Chit-Chat: ROM Hacking Daily Chit Chat

[Blah]

Sorry, but Dark Rising wouldn't be a good hack with ASM features, Gaia wouldn't be bad without them. It will add polish and improve your hack if you use it right, but it's only a complimentary feature.

Dark rising with ASM features > Dark rising right now. I don't know about you, but I don't think anyone would disagree that any hack could be better given custom features. That's not saying to overdo it to the point where it becomes overbearing, but it does instigate some level of enjoyability to experience something unique (ex: Deus's Pokemon Life had cool save points). You're misinterpreting my point, I'm not saying that Gaia is carried to greatness by it's ASM features, but it surely has made it way better. Consider the Rugged Map you obtain, that's made with the use of ASM and it's a key event in Gaia. The Bug catching competition, the battle marsh, these are all features made with ASM. You can't claim that ASM hasn't made this hack become great, because it did by introducing new gameplay and side events the player can do. Now Gaia itself has been worked on hard by Spherical Ice (The guy has really put in a ton of effort, manually inserting everything, learning how to do things, ect.).

The base hack itself is far more important, and what I'm saying is that I'd much rather spend the time it takes to learn ASM working on the hack itself - especially with the vast amount of public ASM resources out there.

Nope. The only public routines are the few I posted in the ASM resource thread and a couple more in the R&D section. It's not even close to having a majority of things done. Not to mention these are routines which still have bugs in them. Touched's Mega Evolution is no exception. I don't think you've considered the use of ASM inside a casual script, because you haven't. You don't see how it can be used in these ways, or you think it's too hard to be worth it. It takes me less than 5 minutes to make my routines of that level (and people who've seen me do it live on the workshop can vouch for it -- I took 5 mins while explaining to them). You realize, our disassembly of the FR ROM is only about 30% complete? We're making routines and stuff mainly based on that 30% or so research knizz had done.

I acknowledge that a hack is probably gonna turn out better with ASM but it depends whether its worthwhile with your commitment level (which is not very high for most of the community including me). Ranting that everyone should be using ASM and C is a waste of time because it won't happen.

I also doubt ASM would be very useful to learn outside of ROM hacking. High level programming languages are what the majority of people in the real world work with and this community will be dead in 3-5 years anyways.

You overestimate the difficulty Chrunch. It's not hard to learn, nor is it a waste of time. People have a hard time starting their first couple of routines, but once you get those it's like a snowball effect, subsequent things become trivial to learn.

ASM can be used to program Hardware directly, there are a lot of processor chips which you program using this language. Though more than ASM, C is the most popular programming language in the world. It's not useless to learn at all outside of ROM hacking. Even if you're not pursuing a career in programming, having some knowledge of a programming language is pretty standard in this day and age. It's a required course in our High schools (at least in Toronto).

I don't think ASM will ever be the new scripting. It's far more complicated, even someone proficient in it should be able to see why that is.

Of course it won't be the next scripting language, it's machine language at best. However, C is definitely going to be the future of ROM hacking. I can say this without any doubts in my mind and to what I consider 100% accuracy. And C stems from ASM, as compiled C code is ASM. So when we get to that point in the future, it is worth knowing ASM to debug your C code after compilation. Right now we're not there yet, so I don't fault you for not seeing my perspective. Old scripting langauges like XSE, unfortunately, are deeply embedded into our community as something basic a hacker should know.

Fair enough, I agree with what you said. Anyone who wants to learn ASM I don't want to discourage. I just disagree with FBI's elitist viewpoint that you need ASM and programming knowledge to have a good hack. This community wouldn't exist if more people thought that way.

I'm glad you agree with his point, he is far better than me at articulating what he means. I too agree with what he has said. As for my "elitest viewpoint", that's not what I'm saying, nor what I was trying to appeal to. I wanted more of the hackers who have spent time already learning the basics (what is a pointer, pointer to a pointer, scripting, how to work with tables ect) to try and attempt ASM. However, I notice a lot of them aren't having an easy time on the transition. I wished to aid with that. I do not mean to say, "H4H4 ur crap and ur hack is crap bcuz there is no ASM!!!11!!" or anything like that. I would just like to see the skill more broadly practiced. The biggest arguement seems to be, "It takes too much time to learn" or "It's too hard". Both of these points I disagree with, simply because the people who say that have gone about learning it the wrong way. I'm trying to facilitate an easier transition/learning phase, yet I'm unsure how to do that. Hence my rant. Does that make sense?

