65535 ways to fail

Time for a Status roundup for August and September….

August, 1st half – Denmark Strait
Enjoying my time off work I am able to make quite some progress on translating Serpent Isle. I decided to start with the remaining ~70 books which are missing as of yet. I will not be able to check any of my work in game, so that has to wait until I return home. Depending on how things go from here, I will decide whether to actually start this project officially or not.

August, 2nd half – Davis Strait
I shall be able to finish the books soon and have to decide what to do next. It quite chilly outside at the moment, so it seems to be most appropriate to translate the guys in the “Northern Encampment” of Serpent Isle next 😀

September, 10th – 15th – back home
The last two weeks I have spent searching for an error, that prevented correct compilation of the the text files. As I have touched a zillion files in August without being able to countercheck my modifications, it’s been a tiresome search for possible flaws and the final find was but a lucky one: File 02C1 is a collection of 48 in-game books, summing up to 64.1 KB (63119 bytes) in the original English version. The German translation I did summed up to 69941 bytes which was appearantly to big to compile and I needed to reduce the size of my translation significantly to below – I can only guess – 65535 bytes including some compilative overhead (is that a word?). I succeeded, but the translation of some books is not to the quality and accurancy that I would agree to under normal circumstances. Whatsmore: One book had to go completely to make everything fit without loosing to much quality on the restof the translations. I decided to replace the somewhat misplaced Biography of Lord British with an easter egg book.

Desperate Measures :-/

On the plus site: the files compile just fine again, all books but one are translated by now, the first quests are playable in German and I will not run into this sort of problem again, as 02C1 was by far the largest file in the set 🙂