry guys, I haven't forgottten about 1.07. But I wanted to wait and see if any more suggestions came through, to make this the final, final patch. I'll be working on it this month.

[Spolygmar]

Hope I'm not too late for this...
As I wrote in one of the latest e-mails I sent to Mark last month, there is another translation issue regarding names and text strings in Chapter 9.
There are three kinds of "riflemen" throughout the whole Chapter 9: first of all, the two guards fighting along with Shana in the hall of the fortress of Longreach; secondly, the enemies you encounter in West Ascension (the red-dressed ones); and finally, the reinforcements you can call at your side.
However, there is one string missing, the one for the reinforcements, so that their names still remain untranslatable.

I hope there are no more bugs or issues to be fixed... That would mean this game has attained perfection!

[Mark Pay]

Thanks Alessandro!

You're definately not late! I'm 3 months behind schedule with 1.07.
It was great to hear about your progress with the Italian translation! ( Just waiting for 1.07 now? ) I'll update the translation download at the weekend.

[Mark Pay]

Release candiate executable here:

http://www.thespiritengine.com/Files/TSE2Patches/TheSpiritEngine2-107.exe

Changes:
---------
Addtext line 494 = Sludge Barrier
Addtext line 495 = Barrier health
West Ascenion riflemen now use line 435
Character names now read lines 482 onwards upon party creation
Widened 'Options' menu title slightly.

*Note - the Accept/Decline conversation options did not need any changes. They are still configurable via the original editor - see 26 Btext1 and 27 Btext2 ( bottom right corner of conversation editor screen )

Please let me know if there's anything missing. I'm sorry that this has taken so long.

[Phenomen]

Hello, Mark. Thank you for continuing your awesome work and releasing patch 1.07!
Unfortunately, non-latin encoding (cyrillic in my case) become broken :[
There was no such problem in 1.06.

[Mark Pay]

Hi Phenomen. I'm sorry for the late reply. I've looked into this issue. I didn't change any of the text objects in version 1.07. In fact, doing so is a big problem, as there are thousands of them that need to be changed manually in the game.

Recently, Clickteam released a 'Unicode' (UTF-16) version of MMF. However there are two problems with this: First it's £39, which I think is too high a price for hobby usage and second, it's a standalone replacement for MMF2, which means that the Hardware Accelerated (DirectX) version of MMF2 is not compatible. I don't want to go down that route because I've been thinking about using the HWA build to make some of the graphical improvements that I wanted to have in the game at launch.

I suspect that in order to accommodate the Unicode plugin, Clickteam changed something in the text handling in MMF2 in the recent patches. I don't think they intended to break non-latin encoding ( the game uses the Arial font for just about everything ) but I presume that has been the effect. Text encoding is not a subject which I'm very knowledgeable on.

My install disks aren't in my flat at the moment, so I can't test this by downgrading my MMF2 version. I'd advise you to stick with v1.06 for the time-being, if that still works. I'm sorry about this.