Langrisser Projects

The new translation patch for Der Langrisser is finally ready. With this patch, every single game error reported should now be fixed. According to the supplied readme.txt, these fixes include:

• Rewriting done on a considerable amount of dialogue based on user reports and play data supplied by MK. This includes revisions to much of the ending dialogue, re-translation lines in more than 30 scenarios and editing of text which was written based on fault speaker assumptions.
• Corrected another bug in the original Japanese game which caused Lana’s injured portrait to appear in the end of Scenario 35.
• Corrected a bug in the original game which listed Elementals as hireable units in the Living Armour and Stone Golem classes. Elementals do not exist as a hireable unit in the games 64-unit array. They have been removed from all units and are no longer displayed in the class change screen, though enemies and NPCs which have elementals will retain their units in game play.
• The Living Armour class has been augmented with Demon units, which were previously dummied out of the game. Demons are a weaker version of Archdemons, and will only be useful in the stage or two immediately following scenario 13, or if Osto pursues Stone Golem instead of Vampire Lord.
• Corrected all unit type (affinity) text which was written incorrectly in the Japanese game. The original game listed only 7 unit types, but the manual listed 18. Reverse-engineering of the class data tables showed the game manages 18 distinct unit types, and this explains why units classified as Bowman, such as Ballista, would remain weak to fliers. In the original game, the developers only allocated screen space for two characters at the right of each unit, so the unit types were all renamed to fit this screen. The English game allows for more space than the Japanese, and we are able to display the original intended names. In short, the unit affinity data in the manual for the first time in history matches what you see in Der Langrisser.

In addition to all these changes, the patch includes cheat files for the bsnes and ZSNES Super Nintendo emulators. All cheats are enabled by default, and create a debug system similar to the code for Langrisser II. Any unit can cast magic, move to any tile, attack any unit, move multiple times every turn and players may take control of enemy units. These codes are supplied to add an extra element of fun to the game for long-time fans, and to aid testers in tracking down any last bugs present in only the translated game.

Our 1.02 release is considered a public beta, and is released in byuu’s UPS patch format. Information about getting a UPS patcher is on the download page. The final 1.03 release, to be made at an undetermined time, will include a container tentatively named NINJA3.

We feel these changes are significant enough to make the game worth another go for any players who have already completed Der Langrisser.

Enjoy!

To keep this site closer to Clouds of El Sallia, it has been moved to the elsallia.com domain. Since the Der Langrisser translation is done, we have opened this blog to anyone working on a Langrisser-related project.

If you would like to post your news and screen shots here or conduct a beta test, please compose an e-mail to langrisser (at) cinnamonpirate (dot) com. Tell us about your project and if you seem semi-serious, we will give you an account on the site.

All script errors which have been submitted to us have been fixed — generally by going back to the Japanese script to check it out. With the context reported, fixes were generally very simple.

We are still waiting for MK to play the Independent scenarios. Been waiting for that for … a while now. His catches throughout Light, Imperial and Chaos have been committed to the script.

As things stand, with the class change corrections and corrections to unit affinity, all known bugs are done except for Lana’s portrait in Scenario 35, which displays her as injured unlike in Scenario 23. I have sent a SaveRAM to byuu for him to work on this problem. As soon as the matching script block is decompressed, it should be as simple as locating the event line and subtracting 1 to 3 from the portrait value.

After that, all known issues in Der Langrisser will be fixed. We will make a 1.02 release with debug codes for most major emulators included. Bug reports will be accepted, and a 1.03 final release will be made at the end of the year.

Today, byuu and I committed what will be the final solution for the Elemental problem. Sadly, the fix is not to make enable hiring of the unit. It is simply too much work to enable them based on how the game stores its unit data and would require some extensive hacking of graphics and palettes.

Instead, we have disabled Elementals. No commander’s class change screen will display the units anymore. However, recognizing that the Living Armour class is weaker than it should be, we decided to add the disabled Demon units to it.

Masaya created a unit called Demons which is a moderately-powerful Demon-class unit — essentially a lower-tier version of Archdemons. This addition is intended to help Osto in gaining experience in the levels following Bernhardt’s fall when battling the Army of Light. Since unlike Spectres, Demons are not an Undead unit, they cannot be wiped out by Holy magic or Turn Undead.

All three units have been tested, and hiring Demons works fine in game. For reference, here are the stats for Demon units:  AT 23, DF 18, MV 7, Magic Defense 80, Price150P, non-Flying.

