What is your most disliked aspect of ROM hacking?

Planning, writing, tile inserting, scripting, spriting, working with data entry - there's so many different tasks that make up the ROM hacking process. Everyone's got their strengths, weaknesses and preferences. There's always one aspect in any kind of project that we'll find mind numbingly dull!

For me, mapping is my least favourite thing to do. I'm not that great at it, I get bored of it easily, I find it too time consuming, and frankly I'd rather be doing something else for my projects.

Item creation, and certain parts of music hacking.

Item creation is just kind of tedious, (at least the sprite inserting part of it, FSF doesn't work in my circumstances, and I have to close out of HXD every time).
But after you insert all the stuff, it ain't so bad, but that first part is irritating.

I like music hacking to an extent, but drum sounds are just the worst. Also looping can be kind of finicky to get right, not because of where to put the start of the loop. The end can be kind of tough though, since Anvil Studio only goes in seconds, but with a little playing around it can sound good.

Drum sounds on the other hand, are just annoying. Add up not knowing what's compatible with the game your using, on top of not being able to find any good info on them for the tool your using to edit your music, and the fact that you can't hear whether or not you have invalid drum sounds until you hear it in game (my love/hate relationship with sappy is showing here), and you get a nightmare for me at least.

Child Amnesiac said:

Item creation, and certain parts of music hacking.

Item creation is just kind of tedious, (at least the sprite inserting part of it, FSF doesn't work in my circumstances, and I have to close out of HXD every time).
But after you insert all the stuff, it ain't so bad, but that first part is irritating.

I like music hacking to an extent, but drum sounds are just the worst. Also looping can be kind of finicky to get right, not because of where to put the start of the loop. The end can be kind of tough though, since Anvil Studio only goes in seconds, but with a little playing around it can sound good.

Drum sounds on the other hand, are just annoying. Add up not knowing what's compatible with the game your using, on top of not being able to find any good info on them for the tool your using to edit your music, and the fact that you can't hear whether or not you have invalid drum sounds until you hear it in game (my love/hate relationship with sappy is showing here), and you get a nightmare for me at least.

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I completely relate to the drums, but my technique is to use Kermalis' GBAMusicStudio to do the hardcore edits like volume and modulation while editing songs in FL for that Piano Roll action
A good tip is to not go all out when it comes to drums, AKA no Hi-hats (Use noise), No Timbale, bongos, etc.
My solution around that is to take a frlg sf2 and using it while making the song to make the whole thing 99% easier, now I haven't had drum problems for months!

To answer the question tho, the 5 DirectInstrument limit is anger inducing when I wanna make a cool drum thing >:(

Scripting.

You write em script.
You test it, it is busted.
You be like, wow what do wrong.
Then you look carefully at your own script.
You figure it out, oh this be wrong.
You fix it, you test em again.
This time something else wrong.
You be like, okay lemma just watch some cat video first.
From cat video you suddenly find yourself in the deep southwest part of Youtube full of weird German dank memes.
Procrastinate stats +10 points
You start to question your own sanity as em USSR national anthem won't stop echoing in your head.
You be like, okay, Let's back script.
You figure it out, oh this be wrong.
This time depends on your concentration, it either go well or wrong.
If go wrong, you be like watch cat video again.
If go well, you be like.
Why am i wasting 1 hour for this 30 seconds script and you start to re-evaluate your life choices.

Based on true story

Ah, well I'm actually good at Programming as I'm in School for it! :P.

I also have an amazing Art Sense, however just have weird mental blocks in my Mind stopping me from being able to Draw, whether it be Digital or Traditional. Once I sort those out I should be good to go....

I'm a lover of Writing and Reading, so I can make amazing Plots and Dialogue sequences.

I know a lot about Music, various Genres and stuff....but as to actually working the Software to Compose it, I'm not so sure. I'd probably Compose it in real life, and then modify it afterwards. But it still is lots of fun doing Digital Composing. However, I DO have fantastic Musical idea on it's own.

