User blog:RottenBlock/Additional Bugs in Need of Patches

Here are a few other AliceSoft bugs that could use a patch. I'm leaving this here as a reference to myself or any helpful, passing programmer. I'll update it if I come across any others, or if I get around to fixing the games.

Rance 3

 * In the Devil's Path, across the endless bridge, there are a few pots that Rance has trouble searching, because their menu somehow defaults to "Don't Look Inside" unless you take additional steps (see the Walkthrough for this section). The code for these pots (begins MZｱｸﾏ.ADV line 218) is nearly identical to chests and none of the differences seem to be responsible. May have to look at the maps for this one (maps are in hex format) - maybe change the pots to chests to see if that's somehow responsible?

Rance 4

 * It's possible to attack enemies out of your range if you do a trick with your mouse involving an enemy who is in your range. I've never quite nailed the trick, which makes finding the error all the harder. Not a very high priority in my mind, it's more of an opt-in cheat than an annoyance or deadlock.
 * Again, I'm against correcting opt-in cheats, but they still belong on the list. Enter the recently discovered Yocchan Glitch. By using a certain combination of commands, you can get Yocchan to halve her prices right from the start of the game!

Rance 4.1/4.2
If the fact that you have to play these in an emulator didn't tip you off, 4.1 and 4.2 are not coded like other Windows AliceSoft games. The usual tools don't work on them. Anything more advanced than text replacement it basically impossible for a casual programmer. That this game was localized at all is a testament to the translation team and the text replacement code they set up. So unless you're willing to do some traditional hacking for few returns, this section has to be restricted to text matters.
 * There are a few scattered examples of untranslated text in this game (like in Rose's first H-scene), which were probably just overlooked, and can probably be fixed using the translation file.
 * It might also be nice to move the few examples of text that ended up outside of the text boxes' clear area, leaving behind loose pixels that stick with you until you quit the game. For example, one such situation happens when you first meet Arnie in the dungeon in Rance 4.1, leaving a loose pixel on the left side of the box until you restart (this is the only such situation I encountered while doing my 4.1 and 4.2 minimal steps walkthroughs, though there may be others off the main path).
 * I wonder if the ugly slot machine can be improved by changing the text it uses? It's not a high priority, especially since the slot machine is so useless.
 * In addition to text issues, the game has at least one legitimate glitch: the game can crash if you try to use items in battle while being out of Seirogan, or something like that (in my specific setup, I was in 4.2, had 0 Seirogan 2, 0 Seirogan 3, and 1 Youmeishu, and was fighting Jofuka and Spartan). This is probably unfixable without traditional hacking.

Rance VI

 * According to the user who created the character pages, Kanami's Shadow Clone Jutsu is supposed to cap out at 95%. Unfortunately, if her Evasion is already higher than 95, it will revert it to 95 for the rest of the fight! Not sure if this is true in the MangaGamer release.
 * Willis' portrait section in the CG Gallery doesn't work like how you'd expect: instead of unlocking at level 80 and showing all her sprites, it seems to unlock at level 60 and only shows her sprites up to level 60, no matter your highest level achieved. I'll have to look into how it's unlocked just in case things are different than I expect, but if I'm right, it should be fixed.
 * While she's only in one scene, Rosé's name shows up incorrectly during her brief scene thanks to the diacritic (a Japanese kana appears instead of the "é"). Is this a font issue? How does System 4 even handle fonts, and if it is a font problem, how exactly do we patch it?
 * Is it possible that I was running the game in Japanese locale by mistake? I don't have a save to test this.
 * One of these days, someone with art skills needs to redraw some upsized sprites for the Satsu DLC patch, namely her portraits. I don't know about you, but I think the battle sprites look fine, it's the portrait that needs work. The automatically resized portrait is nice to have (and miles better than nothing), but we could do even better than that.
 * There's an oversight in the Noctun Mines during your first mission: the door that leads to the second mission's content doesn't react to you in any way. Normally the game gives you a message saying "You can't go this way yet," but this door doesn't. It's as though it were painted there, very confusing. Probably not fixable without considerable effort, seeing as how the game's dungeon data is stored. Not worth it for such a small return. Unless someone goes to the trouble of creating a Rance VI map editor, this isn't gonna happen.
 * Is there any sense in restoring the original Lucky Can Can sprite? I agree with a lot of the MangaGamer changes, but I don't understand why this sprite was changed. It's not like other games where you might be "tricked" into thinking they're regular Can Cans until they run away, they just sit there until you kill them and talk about being lucky, it doesn't seem like there's any reason to "hide" them.
 * A bunch of small problems:
 * The Cemetary Key is missing a line break in its Key Items description. Might be a good idea to check other automatically disposed Key Items for similar issues.
 * There's a typo in the parchment mission description for the Sakura & Pasta mission.
 * During the post-game scene with Camilla in the Eternal Dungeon, Rance says "Hyper Waepon" (sic).
 * The below fixes straddle the line between "bug fix" and "improvement":
 * The undocumented, "skip already read text" button has to be moved off the "S" key. The overlap with the new MangaGamer WASD controls is confusing and far too easy to trigger by accident.
 * It's really irritating that you can't leave the FR upgrade screen without picking an upgrade. It needs a Cancel button. The stat-up screen for the 30 FR events is in a different boat because it usually has scenes before it.

Toushin Toshi 1

 * Aru Naru mentions another bug in his readme for the game, where the game doesn't recognize objects on walls under certain circumstances. Need to look into this.
 * I'm playing through the game again, and I've been able to interact with objects on walls just fine! However, the Hirara Lemon tree on Level 3 wouldn't let me interact with it during the quest to find a lemon on any side but the west (in hindsight, I never tested the north side). Very unintuitive. I died a lot in this section and checked the tree glitch each time and the problem seems consistant. The problem doesn't exist before the quest and when grabbing lemons for general use after the quest. An independent problem to the one Aru Naru describes, or related?
 * As mentioned in my patch's launch post, the official TT patch mentions two other glitches that I've never encountered: a bug that involves losing control of the mouse, and a bug that allows you glitch your way to the ending. The changes can probably be found in a line-by-line comparison of the two JP versions, but since decompiler tools rename all the game's labels seemingly at random, it's hard to pick out the changes with a program like WinMerge (virtually every third line will show up as "changed"). It's sure to be an unrewarding chore.
 * The game has a lot of missing (and sometimes extra) spaces, as Aru Naru mentions in his readme. A problem with the translation tools he was using, apparently. Direct editing of the code will probably fix most if not all of them. Listed below for later reference, along with other typos that I can fix while I'm in there:
 * Knowledge Fruit stat up message.
 * The extra buffer spaces that proceeds a Gal Monster's name when selling them to the Char Shop.
 * Dalis is referred to as "Daris" in some places.
 * Unfortunately, the most frequent missing space are the ones that are supposed to be between a character name and the opening quote mark. This would be easy enough on its own (a find and replace for each character name could have it done in a few minutes), but TT1 uses indented text that lines up each subsequent line with the right side of the opening quote. Correcting this error would offset the indentation by one character, necessitating a fix to nearly every spoken line in the game, re-checking line widths, the works! Not sure if I care to bother with such a large-scale, low-impact problem!
 * Should probably check how it looks. Would it really be so awful if text were aligned with the left side of the quote mark instead of the right?