such as?
All of these modular things are actually intended to make hacks play nicely together.
Oh no we’re aware of bugs as they’re reported. The chad, Sme has been going through and fixing a lot of them, bless. 
Just calling out “numerous bugs” without substance as if bugs aren’t a normal part of development caught my eye.
I was under the impression that this thread was directed towards implementation of skills. Not complaining about the engine/system itself.
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Gaiden spell system?
Str/Mag split?
Although work is still continuing on making Gaiden spells compatible and I’m sure Str/Mag already is.
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(Super late to responding to this thread as a whole, but)
You have to understand that the skill system as a whole is a community effort. There are those who can make a skill and contribute it, those who have to make methods for certain skill types to even become a possibility, and there are those capable (and generous enough) to make fixes to issues reported. I’d also imagine a lot of the complaints are scattered throughout time and space, and even fewer are actually sent in. Even so, someone has to take time out of their busy schedule (a lot of the people I know who actually contribute have school and work that rob them of their free time) to carefully comb through the list of things not-so functional, not to mention it’s not exactly an “aha, I know how every last thing operates” process, so trial and error is also a factor. One last thing (and I don’t know how it works fully but I have a… decent idea, but feel free to correct me), but everyone who contributes has their own isolated copies of the skill repository. From there, they must make pull requests to the main repo in order to fully integrate changes, fixes, and additions.
As for FEbuilder, while it may prioritize the Skill System nowadays, it was not created to be super flexible with everything out there, and it took a lot of time to get to where we are even now. Heck, str/mag split wasn’t even usable in it until a few months ago. You can also see this through additional patches that had to be made just to disable or modify certain skills.
There is also the issue of plenty of quality of life features (and other additions such as leadership stars), being bunched together. I’m not going to pretend to know how buildfiles, github, and builder work completely, but you’d be surprised how many individuals this all has to be funneled through.
In short, there is time, effort, communication, and patience that comes with getting everything to work how we want it. Yeah, it would be “easier” if everyone were to take up buildfiles (or, y’know, at least learn the bare minimum of opening up notepad++, toggling the features they want and don’t want with the .event files, yeeting that spicy .gba into one of the .cmd files, and watching the magic happen, and yes, there is a way of easily adding in the other skills that couldn’t be fit in by default due to the limit of maximum skills addable), but it’s seen as daunting by many, which is understandable.
(Side note, I see there’s a lot of people who have responded to you already but this is by no means an attempt to dogpile you, some of this is stuff I was going to say anyway.)
As for the not-so technical aspects of skills, yes, people often throw in a lot of them without much thought.
Yeti and Zeta have already stated a lot of my own views a few posts ups, but I wanted to give my own takes.
While I do agree to an extent, I’m willing to die on this hill I also disagree. Vantage is a skill that can be very easily messed up. Put it on a unit with too defense, atk, or avoid and you’re looking at an absolute juggernaut. As for enemies, however, I want to just say visual cues are the most immediate way to alert the player, much like how a (!) shows up to warn the player about bows and crit-happy enemies.
Of course, this does not have to be only icons that indicate it. People making their own hacks could even assign skills like this to distinct-looking classes, perhaps introduce them slowly through bosses or narrative means. Much like how we expect a berserker’s map sprite with a huge axe to split you in two if you let them, or a heavily-armored general to soak in lots of physical hits.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that reading every last stat screen is not the only way to convey this information. It’s just as important to make sure sprites and icons also focus on giving us these cues. A certain program has some people who like using three line descriptions, but good skill names/icons are key. Descriptions are a developer’s last resort. I know it’s very tempting to give something a super cool picture, but it needs to be relevant enough to give the player an idea of what they’re getting into. Blows, Rallies, and Stances are all color-coded to tell you which stat they affect. (Stat)+(x) skills show a tiny number next to them. Heroes indicates what level a skill is by the color of their outline (bronze → silver → gold → “BRIGHT YELLOW IT’S TIME TO DIE” or white to show it only has one tier)
Just to run down a few more examples, we have map sprites for weapon-split cavs. If I recall correctly, there’s armored mercenaries and knights with visible shields.
