Pet Peeves of a Hacker

[SK3]

Originally Posted by Mikke

And an excellent game can be made with ugly graphics, awful music, and a poor storyline. Doesn't justify the game's makers being lazy.

Ugly graphics, awful music, and a poor storyline wouldn't make a good game in the first place...
And is it laziness not to have an entirely new tileset inserted? Because, unless you find yourself a custom tiler, the tiles you use probably have been used by other people, and will be used by more. So some people, including me, just don't change the tileset. You can't just attack someone's preference and call it laziness.

[war rock exe]

I hate how people but hacks in the Hacks Showcase section when they aren't even complete. I also hate when people take forever to release betas or release an alpha that only a minute long XD

[DarkMatterLemon]

I have very few rants for this.

I dislike the people who rush the guy/girl/team making the hack when the're taking time out of there life to make hacks for people to play or what ever the reason. It's rude and childish. If I where some of these hackers I would drop or not share my project because of that.

And my 2nd thing. I hate getting lost in a hack. It's probably because I hardly read what the game is telling me though. lol

Not to be a suck up. But if your a hacker my hat is off to you.
I'm making a personal hack myself and it's really hard. Tile sets are nightmares.
And don't get me started on over world sprites lol. that is all. :)

[agentgeo]

Just like giradialkia said, I get really annoyed by people that complain about hacks not in English. Really? Is it so hard to learn the language or just suck it up and play? Come on. Give the hacker a break and enjoy the hack for what it is, don't demand an English version.

[firekoopa]

Well, my pet peeve would be Fakemon. I don't like ones even that are considered "good" (I'm looking at Pokemon Sienna. Some of them are good, such as the fire Starter-I-Forgot-Name-Off, but the rest I just find ugly. That's why I tend to stick to a team of canon Pokemon in that game)

I also dislike those little kids who think it's funny to make an "adult" Pokemon hack by adding "Hi my naim is profasor ***** and i like pokimon and raep them lulz" and stuff like that. (Hope I'm not getting any infractions for that terrible imitation)

Hm... I think that's about it. Oh right, I'm also quite annoyed at the fact that I lack the time to actually properly sit down and start learning Scripting. I mean, a three hour limit a day and only on weekends? WTF parents, you were never that ridiculously strict! (Personal problem though so ignore the last point)

[Obix]

Dont want to sound like a douche or anything but ive read all these "pet peeves" and complaints about using old tiles or having sprites that are the same as original games adding new pokemon everytime a new game comes out, Ya it sucks when you release a game and the players want mods or the new pokemon added and you have the ones that say oh well you didnt use any custom sprites. All i can say is haters gonna hate there is someone that is always going to talk down your project but as hackers you gotta remember that youve done something alot of people dont understand how to do and the haters are usually the ones that tried to do it and just couldnt do it but ya it can get annoying but dont listen to other people keep doing you

[siper x]

1. when people rant about a hack instead of give constructive crit.
2. when people complain about how the story is too similar to nintendo's stories, i mean nintendo's games have been popular for how long? it works!
3. bad fakemon ideas. when people can make good ones, i dont complain, afterall with nintendo eveery new region has new pokemon.
4. when people rant hackers. they take time out of their day to make these hacks.

[Alistair]

Originally Posted by agentgeo

...Is it so hard to learn the language...

Yes, it is. It takes years of studying a language to become fluent in it if you aren't a native speaker.

As for my personal pet peeve, mine would have to be completely disjointed graphics. I don't mind bad graphics as much if they're consistent, but having graphics that don't come together evenly is incredibly jarring and off-putting to me.

As for when I hacked, I can't really remember if I had any pet peeves. It's been such a long time since I touched a ROM.

[Anbuja's_BlooDY]

1. Is that whenever i insert tiles and have them 3+ weeks in the ROM i start to dislike them even thought therye good, i just cant get satisfied with my work.
2. people puttting hacks down just because the sprites,scripts,palletes etc. arent that perfect, if u can do it better go ahead~
3. i really hate much what other people said until now like complaining about different language, or complaining a beta isnt coming out, or asking about release dates when u stated in the first post that its against the rules, thats probably the reason why i dont really post in hack threads or anywhere else that much.
4. other tings too but i dont want to repeat other peoples thoughts~

[Alignment]

1) When you finish a long script, go in game, then you get the white screen. That white screen's been the cause of much annoyance. (I keep forgetting to backup)

2) When you sprite something for your game, only to realise that it looks terrible in comparison to the official things.

3) Losing motivation to work on something because you can't figure it out. I spent weeks trying to figure out how to make your Pokemon evolve during a battle (when it levels).

4) Making promises about updates then not keeping them. I have quite the reputation in that lol. Made a second hack, promised updates, went inactive :D

5) Pallette 7. It changes and I don't like it changing. I used it personally for my gym, then realised that I had to import the pallette every time I used the gym.

