March 2019 Patch Release [Patch #11]

Hey everyone. I apologize for the delay in posting this month's patch. I didn't want to release it on April 1st as it was April Fools, and I ended up being unable to release it yesterday.

Before we get into the details of this month's patch, I want to address an issue with it. $20 supporters who need their names added to the credits since the last time I changed them are still not added. I have to do research into the credits sequence to figure out how the line font size is determined so everyone has the same sized name. I will be attempting to release a second patch this month addressing this issue.

This month's patch may seem a bit underwhelming if you only looked at what changed. Understanding how it was able to change is what's exciting. The biggest feature this month is the reimplementation of item articles. In English, an article is the word that precedes a noun. Some examples are: "An apple", "A pear", "The Eiffel Tower", and "Some paper".

In Japanese, they don't use articles for nouns. As such, when Animal Crossing was retranslated back to Japanese for Animal Forest e+, they removed all the code that was used to add articles before item names. In previous patches, whenever an item name was used, you would just see things such as "That's apple." or "I want spooky wardrobe." It just sounds bad.

Since I want to bring the most polished translation possible, I had to figure out how to reimplement item article functionality into the game. Of course, since the code was deleted in e+, there was a pretty big dilemma. I had to somehow make more space in the relocatable module file for the new code. I spent around 40 hours this month figuring out how I could do such a thing. In fact, I've been dabbling in getting that working for a few months now. After many failed attempts, I finally succeeded in making a program that could properly add space to relocatable modules. After some minor tweaks to other game code to support the reimplemented feature, item articles finally made their return!

This means a lot more for the future of the project. I can finally get to work on the translated title screen. I'll also be able to easily add quality of life improvements to the final release (those will come post-public release though!)

Now let's move on to the full change log!

Changes

• Item articles have been reimplemented.
• More sickness dialogs have been translated. Hoping for full translation by April's patch.
• More quest dialogs have also been translated. Again hoping for full translation by April's patch.
• Item names should no longer be truncated in most situations. This includes Tortimer gifts.
• Fixed a few rare occurrences where a dialog was missing it's end tag and would lockup the game for a bit.
• Fixed a few minor spelling errors.
• Forest Patcher no longer requires xdelta.exe to run. It does the patching itself. Now it's fully standalone!

Known Issues

• K.K. still uses the Japanese song names for requests. This will be addressed in April's patch.
• Tom Nook truncates villager names during chores. This will also be fixed in April's patch.
• Villager names on the map are truncated.

April Patch Planned Changes

• K.K. Slider will use English song names for requests. This requires code changes.
• Tom Nook will no longer truncate villager names during chores. This requires code changes.
• Villager names on the map will no longer be truncated. This requires extensive code changes.
• Quest dialogs will be a focus with a goal of completion.
• Sick dialogs will be a focus with a goal of completion.

And as always, thank you for your support! If you have any problems please contact me on Discord or here on Patreon!