Diplomacy with the Japanese Fire Emblem Hacking Community

I’m becoming more and more convinced that FE hacking is like the Walking Dead and we’re the residents of a community that actually works together. Everyone else is just out there for themselves.

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Glad to see that you have got the point.

I think it is the mistakes that you made several years ago.

One member in your community’s work is “stolen” by someone, and then all of you united to blame him publicly.

For an instance:

Two guys fighted in the street. And then one of them called many friends to help him. In others’ view, it is not which one is wrong that matters. You are lots of people, but he is just one hacker without any resistance. (Especially you are foreigners.)

As someone of you has said, the problem is “hacker x hacker” (not hacker x nintendo)indeed, but you make it a “community x community” one :sweat: Then you went to 2ch (the one you hunt for is not there though) and you expect a reply there. But that is impossible. The people there only know that a guy “stole” your work and may be in trouble now. Is there anyone supposed to be responsible for that? Of course not. They just talked about it as bystanders, like you talking about rumors with your friends at lunch. No surprise that your effort is considered in vain by them because the hacker never leaves any info on himself (jp fe hackers’ common sense).

At last, you found nothing and revenged on the jp hackers by stealing things from IF. You said yourself that theft is theft, no reason can make it better. Is there an exception called “revenge”? Yeah, as you expected, no jp hacker paid attention to that, you can do anything while IF has nothing to do. You can do anything in the name of justice, such as writing “Thief” on his face, making it known to everyone, stealing sth from IF on purpose and so on. Did that really satisfy your desires? I bet not because the hatred will be with you forever. Whenever you find a jp hack, you recall that and pour cold water on it. ひどすぎると思います。

The past has passed and even on 2ch it is not a topic any more. Cast aside your hatred, Agro.

By the way, I was a witness to that event on SF several years ago, so when you said "SAY WHAT? @Arch " to me, I recalled that you were the protagonist in that event and understood your anger. Otherwise I may leave here with sadness. :laughing: After all, I feel quite pleased to become a member here.

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もうおこっていません。ほんとうに!じつは、Archをよんだりゆうは、「にほんのdocumentationがつうやくできるひと、やっとみつけた!」とおもいました。でも、ミサカさんがいったように、documentationはあまりありませんから、むだなようです。

I will say this, while I’m not trying to put a damper on these attempts at outreach, I watched for a good 3-4 years as SMWCentral attempted to reach out to Japanese Super Mario World hackers with little avail. Like Misaka has mentioned, it seems most Japanese rom hackers act independently from one another, with 2ch being the only place they congregate. There isn’t a real community over there in most instances, so trying to contact them is difficult at best.

The extent of our contact was usually when they came to us, one hacker at a time. They spoke English well enough and stuck around, contributing new tools and resources for the community to use. But we never had an influx or a subforum of Japanese hackers on our site because no one could ever find them or talk with them sufficiently enough.

In the Super Metroid community, there are no real attempts at outreach but we do see Japanese Super Metroid hackers making their own hacks every few months. They do appear to have a dedicated website for their hacks, but I don’t know if it has a forum on it. All I know is that every few months we’ll go to that site and see a new hack has been uploaded to it. This is the closest I’ve ever seen to a Japanese rom hacking community, and even then I don’t know if it’s anything more than a collection of their hacks.

So again, while I don’t want to necessarily stop these attempts at contacting someone over there, I think more time should be spent simply developing our resources and tools, giving them Japanese documentation if we can, and then posting about them on 2ch with a link back here, letting anyone curious enough come check us out.

That and we shouldn’t go on a witch hunt again should another stolen sprite issue arise. Even if we use proper language this time, I imagine nothing would change due to 2ch’s anonymous nature.

I’d like to just come in and say to drop most of what we’ve been saying. I’m not interested in talking about anything from the past or to expect anything from that. I’d like to discuss only how we may be able to contact them, as a community, so that we can work collectively to further our hacking.

If any discussion continues to argue over the topic about what happened in the past, I will excercise admin powers, as I have said that this is the one topic I would like to really stay on topic.

@MisakaMikoto I know you’re not jp, for as an admin, I can see your IP address and the approximate location of it, ahah…

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My IP address is inaccurate because I often change my IP adress via VPN, that is why I can post on 2ch, haha~

However, since this site allows ip from my position (unlike 2ch, DMM or other jp sites which requests a jp ip), so no need.