Every wonder why Ballista units positively suck against fliers despite the troop hiring screen saying they are Bowmen?

Blame the Japanese developers.

On the road to 1.02 and during some data exploration I was doing with Niahak, we learned that there are 18 unit flags assigned to classes in the game. But it didn’t seem to make sense because the game itself only had a couple types.

It turns out the game had Infantry multiple times, Cavalry multiple times, Bowmen multiple times, and so on. We quickly deduced they must be different, but had no real point of reference as to why because the Japanese for each was the same.

Then we opened the manual: the affinity table has 18 entries.

So here is what happened. In the Japanese game, each unit type could be only two characters. The menu itself had 24 pixels to store this. We expanded it dramatically for the English game to fit in long types like “Spearmen.” However, the translation was still based on the Japanese. It was accurate — the Japanese was just wrong.

The good news is, we are able to fit the correct unit types into the list now. This means all 18 names, as they appear in the manual’s affinity table, fit perfectly. The hireable units list now demonstrates much greater variety, and the information there will actually match what the affinity table says should happen, so no more nasty surprises.

We have also reached a decision on what to do about Elementals: they will be pulled from all unit windows, since the game just cannot support hiring them. They aren’t in the table of hireable units, and we can’t get them in there. Sorry, it’s just not possible.

However, we will add Demons to the Living Armor class, which should make it a little more bearable. They are the only other demon unit, and it makes sense since it is the tier before gaining Archdemons. Currently no unit can ever hire Demons, so this should add something new to strategy.

byuu and I have decided that the 1.02 release will simply be a public beta. It will ship with the debug cheat codes. We hope everyone can help to test and report any last stray spelling and dialogue errors. Some time next year when our new patching format is ready, we will make all those final corrections and release a version 1.03 — the final release.

It’s been a long time since this page was updated. Der Langrisser still isn’t 100% complete to our liking, and there a few things left to fix.

Moon Knight has been replaying the game to report all kinds of dialogue oddities which beta testers missed — some of them rather glaring like Erwin saying Böser’s lines. When he finishes playing the game and I run back through the scripts, we’d like to do a final release of the game.

byuu has said he will take a look at the last remaining programming problems during his November vacation. There was an incorrect portrait reported (does anyone remember where?) that we need to fix, and yes, the other problem is Elementals.

Elementals, as you may know, are a type of units which can be recruited by Jormungand, Stone Golem and Living Armor commander units … at least according to the class change box. Unfortunately, the programmers never added elementals to the game. There are 64 hireable classes in the game. Each class, we assume, is flipped on or off with a flag. Elementals is nowhere in this list — however Demons are. Demons are never hireable by any commander the player can control.

We have checked.

Thoroughly.

The solution would be to hack the hireable units table to replace Demons with Elementals, then have those three classes throw the former Demon flag.

Much much easier said than done, so if you want to help us out, please do. It will make byuu’s work in November a lot easier if we can at least locate some of this data or how it is stored.

Failing this, the plan is to hack those class window to drop Elementals from display, since they can never be hired anyway.

We will need some testers willing to give one last run through the script to test every last bit of dialogue to make sure it sounds correct and fits the character saying it, and that it matches the context in which it appears. Keep in mind, multiple things can trigger the same text.

To this end, I’ve put together a ZSNES CHT file which effectively gives Der Langrisser a “debug” mode to match Langrisser II’s. Move any unit, move any commander an infinite number of times per turn, cast magic with anyone, attack any tile, move to any tile and so on. It should enable testers to uncover every last bit of dialogue in the game, and quickly test every secret tile and all death lines, since you can control enemies, NPCs and heroes to kill your own characters.

If you are interested in helping in this last test, send an e-mail to langrisser (at) cinnamonpirate (dot) com. Testers from the first round would be welcome back — especially the five who reported anything.

Ideally, we would start soon and go through mid-December.

We would like each tester to play through all 78 scenarios of Der Langrisser. Please write in if you are up for more pain. Yes, this beta process will be much simplified. No more web distribution — that sure failed. With the game already released and the hype over, we are far less paranoid of leakage.

Debug photos after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many users have reported having problems getting the patch to apply on Mac systems. I’m not sure what the problem is, but there does seem to be a fix. If you check the README, it explains that you can specify the target file on the command line. Apparently many users believed this only applied to the Windows executable and never attempted it.

