Hello! I’m Stigurna! I have recently rediscovered my love for Fire Emblem. As such, I’m craving another playthrough of FE6. However, I got inspired by Mangs’ videos on the Google Translated FE8 ROM and thought, hey, maybe I could do that!
I thought a pure text based hack would also be a good starting point, what do you guys think? I’m very new to hacking. How hard would this be? I I have a slight background in game making (Have created a few very VERY basic games with C# and C++)
I did hear that FE6 is harder to hack then the other two. Of course, on the off chance I manage to finish, the ROM would be uploaded for anyone to play. (If at all possible, I would love to translate supports as well)
Anyway, as a thank you for checking this out this introduction, have the first draft of Chapter 1: Google Translate Edition
Hacking is actually kinda easy now when it comes to GBAFE due to FEBuilder. The reason FE6 is harder to hack is that a lot of functions are not part of FEBuilder in that game and the englishpatch also changed some functions which are then only accessable through directly editing the code.
A textbased hack would really be a good Idea for a beginner tho and you can ask the community for help at any time in a seperate threat whenever something goes wrong or you are not sure what to do.
Knowing C# and C++ should be helpful for some of the more advanced hacking techniques. Text editing, assuming you just want to insert new text into an existing game, is a fairly straightforward process. There should be a guide on how to best do this, but I don’t have the link handy (perhaps someone else can follow up here)
FE6 is a little bit buggier and has less support around here. The majority of documentation and support on FEU is for FE8, although there are brave souls who venture into hacking other games too.
I heard some stuff about FEBuilder being outdated or “bad,” or something along those lines. I don’t have very detailed info, just off hand comments that I heard, so I would love some insight on the topic.
I am currently following the Ultimate Tutorial v2, just got Roy’s base str to 10
FEBuilder is not outdated or bad at all. It’s arguably the most popular and most accessible way to get into hacking.
The buildfile method is often considered technically superior as it is easier to do high level custom stuff and make changes, but the learning curve is steeper than FEB’s super user friendly UI.
Even if you build the hack with buildfiles, FEB is very useful for picking out specific pointers and where data exists.
Febuilder is regularly updated and calling it ‘bad’ isn’t really true or fair (It’s useful to have around even for EA users, as I’ve said before). I personally find buildfiles easier than FEBuilder for a number of things, but a lot of people like having a GUI they can just jump into and that’s great for them.
Welcome! If you just want to get your feet wet tinkering with stats and such, it doesn’t really matter which game you go for, but I do recommend FE8 once you want to go into custom events. I don’t know how similar it is to C#/C++ or if it’s in name only, but it may interest you to hear that the GBA FE games were actually (at least partially) originally programmed in C before being converted to assembly, and there are methods for doing this yourself too if you’re interested in changing game mechanics.
Neither FEBuilder nor buildfiles are better/worse than each other; they’re just radically different. Personally, I use the former for quick reference/testing of in-game resources and the latter for making my games.
Exactly. And I can tell you I have febuilder open all the time while hacking, even if I never use it to modify the ROM. One of the things I’d recommend to a new buildfile user is to download it - it makes it easy to learn how tables look (and where they are), and to get an idea what your changes look like without having to open up the game.
Aaahh, interesting. I think I’ll give FEBuilder a shot then! I will most likely still keep doing the Ultimate Tutorial v2, just to get a grasp of the basics.
Feel free to drop by the discord as well - we’ve got multiple channels dedicated to help and various areas of hacking (though posting in the Questions forum definitely works too, just potentially a bit slower due to the mostly slower nature of forums).
Oh, and on my initial view of FEBuilder being “outdated” came from me mixing it up with FEditor. I didn’t see anyone mention it in this thread so I think I can safely assume it is a weaker piece of software(?)