this means that if a game has a message box that says "Hello World!" and you memory edit it to read "Cat Sauce" and re-trigger the message box, you still see "Hello World!" because it's still caching the rendered text
the good news is that I can quit to the menu and re-load the save and it empties the cache
the bad news is that automating this is not going to be easy. this game has its own mouse controls, meaning I can't use absolution positioning
okay got it doing a full reset.
the best part is that if I set it up slightly too slow, it accidentally clicks quit instead of begin, and the game closes, and I have to set up the IDs and pointers again
well, that didn't last long. I was trying to skip some steps and figure out what unicode regions are supported by this font, and instead it just hung my extractor
english (plus extra characters because there's some danish and german in there), hindi, traditional chinese, russian, and probably several more I'm forgetting
interesting discovery: although the game is monochrome, the textures aren't. They seem to be mostly red/pink, with some green used.
The monochrome stuff seems to be done in a shader, but I'm wondering if the colors in the textures are being used for some in-game use?
@foone if i had to guess, the red channel is used for the lightness of the monochrome textures and the green channel is used for emission. blue channel is just a copy of the red channel.
it keeps the list of fate-moments in a CSV file. Interesting.
the column headings are:
"id, r, die,pull, music, clear, keep, fog, loc,corpse, skel,shadows,prune,unlock"
@foone I'm reminded of how in Disgaea, there's basically three types of being: humanoid, monster, and Prinny. Prinnies in-universe are somewhere in-between (as souls of former humans in penguin suits) and the game mechanics match this by having some traits of each of the other two. Also, they're basically walking hand grenades.
BTW my favorite little detail is at the end, your housekeeper says "Tea’s in the kitchen if you need more." in the good ending, and "Tea’s all gone so you might think about going to bed as well." in the bad ending.
okay so I dumped the whole game script and then sorted every character used into their unicode blocks and then counted how many characters are in each of those blocks and I come up with a total of...
It's not just laziness and "not wanting my main PC to be unusable until sunday".
The way the Death Generator handles fonts is inelegant for big fonts, so having huge characters sets in it makes it load slowly
oh, arse.
it turns out it doesn't use one font for the death messages, it uses... at least two?
it dynamically scales it because some death messages are too long
" Swann’s Way, the first of seven volumes of Proust’s most famous work, In Search Of Lost Time ("À la recherche du temps perdu"). Proust’s narrator involuntarily recalls an episode from his childhood after tasting a madeleine dipped in tea."
@foone A truly comprehensive pronoun engine would be extremely interesting, since pronouns can affect other grammar in arbitrary ways. Consider "They are/He is". And one could construct even more advanced pronouns that change disconnected parts of the sentence. You'd either need to have a very sophisticated language understander, or have entirely separate text for every gender.
@foone I think engines that have comprehensive localisation support would be a good start, since those usually have to deal with things far more bullshit than pronouns (insert "if you think pronouns are confusing, wait until you find out about verbs" meme here)
@Jhynjhiruu this engine is fully localized, actually! This is after the localization step: it has to have dynamic pronoun support because user input influences the text.
@bgolus ooh, nice! I had done some searching to see if anyone had figured out what the game looks like without the 1bit/dither shaders, but couldn't find anything
@foone Based on some info in the debug menu and the dev diaries, the different colours are used to create visible seams for the edge detection shader on the surfaces without the need for modeling those details
Fun fact: Lucas had a testing tool that would generate every single text screen of the game and dump them as screenshots in a folder for the purpose of localization testing.
In a way, Obra Dinn had its own Death Generator even before being launched.
@foone i expected the base64 element to be a pdf containing the sourcecode of an obfuscated c program that produces a zip file containing an excel spreadsheet with the data tbh
@foone If you think about what Obra Dinn is then the encoded string makes sense. Most of the entries in the log will be represented as bitflags, and when not they’re low-value integers. Pack em together and encode.
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