One non-fe example that comes to mind is Advance Wars. While not as personalized, you can tell that each unit type has a specific task to perform just by how they look, but also how they’re introduced. That isn’t to say go full FE7 Lyn Mode with it, but giving context say a lot.
Some may believe that you shouldn’t spend time giving a tutorial on a game people have already played, but if you’re attempting to introduce something as game changing as skills, you must ease your player into it, show them what your rules are.
I’m not saying to hold the player’s hand, but hackers should treat these skills as if a player has never encountered them, because in truth, not everyone has played their games of origin! Shocker, I know.
I most likely forgot some points this took long enough to type as-is, but hopefully this gives some who read this more insight.
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Heck, str/mag split wasn’t even usable in it until a few months ago
str / mag split was implemented in FE8U in the middle of 2019.
I was waiting for the bug to die and the routine to mature.
Since it was half a year ago, I thought that the bug would have been fixed, so I provided it in February 2020.
How was the result?
There were lots of bugs. T_T
I was forced to deal with it.
Even after half a year, the routine was not mature.
When to deliver it is a difficult question.
Users want new features.
However, new features are usually buggy.
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- About Program code quality
SkillSystems is buggy.
but, It can be said that it is natural that there are many bugs because it is trying to do many things.
The more source code you have, the more bugs have.
Nevertheless, every time I update it, various bugs occur.
I’ve posted several times with proposed fixes for bugs I’ve found.
Zmr are quite right that no one has reported any bugs.
I was surprised when I found a bug in a routine that was commited over a year ago.
There may be a problem with the way the test is done.
Due to the nature of Hackrom, it is very incompatible with automated test routines.
It’s a very difficult problem to solve.
If exists an emulator that can be operated programmatically, such as a command line browser, the quality may be improved.
There is a library called libretro, but I think it’s probably not what I expected.
The emulator is specialized for playing games, and the debugging features are a bonus.
Like parsley that comes with food.
- About balance.
In the SkillSystems code, variables are often hard-coded in the program.
This is a bad design.
I think it should be created as an external parameter as much as possible.
Even if you use a buildfile, solving this problem is very tricky.
First, identify the offending code, rewrite the code, recompile, and build the game.
When updating SkillSystems, you need to properly merge your code.
Then you need to compile the code again and build the game.
I wonder how often people using BuildFile merge the latest version of github into their products.
Since FE is an Arterios formula, even a correction of +5 to the parameter will have serious consequences.
The Arterios formula is known as a formula that is very difficult to balance.
I think it is interesting to look at the damage calculation formulas of various games.
- Why I hate skills. lol
The reason is that the element of luck increases.
Pandan used to say something similar, it’s dangerous if the skill’s effect is more than critical.
I think that skills such as Skill Astra that can always win when activated apply to that.
I think this is a problem with FE5 as well.
You can beat any boss if you reset it until this skill activates.
In the FE5 RTA, the route to defeat Raidrick using Skill Astra without using the Lopt’s sword is a standard.
You can almost win if you give Galzus a Master Sword and activate Skill Astra.
Skills give a unit its personality.
However, if you give a skill that is too powerful, the game will break.
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oh hey i somehow became relevant here
I’ve been making an effort over the last while to make skill system-compatible versions of as much as possible, and I’d be glad to take a look at anything else if you name specifics.
Given that I was the one that reorganized the thing I know better than most the amount of stuff in the skill system; at the time of writing this I am currently 8 pages deep into a tutorial on everything included with the skill system and I’ve yet to reach the actual skill system itself. That being said, there’s literally a file where you can turn off all of it if you want. Nothing that significantly affects gameplay and is not tied to the function of skills (with like, 2 exceptions of things that are tied to skills but you can turn off) is necessary, you can pick and choose what you want to use. Insurance doesn’t cover prescribing medicine for an off-label use.
List of things that are required to be present for skill system to function:
- Calc Loops: replace vanilla functions with functional equivalents that allow for various skills to do their things, does not change gameplay directly.
- Expanded Modular Save: changes the way saves work. Does not change gameplay.
- Growth Getters: replace the way growths are retrieved to add more things. Does not change gameplay.*
- Icon Rework: changes the way item icons are drawn. Does not change gameplay.