The only real tricky thing is just putting aside time to do it! And figuring out what I want to do. I'm currently working on a big Game Boy Colour Project, to sweep out a lot of this "Advance" era stuff. I find it just isn't the direction Pokemon should go! But by all means the Engine alone is fine to work with I'm sure. I just feel it isn't paying proper respect to the World to use the Advance Engine :P.

Finding a great feature someone has posted, but then they don't give you enough information on how to actually add said feature, often because they are a high level hacker posting high level stuff (or even low level stuff for other high level hackers). So then I spend hours either trying to learn how to properly add said feature, then get nothing but wasted time, frustration and a headache, or all of that stuff I just said but instead I'm just tying to figure out what it is I'm even need to learn to add said feature in the first place.

And trying to get help for said feature, and getting "just use pret/pokeemerald" as a response. I 100% agree that any new hacks should be using the disassembles, but that is not what I want to hear when adding a small feature into a well develop hack. At that point I go from adding a minor feature to days recreating an entire game.

Also when you find glitch that came from nowhere (like corrupted pointers for sprites when you didn't even touch any Pokemon data since your last patch, or a stray 00 becomes FF in the middle of nowhere, breaking an important event), and then wondering what other glitches are now there that you didn't find.

People using vba to test and make hacks because it could cause your hack to be incompatible with other emulators pokemon vega for example crashes on mgba and the emulator on my psp. If your making a hack make sure you test it with the most accurate emulators then its more likely to work on most emulators and a real game boy too using a flashcart.

I've only hacked gen 1 thus far... But it's definitly the data bank juggling you have to do to fit in any custom sprites !

Dude coeurdhiver I completely feel you! In the past I attempted to hack gen 1 via disassembly and wanted to try to expand the room for base cries (the sounds that Pokemon make when viewed, sent to battle etc.) after having figured out how to make my own. But the issue I found was that each base cry had 3 copies located in 3 different banks and I hadn't figured out how to place all the cries in a new bank and then have the game switch to it when needed :(

scripting, for sure. is not the scripting itself, but the thousand of hours expended on trying-to-make-this-program-work-in-linux-for-scripting-but-it-wont process.

Honestly; it's probably tile editing/creation. You want something custom? You want to do it yourself? You suck at using art programs for bit-by-bit tile editing? Good luck.

So far (as someone who is still fairly beginner level)
Anything to do with changing the overworld, it's simply a nightmare for me
Expanding the dex and some aspects of XSE scripting have also given me trouble

That being said, I anticipate music/cry insertion to be a nightmare.
Also making and adding new move animations probably isn't fun either.

Really? I've never heard of testing on an emulator causing issues.
What causes these problems and how should I test my Rom hack if not with VBA?

I've only recently come back from a 10+ ROM hacking sabbatical, but the party I'm dreading most is graphics editing (replacing images, world map, tiles...). I just remember how tricky and buggy it used to be. UnLzGBA still gives me nightmares.

Then again, I can imagine being older and a little bit wiser that it's not that bad if I actually know what I'm doing.

I know it's not the question, but I find it funny how some people dislike scripting, because it takes a lot of time and retreading of steps / debugging. I totally understand that, but for me that is the fun of it. ;-) The end result is extra rewarding, and most of the time it eventually works out, which is great.

going through and editing all 400+ pokemon (depending on how many your have in your hack).

it's not difficult in the slightest, but my god it takes months.

The constant worry that no one will like my hack 😨

TriAttackDev said:

The constant worry that no one will like my hack 😨

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Don't worry about that at all! As long as you like it and are having fun making it, that's what really matters :)

Glitches/ROM Stability, that's what ends up discouraging me and eventually dropping the ROM Hacks I work on. I don't want to release a glitchy mess to the world.

I often feel my ideas, are bad ideas.
So I do not act upon them.

I like everything about it