If you're interested in more Animal Crossing stuff, this video came out a few days ago diving into how the letters sent to villagers are scored. It uses some interesting rules.
This video was how I found the James Chambers blog and submitted the story.
It's good and uses the medium well.
The YouTuber demonstrates the letter score system in real time with a custom romhack.
Here is how I summarized the video elsewhere:
> In the English release of the original 2001 Animal Crossing game, they checked capitalization, English trigrams, runs of repeated characters, ratios of spaces to non-spaces, and sentence length in order to score your letters to villagers and simulate the villagers understanding the letters.
Capitalization is worth more than trigrams, so the game is vulnerable to spamming a capital letter followed by a period with some spaces thrown in.
It should probably be noted that this article is from 2018 - but it's definitely still worth the read if you're interested in this and haven't already!
Also, there were source code leaks for the iQue version of this game and other Nintendo games and consoles in 2020, but I don't know if that contributed anything additional in that regard:
If you're interested in more Animal Crossing stuff, this video came out a few days ago diving into how the letters sent to villagers are scored. It uses some interesting rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VbwWVvw-zI
This video was how I found the James Chambers blog and submitted the story. It's good and uses the medium well. The YouTuber demonstrates the letter score system in real time with a custom romhack.
Here is how I summarized the video elsewhere:
> In the English release of the original 2001 Animal Crossing game, they checked capitalization, English trigrams, runs of repeated characters, ratios of spaces to non-spaces, and sentence length in order to score your letters to villagers and simulate the villagers understanding the letters. Capitalization is worth more than trigrams, so the game is vulnerable to spamming a capital letter followed by a period with some spaces thrown in.
It should probably be noted that this article is from 2018 - but it's definitely still worth the read if you're interested in this and haven't already!
How did they get the debug symbols?
From what I can tell, some debug symbols failed to be removed from release versions of the game:
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Ships_with_Debu...
Also, there were source code leaks for the iQue version of this game and other Nintendo games and consoles in 2020, but I don't know if that contributed anything additional in that regard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_data_leak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQue_Player