- Item Range Fix: rewrites the way range is displayed (this lets you do non-standard ranges on weapons). Does not change gameplay.
- Modular Stat Getters: replace the vanilla stat getters. Does not change gameplay.
- Modular Stat Screen: replace the layout of the stat screen with something new. Does change the layout, but no information is omitted and as such does not change gameplay.*
- Negative Stat Boosts: lets negative boosts exist. Does not change gameplay.
- Popup Rework: changes how popups work to make it easier to make new ones. Does not change gameplay.
- Suspend Expansion: an alternative to Expanded Modular Save. Does not change gameplay.
- Unit Action Rework: changes how unit actions function to make it easier to add new ones. Does not change gameplay.
- Fix Weapon Ranks: disallows gaining wexp in a weapon type if you currently have 0. Affects gameplay insofar as if you mine glitch Stone you can no longer give anyone a magic rank.
* can change gameplay if you configure it to, but does not by default
You…entirely can, 99 times out of 100, the only restrictions are hardware restrictions. It ultimately comes down to how much effort you’re willing to put in if you want something to exist that doesn’t already. The system is, as you say, massively editable, and if you’re willing to put in the effort you can get it to work however you want it to. As far as I’m aware, nothing even comes close to pushing the limits of the GBA within the skill system.
Name them
I literally fixed all reported issues related to Canto and Canto+…28 days ago. Issues cannot be fixed if they are unknown to those who would fix them. If you update and run into issues tell someone, or better yet, submit an issue on GitHub.
If there are issues
report them
how will they get fixed
if the people who would fix them
don’t know about them
fixed in december, please to close
Note there is no public, fully-functional version of the gaiden spell system.
After a point, I think it’s best to release something that may have bugs. The best way to find bugs in something is to have many people use it; sunlight is the best disinfectant, as it were.
Taking a moment to speak more generally, the skill system has always been intended to be a buildfile; it predates the existence of FEBuilder, for one. Any static patch implementation of it is inevitably going to have drawbacks, and this is necessary for an in-place ROM editor like FEBuilder to use it. Using a tool in an unintended way is bound to have negative consequences, no matter what the tool is. That being said, many small and large-scale changes have been made to the skill system specifically to make things easier for FEBuilder users. A significant rewrite of nearly everything is what would truly be needed to make it 100% friendly to this alternative system, and no one has been willing to do this as of yet likely due to the massive amount of work that would be involved.
I’ve made it a point to fix bugs as they are reported; just recently, 30-40 pull requests were approved that each included a fix for some issue. The thing is huge, bugs get missed in development or require specific circumstances to trigger, and if they are not reported, no one who can fix them will know of them to fix them.
As a final note, I think it’s important to note that, although they are often dichotomized, buildfiles and FEBuilder are not opposing or competing hacking methods, but exist in a symbiotic relationship; advancements with each ultimately benefit the other, and I find that most people either ignore or fail to realize this.
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Honestly, it feels like the skill system is the equivalent of cramming all 800+ Pokémon in a romhack: It’s basically seen by naive people as an easy “Make Hack Better” button. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. For the most part, skills just make the game more complicated and less intuitive to play. And sure, skills help make units and classes unique, but it costs you the ability to just sit down and enjoy some plain simple GBAFE gameplay.
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This thread has derailed into more of a discussion about the code and the contributors themselves, instead of the original design rant. I’d like to bring it back on topic and share my thoughts.
While I don’t see this as a big issue, there are numerous ways to fix it, such as putting skills on a separate page with their names written out on the page itself.
I agree with both of these points. Skill bloat is what’s turned me off from playing some of the more recent hacks. Everyone puts 6 skills on any unit, just because the system allows it, which is most if not all the time a terrible design choice.
I do not enjoy having to check several skills before moving any unit that I control. It simply drains the fun out of core fire emblem, which is very much about strategically placing units. Adding more numbers to keep track of and more luck to the game flow doesn’t help anything.
I believe the main purpose of skills should almost always be to differenciate classes. The most important ones (speaking for the official FE games) of course are Dance, Canto and Locktouch, all of which make their respective classes extremely different than a regular unit. I think more people should be taking advantage of skills like them, and cut down the amount of “haha heres extra numbers” skills to a minimum.
