Suikoden II NPC Dialogue

[Raww Le Klueze]

Well, I did a quick search with a hexeditor in vd02 on the US disc version and the problem appears to be in your text dump as the lines appear fine to me there.



I can't really send the files as they're kinda tied to the program I'm using, I'd have to copy them one by one. But you could use a hexeditor to view it yourself if you just need a rough idea of what the lines are.

[wataru14]

Yeah, I have no idea how to do that.

Oh well, it just means I have to do actual legwork for those two towns. I doubt Banner changes at all before endgame (if even then) and Kobold Village is probably pretty static since no main plot happens there and none of the people talk about current events.

Thanks anyway.

[Pyriel]

I'm looking in my text dump for VD02, and:

Code: Select all

80112c1c 045: "Huh?{eol}Oh, no it`s nothing!!!{eol}Right now I`ve got to finish my{eol}work. Let`s go, {Chara 000}."
80112c70 046: "Hello there.{eol}Umm...pardon me, but who are you?{eol}Are you a friend of my husband?"
80112cc4 047: "Whew, should we take a rest?..."

Edit: Oh, you did say that line was in there.

Edit 2: I took a look at VD02.BIN. The issue is that there's nothing I've ever found that gives the length of dialogue/text arrays. I'm pretty sure the heuristic I used is just that the dialogue strings always start with a quotation mark (A4 in the hex viewer on the PSX version). For some reason, that "Oh, hello" line just starts with the "O" and isn't marked in the way 90% of the dialogue strings are. That should be apparent in game, if you're looking for it.

Edit 3: I see what it was. I imposed an arbitrary limit on strings so I wouldn't end up consuming an entire sprite as text and writing it to the dump files. I set the limit at 50 characters, just as a guess, and this string is 80. Once the process thinks it's run into something that isn't a string, it stops looking for more to go in the current table. I'll have to dig up some old install media to get this rebuilt, but I can up the limit and regenerate the dump.

[Julian]

PSP text is *a lot* easier to get to, and they even give you table sizes.

The logic I used on my PS2 extract was as follows, fwiw:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QZXwxa ... sp=sharing

My dump:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CLY-SC ... drive_link

I was doing pseudo code but source code is probably easier to follow. Forum didn't like me pasting it so I attached, sorry, linked it instead. Basically, we test tables and pointers to see if they're valid, and go until they stop.

There ends up being some junk, but a lot of it is real junk. Like untranslated text, or blank entries. There are a lot of entries that just read "Placeholder" that were left untranslated, etc. When aligned with PSP text, I think 99% of the time it worked out, though it may have gotten misaligned at a few points.

If this shouldn't be here I apologize and feel free to delete it. ._.

[wataru14]

Thanks guys! I've managed to clean through Kiba and Klaus and have created a semi- workable game script so far. There are "alternate" scenes here and there that I'm pretty sure are unused (flour being attainable in the Merc Fort) But there are some things that I'm sure are buried in dialogue trees that I'm still working on. There's also a lot of ".........." and "..... [HERO]" lines that are impossible to place with certainty.

Although I have managed to figure out what plot events cause NPC lines to change. It looks like all the areas in a particular region change at the same time, although the triggers are different for each region.

Thrre's also a missing history class in Greenhill. Lines for six students, but none if them appear in-game. I'm guessing they were supposed to be in the empty classroom on the second floor of the academy

[Pyriel]

PSP text is *a lot* easier to get to, and they even give you table sizes.

The logic I used on my PS2 extract was as follows, fwiw:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QZXwxa ... sp=sharing

My dump:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CLY-SC ... drive_link

I was doing pseudo code but source code is probably easier to follow. Forum didn't like me pasting it so I attached, sorry, linked it instead. Basically, we test tables and pointers to see if they're valid, and go until they stop.

There ends up being some junk, but a lot of it is real junk. Like untranslated text, or blank entries. There are a lot of entries that just read "Placeholder" that were left untranslated, etc. When aligned with PSP text, I think 99% of the time it worked out, though it may have gotten misaligned at a few points.

If this shouldn't be here I apologize and feel free to delete it. ._.

Yeah. You did almost exactly what I did. I was just testing a process to rip a variety of data at the time, and I didn't want a bunch of rubbish in the files, if it turned out there was some weirdo file format I hadn't seen yet. By the time the dump started getting passed around, I had completely forgotten the limitations I imposed on it.

[wataru14]

Raura has two lines that are not part of the normal recruitment set, how they are used or even if at all I can't say but the placement suggests you don't fulfill the requirements to recruit her yet, though she might simply not show up until you do in the final game.

"That's strange...
The letter says that
this is the place...
Damn Jeane..."

and

"Strange... everyone we ask says
'I don't know any castle
like that'... A castle can't
be that small, can it..."

Found where these are. They're alternate introductory lines for the first time you talk to her. She does show up if her recruitment conditions aren't met.
Thie first line is if you talk to her without Jeane being recruited. The second is if you have Jeane but your castle is lower than level 3.
Big surprise, I know.

[Julian]

I have a partial event decompilation set up (it's still very rough, lots of clean up and fixing to do, but eventual hope is to be able to recompile the bytecode), so if there's any text you want to find if it's used / how it's gotten, just ask.

[wataru14]

I have a partial event decompilation set up (it's still very rough, lots of clean up and fixing to do, but eventual hope is to be able to recompile the bytecode), so if there's any text you want to find if it's used / how it's gotten, just ask.

I have most of what I need. Been checking the text dump against my transcription and I'm up.to the Liberation of Greenhill, so I'm almost done. I'll send you a list of stuff I can't find.

When the Kobold Village gets sets 2 and 4 of their villager lines is puzzling me. Set 2 is almost the same as 1, except people throw in comments about shiny objects all over town. Set 4 is the same but they talk about flutes instead. Do the lines change in response to trading post prices/stock? Because, if so, that's pretty cool.