September 2020 Patch Release [Patch #26]

Hey everyone, I hope you're all doing alright! I've finally got another patch release. I'm going to talk in depth about what happened over the past 5 months below, but if you'd like, as always you can just skip that and download the patch.

Causes for Delay

Alright, so there's a lot to talk about. Let's start with what happened back in early April. I had taken a couple months off translating as I'd been working on this project for over two years. I'm also in college at the moment, and as early May was nearing, I had to focus on my upcoming exams. I did fine, and planned on resuming in late May. However there were problems I was having recompiling the binaries using GCReLink (Dolphin was crashing). That, along with another huge change in my life, caused me to hold off on the project for a bit longer.

In late May, my one of my other side projects, a mafia themed turf capture game, took off. Out of nowhere, a massive YouTuber decided to play it and called it his favorite game. This sent hundreds of thousands of players my way, and I had to focus 100% of my time on that as bugs were being found left and right, and updates were needed. That lasted for around a month, and things had relatively calmed down by mid July. My game is still doing well, and has over 1,500,000 plays.

I begun working on the patch again in late July. I focused on translating and ignored the issue with relinking. I planned on releasing the next patch in August, however shortly before I received a copyright strike on one of my most popular Animal Crossing Modding videos. This was a manual copyright claim directly by Nintendo themselves. Someone from Nintendo must've seen the video and didn't like the content. I assumed the worst. I thought they would come after the Patreon, even though everything done here is legal as it's distributed as a patch. However, nothing has occurred over the past month, which I'm very grateful for.

I decided in mid-September that I would continue to use the Patreon for the time being. As I was preparing the patch, I attempted to fix the relinking. After over 10 hours of debugging my code, I figured out that the issue was with Dolphin Emulator and not my relinking. An update to the way files are fetched via the DiscIO interface was causing it to fail to read files and/or crash because of incorrect reads. After figuring out what I needed to do to change it, I got the patch working again! That leads us to today, where I'm releasing the patch finally. Thank you all so much for being patient for the past few months. I am going to be more active for the time being.

Dolphin Bug

I'd like to talk a bit about the bug I discovered in Dolphin now. Since the start of the project, I've used a slightly modified version of GCReEx to rebuild test versions of the patch. I've always been greeted by errors like these when launching the rebuilt ISOs:

After hitting Ignore for this session, the problems would go away with no issues. I never thought anything of it. However with Dolphin 5.0-12436, this started occurring:

This screen basically says in short: "An error has occurred. Please restart the console."

So, what changed?

Well, the way DiscIO reads files from the ISO was changed to be more accurate. However, there's one case they didn't account for:
When an aligned read size goes past the end of the ISO file.

This single case is what was breaking the patch. GCReLink wasn't aligning the size of the ISO to the standard 32-byte increment. This means that when the file at the end of the ISO was requested, Dolphin issued a "Disc IO Error" for an "Out of Bounds Read". Modifying GCReEx to add bytes keeping the ISO's alignment to 32 bytes fixed the issue, and things were up and running again! Funnily enough, this case doesn't occur on console, so it's definitely a Dolphin bug.

Now, lets get onto all the changes!

Changes

There's a lot of changes, some of which I've likely forgotten. Here's the list:

• Over 1,000 new dialogs have been translated since the last patch. The following categories have been translated:
  1) "Other Action"
  2) "Player Action"
  3) "Address Foreigner"
  4) "Address Native"
  5) "Sex for Girl" <= "female gender" based dialog
  6) "Sex for Boy" <=" male gender" based dialog
  7) "Weather-Time"
  8) "Normal" <= Generic dialog
• All default catchphrases are now translated. They're still limited to 7 characters though.
• All strings have been translated, which means that Katrina won't show Japanese during her fortunes now.
• Because of the above changes, villagers shouldn't ever use Japanese in translated dialogs now.
• Passwords now use English characters instead of Japanese! Entering them should be a bit easier now.
• A slew of code changes were made, starting with font spacing. I undid a hack I made early on to fix it and have been slowly fixing the calls to properly space things.
• The message noticeboard has been translated (with some image bugs).
• The town tune board is now fully translated.
• The post office repayment overlay is fully translated.
• The gyroid item storage overlay is fully translated.
• The gyroid message broadcast overlay is fully translated.
• A few spelling and grammatical errors were corrected.
• Forest Patcher now has a "compress" option that is enabled by default. It uses gcit.exe to do the compression, so if you'd like to use it, keep that program in the same folder as ForestPatcher.exe!

There are probably more changes, but I can't remember them all. 

Also, I'd like to welcome Sonofkumiko to the translation team! They have already done a significant amount of work. I'm super grateful to have them helping!

Next Month

• Finish translating "relation", "place", "friendship", and "weather" categories.
• Continue to translate overlays. Mainly, warning overlay, birthday overlay, and mail overlays.
• Continue to work on the controller port (it's hugely complex, I honestly might put it off until the very end since it's so time consuming.)

I'd like to thank everyone again for putting up with the huge delay. I do not plan on having further delays. There should be a patch released every month, however if I need to delay a patch I will post notifications on Patreon from now on.

See you next month!