6) When you talk to someone and they say "Vo". Ussually happens when you use a pointer in a script but forget to put something there.

7) Beta testing. I can never tell if my game is too hard or too easy or boring. That's because I know what's going to happen, where to go, who to talk to and where I hid the secret items at. I have the luxury of using my little brother, but I'm sure most of us don't have that :P

8) Having to make new tiles to fix tile errors. Especially when you need to sprite them. It's not hard, but it ussually takes time to make sure that once it's inserted it's the right amount of pixels from left, right, top and bottom.

9) Hacking tutorials that are very badly done and very obvious. For example, a tutorial on how to change the hero's sprite in Fire Red and all it is, is a wall of text with no evident organisation or pictures.

10) Hackers that call others bad. OK, you're good. Stop stroking your own dick and making fun of people now. I know not all hacks are as good as others and that not all hackers have the time or committment to make a good hack. That being said, we should not make fun of newer hackers. It's demotivational, rude, and just plain saddening because often time the people saying so, don't know what they are doing themselves.

11) Hacks that are very silly are annoying. I don't mean funny, I mean pretty stupid. I was responsible for this when I started my first hack (now somewhere in the depths of my recycling bin). You go outside, there is nothing. You find a shiny Mewtwo, he is now your starter ect..ect..

12) Some of the default graphics. Some of the default tiles are fine, but some of them I don't really like. In my opinion, R/S/E is a mess. Most of the tiles are very poor, the overworlds don't look very appealing, even the Pokemon sprites look rushed compared the FR/LG. If you don't believe me look at Gloom's Emerald backsprite.

13) Overuse of an element. Most of the time this is a mapping tile or scripting element. I.e move camera script every 5 mins in the game. I.e.2 Too many little rock tiles

[Midnight Bear]

I'm usually pretty positive when it comes to playing hacks, but there are a few things that really bother me:

When the protagonist speaks. In a Pokémon game, it just feels very unnatural and jarring. It's not bad, in and of itself, but I don't like it. At all.

Overuse of swearing. It doesn't tend to be too big of a problem, but sometimes it is. Now, I understand that sometimes it is appropriate - but when it's every other word it just gets irritating.

Grammar / spelling errors. Now, I understand that there are some words that are so uncommon that people don't even realize they're misspelling them, and, of course, there's the occasional typo. My other pet peeves are about style choices - this is not. Unlike the others, it looks lazy and unprofessional (not to mention irritating), which are not things that I would hope that any aspiring ROM Hackers would want to convey.

Teams. Well, not exactly - I've no problem with teams in general. My issue is with teams that the "leader" of the team does absolutely nothing, besides come up with the original idea. You know, when people find out about hacking, and they jump in, feel in over their head, so they recruit a half dozen people to do everything for them. I can understand people having difficulty with some aspects of hacking - if they didn't have any whatsoever I'd be amazed - the problem with them shielding themselves with a team is that it, ultimately, just hurts them. They never learn how to do it, because they don't have to. Ask for clarification and help, don't give up and declare that you need a team.

As for making ROM hacks, I'm okay with pretty much everything. Except, I hate doing graphics - I'm not a sprite artist by any stretch. Also, I hate typos in codes, both scripting and asm. For example, I remember, when I was first learning how to script, I made a simple applymovement script, and, when I loaded it up, the game messed up [it didn't crash, but the player sprite and camera messed up]. I spent, like an hour, looking over that script to see if I'd forgotten to set something, or set something incorrectly. Finally, I figured it out - instead of "applymovement", I'd mistakenly written "applemovement".

[itman]

Things I hate doing:

Inserting OWs. It has to get done, but it takes so long to change all the pointers, point all the frames, insert the sprite, usually have to recolor it...ughh.

Tiles I add always bore me and I start hating them after a few weeks. I now don't add tiles until the very end.

Things I hate that other people do:

People that make a hack but use ruby and or firered's original scripts. I feel like I'm playing the same game just with edited maps.

Everyone seems to be so obsessed with tiles now a days. Sure they look good in screenies, but in game after the first map nobody pays much attention anymore.

[NatureKeeper]

I've stopped ROM-Hacking for who knows how long, but there is something that annoys me. People that use Advance-Text and call it a hack. Heck, I've seen a video on YouTube called Pokemon Ruby Super Hack, and it was an awfully lame hack whipped out in Advance Text in five minutes.

The things I hate doing? Music and Tile hacking. Thanks to the lack of proper tile editing software, I use Advance Map (I do not have an idea how outdated I am, to be frank, it might've became easier lately), which has no sense of palettes and indexing, and usually destroys the rest of my palette. Plus, the palettes produced by AdvanceMap cannot be imported by IrfanView (I haven't tried GIMP yet), so you need to recolor each and every part carefully and not forget a single foreign pixel or else your game is a mess. Plus, you cannot identify the problem, especially if the colours are too similar. The reason for the former, however, lies mainly in how heavily incompatible Sappy is with later versions of Windows, but I guess a new program got release lately.

