Just wanted to share the great news that the US version of Harvest Moon 64 has reached 100% completion after several years of work!
This means that all the game code is reversed into human-readable and easily modded source code.
For the future, I'll be doing some more work for the following:
- Improving labeling in the code (many functions are still unnamed, for instance)
- Decompiling cutscene and dialogue data into a human-readable and editable format (very easy compared to function matching)
- Making a new repo with an improved game engine and easy building for modding projects
You can check out the decomp repo here: https://github.com/harvestwhisperer/hm64-decomp
Let me know if you have any ideas for modding projects I can help out with or if you want to help contribute to the future work!
WONDERFUL! :)
May I add this repo to my website I am making later?
Sure!
Thank you so much! I love stuff like this and have been taking a look at the assembly in the snes decomp too :)
sure?
sure?
sure?
Geeze, that’s incredible!!
wowow maybe some of the slow aspects like opening and closing the menu taking forever can be fixed? literally the only thing i don’t like abt HM64 is the general slowness of menus and dialogue :3
Yeah, something I started looking into. The game doesn't keep the graphics data for the map in memory when a screen is opened, so every time you close one, it has to do a full re-render of the map
right right i remember quite a few n64 games are like that. i hope there is a fix now it’s on PC
That's why I always go inside the barn to ship things. The menu loads much faster in there than outside.
HM64 is my favorite in the series, but man those days feel lightning fast these days. Also typos. Excited to see what ensues from this.
Great news~ Considering mods, I guess we all would like to add the bachelors as marriage-candidates plus have the usual BttN / MFoMT girl as another playable character?
Doable, but I might need some help from the community with getting new sprites that match the game's style. I unfortunately have little to no abilities with graphic design haha
If you're looking to get some sprite work done I would be willing to help! I have a good amount of experience with pixel art and I find it quite fun!
That'd be amazing!
Awesome! Feel free to hit me up here or I can share my discord in the DMs. Could even be fun to get a little team together depending on the volume of work!
A team would definitely be a blast! I'll keep you posted once I get things set up!
How would you go about recreating the prerendered sprite look with pixel art for new assets?
My first thought was focusing on the pixel art portraits for dialogue boxes!
The sprites themselves would be trickier for sure! They seem to be 2D images of 3D renders. Like someone made 3D models but weren't able to insert the models into the game so they took pictures of them and inserted them as 2D assets. That does make them manipulable through image editing, pixel by pixel, sprite by sprite. Don't know if it would make more sense to recreate the 3D models (not a skill I have) or edit each sprite movement.
I just really like the idea of the project and would love to help any way I can!
I played around a little bit with recreating the 3D models from the spritesheets via AI. I used Meshy AI and got some decent results. I think someone with more skill than me could possibly use this approach and touch up the AI-generated models to make them usable. This could be done for new animations of current sprites and having a base for new sprite assets.
That seems like a really cool use for AI. All of this has me wanting to brush up on my coding skills and take a stab at modding one of my all time favorite games!
Were you able to pull out the unused content (eg Thumbelina) or is that only in the JP release/removed from EN entirely? How about farm completion screen (functional and used in JP but abandoned in EN)?
If you mean Princess Vanilla (I guess she has different names haha), the unused sprites and texts are certainly there in the EN version. The character object for her is never initialized in game, and I haven't been able to find any associated cutscenes that reference the texts or the sprite in the data yet (I'm thinking they're cut or were never made, but not 100% sure yet).
The repo supports extracting all assets (including gifs) via Python, so if you like tech, anyone can explore for themselves too!
For the farm completion screen, the code is indeed still all there in the EN version and required some work to decompile haha
Yes! I'm not sure where Matt (of Gerry's Guides) got the Princess Vanilla name (I haven't heard it used outside of his naming her) - is that actually her name in the EN assets? I did the translation work for his big guide, and the Famitsu JP guide has a developer interview about unused ideas that calls her Thumbelina and explains the idea they had for her. Ironically I'm in Japan now so can't pull the text from my copy, but am happy to do that when I get back home if anyone is interested.
Nice! Would love to see it!
Princess Vanilla seems to be the name found in the in-game texts from what I can tell:
"[CHARACTER_AVATAR:50] Princess Vanilla? What happened?"
"[CHARACTER_AVATAR:78] I was about to become the wife of a frog. What were the guards doing!"
Oh that explains where he got it! I wonder why they bothered translating this piece when it was so clearly unfinished? Thanks, this is really interesting. I'll try to remember to pull the text when I'm back!