All of these are great points, and I feel the need to elaborate on the last one about Capture. Really, you should design everything around whatever skills you have, in general.
please don’t call it this, there’s no S at the end
This is completely due to FEBuilder’s implementation not fitting the nature of the skill system’s modular design, it has nothing to do with the skill system itself.
This is probably the best point in the entire thread.
I think it should be top priority to make AI for a lot of the more common skills, packed in the skill system. It would make the entire thing more fair during gameplay, and remove arguments like “I don’t like canto+ because enemies don’t use it and players get an advantage”
This post has already been broken down but like wtf man there’s literally nothing factually correct about the entire post
PLEASE EVERYONE REPORT YOUR BUGS INSTEAD OF FINDING A BUG AND COMPLAINING THAT IT ISN’T FIXED BUT YOU DIDN’T REPORT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE
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Thank you Peer for drifting this thread back to its course lel
like someone said above, skill system is not really that balanced and I do believe that many people are using it without tempering it at all, so imo the problem is on the hacker itself, not the system
(people who uses buildfiles that I know mostly edit their skill system, so the points below are mostly for FEBuilder users)
although yeah there might be bugs but the community is here to give and take feedbacks, so again PLEASE REPORT THE BUGS INSTEAD OF KEEPING IT IN YOURSELF AND THEN COMPLAIN ABOUT IT we are not psychics lmao
skill system is designed as a template for the hackers, so they can use it-- yet since it’s not balanced like someone said again, I think most hackers should make the skills to be compatible with their game designs
I also remember that 7743 is trying to make a feature about designing your own skill system in FEBuilder, so it’s gonna be a useful feature, and a big plus
tl;dr it’s completely the hacker’s choice to use skill system or not. but if you’re going to use it, make sure to make it coherent to your designs
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Tbh I’m just mad that Ghast got me again with another clickbait title
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you love to see it
OK, so, there’s very little point in responding to this misguided “clapback” when it’s become abundantly clear that people are much too interested in stroking their egos to listen to what I’m actually saying, but I’m going to attempt to clarify my position.
I have so many problems with the skill system that it would be difficult to ever nail down a “main problem”, but for the purposes of this discussion, you can consider it similar to the reasons I dropped RPG Maker years ago. For anyone who doesn’t know, the RPG Maker engine as a base is almost completely useless, in order to actually make anything of merit you have to download dozens of third-party plug-ins to get a fraction of the value you payed for when you bought the engine. The RPG Maker engine is in fact so useless that you need plug-ins for other plug-ins, most of which are made by different people.
I quit RPG Maker development because every time I wanted to do something major, I had to spend hours gleaning someone else’s code while also keeping ancillary code fresh in my memory or else everything would turn into a shambling mess. It became a Frankenstein’s monster of a platform.
The skill system is somewhat similar in nature to these “code, conjoined by different code, conjoined by different code” plug-in chains except, unlike RPG Maker, such an all-consuming system is both: A. totally unnecessary from a development standpoint and B. totally unnecessary to make good games. Bugs or no bugs, the issues produced by this glut are so much more vast than something like Venno’s ASM which have never caused me any problems at all.
Like, let’s say I make a buildfile, test it’s features and then the core gameplay, and I encounter a huge bug. Then I get rid of the buildfile, or load up a backup, and it’s like it never happened. What am I supposed to do when the same thing happens with regards to skill systems? Uninstall skill systems? Which part of it? Can I even afford to get rid of that part? Do you get what I’m saying? The more features like STR/MAG split are conjoined up in this ungodly behemoth of a system, the more I have to put up with, and the more I have to learn in order to be able to learn it’s intricacies.
When I encounter a bug in a mostly vanilla ROM, I instantly narrow it down to two or three possibilities and fix it within a half hour. When the exact same thing happens in a ROM with skill systems, who the fuck knows what is happening? Which of the twelve million changes to the core system (which you have pointlessly labeled as “not effecting gameplay” purely because they do not alter the user-centered play experience–an extremely weird attitude for a coder) is causing it? The more you add on, the more unwieldy it becomes, and claiming that because “you can theoretically turn off everything that makes it accessible, actually” is some serious “guns don’t kill people” bullshit. It’s an especially absurd stance to take if you are actually serious about improving the FEBuilder compatibility.
