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Chit-Chat: ROM Hacking Daily Chit Chat

10,078
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15
Years
  • Age 32
  • UK
  • Seen Oct 17, 2023
Does anyone have any links to good posts on "design philosophy" like these posts by DoesntKnowHowToPlay, involving analysis of concrete examples of game inbalance and looking at alternatives? There's no shortage of technical discussion in this section, it'd be nice to have some more ivory-tower thinking as well.

I don't know of any - but would be an interesting thread!

Does anyone here likes the Day and Night System? I, myself, don't like it.

I don't care for it, seems a bit gimmicky and I always found it a bit of an annoyance in the real games as I would play them at the same time normally ><.
 
1
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10
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  • Age 32
  • Seen Feb 16, 2016
ORAS Mega Evolution Edit, Wild Pokemon Edit

I know most of you are aware of ORAS hacking :)
But heres a few things I have done. I currently lack the time to do any full hacks, but the possibilities are endless. Once the initial "decrypting" and "extracting" of of the rom is done, its not to difficult to work with.

Here's a few of my videos :) I hope to work on a full Rom Hack Project this coming summer break. But smaller projects like editing wild encounters for "nuzlocke" and "randomizer nuzlocke" is simple and easy :)




 
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17
Posts
9
Years
  • Age 29
  • Seen Apr 6, 2015
Anyone of you successfully implemented a season-based tileset change yet?
 

Danny0317

Fluorite's back, brah
1,067
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10
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  • Age 24
  • Seen Nov 19, 2023
Anyone of you successfully implemented a season-based tileset change yet?

I saw a spanish hack that did that, I think..

What do you guys think of incorporation of real life things in hacks?

Like for example, in my hack, I'm adding Somalian pirates (it's not exactly a SERIOUS hack, though lol..), but like other things like people acknowledging the real world and such?
 
1,344
Posts
14
Years
  • Seen Dec 10, 2021
Anyone of you successfully implemented a season-based tileset change yet?

I've seen it done before, but honestly I don't really see the utility of it. If you're playing a hack, chances are you're not going to be playing it for more than a few days at most. In 90% of situations players would only ever be seeing one season. If you're basing it on RTC at least, it seems a bit useless to me.
 
136
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10
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  • Age 35
  • Seen yesterday
What do you guys think of incorporation of real life things in hacks?
No thanks.

For one, Gamefreak have moved sharply away from referencing the real world in Pokémon. Kanto was supposed to be the Kanto region of Japan, hence the references to Tiksi/Podkamennaya Tunguska, Indian elephants and salmon, but the other names are more fanciful rather than being called Kansai/Johto, Kyushu/Hoenn and Hokkaido/Sinnoh, to say nothing of New York/Unova and Northern France/Kalos.

For another, it's far too easy to date your hack horribly. Your reference to Somali pirates will be utterly lost on people in five years' time.
 
10,078
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15
Years
  • Age 32
  • UK
  • Seen Oct 17, 2023
I think it depends on the context a lot - small easter eggs that hint at a connection can be quite fun in an otherwise serious hack, but if you're being bombarded with confusing information linking the worlds then everything becomes that bit more complicated.
 
5,256
Posts
16
Years
Going to spark some discussion on something totally irrelevant — this post in my Movie tool thread highlights something intriguing.

Why is it that the tools we've developed for ROM hacking are so flawed, and even closed? Tools like AdvanceMap have features like a free space finder, tileset mapper/inserter and other things, but the code and the parts of it that would really benefit the community, are not made available. Not only that, but tools don't appear to be made with extensibility in mind.

Wouldn't it be nice to imagine the time when, with the contributions of many others, you could have a map editor that supports a script editor plugin, movement editor plugin, and other fancy plugins, to really integrate the ROM hacking experience? It's something the largely closed-off Pokémon ROM hacking community lacks. If things were easy these days, we wouldn't need Movie.

I think you'll find a lot of the new WIP tools like G3HS, MEH, SEA, Blue Spider, etc. are all open source (even XSE is iirc), it's just that they're all rather unstable at the moment which is why hackers still use the closed-source (and sometimes just as buggy) alternatives. Not to point fingers, but I do think a reason why so many past tools were closed-source stems from the exclusivity mindset that was prevalent in the community a few years ago, and went into things like assembly routines and sometimes even scripts.

Thankfully I think that mindset is finally shifting, with things like the ASM Resource Thread, Quick R&D, Move Resource Thread, Ability Resource Thread, etc. and all those tools I mentioned, as well as the growing presence of C in hacks and so on. So yeah, we are getting there, gradually!
 
17
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9
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  • Age 29
  • Seen Apr 6, 2015
But who will be able and willing to create the plugins? Also, such a dynamic way of programming involves plenty of time. Coding plugins for everything and make them work correctly will take several years, in my opinion...
 
This is part of the reason that I can't wait for the disassembly of Firered and Emerald to happen. No more of this shot-in-the-dark, what-does-this-do Tauros crap. We'll have the routines, we'll have all the offsets, we can modify things easily and in a vacuum. We won't need all these tools, at least, not to the extent we do now.

Basically, once we understand how everything works, tools will become less important. The tools that are made in that era of hacking will be more precise, more transparent, and largely just for quality of life purposes. I imagine having a Trainer editor to lay things out in a pleasing way will still be a thing, for example. Updating the engine will be something a few people do every time a game is released and then made open-source (think MrDS' ROMbase).

