Hello, folks!

I can’t believe it’s been a full month since I’ve updated. Things have been really busy in my personal life so I’ve not has much time to touch the project, and it’s been weighing on me to not be moving forward.

That said, I won’t go into much detail, but here’s a short list of everthing going on:

  1. I’m gonna be a dad! Its still a few months off but there’s been a lot of prep work, and there’s a lot happening at home preparing. I’m hoping soon that will calm and give me a bit more working time but getting into summer there will probably be other things going on.
  2. I’m fixing up my condo to sell, so there were a lot of trips over there and contractor things to figure out. Most things are pretty much in the hands of contractors and installers now, just some pushes needed here and there. I took an entire week off and it felt like that’s all I dealt with.
  3. I got a new TV as well, so my office got a whole refresh that it was needing. There’s still some odd things to do on that front but for the most part the new TV is in. It was going to be a new monitor but I find the productivity with an ultraiwde is still better than I can do elsewhere, so I’ve shifted that desk to be my main “Productivity” desk instead. However, my main workstation has both had a new fedora install on it, and been moved where it’s less accessible to code on, so I’m finalizing that before i move forward.
  4. I was promoted at work, so it seems the busy energy there is just never ending. It gives me a bit more spending room, so maybe I can hand off some of the tasks really weighing us down at home.
  5. Partially in preparation for the baby, I’ve been getting on home automations with Home Assistant, which is a huge rabbit hole to fall down. I think more of this will come later, especially in fine tuning some of the nuance, but its one of those things i started looking at as a new home lab project.

Anyway, to catch yall up, just because I’ve been out doesn’t mean nothings been happening. A new user in the discord was working on his own scripts that looked super cool! OX-Carnage is looking to make his own tools based on our work, but also improving the user experience.

I took some looks today, and I’m not sure whether i’ll implement the same changes yet, but it did push me to ensure i review all of the scripts for command line options, and ensure they can all be run properly. Radio tools are probably most in line with what I want done in the end. However, I have thought about a front ends, and a GUI would be super cool for seeing the subtitle previews live. For this to happen I’d need several things:

  1. A way to show the face/demo scene.
  2. Maybe a live preview that actually plays the demo as well.
  3. I would currently have NO gui so i’d need to learn to build a front end.
  4. We’d need to finalize the font sizing so that you could preview line breaks accurately.

Anyway, a lot of that has been musing around in my brain. But since there’s been a lot of attention on my scripts lately (a few stars from various folks) I added some adjustments to the readme. I wanted to show a bit more of my thinking behind how the iso’s are compiled for testing. Basically I started shifting a couple months ago to the mindset someone might try to help either with code or translation. I’m learning Git as we go, so it would help to have someone sending pull requests for me to merge.

That said, I broke the project apart and moved all the injection json/xml files to a separate build-proprietary directory that keeps any in-game content like scripts separate. This way, I have a separate git hub that’s private and ready for collaborators.

Additionally, i showed how the game files are extracted and rebuilt in the build-src and build directories, mostly because since some of the file directories i work from are hard coded, it helps to show why this code is there.

This all needs to get ripped out, but my thought was to maybe make a specific directory where files are extracted by default, and an override if anything is set in a config file.

It’s a lot of work for later on, but I’ll get to it eventually. Hopefully things are on the way to slowing down a little bit before im lacking a ton of sleep. That said, feel free to keep an eye on the comms between myself and OX-Carnage in the discord, and keep an eye on what’s to come! In the meantime, take a look at the README on github for some recent updates and don’t worry… the best is yet to come!

J-Rush