2022 Retrospectives

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2020 2 2 was a year, alright. As always, I wish that I had accomplished more.

For International Hack Release Day, I published a small hack called Muscle Memory, designed to challenge veteran FE5 players. You can see it in my IHRD thread.

This year, I also decided that whining about code quality wasn’t enough, and I set out to rewrite community code in a style that I like. This, like a lot of other things, got tabled really fast, and I’ve only got two rewrites posted. You can find the thread here.

At the time of posting, the two things are a moving sounds fix (rewriting the hack linked here, by the ever-wonderful Tequila) and a hack to get around the vanilla game’s Huffman text compression (this is an alternative to the ubiquitous anti-Huffman hack made by Hextator and Nintenlord).

I’m actually really proud of these two. Writing hacks in C is a lot of fun and I feel like I’ve grown a lot since I picked up the EA buildfile hacking method.

For my WIP disassembly of FE5, this year saw a decent bit of progress.

Thanks to @Ultimage, a lot of AI-related code has been added (and with it, definitions for my library). There’s still more AI stuff that Ulti did that I’m in the process of adding, along with other cool stuff that he’s worked through, so stay tuned for that in 2023.

A fine-grained space usage/disassembly progress tracker has been added to the project’s build messages alongside a better section printer:

It looks a little something like this 
...

Region: $018E98-$01901B $000184
  $018E98-$01901B $0184 DeploymentSlotTableSection

Region: $01A5B2-$01A5FD $00004C
  $01A5B2-$01A5FD $004C PickPhaseMusicSection

Region: $01CE64-$01F44D $0025EA
  $01CE64-$01CEAD $004A ActionStructSingleSection
  $01CEAE-$01CF2A $007D ActionStructUnknown83CEAESection
  $01CF2B-$01CFEC $00C2 ActionStructCombatStructsSection
  ...

...

Total:                 $0B7423 %17.90
  Freespace:           $017A84 %02.31
  Text:                $02CB68 %04.37
    Menu Text:         $0004CE %00.03
    Dialogue:          $02C69A %04.34
  Data:                $005EA1 %00.58
  Events:              $009DC6 %00.96
    Data:              $002865 %00.25
    Scenes:            $007561 %00.72
  Code:                $008920 %00.84
    Procs:             $00015E %00.01
  Graphics:            $05A8B0 %08.84
    Map Sprites:       $000000 %00.00
      Moving:          $000000 %00.00
      Idle:            $000000 %00.00
      Battle:          $000000 %00.00
    Battle Animations: $000000 %00.00
    Portraits:         $029508 %04.03
    Tilemaps:          $00547C %00.52
    Palettes:          $003458 %00.32

A lot of little misc. stuff was added, like battle backgrounds, some portrait stuff, world map markers, along with some big stuff like the trade, status, and options windows.

For my FE5 library, Volt Edge, the most notable thing added this year was my weird obsession with trying to mimic functions from other languages like Python.

And, finally, for my personal project:

Lots of menus:

https://i.imgur.com/gKN08wu.gif
https://i.imgur.com/lMzaoOc.gif
https://i.imgur.com/60CS4EI.gif
https://i.imgur.com/bNPWnSf.gif

And also, WIP breakable walls/snags:

https://i.imgur.com/OyEzsRl.gif

If you want to see more of this kind of stuff, check out my Twitter.

There’s a lot more that I need to do, and I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to do it. The unit list menu is next on the chopping block, probably with breakable tile stuff in the middle, and then I’ll push for more chapters.

Here’s to hoping that 2023 is more productive.

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