It seems a bit strange that, after they try to discuss why they would like a hack regardless of ASM routines, your response is that they should download, patch and play to some amount a ROM rather than responding to their point. With no reason to do so other than it has ASM. ASM features are just technical asides to a game which is essentially the same, though, and realistically, since we're discussing ROM Hacks, most such alterations don't even result in anything significantly better than the original - and generally don't deal with the things that people liked about the originals. This should surely be some point of reference for a ROM Hack.

I was showing an example of a ROM hack in which the features were obvious and appealing, rather than trying to distract from the point (which I've addressed too). You don't need to download it, there's videos on the page you can watch to get an idea. The rest of your point is spoken as someone who doesn't know what ASM is capable of. So instead of arguing with you about it, because you don't know what you're talking about, I'll continue to your next point. I don't think you can assess what people liked about the original games that easily. Different people enjoyed different things, from leveling Pokemon, battling gyms, exploring caves, catching all the pokemon to doing the story line. What ASM brings is a fresh perspective, and is also used to implement features from newer games such as Mega Evolutions, Battle Frontier-like structures, dynamic events sequences, cutscenes ect.

I feel like you're dismissing it's potential because you don't know what that cieling is. As someone who does know, I'll tell you that you're off the mark rather significantly. I'd have to write you a few thousand words to describe how far ASM features go to make hacks better, but I think you should head to the R&D section and read up there. It'll give you a good idea of the basic potential of ASM for your next rebuttal.

If you had the rival from G/S, and they just went around talking about ROM Hacking and ROM Hacking technique in lieu of the game, then this would not only alter the game (quite notably) more than most ASM additions, but plausibly distract from the point of the game and why you might play it - unless it were satirical, of course.

This is a fallacy, derived from unfair comparisons. Why do you assume the hack with ASM has this kind of issue in it? This is not an ASM issue, this is an issue with the hacker's design. ASM introduces new features, events, and enhances existing ones. You're giving me an example of a game with an extreme gameplay issue to try and argue that ASM wouldn't help it improve much. It has nothing to do with some protagonist conversation. Here I'll give you a more obvious example similar to what you've stated here:
"Lets say a hack gives you lvl 100 Mewtwo as a starter and all the rest of the legendaries . No one would want to play it, and ASM wouldn't help it get better". Yeah neither would mapping or scripting or anything.

If it's a basic issue, then they don't need ASM to fix it, presumably. In which case they can just do that and get back to designing the game. Most hacks are broken more fundamentally.

No. What? I use ASM to debug non ASM bugs all the time. There's key areas in the ROM in which you can set breakpoints to easily deduce the point of origin for the bugs. Again, you've spoken based on assumptions. I dislike arguing with someone on my field of expertise when they don't know it themselves. They introduce fallacies and it becomes hard to explain to them the reality of the situation because they can't understand what I'm saying. So please don't try to teach me how good or bad ASM is to a hack, you don't know the first thing about it, unfortunately.

A rallying-cry, other than this somehow making the post a weird parody of Whismur, would require an ethos. ASM is just things. Unless you were trying to rally posters to disapprove of chrunch, which I suppose could have some appeal to the Lutherans.

No, it's not my intention to turn anyone against chrunch. I don't know him, he's not my friend or enemy. I just rebuttled his point. Admittedly I should not have pulled up our VM conversation. What you've said here seems like a personal attack, however, I'm not really down to take this bait. I'm an adult. I will exempt myself from participating in personal attack wars.

 

[LilBueno]

Well, I had a long post typed up and accidentally deleted it so here's a slimmed down version of the two cents of a newcomer to the scene:
I want to learn hacking. I really do. I'm pretty smart when it comes to technical things, but aside from knowing what a "hack" is, I know virtually nothing about hacking itself. I mean, the nittiest of the gritty, the bare bones, the literal beginning steps of it. Unfortunately, as a grown adult with responsibilities and plenty of other non-hack projects, it's difficult to find a way to actually learn. Most of the beginner tutorials I see assume I know something. The others jump from topic to topic or tool to tool without explaining exactly what they're doing. I just learned how to read binary (it's not secondhand, but I can do it with paper) and I'm practicing that and Hex. That's literally as far as my current knowledge goes. I know it's all rudimentary to people who have done this for a while or played more than the three hacks I have, but look at it from the point of view of someone who just discovered that you can hack games.
I know the theory behind it as in what features I want in my hack, I have the story all planned out, I know what it means to map a town or script an event, but...there's no real way to learn those in detail with the current tutorials available. Well, let me clarify because others apparently have had a different experience from me: those tutorials are scattered and difficult to find. For learning one thing, I need to read several different tutorials but it's not like there's a guide to which ones to read when. Granted, I'm planning on just going into XSE and AdvancedMap and just experimenting myself as I learn better that way, but if there was a way to find tutorials that are either better at teaching beginners or go well together. There are several times where I read a tutorial and it all of a sudden says "search for this aspect elsewhere to see what I mean" or "go look at this person's tutorial on this thing" or assumes I know something I don't. Even if it's something I should already know, there is no clear sequence of events for what to learn when for new beginners. I know a lot of is learn-as-you-go and I'm fine with that, but I personally don't have the time to learn about what I need to learn before I actually learn it as I go, if that makes sense.

