📝 Posted:

2021-05-13

🏷 Tags:

rec98

meta

Last updated: 📝 2024-04-24

Secured a 22.5-hour RL workweek to leave plenty of time for this project, Touhou Patch Center's commissioned MediaWiki update work is also nearing completion, time to reopen the store! Since it's been a long time, here's an overview of where we currently are in each game and binary, and what the next logical step would be:

• TH02:
  • MAIN.EXE: The final PC-98-specific low-level rendering functions are blocked by a single inconsistent and thus undecompilable assembly instruction. Rather than going for 📝 code generation and turning the rest of the function into a mess, I'd like to introduce a new build step between compilation and linking to patch "mistakes" like these. This would be an investment of 1-2 pushes into more readable code. Otherwise, I could continue with
    • player character movement,
    • player shots and the control code for the three shot types, or
    • bomb rendering.
  • MAINE.EXE: main() and the congratulation picture screens.
• TH03:
  • Interested in netplay? 📝 This blog post details all possible approaches for implementing it, together with their prerequisites.
  • OP.EXE: Story Mode initialization or the title screen.
  • MAIN.EXE: The enemy structure? Or the bullet structure, maybe? Either way, we're still missing a lot of essential gameplay structures.
  • MAINL.EXE: The stage start screen, which will be nice to have for the 📝 upcoming multilingual translations commissioned by Touhou Patch Center
• TH04:
  • OP.EXE: Finalizing the ZUN Soft logo animation, decompiling the game title slide-in animation, decompiling the High Score menu in parallel with TH05, and then we're done!
  • MAIN.EXE: There's a lot of partially reverse-engineered but not yet decompiled code, including all of this game's custom entity types. Covering that would significantly boost finalization% for very little money. Otherwise, we could go for either
    • Gengetsu's boss script
    • HUD rendering (in parallel with TH05)
    • player update code (in parallel with TH05), required for all midbosses in this game
    • player shot control functions
    • the end-of-stage bonus calculation
  • MAINE.EXE: High score name entry.
• TH05:
  • OP.EXE: Finalizing the ZUN Soft logo animation, decompiling the High Score menu in parallel with TH04, and then we're done!
  • MAIN.EXE: Got quite a lot of segment splits where we could immediately continue:
    • midboss and boss script code, either continuing with the in-game order and the Stage 2 midboss fight, or going directly for
      • Mai & Yuki,
      • the Extra Stage midboss,
      • or EX-Alice
    • stage tile rendering
    • player update code (in parallel with TH04)
    • items and extends
    • bomb rendering
    • the single-color areas of boss backgrounds, which use the GRCG's TDW mode
    • HUD rendering (in parallel with TH05)
    • boss sprite rendering boilerplate
    • player shot collision detection and rendering
  • MAINE.EXE: The staff roll animation.

But as always, you can request pretty much any other part of any game. We're now at a pretty good place as far as arbitrary requests are concerned, as I simply can't decide myself where to put all the current pending contributions in the funding backlog. 😅 By spending only the missing amount of money to complete any of those, you can capture any of those "fractional" contributions towards a specific goal.

The next specific requests are going to set the priorities of this project for quite some time! The best strategy: Spend a low amount of money on something very specific, and watch as existing generic contributions will necessarily have to be put towards making that specific goal happen 😛