Pet Peeves of a Hacker

[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.

 

[DaleFails]

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.

 

[BrandoSheriff]

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.

 

[amcolash]

I really dislike when people post tutorials of the exact same thing. There are about 5 World Map hacking tutorials, yet not one actually worked for me, I made a new way and hopefully my tutorial will be useful.

I also dislike how closed this community is in terms of questions - the simple questions is a great thread, but at over 800 pages, I feel that not all of the questions are so simple....

Otherwise I am quite happy with the hacking community, and as I have yet to release my hack, things are going well!

 

[Mr.Man]

Replaying the game over and over.... And scripting might as well be an almost completely different language for me. And that I CAN NOT GET EDITED SPRITES TO SHOW UP IN THE GAME WHEN USING NSE 2X!!!

 

[Eelektross]

Shared map data.
I'm replacing the Contest Halls with faux Hidden Hollows in the hack I've been working on, but the way the game responds is awful, and doing it even the slightest bit incorrectly results in the game vomiting everywhere. It decided to destroy one of the maps in Fallarbor Town, even. Thank god for backups V:
Another one is the occasional text overflows in the Dex and move descriptions. Easy to fix, but the moment you pick them up your heart sinks right to your shoes.

 

[Harmonious Fusion]

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so there are a lot of things that annoy me. But there are a few things that particularly get on my nerves.

1. Bad spelling and grammar. A mistake every now and then is fine, because even the best of us make typos, but I've seen hacks where practically every other line has some sort of mistake. If you know spelling and grammar aren't your strong points, or if you don't speak English well at all, then maybe you should try to find a proofreader.

2. Storylines that sound like bad fanfics. Almost nothing will lower my opinion of a hack faster than a terrible plot. I mean, you don't have to be a stellar writer or anything (I know I'm not), but I don't want to play a game that sounds like it came from the darkest depths of fanfiction.net.

3. Fakemon. Never liked them, never will.

 

[Kevin]

Bad grammar in scripts and obvious tile errors. Ughh. -.-
As a hacker myself, I hate inserting tiles, as in indexing the palletes, resizing the tiles, actually inserting/squeezing them in the tilesets, and all that mess.

Oh and when scripting I forget to have all the values in HEX, so when I test it in-game I'm just like, wtf?

 

[Jesseb106]

Hmmmm, my only pet peeve would have to be when you're playing a hack, and it's easy to miss an important event. For example, I've recently been playing Ash Gray and I think I missed the Squirtle Squad event just because I didn't notice a path. I can understand this would be a problem that's easy to miss, but I just felt like ranting a bit.

 

[Ach7AC]

As a hacker:

Forgetting to create a back-up: Self-explanatory, this usually costs me hours and hours of time I could have used to add more content

Good sprites that are terrible in-game: It's sort of annoying to find out the sprite I've been working on for hours on end happens to have wonky colors or disproportional body parts when compared to other sprites.

Broken scripts: Even though I've been getting better, I just hate it when a script either simply does not work, or under performs.

Rude players: Take a look at the thread for Metapod's AshGray. It really surprised me how some of the players were pretty much going "Screw it, who cares about the hacker? Let's just take his work and build on it!"

Arrogant Hackers: Something I see far too common. Which seriously needs to stop. Your spriting skills are at a professional level? Good for you, but you clearly don't need to flame those that have just begun to sprite and put their badly-drawn sprites in their hacks.

As a player:

Overusing a specific weather condition: Honestly, I don't mind when weather conditions are used, as they give a nice aesthetic feel and helps develop strategy in battle, the problem is when over half of the time in a hack, the weather stays the same. In some hacks I've played, I was pretty much limited to using Fire-type Pokemon only indoors due to constant raining.

Requiring too much HM use: HMs are nice, they serve as decent broken bridges, such as putting bushes on a path to a town that story-wise should not be accessible at the moment. The problem is when the hacker practically requires you to carry HM slaves at all times.

Misusing its/it's and your/you're: For some reason, nothing irks me more than getting the above mixed up. I'm not really picky on grammar, but too many errors can really put me off a hack.

Schizophrenic difficulty: I do like difficult hacks, but I still play easy and average hacks from time to time. What I hate is when the hacker can't seem to decide whether to make his game easy or hard.

Going crazy on 4th/5th Gen mons without proper mechanics: Seriously, it's not that I'm a genwunner or anything like it, but some people just badly implement these later gen mons in their games. In the end, we end up getting useless mons such as Vespiquen without its signiture moves, or an Abomasnow without Snow Warning, or even a Darmanitan with only special moves. Really, can you imagine if someone attempted to put a Shedinja in Gen I or II without its ability?

 

[The_Show]

As a hacker: Downloading and finding the right tools, and hoping they don't have viruses. My computer is VERY slow, so just opening Explorer takes minutes, let alone downloading tools. Tilesets are time-consuming as well. A lot of people try to ask other people how to do things they haven't tried before, when they could just try it out and learn from their mistakes (I'm ashamed that I used to be one of these people not too long ago).

As a player: Incorrect grammer, poorly written plot, terrible Fakemons (if they are professionally looking, they are all right), A-map errors, and BUGS.
I hate bugs that screw up your game and you have to start all over.

 

[Pinta77]

As a player, my pet peeve is when people have more Advance text than new scripts in a hack. I also hate it when the map is shaped just like the old region.

As a hacker, everything is a pet peeve to me...