Entry 214

The talk pages on the generated talk records

2026-09-27volumes

Filescrates/piney-fieldui/src/talk.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/menus/breeder.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/tables.rscrates/piney-fieldui/src/lib.rscrates/piney-gen/src/manifest.rscrates/piney-gen/src/talk.rscrates/piney-data/src/tables

The field UI no longer reads GCMN.PRG's image at run time. Its talk pages were the last part that did: they read the people's lines, npcTbl and the breeder's food table from the PRG over an empty executable. That image has no main, so the trading PCs' lines (in main's .sdata) came out as errorData: the six trade and shop harness failures of 0210.

What the pages read now

• The records come from the talk group (0211) by the address the save and npcTbl hold:
  • TalkTexts::record(p) finds the record array that holds p;
  • TalkTexts::word(p) finds the pointer table that holds p;
  • has_text(p) tells a record with text from an empty one (the chain to errorData).
• An NPC's base (Base::npc) is its battle::npcs row.
• charTbl's names are newgame::chars, so a later volume gets its own 21 rows. The fixed Infection read at DEMO.PRG 0x0040dc80 is gone.
• The breeder:
  • breedTeachMsgTbl and pgEvoMsg are the volume's (fieldui::breed_teach_va, pg_evo_msg_va);
  • foodTbl is a new entry (fieldui::food, FOOD_PARAM).

The generator now writes a DWARF name in capitals, such as FOOD_PARAM, as FoodParam.

A pointer table read as a record

An NPC past the PCs (row 80 on) whose type sends the talk page to its last branch opens msg + 12 * talkNum as a record. msg there is pcMsg0, a pointer table, so the game reads its words as a record:

• emode is the address of pcMsg0_00;
• str is the address of pcMsg0_20, a record array whose bytes it shows as text.

The shop harness checks this case. To rebuild those bytes, each record array in talk now also lists the addresses its records hold (RecordVa: name, str). TalkTexts::bytes_at lays a record array's words (emode, name, str) and a pointer table's words back into bytes. separate then cuts them as ccKanjiStrSeparate does, one byte for 0x20-0x7f and two for anything else. talk.rs grows from 0.9 MB to 1.4 MB.

Checks

The field UI harnesses all pass against the game:

The crate's own tests pass.