Big mistake.

This method has been tested to work for many people experiencing various patching problems:

• Open Darwin. If you don’t have Darwin, get it. Refer to your Apple documentation.
• Change to the folder where you have stored the Der Langrisser patcher and dl_j.smc. If it is on your desktop, then enter the command “cd ~/Desktop.”
• Type the following command line: ./patch dl_j.smc.
• This should give you a success message and create dl_e.smc. If it does not, you can try this command line: ./patch dl_j.smc dl_e.smc.

Enjoy the game. If it still doesn’t work, I suggest you download DOSBox and try patching with the DOS executable.

As many as 1,645 users have downloaded the Der Langrisser translation from this website; 2,229 have downloaded it from ROMHacking.net; an unknown quantity have downloaded it from Clouds of El Sallia.

That’s a lot of downloads.

But the truly amazing thing is this: ten people have downloaded the QNX patcher.

In addition to the known bug in ZSNES and SNES9x that cause Der Langrisser to periodically lock up and crash, mil from the Fantasy Anime forums has verified that the bug also occurs in SNEeSe. Therefore, we do not recommend playing Der Langrisser in SNEeSe, either.

This leaves bsnes and SNESGT as the only verified emulators capable of playing Der Langrisser correctly. As an aside, Super Sleuth is completely unverified, and lacks both sound support and speed throttling, but may still work if you’re willing to play that way.

We are still accepting bug reports at this time.

Our current plans are to develop a new patching format. We expect this to take 1 - 3 months to complete. Once finished, we will be releasing a new patch in this format. This will be the final release, at which time we will no longer accept any bug reports.

If you see a bug and want it fixed, you absolutely must report it as soon as possible. We do not intend to continue to support Der Langrisser for the rest of our lives. We have over four hundred downloads of our patch thus far, so there is absolutely no reason any bug should remain uncovered within the next few months.

We are accepting reports on the following issues at this time:

• Programming errors
• Wrong portrait errors, eg dialogue shows Aaron but portrait shows Cherie. We may or may not fix these at our discretion. They are all bugs from the Japanese game, and not from our translation.
• Script errors, such as a character speaking in the wrong person, eg “You have failed.” when the text should clearly state “I have failed.” — the context should make it clear when this is an error.
• Script errors, such as a window with only a single word, formatting errors, typos, etc

We are not accepting reports on these issues:

• Graphical glitches on character sprites, eg Bernhardt turning into Egbert or glitches after being killed by a Vampire Lord — these are bugs in the Japanese game that is due to WRAM corruption. We do not have the resources to reprogram half of the game engine to fix this. The bug is not the fault of our translation patch.
• Problems in the load screen secret menu (L, R, L, R, Select, A). There are multiple bugs here, and all of them are from the Japanese game. Notably, some sound effects do not play, and many options in the Battle Test menu will cause the game to show garbled backgrounds, play incorrect sounds, and possibly even crash the game. There is a reason this feature was not enabled in the Japanese release. We chose to release it as we knew many people would enjoy seeing it anyway. Again, none of these were caused by our translation.
• Sound cutoff at the end of the introduction loop by ~3 seconds. This is due to the extended length of dialogue text used by the English translation. There is little we can do here.
• Dark Princess - Dark Princess overflows the 8×8 Name - Class line by two pixels. It is still perfectly readable, and does not cause any glitches. The text is not even clipped. Our only other option is to shorten this line, but there is no reason to. It fits perfectly fine.
• Personal opinions on how something should be translated. The script has been meticulously edited for several years. We do not care if you are upset with our use of profanity, localizations, colloquialisms, etc
• Odd script messages when a character is killed. This is usually due to killing a character on the first attack, and is not a bug.

If you would like to submit a bug report, you may either submit it here, or on the Clouds of El Sallia forum. We will not accept bugs from anywhere else.

When submitting a bug, you must include all relevant information. We need the exact text spoken, a detailed reason of what is wrong and why you believe it is wrong, and how to reach this bug. If it is a programming bug, you will need to post a save RAM (.srm) file, and not a save state (.zsN, .s9N, etc). You can make the needed save RAM by choosing the “Save” option from the game menu immediately before the bug. Exit the emulator to be sure your save RAM was updated before mailing it to us.

We thank you in advance for any bug submissions, and apologize for any bugs you encounter while playing. It is inevitable that some issues will have slipped past us during beta testing.