Hello, I am the one behind omoshiro-game.github.io and AE4 / SRPGEditor sudden resurrection around this summer. The community reach I had is mostly japanese and focused around Speedrun/challenges, not much the engine itself. I've currently on idle the project to remake (and distribute) parts of the engine sourcecode, alongside tutorial and tooling to better work with it. Right know I've paused work around it because lack of outside collaborators interest for it... But I'd be open for feedbacks if any, or change/custom tool making to assist translation. Happy to see some people outside Japan (95% of the website traffic is japan) to Aquedi4 !
- Thread starter TragicSolitude
- Start date
Hello, sorry for double post but I'm unwrapping this thread with a lot of knowledge to bring about Aquedi4.
Doing the ResourceHacker way to edit the editor won't get you far, as the editor hot-pull most of the strings from its internal code. Simple string replace will mostly work until you get into the commands editor, and then it's game over. I've tackled this issue many time in my brain until to find out the best thing is to recode the editor. Which is what I did, but it's very far from a stable release... It can only edit database for now.
Also you add context about the BBS version and why they are so big, it's because of being part of "the wire puller" which is a Speedrun/hardcore map underground event among the Japanese Aquedi4 community. They have strict rules about using a fixed engine version (with known bugs and limitations) and fixed assets. Every round of it brings new assets and rules, I almost took part of the 23th edition of it earlier this year but my level at mapmaking was *nowhere* near the expected entry level. What they do with Aquedi4 is crazy!
About the .stg_xxxx and various file format, I can also bring some light into some of the internals reason why this is. Basically the file format changed a few time between editor version (bug fixes, new features...) and although the file format is pretty well though to be future proof (speaking of the v4, the "plus" and the older version are terribles) there are time where the editor upgrades some change. If you're curious to take a look at the humongous if/else branching of the parsing code of the editor or game, it is backwards compatible but not assured to be forward compatible. If you need to know exactly which version of the editor breaks what, let me know. I have a pretty large documents listing all the breaking changes. My advice is to always upgrade to 1020+ as everything should be ported to that version safely (unless you're into speedrunning, from what I understood they know at the tick right what's causing the lag or delay and use it to time very precisely on screen effects... But I mostly get that you're all into translating foreign games and not much that competition niche thing so that may be enough for your use case.
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> and if I'm missing one please let me know. I'm also seeking for the Ulta rare "V5" of Aquedi4, alongside the very early version before the first beta that's available there. I know for pretty sure either the v5 or the very very early beta of V4 leaked a lot of sourcecode, and someone online managed to get it. But he never published the full dump nor instructions on how to get there and from what I'm seeing it looks like its codebase is as much optimized as the original Aquedi4, so kinda dead end here. From my niche japanese game connoisseur tastes, Aquedi4 looks heavily inspired by Luna. I've even seen someone ports its Aquedi4 game to Luna saying it was fairly easy. While it was kinda challenging but not that much thanks to the Aquedi4 community being still a bit alive, I fear that LunaDX9 is dead waters. I've managed to pull some of the SDK symbols from some early version build (but lacking the sourcecode, still a great help and better than nothing) alongside the Selene (Luna next iteration) build/optimized library (not speaking about the 3D, but the older 2D). So that's kinda dead road, I found some re-imp of Selene3D with Luna-compatible bindings and that AIMS was based off an highly modified Selene fork, so I spent countless nights xRef'ing that to get dometh kinda usable. It's still desperate fox's late night works, and don't really get anything but some successfully read assets *and yet* that was better than nothing. Kinda losing to monologue there but in the end I found that the very early Aquedi4 beta was sharing some code with SRPGEditor (find it alongside Aquedi4 on my website) and by doing heuristics and taking into consideration the enterbrain/tkool rpg maker engine knowledge I amassed along the years, I managed to built some fairly good mental model of how the data model works. I've spent more hours into IDA smashing the stack and bumping gadgets into the subroutines of the engine than I've ever played Aquedi4 games (and I played a lot of them before I decided to save it) until some point where I made some auto translate tool for Aquedi4. It was very laughable at, not very flexible but do so by intercepting and rewriting memory in the game on the fly. Thanks to this I also managed to pull a lot of interesting patterns and understand a bit better the engine internal. As someone who's been into gamedev/modding for a while, that have looked into many niche games and done quite a few low profile niche engine (been there breaking AGM before the beta was even released from compiled demo game), Aquedi4 have a special place in my heart as being an action engine that tastes "good" both in gameplay experience and code structure. It's one man work (Anton) that got bound by its work and put its very soul into it. I spoke with a few people that knew him from when he was active and he was slowly getting chewed by the work he had put into making Aquedi4 what it is. Reading the translated posts he did back then when I was translating the whole website was heartbreaking, it felt like one lone man carrying dozen years of work yet getting nothing back. Seeing people still being interested in Aquedi4 really brings me joy although I'm just being some data hoarder that happened to have both the keys and the interest to dig into a wonderful story of an abandoned engine, and slowly take part into the journey of Aquedi4 (hopefully) revival and long life.Feel free to contact me if you have any question, or if you just want to discuss about Aquedi4 or similar era game engine. Although I'm kinda ghost in online forums, you can find me on this forum official discord (just search for my name and ping me, I'll respond in less than one day)
Thanks again kind internet stranger for your interest in Aquedi4 !
