Obsidian SO3 Dictionary

A fully-linked implementation of the Star Ocean: Till the End of Time dictionary feature as an Obsidian vault.

In this repo you'll find:

• The Obsidian vault proper (in so3-dictionary)
• The JS I wrote for all the text manipulation up until I thought "That's enough hand-rolled text manipulation coding in JS for one lifetime, thanks" (in js-scripts)
• MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE GAME. Yeah, it's almost 17 years old at this point, but this is just a fair warning!

Currently the CSS theme powering the appearance is stable (-ish) in Obsidian version 0.10.8. Updates will occur to restabilize as Obsidian rapidly develops!

Table of contents

• How to use the vault
• Differences from the in-game dictionary
• Differences in functionality from a typical Obsidian CSS theme
• Steps I took to make this (in brief)
• Disclaimer
• Credits
• Screenshots!

How to use the vault

1. Download and install Obsidian.
2. Download/clone down this repo.
3. Copy the so3-dictionary folder somewhere (or, use it right from the repo folder via the next step).
4. Open Obsidian and point it to the so3-dictionary folder.
5. Click around the category folders or tags and enjoy!

Differences from the in-game dictionary

Entry text changes

• All "(Part 2)" and/or "(Part 3)" entries are now moved to their respective base entries, under "Part 2/3" headings.
• All entry types (Weapon, Universe, Scientific Term etc.) have been added to the bottom of each entry's file as #tags.

Linking as per in-game term highlighting

• Many more links were added as I thought appropriate. For example, there were some instances of "humans" or "dragons" that are unlinked in-game, even when almost all other instances are.
• All Remote Station and Federation Station entry titles had their # characters removed, but in-entry text correctly links to them. This is due to Obsidian's "link to heading" feature interpreting the numbers as headings.
• All instances of "Federation" link to the entry for the Pangalactic Federation.
• Some highlighted-in-game terms that reference non-existent entries remain unlinked, but are still highlighted as they would be in-game.
• Certain entry types (such as "Myth/Tradition") were altered to get around Obsidian's tag-parsing limitations.

Differences in functionality from a typical Obsidian CSS theme

All of these can be turned off by going into .obsidian/theme/so3-dict.css and commenting out/deleting code in the "SO3-Specific Presentational Styles" section. Use Ctrl/Cmd+F in your text editor and search for "SO3" to get there fast.

• Your actions bar is now in the bottom right of your note's pane. The entry type now covers the top right of the header so it had to go somewhere!
• The "drag this note" icon has been moved into the square in the top-left of the note.
• All hover-able links pop up a white hand, intended to be analogous to the in-game white glove on menu choices.
• Tooltips when hovering over titles/tabs are removed.
• Note actions have had their descriptive text altered (this text is overall-theme-specific and will have to be disabled from above the SO3-specific styles. Search for the descriptive text to find where it's defined.)

Steps I took to make this (in brief)

1. Paste the entries into four plaintext files as per the top-level categories in-game. BIG credit to Rashidi's Dictionary FAQ on GameFAQs for that starting point.
2. Generate separate entries with NodeJS, adding them to folders by category.
3. Manually go into each file to remove all the newlines added by GameFAQs' formatting.
4. Breathe.
5. Hack away for days on a solution to parse each entry, [[internal-link-ifying]] each reference (as well as variants like plurals), all without clashes or overlaps.
6. Get really close to intended, then just use Visual Studio Code find-and-replace to get the rest and fix bizarre output errors, so I can move on with my life lol.

Disclaimer

I DO NOT OWN STAR OCEAN: TILL THE END OF TIME OR RELATED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY/TRADEMARKS. Any applicable ownership rights/copyrights belong to the game's publisher Square Enix and/or its developer triAce, or any other unmentioned copyright/trademark owners.

This project is purely a labor of passion for the game, is NOT FOR PROFIT, and is intended for NON-COMMERCIAL, PERSONAL, PRIVATE USE.

Credits

All the entries use text scraped from the Star Ocean: Till the End of Time Dictionary FAQ on GameFAQs. All credit for compiling that text goes to the author, GameFAQs user Rashidi.

All I did was manipulate that text and programmatically add <span> tags to that text to generate the Markdown files (and quite a few manually...). BIG credit to Rashidi for actually transcribing what they did and compiling that FAQ.

Screenshots!