On a similar note, actually making the hack. If someone where to ask how to start -if they should map bit by bit and then script, map everything first and script later, when to worry about other features such as spriting or side-quests or music- the answer is usually "it's different for everyone." I understand that, but if I'm completely new to hacking, I'd like a little bit of direction. I know some of you probably don't think its your responsibility to teach newcomers or feel that we feel entitled to more help than you received, so I'm mainly directing this at those who want to help: direction is good. Step-by-step is good. Pictures help! The best tutorial I've seen, or at least the most helpful one when I decided to learn the basics, is linkandzelda's mapping tutorial on romhack (titled Complete, but never finished). The Hack-Along in the Beginner's Lounge will be amazing once it's finished. We need more things like that.

If I can't even find a way to learn the basics, how am I supposed to work my way up to ASM, something I am interested in learning?

So I guess what I'd like to see from the hacking veterans around here is more detailed help for beginners. Hell, simply a collection of tools and tutorials in one thread would help. Or a list of what to learn before I start working on a hack so I know the basics.
You know what I would love more than anything? A template hack. Something like two towns, a route, and a few basic events scripted in. Then the whole thing should be disassembled step-by-step (what the scripts are; how the maps were made; hell, even the decision making process on why certain things were done that way). Ideally, it'd be like a worksheet: there would be problems like "Change this item giving script to three-step trade script including this character" or "insert a warp here leading there" or "Change this character's dialogue to say this" or "Change the route to a Cave." It's probably something too tedious to hope for as you all aren't the teachers, but I do feel like a student with no direction. It'd be nice to have a hack like that and then a thread where I can go if I don't know how to do one of the problems. Then that would be a good time to say something like "If you're having trouble with this part, try this tutorial on Scripting." Hopeless Masquerade/Lost Heart's Hack-Along thread is similar to what I have in mind.

I don't know, maybe it's too much to ask for, but if anyone is willing to create a Pokemon: Tutorial Version, I'd love to be a part of it, even if I'm just using it to learn.
I check the RomHacking sub sections on a daily basis and I follow several threads so I can keep up with the "industry" so when I finally start making headway, I can take more part in these things. That said, I think I have a decent understand of what's considered a quality feature of a decent hack because it's talked about daily in some thread or another. If the "3-4 experts" found a way to bring in newcomers (or even learning hacks) and instill these ideas in them/us early, I think we'd see higher quality hacks in the future.
I've been following FBI's New Battle System thread as well as Epsilon's new rombase. I have absolutely no idea how either of those are doing even the smallest bit of those projects, but I understand the theory of them and why they're such monumental ideas. Same thing for Touched's Mega Evolution/Primal Reversion thread and a few really great hacks like Heiwa and Gaia. I may be able to appreciate the ideas behind everything the creators are doing, but if I can't even find a way to learn the basics, how am I suppose to aspire to projects of that level?

tl;dr: What I see missing from a hacking community that I'm not a part of is an easily-accessible entry point for completely new beginners. At least not one that won't take a large amount of time just to learn where to start.


EDIT: Okay, I just read the rest of the recent posts and realized that the topic at hand is mostly about ASM whereas my mini-rant is more about hacking in general. I guess to keep what I said relevant, I'd just like to emphasize what Kimonas said about the "jungle of information." If I can't even get a focal point to start learning the very basics, I'm going to get overwhelmed before I even think about getting to ASM and then, eventually C.

 

[Deokishisu]

Well, let me clarify because others apparently have had a different experience from me: those tutorials are scattered and difficult to find. For learning one thing, I need to read several different tutorials but it's not like there's a guide to which ones to read when.

...

So I guess what I'd like to see from the hacking veterans around here is more detailed help for beginners. Hell, simply a collection of tools and tutorials in one thread would help. Or a list of what to learn before I start working on a hack so I know the basics.

