Last update of 2012

Well, not much really. I've put the donate button back, because I am actively working on RPGMaker Trans now. Any bribery to speed me up is greatly appreciated.

Also I believe I've managed to solve all the fundamental problems I had previously encountered with patching XP/VX games. With a bit of luck, this will get rolled out early in 2013.

Hope people have had a good year, and let's hope for a good year to come.

About Trans-locale patching...

Long story short, it ain't working.

As to why, I'm at a bit of a loss. Evidently, there's something in the file somewhere which is still in cp932 locale, but as to what exactly, I don't know. So, for now, I'm suspending work on this feature. Apologies to all who wanted it, but there's at least one RPGMaker VX game coming out in February which I would like to see translated, so my current priority is to get VX support working.

However, one nice note on this subject: XP/VX use Unicode, and hence whilst it probably won't be possible to translate 2k games to non-latin based languages for the forseeable future, once XP/VX support is in those games will be translatable to any language.

UPDATE: I've managed to get a primitive VX dumper/(sort of) assembler going. Looks like XP/VX support should be done sooner rather than later.

RPGMaker Trans v1.99b

Not a big update, unfortunately, but an update to add a feature that was requested and I thought was already in.

• Unused strings are now in a fixed order, rather than the arbitrary order used before. This should make versioning using RPGMaker Trans easier.

I've been playing around with getting XP/VX support working, but nothing concrete is done yet. Partly this is because I don't know much about Ruby programming, but a lot of this is because the scripts out there for reading/writing RPGMaker files aren't written that well (heavy use of global variables, lack of safety checking, highly dependant on Windows platform, and using eval. Eval for crying out loud! gegerlan/rakudayo, you should be ashamed of yourselves - although I am still grateful for you giving me a decent starting point...).

Progress Report

Just figured I'd drop a progress report here...

1. Trans-Locale patching: Targetted for end of year.
2. RPGMaker XP/VX support: Currently investigating msgpack for Python/Ruby communication and learning some more Ruby - which is, annoyingly, pretty much required to actually unpack XP/VX files. 
3. ScriptableQuickAtlas: Learning QT, as my current UI toolkit, wxwidgets doesn't support some features I want on Windows.
4. Speed improvements: Investigating if it's possible to use PyPy instead of vanilla Python; currently struggling with packaging. If it is possible, I'll be able to offer a much, much faster version of RPGMaker Trans.