Introduction
What is the Fire Emblem Conversation Editor?
The Fire Emblem Conversation Editor is intended as a replacement for the old method of editing Fire Emblem text for Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem: Fates by hand in their own frustrating syntax.
The Editor achieves this by the use of a simple, human-readable script format. This format produces functionally equivalent output if run on default game files in 95% of cases -- that is to say, in the parser's current state I have yet to encounter any issues despite extensive testing, but I'm sure some that edge cases still exist.
Many text control codes have functions that remain unknown to me and thus will not be converted when going from game text to script. They will instead be left as-is. As and when information about how they work is discovered, the Editor will be updated with script commands to support them. If you have information about an unrecognized control code, please file an issue describing it.
Why Use a Script?
The script format's strength is in its simplicity. Rather than force the user to copy and paste or use an IME to produce the required katakana for a given character's name or the name of an expression portrait, a simple declarative syntax can be used instead. While the syntax is in English by default, it is possible to translate every aspect of the Editor without any knowledge of code or need to rebuild the jar file, and thus includes the script commands. For more information about translating the Editor, please see this page.
That said, if you really want to write in the default Fire Emblem text style, be my guest! The Editor will accomodate you, though it currently lacks highlighting for such an endeavor. That is, however, planned for inclusion in a later release.
Launching the Editor
There are four scripts provided for launching the Editor: .sh files for Linux and Mac and .bat files for Windows. Simply double-click on one of the files (or run it from the terminal or command line) and the program will launch.
While you could run the jar file directly, this is not recommended. The scripts contain some optimizations for Java's memory use, which can be omitted with no ill effect save for greedier RAM hogging.
The scripts ending with "-sw" also contain a directive for JavaFX to use software rendering rather than hardware accelerated rendering. This is required if you wish to be able to quickly save long conversations as a single image file. While the hardware-accelerated version will still be able to save long conversations, it does so by writing them out in chunks and then sticking them together in a much slower process. The wait times should not be unbearable, but the impatient should use the software-rendered scripts.
If you are impatient and still wish to launch the jar directly, you can provide the -Dprism.order=sw property to Java in order to make use of software rendering. You are free to ignore this if you do not care about being able to save conversations quickly.
If you're ready to learn how to use the program, let's begin!
License
The Fire Emblem Conversation Editor is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
Third-Party Licenses
A major portion of this project would not have been possible without SciresM's work on FEITS, on which the simulation panel was based. It is licensed under the GPLv3.
I am similarly thankful for SciresM's FEAT, from which the ability to directly edit .bin and .bin.lz files was derived. FEAT is licensed under the GPLv2 with the "any later version" clause.
Einstein95's DSDecmp is also present in this project, where it assists the FEAT-based code in loading the aforementioned archives. DSDecmp has no license.
Tomas Mikula's RichTextFX is used for syntax highlighting when editing scripts. It is licensed under a BSD 2-clause license.
iamlixiao's fork of PNGJ is used to enable the saving of large conversations as a single image when running in hardware-accelerated mode. The code from the fork has been included in the project repository, as it is not present in the Maven Central Repository and in any case uses an outdated Gradle build script targeting Java 6. It is licensed under the Apache License v2.0.
The Apache Commons Collections 4 is used for the sake of caching via the ReferenceMap class. This allows cached images to be garbage collected if the JVM's memory is running low. It is licensed under the Apache License v2.0.
A single method from JFXtras has been used in order to allow conversion of hex strings to colors. It is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license.