Hey there. I actually wrote a post aimed at you. Well, the newcomer who is willing to learn but overwhelmed and confused. Here's the link. It's not finished, and has a few typos (it was its own stickied thread at one point, but the mods hid it as the third post of something that is probably not often viewed and I can't edit it anymore), but it was designed to be a decent starting point to fledgling hackers such as yourself. It's a long read, so strap in. Let me know what you think.

On a similar note, actually making the hack. If someone where to ask how to start -if they should map bit by bit and then script, map everything first and script later, when to worry about other features such as spriting or side-quests or music- the answer is usually "it's different for everyone." I understand that, but if I'm completely new to hacking, I'd like a little bit of direction.

I know that you don't want to hear this, but it actually is different for everyone. I'm the kind of guy who will map out their entire region before doing the bulk of the scripting. I find that the time it takes to visualize, and then finally realize an area or group of maps gives me ideas for events and features that I want to plop down into them. I know a ton of people who will map something and entirely script out that map before moving on. Some people place down central events first and build a map around them.

If you want my advice, do exactly what you planned on doing in the first place. That is, mess around with Advance Map and XSE. Those two programs will end up being 70-90% of your hacking, depending on what you're doing. That's how I started, and I was in much the same boat as you, except we didn't really have tutorials. You'll find, despite the wealth of knowledge that we have going on today, that your biggest learning moments are going to be self-taught things that you'll stumble upon; either that, or you'll run into a problem that you don't know how to fix and you'll learn a ton by working around the problem, or dancing around it until you figure out a gimmicky way to fix it.

But, before you do anything serious that you'll regret having to redo, make sure that you've planned out your hack well. It seems like you've given considerable thought into that already, but while you're learning, allocate some brainpower to finalizing things in your head. As someone who's been working on the same project for several years, the worst feeling in the world is ripping up content that you spent hours working on because it was poorly thought out and doesn't fit right. Revisions of things are fine, and a part of ROMHacking (and Game Development in general), but I give you this warning because you're a beginner and you'll have a lot of things that you're going to be throwing out in the end. Focus on learning through your implementation, not on implementing a final product. At least, not at the stage that you're at now.

You know what I would love more than anything? A template hack. Something like two towns, a route, and a few basic events scripted in.

Well you're in luck! You probably already have a template hack on your machine right now that has a ton of content mapped out and scripted in that you can tinker with and learn from!

Your best teacher is Game Freak. Whatever ROM you're working with is the ultimate tutorial. Want to script an event but don't know how? Well... did Game Freak do an event like that anywhere that you can take a peek at? Tinkering with scripts is how I learned how to script. You have the benefit of diegoisawesome's tutorial on top of examples of implementation from Game Freak. Who cares if your script is a Frankenstein Monster of clipped together Game Freak script bits if it works and you learned something? The nitty-gritty of flags and variables falls into place as this more fundamental, "How would I actually put this event together? What would my script actually look like?" knowledge becomes more clear.

Need to learn how to map effectively? Check out Hoenn's Routes 119 and 120 for a good premier on natural mapping. You can glean a ton of useful lessons from Game Freak's Hoenn maps, as well as some of the maps in the Sevii Islands (Sevault Canyon and Ruin Valley, specifically). Most Kanto maps are emulating the old GBC style of mapping. If that's what you're going for, than study them too. If not, ignore them as they're bad examples. The concepts you rip from these maps (flow, shape, tall grass and tree placement, Trainer placement, etc.) can be extrapolated to your own. I'm not a good mapper because of tutorials; no good mappers are good because of tutorials. They're good because they practiced on their own through a hundred crappy embarrassments that the community never sees and studied the maps that do the things they want to do well. I critique some member made maps in several of my posts that might help you learn map structure concepts once you're at the point that you need that advice. Here's a post where I critique maps in a Map Making Competition that may help you. The maps I'm referring to are in the first post of that thread.

I hope that I've helped you. You'll find that the community can be very helpful and open, especially since your posts are well-written and you seem to have a genuine interest in learning. If you need anymore general help, let me know.

 

[Crizzle]

I think FBI is correct, despite him coming off as a snobby elitist. ASM is really useful and not nearly as difficult as people say it is. More people should give it a shot. When used correctly, it makes hacks better.

Now you don't need it to make a good hack. As in my opinion, a great hack is one with an interesting premise. A bland 10 year old travels and region with a billions fancy features still usually bores me. While like FireRed Rocket Edition(check out the thread if you haven't; it's not a typical Rocket hack), interests me even if it lacks the the list of fancy features.