That is, assuming that my understanding of how disassemblies help hacking communities is correct.
 

Blah

Free supporter
1,924
Posts
11
Years
But who will be able and willing to create the plugins? Also, such a dynamic way of programming involves plenty of time. Coding plugins for everything and make them work correctly will take several years, in my opinion...

Actually, no. If someone decided to program a tool with customization in mind, it would be very easy to have a nice little addon. It's important to note that most of these tool writers are self-taught people who are making these tools for free. Anyways, the reason I'm saying it would be easy is because the base which the tool was made for isn't changing. Fire Red will be Fire Red forever. Tools only need to support repointing. It's all just poor programming practice which has lead to the problems we're having today.


This is part of the reason that I can't wait for the disassembly of Firered and Emerald to happen. No more of this shot-in-the-dark, what-does-this-do Tauros crap. We'll have the routines, we'll have all the offsets, we can modify things easily and in a vacuum. We won't need all these tools, at least, not to the extent we do now.

Basically, once we understand how everything works, tools will become less important. The tools that are made in that era of hacking will be more precise, more transparent, and largely just for quality of life purposes. I imagine having a Trainer editor to lay things out in a pleasing way will still be a thing, for example. Updating the engine will be something a few people do every time a game is released and then made open-source (think MrDS' ROMbase).

That is, assuming that my understanding of how disassemblies help hacking communities is correct.

While I do agree with you that the disassembly projects are quite awesome and useful, I don't see them being successful in terms of user base. Most hackers coming into the scene are learning via tutorials posted and using tools their predecessors have left behind. There's still going to be a learning curve, and I'm sure many hackers are going to still stick to the conventional hacking because it's more familiar to them. We'll see how it ends up down the line, but I don't think that it'll have much of the fire works launch we'd all love it to have (at least not in the near future).
---

I kind of agree with Spherical Ice's comment about the mindset of hackers in the past. Everyone was on that, "Oh check out this thing my hack can do that no one else can!" mindset and it really hindered the growth of this community. If you discover something, post your findings! Help grow the ROM hacking knowledge. I really respect people who have this kind of mentality, including a lot of those who post in the R/D section, tutorials section and resources threads.

I wouldn't really mind the closed source aspects of many of these tools, if only the tool creator documented their findings as well. So lets take a tool like A-text for example. Wouldn't it be so much better if not only did this tool edit text, but it gave you pointers to where the text it's editing is? Now imagine that A-text read it's whole data base of in-game strings in some nicely formatted table file. Something like [Pointer] [Brief description of pointer]. That way the user can add more pointers into the data base themselves. This would allow the creator to keep the tool closed source, while still allowing "expansion" of the tool.

As it stands now, most tools don't support expansion, repointing the tables they deal with ect. Table files of pointers is the key to solving this. Hopefully people catch on and realise it's not about open/closed source as it is about customization. GS3 tried something similar, but unfortunately their "ini" file didn't make any sense to anyone who wasn't the creator. He should've split his ini into separate files about separate pointers/data. Anyways, I'll stop there to prevent this into becoming a post about tool development. :P
 
3,044
Posts
9
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I have a question. We are not allowed to distribute ROMs, right? We distribute IPS and UPS files. But, can we distribute .bak files? Like Pokemon Something.bak. So, the player just need to rename the file extension.
 
6,355
Posts
18
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  • Seen Apr 16, 2020
I have a question. We are not allowed to distribute ROMs, right? We distribute IPS and UPS files. But, can we distribute .bak files? Like Pokemon Something.bak. So, the player just need to rename the file extension.

A .bak file is stil the same ROM, just with a different extension, so no.
 

Blah

Free supporter
1,924
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11
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What do you guys think are some cool field moves to have? Try to think of ones which don't require interaction with an overworld to work (i.e Rock Smash).
 
6,355
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18
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  • Seen Apr 16, 2020
What do you guys think are some cool field moves to have? Try to think of ones which don't require interaction with an overworld to work (i.e Rock Smash).

Marble, Quartz's sequel was going to have the move Spider Web as a field move, where you'd use it on top of buildings in a specific big city to access other places. Something like Gust that could unearth wild Pokémon from the ground/sand, maybe. Or Mind Reader, that can be used to either see what NPCs are thinking or, to make it easier and maybe more interesting, Pokémon.

If I were you I'd just go through the list of all the moves until I come up with something. :p
 

Blah

Free supporter
1,924
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11
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Marble, Quartz's sequel was going to have the move Spider Web as a field move, where you'd use it on top of buildings in a specific big city to access other places. Something like Gust that could unearth wild Pokémon from the ground/sand, maybe. Or Mind Reader, that can be used to either see what NPCs are thinking or, to make it easier and maybe more interesting, Pokémon.

If I were you I'd just go through the list of all the moves until I come up with something. :p

Mind reader looks interesting, but that would require a seperate dialog (one that probably changes after a while) for almost all NPC in the game. I mean, unless the think of the same stuff all game.

Fuji suggested I read through all the moves too. Right now I'm hoping I can avoid that :D
 
6,355
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18
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  • Seen Apr 16, 2020
Mind reader looks interesting, but that would require a seperate dialog (one that probably changes after a while) for almost all NPC in the game. I mean, unless the think of the same stuff all game.

Yeah, that's why I suggested Mind Reader could just work on Pokémon, instead. It could just be generic NPC dialogue for most of them, and it could be used to get useful information from specific Pokémon in maps.
 
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