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This part seems important. We might not be using real names here or anything, but I (for example) am probably not that hard to track down for someone determined enough. It’s not something a lot of us worry about very much, I think. But jp hackers are in the same country as NoJ after all, so I guess they have that much more reason to worry… if that’s the problem, then there may not be much we can do for outreach :frowning: Like, some of us have talked more seriously (just a little more seriously) about doing a jp portal like Ghast mentioned, or even a jp version of this site… but would anyone come?

In my opinion, if anyone wants to communicate with them and learn sth on jp rom hack, it is not a hard thing. Their wiki and uploader is open to anyone, and you can communicate with them on 2ch or some author’s blog or sth like that.

However, a great difference in the atmosphere between jp and Eng needs to be understood.

Firstly, their attitudes towards novices’ problems in the process of hacking.

I have been in English community for several years and know that you are friendly to newbies and willing to answer their questions. However, jp hacker’s rule in their wiki is this:

基本的にまともに答えてくれる所はありません。そういう世界です。
結論:質問なんかやめとけ。黙って自分で探して自分で努力して試行錯誤。
でも、だからこそ改造は楽しいのだ。

Which means that newbies are discouraged to ask questions. “Shut up and try to solve the problem by yourself ! Cannot solve it? Then you have no qualification to become an actual hacker. It is the hard procedure that makes hacking interesting.” I know it may sound pretty cruel, but it is the japanese culture.(教えて君 と 屑回答者). Therefore no place is needed for a newbie to ask questions.

Secondly, they do hack by themselves.

I know that there is a piece of advice called “Nobody builds a full-length hack by themselves.” on the SF. However, hacking a rom is considered as the hacker’s own affairs in Japan, so they do a hack all by themselves. Their hack such as FE7if, FEGIRLS, Midori and so on is made by only one hacker. Therefore no place is needed to talk about project concepts or sth like that.

Thirdly, it is really difficult to contact with the author.

A Jp hacker don’t want to make himself famous.(They think it may cause many problems.) I believe you have known it well enough, so I will explain nothing of it. However, it determines the rule on using others’ thing from other hacks. Usually it is too troublesome to contact the author of a hack if you want sth, so it is OK that you use it and credit the author in the readme and there is not too much blame on it.(If the original author is unwilling to let anyone else to use it, he will make it clearly in the readme.)

Now I believe you will understand why jp hackers act so independently and little communication between them. Learning jp hack is not easy, you need to search tools, read tutorials and research sth all by yourself. Then make a hack by yourself. After all, hacking is regarded as a very private thing by them. Japanese culture, haha~

By the way, they often visit English site for information, such as SF, FEPlanet and so on. Jp hackers’ English is not that bad. For example, they often link to Blazer’s UT as an answer to some questions as you do. And I know that your song editor and FEA is popular in them, zahlman. :grin:

do they play our hacks ?:3

Of course, your hacks are popular in Japan and China.

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Okay, let’s try to get some actual goals down so we know where we’re headed with this:

[ ] 1) Try to get information on [the Green Patch][1], specifically, I’m interested in how the skills were implemented, what they do, where whether a unit has a skill is stored (and how that’s written to the save file), and how they’re displayed.

[ ] 2) Get information on how they are getting really high stat caps (I think it was FE7if? Maybe it was another hack, I remember seeing it somewhere, but caps were like up to 50). How they changed the display (this is probably the easy part) and how the save file was modified.

[ ] 3) In exchange, see if there’s anything interesting that they have seen in our hacks that they want more info on. Or, requests for things for us to do in general, I’d be fine with sharing my talents.

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Haha, the credit for FEA mostly goes to Hextator (just don’t let him hear you call it that :stuck_out_tongue: ) but I’m glad the song editor was useful, despite its limitations. It’s something I want to come back to eventually to do more work.

FE8 Girls had this. Green Patch also had nominally higher values but FE8G had up to 50.

Back on-topicish kinda, but one thought I’ve discussed with the staff would be to set up an feuniverse.jp affiliate site if there were enough potential interest. @MisakaMikoto, do you think there would be enough people interested in a dedicated Japanese FE hacking forum?

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@Arch, maybe we can set up feuniverse.jp for a 3 month trial period, and try to get word about it out to wherever JP hackers are to be found, and see if we get traffic or people stopping by?

Also, where can I donate for a month of server costs for this side-project?

I`ll donate some too!

Stupid question alert: Why not, since Discourse makes this easy, add the Japanese language to the English one, and simply make subsections for the Japanese community in their language? Or would this actually require a second site?

I believe they will have interests in it, but considering the number of active jp hackers is so little, maybe a subsection for jp rom hacking is enough. I will ask some jp hackers for their opinions.

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Oh, what’s this?

I read it half a year ago, sir. It is a personal blog. Its author always link new threads here on his twitter.

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