Funny thing is, I actually have experience using Assembly(which i hate) and C outside of ROM Hacking. And now that I've gotten used to the basic hacking tools and whatnot, I could try to incorporate that into my hacking. I don't plan on using those skills in ROM hacking because I personally prefer hacks that keep the original gamefreak gameplay but tell a new or different story. Of course, I could make a more well received hack if I didn't do that, but I don't really care about that too much.

That's just my 2 cents. As far the debate that went on last page. I'm declaring FBI the winner. He's a friggin legend.

 

[Cartmic]

Snip

Being a red hacker, I have no choice but to write assembly haha.

 

[Blah]

Being a red hacker, I have no choice but to write assembly haha.

Wow, Oct 2003 join date! I've seen people post their Gen I source code before, the differences in the instruction set really becomes apparent.

How do you guys graphic hack? Is that done in some external editor?

 

[esperance]

These days the disassembly lets people just edit the images in Paint or their graphics editor of choice. It's very convenient as the images are converted to the appropriate format during assembly (in either 2 bpp or 1 bpp format).

Before this, it was done through various tools and generic hacking graphics editors like Tile Molester.

 

[Cartmic]

Wow, Oct 2003 join date! I've seen people post their Gen I source code before, the differences in the instruction set really becomes apparent.

Yep it's been while, I've also been away for awhile. Welcome to adult life! Yeah the GB's z80 based instruction set will be a bit different from ARM code. As much as I've ventured into ARM assembly is looking at playing with it on the RISC OS operating system.

How do you guys graphic hack? Is that done in some external editor?

Well back in the day I used Tile Layer Pro and before that Mr. Click's TileED but as Lostelle says, since the the disassembly project came to fruition, graphics can be done in an external editor now.

 

[machomuu]

So a web IPS patcher called JPS was released a little while ago.

https://wanderingcoder.net/projects/JPS/

Just thought I mentioned. I imagine a good few people could get a use out of this. It's only in Open-beta, buuuuut that just means it's subject to bugs and is otherwise finished.

...Which, when you think about it, begs questions about why the community uses "Beta" so much when it doesn't really accurately describe the state of the hack. I think I discussed this years back, but...eh, well. Doesn't really matter, just a branching thought.

 

[Mana1]

So a web IPS patcher called JPS was released a little while ago.

https://wanderingcoder.net/projects/JPS/

Oooh looks pretty cool :).

In terms of bugs, Beta is pretty accurate haha. Most Beta releases are unfinished, and hackers are looking for feedback a lot of the time. I guess some kind of Beta/Demo/Taster combo is most accurate of progressing hack releases though.

 

[Logan]

I think they can be called whatever people want: release 1, beta 1, demo 1 etc. anything people call them is going to be relevant.

 

[Etherion]

yo guys! ^^ we need a Discord room asap!

 

[Christos]

I'm still waiting for PC 2.0 Chatrooms™

 

[Logan]

Come on the battle server, plenty of ROM Hack chat happens already ^_^

 

[Spherical Ice]

There's always the regular PC discord too, if we overflow #general with ROM hacking stuff I'm sure they'd want to hide us away in our own channel soon enough, lol.

 

[DasManiac]

Has anyone ever looked into what can be done with the TCG games? They're neat games but I can't seem to find anything related to hacking. Someone made a randomizer but that seems to be it.

 

[Deokishisu]

Has anyone ever looked into what can be done with the TCG games? They're neat games but I can't seem to find anything related to hacking. Someone made a randomizer but that seems to be it.

Take a look at this.

It's basically all ASM at this point, and the community for it is non-existent, but it's there and I would definitely play a hack of TCG2. Grab the translation patch and hack away!

EDIT: Also, someone (I forget who it was) told me a while ago that a disassembly was happening for the first TCG game, but I didn't look into it and don't know if it's true. May want to use your Googlefu and check around.

 

[Logan]

That's awesome, I'd love to mess around with the TCG

 

[DizzyEgg]

no idea what tcg even is :D

Spoiler:

I know, I know, I can google it

 

[DasManiac]

Take a look at this.

It's basically all ASM at this point, and the community for it is non-existent, but it's there and I would definitely play a hack of TCG2. Grab the translation patch and hack away!

EDIT: Also, someone (I forget who it was) told me a while ago that a disassembly was happening for the first TCG game, but I didn't look into it and don't know if it's true. May want to use your Googlefu and check around.

That's an interesting thread. So it is possible to add more cards into TCG 2. 66 is a decent amount of cards. It's not great but at least it's something! Also, yup I just googled the disassembly. Someone is still working on it but they seem to have made quite a bit of progress.