It is possible Natsume translated every bit of text because filtering unused assets would require valuable programmer time and introduces more chances for mistakes. Considering they misspelled their company name and cut out the farm completion screen, it might be for the best that they didn't risk letting untranslated text appear in-game.
Hoooooray!!!
The level of nostalgia that hits me whenever I hear Harvest Moon 64 🥹🥹🥹
Same! The entire project has been a gift of sorts to my inner child haha
As someone who tried to get into HM64 but struggled to do so: would it be possible to request mods on the difficulty or how fast time elapses? Those were the biggest barriers to entry for me but I literally know NOTHING about coding
Totally! The time fix is super simple, actually. The original devs increment the in-game seconds by 10 every frame. Pretty easy to change that number
oh do please update us on that! i think the game will be much more playable with adjusting the time. the time is very too quick for me, haha!
I'm thirding this. I love the exploration in HM and the overall relaxing vibe. 64 went counter to this for me so I always kept coming back to BtN. I would love it if there was a time slowdown mod.
Would LOVE something as simple as music not resetting between screens.
Also on my list of initial QOL fixes!
Heck yeah, that's so exciting! Nice work!
THIS is wild and I love it. It's going to be amazing to see what mods/rom hacks the community'll be able to do with this. Thank }ou for all the hard work!
Ahhh this is awesome! Thank you for your work on this :)
Awesome work! If we start getting more mods and stuff I'll be so pumped!
Huh...and I wad asking about this too last year. So typo fixes and QoL changes in the future?
For sure! The sky's the limit now!
Nice! But from what I'm getting/understand it's still not playable yet?
So, a decomp is meant to match the original game format. The project builds a N64 binary, but the source code is usable for making ports to other platforms. It takes a little bit of work to get ports set up (for instance, translating Nintendo 64 native graphics calls to modern graphics APIs).
Ahhh, okay thank you for the explanation!
There was a guy working on an HM64 randomizer... hope he sees this!
Hopefully he doesn't mind a ping since this a such a cool project for HM64 fans. u/DezertPenguin8
I don't mind at all, thanks for the ping! Definitely interested to see what comes out of this project
All I want is bugs removed and modern updates a la FoMT Switch (multiple saves at any point being the biggest one). Also, I don't want the old lady to ever die ever ever ever.
Hopefully a PC port incoming
I wouldn't say "incoming" as it would be a whole separate project. Decomp just means the source code has been painstakingly reconstructed, what you do with that source code will take effort on its own.
What does this mean?
This means that the original, human-readable source code has been reconstructed from the machine code. The decompilation project contains code that, when compiled with the same compiler the original developers used, produces machine code that matches byte for byte.
Having some human-readable source code for the entire game makes it possible to understand the code (i.e., for speedrunning or just intellectual curiosity), make changes easily without all the headache of doing assembly-based hacking, and also aids game preservation.
Decompilation doesn't necessarily mean PC port or mod, but having usable source code that 100% matches the original game behavior makes the process for doing those things relatively straightforward.
Wow, very cool! Thank you for taking the time to explain! I thought HM64 was pretty much decoded, so I'm excited to learn what mysteries were uncovered.
seeing this after Twilight Princess was also 100% decompiled is great news!
Omg does this mean future Harvest Moon 64 mods will be possible?
100%. My goal is to not only make them possible, but relatively easy to do
Omg that is so exciting, I always thought harvest moon 64 is one of the harvest moon games that feels the most real and alive, so I can't wait to see what people will start making with this, QOL changes? Add new content? Making the game playable after 3 years? Or even make a female character playable and make the bachelors possible marriage candidates??? That last one seems more complicated but if it will be as easy as you say, maybe someone will dare to do it, this is so hype.
Just unbelievable work, thank you so much for this and I can't wait to see the future of what still is my favorite game in the franchise.
I hope someone makes a mod where we can experience the Princess Vanilla events that were cut from the game! :O
What a wonderful gift before Christmas! Thanks so much for your work
I wonder if we'll get a HM64 True Love mod, like Claire being able to romance the girls!
Hey that's pretty neat
The only thing I would really want of a mod for HM64 is to make the day last just a bit longer, like maybe twice the original time would already be grand. I like the coziness of the HM games, but 64 always just seemed to hurry me along, unlike FoMT or BtN.
Super cool!
Can you have same sex relationships in it with this??
Harvest moon 64 is one of those games I wish the devs would remake like they did with some of their games. I wonder what great ideas fans can get out of the decompiled HM 64!
I am not a modder, but if anyone can make a mod where I can marry superior HM64 Rick I would be eternally grateful. Thank you.
your repo is extremely funny. you wrote out windows instructions telling people to install WSL, but didn't write any linux instructions? lol