Discussion on the Japanese Mindset for Hacking

Doesn’t help if there’s no link to the docs.

I was mentioning it in reference to what @MisakaMikoto said about needing to rely on low level assembly to make hacks.

1 Like

I haven’t published any of my skill notes yet, I thought it’d be better if I released my notes with my purposed general skills patch. What I’ve found, however, is thus:

[spoiler] RAM addresses are 8 less bytes in the (J) ROM than the (U) ROM. For instance, the slot 1 character struct starts at 0x202BE4C in the (U) ROM, but 0x202BE48 in the (J) ROM, and this formula remains true for a vast majority of the WRAM as far as I’ve seen. The ROM data (data past 0x08000000) is the same if you subtract 90 bytes bytes from the (U) address, which means that I may be able to release one skill patch that can be applied to either the (J) ROM or the (U) ROM.
[/spoiler]

However, like you said, this isn’t what the topic is for so you can disregard :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: spoiler tags don’t work?

I assume you mean 4 bytes before?

oh yeah oops

I moved 2 posts to an existing topic: [Community] Diplomacy with the Japanese Fire Emblem Hacking Community

Wouldn’t the best thing to do be to just make it?

That’s the thing, though. If there isn’t much interest, what’s the point of putting in the time and resources?

While this may be true, right now the great majority of the ‘upper tier’ hacks have lots of ASM modification in the American fandom, as well as custom maps, custom characters, and custom everything else, while the majority of these things pretty much don’t exist in the Japanese fandom. The Midori Patch has some custom maps, and custom characters, etc. It’s probably the most high end hack I’ve seen come out of that fandom in forever, and other hacks like FE7if have waaaaaaay more music modification than we do (Unless it’s Eternal Bond, heh), but to find all of these things in a single Japanese hack is extremely rare. While the Japanese may actually be more technically skilled, their projects themselves have less customization in general, see?

And if Arch made a Japanese hub for them, that would be pretty cool IMO. Maybe a merging of the communities or at least some sharing would improve both communities tremendously.

Western Fandom*

Well yeah but that’s because unlike our side, they don’t have teams and all of their custom sprite work tends to be only their own. So they likely don’t value customization the same way we do.
Custom sprites seems to be a hugely Western thing to do from what I’ve learned.

1 Like

Western hacks have pretty graphics and Eastern hacks have assembly shenanigans

Typically

2 Likes

But but but western hacks have both :frowning:

not really
Western hacks usually don’t have anything special going on under the hood save a few simple RAM modifications. It’s really rare to see new code that actually changes how the game itself works at least on some level of gameplay

I think it might just be that there’s more of a recognizable community specifically for spriters here. If you’re Japanese and you draw sprites, and you actually want them to be used for hacks (not made for a specific hack on commission or anything like that), where are you going to show them off? Pixiv? Then people wonder why you’ve limited yourself to 96x80 and 16 colours… right? On the other hand, we don’t have people making custom music, maybe just because authoring MIDI from scratch (never mind writing “ASM” for Sappy) is a pretty rare skill, and anyway most people seem to just want to convert music from their other favourite games.

As for “fool tools” - well part of the point of this community is to make them. Personally, yes I feel there is value in learning to hack, but I want people to be able to tell their stories without that skill. The people who can do crazy ASM tricks aren’t generally going to be the same ones who can write a good story for an FE-style game (and let’s not kid ourselves, the “official” stories… have some issues). I think this is what was meant with the “stone age” comment (though it could have been more diplomatic :stuck_out_tongue: ) - it’s about the sophistication of the tools. You can be very skilled and make a beautiful, gleaming, perfectly round stone wheel with a crude axe… but it takes forever, and it’s still heavy.

On the other hand, you can rent out a factory and pop out a nearly-mathematically-perfect wooden wheel in minutes, and it’s lighter than stone.

The “fool’s tools” are like all technology in my eyes; they simplify a specific process and do it efficiently, however, this also leads to people not really learning much or wanting to scratch below the surface because the machine can do it

1 Like

Excellent point! It’s like cars. I can drive one, but I don’t really care what goes on under the hood. That’s someone else’s “job”. But taking an interest in it could only help me in the long run so really I’m shooting myself in the foot by not trying to learn more about it.

i would argue that it’s superior to have the machine do it anyway because it minimizes the chance of human error

it also means that, instead of spending the time doing it by hand, i get to spend that time doing something else

knowing what’s under the hood is only really a necessity for people wanting to improve the current state of things - if you’re fine with what’s currently present (for the record, i am not) the only reason to look would be intellectual curiosity

:frowning:
You know, a lot of parts of this remind me of the story of Cardano and the cubic equation. Back then, mathematicians would discover things so they could beat other mathematicians at competitions, and “published” them by encoding them into poems so no one could steal their solutions. When Cardano and his student built off of Tartaglia’s unfinished cubic equation solution (which he wanted to keep a secret forever) to solve the quartic, Tartaglia was furious that his work ended up published.
(Today, mathematicians credit them both equally.)

4 Likes

… then we proved that there exists no such equation for quintic polynomials, and the competitions at finding the formulas have ended accordingly.