- Jun 26, 2017
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Hey! Thanks so much for your hard work supporting the engine, glad you found us here in this thread
Haha thank you so much, yes I ran into this issue pretty quickly when I tried! I soon realised that I could only translate the surface-level stuff, and not the commands (which was really important to me). So I guessed it was 'info stored elsewhere', but it's great to have the context. Oh well, even with the small parts I translated it has really helped with my work so far so I'm happy with that.
Yeah I think that's pretty much it for everyone in this thread! Translating games we love, that aren't yet in our native languages (I think usually English), so that others can enjoy them. Although for me I'm also trying to mod games (add new scenes, some quality of life features etc) - it's very tough, but it works eventually
Thanks again for your advice and dropping by, it's really cool to see other fans and users of AE4.
It's a shame to see TragicSolitude has seemingly been hacked... I hope he gets his account back soon
After the initial link to the website I started to see people outside Japan coming to the website and consulting various pages, including the freshly translated manual. It was really a good surprise, and the total visitor count broke the 2k (rum, excluding bots and non standard/AdBlocker) total in one week. Curious about what was the source, it took me fairly long to notice this thread... I think it may be the only non japanese place on internet where people with interest in Aquedi4 exists, and so I had to at least say hello !Hey! Thanks so much for your hard work supporting the engine, glad you found us here in this thread
I'm trying to connect with the few people that are interested. On the Speedrunning scene they only care about having more commands and finding logic bugs to finish custom level easier. If you're into "I wanna" style hardcore game and enjoy the "wtf" private jokes memes japanese enjoy it's nice to talk with them... But quickly it gets difficult to translate everything and exchange with people that don't really are interested in the editor porting effort...
The original creator (Anton) granted rights to "YAKU" to further keep the game alive, and Yaku allowed me to work and reverse engineer the engine and editor as long as I respect the original work (not claiming it's mine). Which brings me to my second point
I have started to map and understand how the scenes file work and I'm pretty close to fully parse its general syntax. Still, the hardest part that's left is mapping the variables and understanding how they works. Being a seasoned reverse engineer, the Aquedi4 have the issue of using a fairly old compiler with aggressive options, basically removing the yummy text in the program that allow you to get an easier understanding on how the program work. It's not impossible but rather much more complex to fully understand it, yet there exist some hopes for a black box approach. It's a bit long and unfunny, ideally I should make an auto clicker to do it, but the base idea is for each command, make a scene with one command, edit a parameter, see what changed on the config, edit another parameter, see what changed, and so on and so forth for every commands. Doing that will allow to understand how commands works, but also create each command handler on my editor rework, and also open the way for a possible script that can extract text and things out of the project as text (like code) and then convert it back to Aquedi4 scene... Pipe that to some mtl and you can easily translate or edit/mod games. While I won't force anyone doing this boring mapping, it would really help me if other people are interested in participating in that effort (and also bring out the Aquedi4 knowledge further !). Also, I could ship the dumb editor I'm working on to people that **use** Aquedi4 (and not re into the code, it's very different because I've no idea how to add some even yet I know precisely how they are structured) and gather feedbacks and idea on what to do and add. Essentially I wish to support people that do the translation work on japanese game, thanks to their work I can fully enjoy them and I see it as a way to help them back for their hard work they put for free. Power of the community, give back what you can give !
Going a bit further, if you're interested in old school memory hack /binary patching level of modding, that may also be possible. My main issue is the screen size that's not matching my steam deck and I wish to fix that someday to support multiple screen resolution. I've found a way to hook some of the internal code of the program to run custom code in it, and at some point I may even add some special hook to load and script in lua on the game. Pretty huge things, but to run you have to learn how to walk and I'm still at the very crawling phase...
If you want to discuss more Aquedi4 or modding (I'm a RPG Maker MV/Z script modder myself) in details, don't hesitate to reach me out. I've joined the discord server with the same username as here, you can ping me all day and I'll reply asap (whereas I only checked forums every now and then)
Thanks again for the warm welcome, and I do hope being able to bring back help to translator and modders !