At least I am not begging to stay with binary
(meme)
Seriously. Show people the results instead of telling them. Make amazing stuff. We are all here to make things!
Binary has more results on that end in gen 3. Binary's merits are plainly visible in the fact that more projects seem to get finished on binary. That's not enlightened centrism, it's just blatantly true. I KNOW decomps are better - instead of worrying about binary holding the scene back, push it forward with what you have yourself. Be the change you want to see! I wanna play everyone's hacks!
Gen 3 binary hacking has been around since Ruby and Sapphire released over 20 years ago now. The Gen 3 decomps haven't been usable by most people until two-ish years ago, if that. Two years may actually be generous. Of course there are going to be more binary projects; that's a given with the time spans involved and the current inertia that binary hacking has in the scene (that I am trying to mitigate with posts like these). I myself have a decomp hack that is completed. There are several in the works right now. "Show me the money," in this case is a non sequitur. It doesn't take a lot to see why pointing at Pokemon Quartz from 2006 and being like, "Look at all these completed binary hacks! If decomps are so great, where are all the decomp hacks?" isn't really an argument for or against the decomps. It's disingenuous at best.
I think it's important to separate the process of decomp hacking from the projects created with it, because the quality of a project doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the method used to create it, or how the method compares to other methods.
Imagine for a moment that <insert your favorite hack here> was created purely with a hex editor and no other tools. You wouldn't go around advocating for people to give up all hacking tools in favor of a hex editor, just because an amazing hack was made with such a method. The qualities that make a hack good aren't dependent on what method the hack was developed with.
Are Unbound and Crown good because they were created with binary hacking, or are they good because they were created by talented people who put a lot of effort into creating them?
The qualities that make a hack good aren't dependent on what method the hack was developed with.
Point missed again. No one would have to advocate for using "just a hex editor". Just like no one has to advocate the binary tools that made Unbound, or whatever made Crown. It's just the automatic assumption that beginners will reach - "I want to do what these people did!". And apparently OP is infuriated with beginners being pushed towards binary when decomp exists. There are zero topics going "screw decomp, just use binary and make Unbound!" It just happens naturally. Unbound and Crown are not good because they were created with binary hacking, but this is an assumption outsiders could reach and OP knows it, which is why he created this topic in the first place (his words), so let's not act like we need to separate process and product at this stage. If we separate them, this topic doesn't need to exist at all *shrug*
The facts are that binary is prevalent because binary hacks are cool because decomp hacks are not cool (yet). No one has to advocate anything here - this is what newcomers will experience. The good solution is to make better decomp hacks. The solution OP has chosen is to ask people to stop making binary hacks.
That is the antithesis of the original post good sir
My point is that people in this thread are using "look at all of these cool binary hacks" and "look at the lack of cool decomp hacks" as arguments for why binary hacking is just as good(or better) as decomp hacking, when they should actually be comparing the merits of the methods themselves.
Gen 3 binary hacking has been around since Ruby and Sapphire released over 20 years ago now. The Gen 3 decomps haven't been usable by most people until two-ish years ago, if that. Two years may actually be generous. Of course there are going to be more binary projects; that's a given with the time spans involved and the current inertia that binary hacking has in the scene (that I am trying to mitigate with posts like these). I myself have a decomp hack that is completed. There are several in the works right now. "Show me the money," in this case is a non sequitur. It doesn't take a lot to see why pointing at Pokemon Quartz from 2006 and being like, "Look at all these completed binary hacks! If decomps are so great, where are all the decomp hacks?" isn't really an argument for or against the decomps. It's disingenuous at best.
U. Flame's post being a good example of this. If a kid can only figure out how to use Advance Text and AMap, they would still have an easier time with the decomps. Porymap is more user-friendly that AMap and the kid could search for the text they're looking to change and edit it without regard for offsets or repointing with no need to understand scripting. Even so, the terrible scripting system has a replacement in Poryscript that is easier to learn and has robust documentation to get the hypothetical kid started if they wanted to actually script. You don't necessarily need to understand or even be aware of what's going on under the hood to follow step-by-step setup instructions and run make after you've made your edits. Not to mention, starting the kids on the decomps gives them the opportunity to learn real skills if they decide to try out some C. If the decomps were around ~18 years ago when I was first starting as a clueless kid, I would've been programming for this entire time. I can't even imagine how important that would have been for my life and its trajectory. Don't rob kids of this opportunity by leading them astray.
