How much faster is it to make your own rom hack with the Decomp compared to Binary hacking?

[Libelldrian]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering how much time you can save rom hacking Pokémon, now that the Decomp is available.
I always here that it takes years to complete a full game (from scratch), but this was said back when binary hacking was the only thing available.
How much quicker is Decomp hacking (e.g. %-wise)?

Thanks a lot in advance!

 

[Lunos]

That entirely depends on factors such as what kind of changes you intend to make, and depending on those changes how proficient you are at reading and writing code in C would also become a relevant factor.
There's no way to measure something like this.

 

[Anon822]

I'd assume that the difference isn't as big as you might expect.
While the decomp makes editing code much easier and quicker, editing data isn't that different from binary hacking, and in full games a large part of the work is editing data (pokemon data, graphics, maps, trainers, scripts, etc.). There's also the game design aspects which are going to take a lot of time regardless of your tools.

Considering that there aren't that many full games made with the decomps yet, it's likely that they too take years to complete.

 

[Krendall]

As has been stated, it depends on what changes you're looking to make. The biggest positive of binary hacking is there are programs that make some edits simplistic, particularly Pokemon stats, level/TM/Tutor moves, etc. As of right now, all that has to be done by using a text editor for decomp (with the wonderful exception of map edits; PoryMap is awesome). However, decomp takes away the annoyance of pointers. With binary hacking, you have to make sure certain numbers of something doesn't exceed whatever exists, otherwise you'll have to try to manually change the memory pointer. For example, if you want to add a move to a Pokemon, you'll have to remove a move first, or else you run into memory problems. With decomp, setting the pointers is part of the compiling process, so that's generally a non-issue.

To sum up, decomp does take longer, especially in the beginning, because there's the learning curve of finding what you want to edit and, at least in some cases, how to write the code for that edit. However, as you get past those learning curves, you'll find there's more freedom in what you can do. At least that's been my experience.