As for DS hacking, to start with, PPRE just ruins the scripts. Plus, having to separate the ROMs into files and use a ROM map to find everything was downright frustrating that I quit six scripts into the game. I even forgot what the project was about, mainly.

[CrystalStatic]

When I feel like I need all of the tiles in A-Map to be exactly correct and look exactly how I want them to look...

[Controversial?]

Sticking to the formula.

As in story-wise. Unless there's a really good reason, I just find that hacks that all start out the same just don't inspire me to play, or help make them.

[Trainer Jun]

My pet peeves:
1. Arguments in threads. Everyone has different opinions. Deal with it. I surf threads daily for info, advice, and tools. I don't like seeing witless banter. It makes me think that the hackers I'm gleaning from are children.
2. People expecting more from a single romhacker than can be given. I'm new, so don't expect much more than new maps and custom scripts. I can script well. That's about it.

[Slike]

The only problems I have in hacks I play are level curves and balancing issues. A bad level curve can be incredibly annoying, especially when I have to suddenly grind five levels. Balancing issues are less of an annoyance, but a Pokemon doesn't need base 130 attack to be good. (Granted, I'm fairly guilty of both of these.)

As for hacking itself... Oh boy.

1. Level curves. Your test runs are half dedicated to make sure this isn't screwed up, and if you need to fix this, it can take a long time.

2. A-Text. It's frustrating that I have to keep things I edit under the limit that's already set. Granted, there's probably a way to make longer text, but I never found one.

3. A-Tack. Sometimes attacks break. That's fair, and is always my fault. The problem though, is that if you try to FIX the attack, the prgram crashes. Thus, if something is broken, it's suddenly extremely difficult to fix.

4. Water tiles. This one is silly and easily fixed, but if you're mapping, you have to have specific land tiles just below a pool of water with certain tilesets. Only now have I realized how easily I could have fixed that, but it was never a huge deal.

5. Grass in Fire Red. There are five tiles, and you kind of have to scramble them around if you want the grass to look good. This is another silly problem, but it annoys me.

6. The fact that YAPE doesn't open or save if you have A-Map or XSE open. I like to have all my editors open as I take care of things, but I have to go back and open things because of this.

Yes, I am very petty.

[Teh Blazer]

My biggest is when you save every step of the way and create a back up after every time you edit. Then the one time you forget to back up your progress and it gets screwed up, losing you a couple hours worth of hacking.

It's fun the first time, but recreating a duplicate script from scratch or re-inserting a tileset from the start get's terribly painful the second time around.

[DaleH771]

1. Without a shadow of a doubt, continually testing scripts to find out they still won't work and spending a good half hour getting it right, and STILL having to make the script not do what you want it to...

2. Clashing palettes... When people have a mix of bright green for trees yet a dark mellow green for grass and then a really dark almost black green for something else with brown flowers and ugh. At make your palettes match!?

3. Tiles that clash with the OW's. It's all very well and good you have made your hack look kind of like a DS style game but for crying out loud, you're still using the R/S/E or FR/LG overworlds and it's looks stupid.

4. The most annoying for me... When you change an interior map for Firered in Advance Map, it will change it for every house that has the same interior throughout the entire game and you don't discover this until later on, and it's just irritating.


Mainly graphical issues... But apart from that ;D

[johnr754]

One of them, as a new hacker, is changing tiles. Once I tried to change the rocky path from FireRed to a stone texture. I got it done, but it would not load the tileset correctly, so I put in the regular stone, and it glitched out. I got it fixed, but this was just annoying.

[thanethane98]

For some reason scripting doesn't really get on my nerves, no matter how many times I have to work through it again. But, there are two things that really annoy me with rom hacking.

1. Image editing of any kind. I'm terrible at it (and have very little patience for it), so I just try to avoid it in any way that I can.

2. Music editing. I'd actually like to do this, but it's definitely one of the tougher things to do in hacking (for me, at least). I still don't hate this as much as image editing though.

[johnr754]

Another thing to add is when your rom stops working. When you start up your rom hack, the screen turns white, and a savestate is needed. But it won't load any scripts. At this point, you feel mad, and you have to restart.

[Darkrai Lv.1000]

One of my biggest ones is screwing up, whether it's in ASM or scripting, then solving the problem seconds after asking for help. I do get a good sense of satisfaction afterward though.

Another one is importing tiles from other games. So tedious.

[tajaros]

The trainer sprite errors in A-trainer are the one's that are getting on my nerves, especially when you forgot to make a backup!

Also Image editing in unlz makes me wanna blow up If i get any errors!

[Ferox]

Hacking happily in one part of the rom/map, only to find that it caused an error 3 backups-ago in a totally different area that you weren't looking at.