Hacking update

basically everyone knows about this already (i think i might've been the last to know, actually), but there's been some unfortunate news on the hacking front. for a year or two now, the technical side of the project has been the domain of MP2E, who was working on reverse-engineering FE4 and devising new tools to dump and inject scripts for the game. regrettably, however, today he had to bow out of the project. to quote from the message he left on his github:

NOTICE: I’ve been putting off this project for quite a while in the hopes of being able to return and finish it, but it’s looking more unlikely as time goes on. Very sorry for all who got their hopes up.. I’d love to see FE4 translated and Bookofholsety has created a fantastic translation that very much deserves to be ingame, but I’m low on time and motivation. What killed this project was ultimately my inability to reverse engineer. I would like to pick this up at some time in the future, but I really have no ETAs and at this point I have to declare this project kaput. Resire never got more functionality than the original C patching tools floating around so there’s no point in releasing it.

i can't thank MP2E enough for all the work he put into this thing and for humouring my bullshit. the day he offered his services was the day that this thing went from "some arrogant idiot noodling around in some dark corner of tumblr" to "something kind of sort of vaguely resembling a legitimate translation". even if his efforts never came to fruition, he did so much for this project, including christening it "project naga", and i am so grateful for everything he did. best of luck with everything, man!

anyway, this also means that once again, i'm a free agent in need of a good hacker, or perhaps several. gringe has graciously offered to give it a look and see what he can do, but the man's really busy and perhaps there might be some value to having multiple hands on board for this thing. now, i should mention that i have exactly zero experience directing any group efforts at all, let alone a programming project. i don't know the first thing about how to structure a group programming effort. hopefully we can figure something out together, but i apologise in advance because i have a feeling i'm going to be terrible at the whole "responsibility" thing

a couple of notes/stipulations for anyone who's interested:

• part of the issue with my work is that i've kind of got a ridiculously stubborn idea of how i'd like the finished product to look. we're talking "oh dear god this guy has made fucking mockups" levels of stubborn. as part of this, i'm kind of dead-set on the gameplay side of fe4 (menus, etc) having a variable-width font implemented, though if MP2E's commentary is anything to go by, that might actually be the least frustrating thing about hacking this game!
• in addition to properly implementing the game's script, i'll also be needing somebody who can hack graphics. there's a lot of graphics which, in current patches, remain untranslated, and i'm determined to see those sorted out for this translation. i've prepared prototypes of most of the graphics changes myself, but i don't know the first thing about how snes games actually format these things or how to implement them
• fortunately, there's a sizable amount of prior work to use as reference here.  MP2E's github is still a very useful resource for documentation on the game, and the source codes for the earlier work of the j2e team and twilkitri can be found here and here. as i understand it, both are very dated and less than optimal, which was the entire reason MP2E sought to develop the resire engine to begin with, so keep that in mind

if you're interested in the job, leave a reply on this entry or shoot me a pm on serenes, and be sure to reference any development and/or fe/snes hacking experience you have. odds are you'll hear back from me sooner or later

thanks, everyone. and once again, thank you so much, MP2E