A very spooky vacation

(Shoutout to discourse for saying this thread is similar to my asm thread)

I’ve decided to take a short break from here/the FEU discord/the community in general for a short time, probably until the end of the month. This thread is mainly for the people on the discord who weren’t around when I mentioned taking a break.

I’m stressed out, things haven’t been fun, and I’m hoping that getting away from distractions will help me arrive at things I actually want to do. At the end of the month I hope to have some neat things to talk about, motivation permitting.

If you need me you can find me on discord as Zane Avernathy#7138. Stay spooky, friends

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Be safe out there, Zane. Have a Happy Halloween and feel better.

Be easy man. This ain’t the sort of thing you should force. Take care of yourself and come back when you’re good and ready. I was there when you said it but I didn’t say anything.

Heppy Halloween man. Hope you feel better soon

We love you Zane, please take care of yourself! <3

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Stay spooky yourself, friend :skull:

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See you later, hope the break helps.

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Have fun, besides it was getting obvious that you were getting pissed off from getting spammed skeleton jokes due to halloween season

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I hope you’re okay Zane. Just don’t burn yourself out or anything and have fun I suppose.

おつかれ。

Happy Halloween, dude.

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Always have time for you, bud, hope you get the rest you need.

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I don’t know what I had originally planned to say here once I returned, but I’ve got two little things to talk about now:

A short bit about hacker-y things.

Finding what I was C-king

I’ve been trying to learn the C programming language over my break. I’ve got it down enough that I can understand it, but I wouldn’t say that I know it, y’know? I decided that I wanted to write a small SNES game in C, because the best way to learn something is to just get right in there.

I was going to use the WDC 65816 C compiler because it has settings and options for making SNES games, but I kept running into issues. Everything from the optimizer creating loads of empty temp files to tools refusing to output files only in the nintendo format to the manual talking about files that didn’t come with the compiler. Well, actually, it came with pre-compiled versions of that file. When I could get the compiler to play nice I’d mess around with writing to I/O registers. I realized that pretty much all of the hard work would be wrestling with the SNES itself and I’d probably want to just write ASM for all of the hardware things, so I gave up on writing a game.

Now, I mentioned before hat I didn’t have a file that the compiler manual talked about, but I did have a pre-compiled version. The compiler also came with a set of pre-compiled library stuff, some examples for supported processors, and a bunch of header files. Hidden in these header files was one that described the file format output by the compiler. I had a new idea: I’d learn C by writing a tool that read the pre-compiled objects and libraries by using that file to figure out their format.

It’s been going alright but I keep getting distracted. Memory management and file I/O is really weird and clunky, dealing with strings is odd, and there are curly braces everywhere. Oh, and it’s all on fire. I’m really glad to have things like compiler explorer and the -Wall option to help me.

Another bit on personal things with a bit about hacker-y things.

Maintenance and Maintenance

Words are hard and I’d like to word-vomit thoughts but let’s be a little bit classier, I guess.

I felt like I needed some self-maintenance, but how much of it I got is hard to say. In an effort to stave off stagnation and gain something useful I’ve been working on learning C, as mentioned above. And, while that’s all well and good, secluding myself from my friends was probably a bad call. My brain is unkind when left alone.

There’s a lot that I worry about with regards to the things that I work on. Back when I started hacking I had no idea of where I’d end up and now (not to toot my own horn too much) I feel like I’m one of the experts on hacking FE5. There are plenty of shortcomings in my hacking tools, methods, and code that make me feel self-conscious, especially knowing that thousands of people have seen them (unless one of you is just, iunno, clicking links on repeat). I know that worrying about what other people think is something that I need to work on myself but I wanted to ask:

What’re all of your thoughts on publishing and maintaining things like hacks, tools, doc, etc.?

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Publishing - Please do. I say this probably everyday but we’re a community based on sharing stuff. Nobody gets anywhere on hoarding whatever they make. The whole view of FEU as an “elitist” community is based largely upon this, I feel - and that view has been getting less popular as time goes on and people start sharing their work more. I work on my hack behind closed doors for various reasons but I make it a point to release whatever assets I can when they’re made.

Maintaining - It’s nice to do, but understandable if you don’t. People have lives and stuff is constantly changing overtime. There’s still a good backlog of stuff to update for skill system compatibility. I think as long as your work is commented well enough that other people could follow what you’re doing (in case they want to use it later), it’s not a big deal.

Most of this just boils down to being a good community member and trying to help others where you can, I guess. Also, welcome back Zane, nice to see you.

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It’s good to see you back, Zane~ ^^

Ultimately, I think just keep doing what feels right/rewarding for you. Personally, it’s nice seeing people publish hack/tool/doc/content since it usually helps the community move forward and do bigger and better things in the long run. (+It’s fun to see what you’ve been up to.)

Maintenance and support is probably something the community is doing well on at the moment, but it isn’t a bar that every tool/project needs to clear, imo. The time/interest invested to clear a path/direction or put into a hack project might be all you’re able to comfortably give, and that’s okay (or at least we need to remind ourselves that it’s okay and not everything needs to be fixed).

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Even if you publish something that isn’t perfect (or isn’t even complete), that doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful. Look at Event Assembler. Original core was slow and the language raws are filled with weirdness that everyone complains about. But it’s still a really useful program that other people have continued working on and improving over time (shoutout to ColorzCore). I can tell you I have a lot of gripes with various FE8 hacks and hacking stuff, but I’m still glad that stuff exists and thankful that people made it.

No one’s expecting perfection out of ROM hacking tools. No one who’s reasonable or worth listening to is, at least.

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