Grumbles... Mediafire...

Mediafire has decided that all 7z files are verboten. I've replaced the link with a Dropbox link for now, but depending on traffic that might not take.

I'll figure out a more permanent fix later on.

Other progress: Got VX save files to load. Started redoing some backend infrastructure of RPGMaker Trans to support VX games.

Update: I've had an email from Mediafires customer support crew- it seems that now there is a limit for the number of downloads that any free hosted file can have. So, that means that Mediafire has just gone from a good file host to probably one of the worst. Also explains why so many other Mediafire links have died recently...

Progress and such

In the spirit of actually trying to get things done, I'm going to start posting more regular progress reports. Not sure that it makes too much difference given that this is a low-traffic blog, but what the hey.

So, in the time since the last blog update these things have been worked on:

• Bugs: Designed the fixes for the bugs (as said before, they're actually quite complex to fix), now just need to implement them
• New feature: In-place patches. These won't create a copy of the game, so they're not useful for games which are in a constant state of flux or translations that are being updated frequently. However, once the game and translation are finished, in-place patching is a lot faster, so it's a nice feature.
• New feature: QT based UI. Up until now, the UI of RPGMaker Trans has been based on wxWidgets. I'm migrating to a QT UI for primary reason that rewriting the UI properly will mean less work in enabling features, and the secondary reason that I really need to learn QT for other utilities I'm planning, as wxWidgets doesn't support certain features on Windows.
• VX Support: Um... no progress on that yet, whoops.

Bugs and Workarounds

This post describes a couple of known bugs in RPGMaker Trans, and workarounds. I'm posting it because I'm somewhat overloaded at the moment, and fixing these is actually quite a bit more involved than most of the bugs I've seen so far. Well, for a good fix, at least.

Bug 1: Repeated Bad File Descriptor error
Cause: Patching from a ZIP which contains non-ASCII file names
Solution: Unzip the ZIP'd patch, and patch from the unzip'd version.

Bug 2: Files copying never finishes / files aren't copied to translated directory
Cause: Stale files in the _translated directory
Solution: Delete everything in the _translated directory apart from save games, and then re-run the patcher.
Solution 2: If the first solution fails, when the patcher enters its "waiting for file copying to finish state" close it. Then manually copy all files apart from LMU/LDB files from the base game to the translated game.