Tutorials for Decomp for someone with little coding experience?

[raviolus]

hi,

im interested in making a hack of emerald with decomp/disasembly, since it seems more versatile, but i have basically no experience with code or anything like that. ive managed to build a pokeemerald folder with dizzyegg's works and compiled my first pokeemerald.gba without issues (thanks to Lunos' awesome tutorial), but editing anything seems overwhelming. the learning curve looks steep but im determined to figure it out, im just not really sure where to begin. ultra-noob here, so im not even sure if this is an appropriate question to ask (forgive me if i sound like an idiot), but are there any resources for people like me to learn how to do basic edits with decomp, so i can learn the ropes? thx

- raviolus

 

[Lunos]

are there any resources for people like me to learn how to do basic edits with decomp, so i can learn the ropes? thx

Personally, I believe the best way to get started is by familiarizing yourself with the project's structure.
Look at its folders, look at the different files, look at the content within some of those files.
Then once you have a bit of a general idea where things are located, go and try to do some small changes here or there to get your feet wet; modify a sprite, a map's wild Pokémon distribution, a move's stats, an overworld script, a trainer's party. Things like that.

For example, with a quick look one can tell that inside the src folder the majority of the game's source code is located. Lots of .c files, functions of code written in C inside of them and such.
Then you have a "data" folder within that contains .h files for the most part.
Those files contain readable tables don't they? If you look at items.h you can get an idea of what it'll be, and when you open it... bam; it's the table with the general data of the different items in the game.

 

[Anon822]

hi,

im interested in making a hack of emerald with decomp/disasembly, since it seems more versatile, but i have basically no experience with code or anything like that. ive managed to build a pokeemerald folder with dizzyegg's works and compiled my first pokeemerald.gba without issues (thanks to Lunos' awesome tutorial), but editing anything seems overwhelming. the learning curve looks steep but im determined to figure it out, im just not really sure where to begin. ultra-noob here, so im not even sure if this is an appropriate question to ask (forgive me if i sound like an idiot), but are there any resources for people like me to learn how to do basic edits with decomp, so i can learn the ropes? thx

- raviolus

You can find some tutorials on the decomp resources forum section, in pokeemerald's wiki and even on Youtube, but there really isn't that many tutorials for decomp hacking. Looking through the files and experimenting with them is a good idea and will help you learn to figure things out by yourself.

If you are unable to figure something out, you can always ask for help on these forums.

 

[gafocog]

Adding to the good answers already provided I would also learn basic programming stuff like functions. Preferably you would watch a C tutorial video or something like that. You don't have to know everything perfectly well. Just enough to understand to pokeemerald decomp code a little bit more.