Hey, I'm someone who primarily comes from SMW hacking, and honestly seeing this debate is a little interesting to me. It's one that's popped up in our community before so I figure I'd chime in a little. We still do primarily binary editing through a few tools, but honestly that's partially due to the fact that SNES asm editing is much more approachable at a binary level due to tools like ASAR, and partially due to the fact our tools are actually quite polished and tend to -not- cause random corruptions. While I've seen people argue bar of entry for newbies as the big issue (and yes, you are -never- going to get as many adopters getting their feet wet with hacking when they have to set up an entire dev environment as opposed to running one exe on one file) I'd bring up that you're fighting against years of experience and resources as well. When you work on a large project for as long as some of these take, you establish a workflow, and adapting to a new workflow can be very difficult. When someone who has finished hacks in the past decides to start a new project, they're likely going to go with what's familiar over something intensely different unless the point of the new project is to play around with these new tools. If someone is used to making direct hex edits and working with the tools that are still considered up to date for binary hacking, that's probably what they're going to go with. Swapping out the tools that are broken for similar ones that don't disrupt said workflow.
And past that, you're not just fighting initial user experience, established user experience, but sheer resources as well. Yes, writing C code might be easier than staring at a hex editor, but following a quick guide to flip a few bits on a 10 year old forum post to make a small change is much more straightforward than hoping that some people in a discord might be able to point you at what file the function you need to modify is in. Furthermore, not everyone is a programmer, and not everyone wants to be. I can not stress this enough as someone from another community, the sheer idea that you are going to have to write your own code for certain features is daunting as hell when, well, a .ips or bps or ups or whatever format your community uses is -right there-. Having to merge in different codebases through git for community resource patches is, frankly to me, still actually kinda ridiculous (I think I'd rather do what I've seen with FE hacking and have a binary tool setup with a makefile and keep my patches separate). I understand pokemon hacking is very different, a lot more volatile, and all y'all can be a lot more hostile to eachother, but you're always dealing with people who regardless of their skill or time or whatever just want to make a game. Until using a decompilation is just as accessible as using a binary you aren't going to be able to get the majority of your community to switch over, and telling people they are actively dragging everyone around them down by doing so isn't helping.
Over in SMW we've argued for a long time about moving to a disassembly, and I've been told by some of the experienced ASM hackers over there that frankly at this point, for 99% of the people making hacks it's just not worth it. We're ultimately shackled to Lunar Magic, and despite it having some really real weird downsides and its own drama (it is utterly ridiculous that an export overworld function is a hard no) it is an incredibly polished tool, so there's an incredibly slim chance of replacing it. It is still to this day the most straightforward and easy to use level editor for hacking I have ever used, and it even beats Mario Maker 2 for me (though I think I like MM1 more). If you need to touch the code, it's much easier to use the disassembly as reference and write an ASM patch to insert with ASAR since you're going to have to work around Lunar Magic's ASM modifications anyways. Our entire tool ecosystem is built around this, and even then getting people to even switch tools that work in this ecosystem can be like pulling teeth. There are people who would rather stick with zsnes than switch to a new version of addmusic that doesn't cause more accurate emulators to explode. If you want that keep everything separate and have a dev environment build experience that a decomp provides, you can set that up too (users in the community have) since all the tools work straight from command line. Unless somebody comes up with a stronger tool that works cleanly with a disassembly, or there's a viable reason for us to move to a C decomp over a 65816 disassembly or binary editing it's a very very very hard sell, and I'd argue that GBA pokemon is basically at that crossroads even if there's competing tools and standards. It shouldn't be anywhere as hard a sell if the tools for the decomp are easy to use as I see argued, but being super aggro and elitist about it is going to make it a harder one. You'd be better off trying to make the experience of using decomp as close to "download files, run LunatoneMagic.exe, point at decomp folder" as you possibly can.
Sorry if this got a bit rambly and lost focus a bit, it's a late night post from a long day and my adhd is going all over the place from it.
You'd be better off trying to make the experience of using decomp as close to "download files, run LunatoneMagic.exe, point at decomp folder" as you possibly can.
I'm sure people would naturally gravitate more to decomp the closer it gets to the level of ease binary is. As it is, the appeal of "download Advance Map, double click the .exe, open the ROM, go wild" remains one of the biggest draws to binary for the inexperienced.
I'm sure many will call me an elitist for spelling it out this plainly. I am not an, "elite," I just have more experience than 99% of you.
also note you go out of your way to not call yourself elitest while in the same breadth calling yourself the top 1%
Why Should We Abandon Binary Hacking?
Even just within the past 2 years there's been huge strides on the binary front, making many things
people thought impossible possible, and simple to boot.
Decomp is NOT a necessity.
its a choice.
The levels of irony here are too intense 💀💀