This is why I stated I want the system to be smaller, and yes, even more modual than it already is. If I can install heroes movement with nothing but the action rework, that should be the way it works. If there are skills that do not require rewriting battle round calculations, then they should be released separate from battle round calculations. I have very little faith that this will ever actually happen considering the overwhelming feeling of scorn and derision the people working on it display every single time this conversation comes up. Do not pretend like I am the first person you have heard this from, because I’ve seen these debates over and over again on the discord and every single time the detractors of the skill system are not met in good faith.
as for the “OMG, you are personally responsible for every bug you encounter and do not report!” bullshit, don’t give me that. My point was that the skill system is in a state of constant flux, and people find new skill systems bugs on the discord every day. If you actually are not receiving formalized bug reports that probably has more to do with the permission-driven content culture and the overall anxiety that comes with handing over your ROM to someone else than it does people being lazy. As for me specifically, my ROM won’t be of much help because I do not have the most recent build of skill systems. Not that I’m particularly encouraged to help out in the first place considering this place dropped from “obnoxious” to “morally untenable” after the affair with the FE5 menu translation.
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It’s years of practice
You’ve misunderstood the tenor and purpose of my response, but I’ll touch on some specific points first.
This is, a very poor metaphor; there are a handful of centralized locations that everything is attached to, and these were made specifically to easily allow for however many pieces you’d want to go there. Plus, there is a singular location from which you can change what is and is not installed at these points. Note that without a system like this, compatibility between hacks that want to go in the same place would be nonexistent.
I don’t think you quite understand what a buildfile is, if this is your interpretation. A buildfile is essentially a list of changes to make to a ROM. Every time you run it, all of these changes are applied to an unedited ROM. The benefit of this is you do not need to worry about keeping backups as if something breaks you can just remove it from the list of changes without losing progress elsewhere that’s been made since you added it. You can’t install or uninstall a buildfile, as it does not work that way.
Yes, that’s…what that means? I don’t understand your point here.
The reason hacks that are integrated with skill system calc loops are included with it at all is for FEBuilder compatibility; these are things that are easy to change in a buildfile but difficult to change in a rom with things already installed, so they come pre-packaged as to let them be usable without expecting a user with little knowledge of buildfiles to add them themselves. The idea is for it to be easily controllable by someone who may not want to work with a buildfile for their project.
Systems like this exist in-part already, in the form of things like global Capture. This in particular I’ve seen suggested before multiple times, I’ve just yet to find the time to sit down and see how it works to add a toggleable option for. The one thing of this type no one is particularly comfortable doing is an option for removing the skill system itself, as this raises a number of questions as to what the skill system buildfile actually wants to be that no one quite agrees on.
I can’t speak for others, but this is definitely not what I was saying. If you run into issues and keep them to yourself, that’s fine, I don’t blame you for anything. If you share the issues, that’s preferrable, so that they can be fixed. If you go around yelling “there are issues here!” and don’t say what those issues are, you can see how that would be frustrating to someone that wants to know what the issues are so that they can be fixed.
Good news! You don’t need to send a ROM to make a bug report, you just need a reproducible way to trigger the issue.
This then is the crux of the issue here, isn’t it? If you are running into problems with something and not using the latest version of it, the first thing you should try is updating it and seeing if the problems persist.
I want you to understand that I hold no ill will towards you or anyone else that has criticism to offer, I merely ask you substantiate your issues not because I don’t believe that you have found them but because I need to know what they are to be able to fix them. If you have issues or suggestions then by all means share them (on the skill system thread proper, this one probably isn’t the best place for that) and I guarantee you they will be seen. But, if you do not put it in a place where those who may act on it will see it, how are they meant to know of it?
Anyhow this is careening back into offtopic so I’ll stop this conversation here
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I am going to remind people, once, to remain civil. I don’t think arguing about who is stroking what ego is productive, and I’d appreciate that further comments to that effect be kept to yourself.
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The what? I can’t understand what this means. (This is an actual question. I do not mean this in jest or prodding, I just… don’t understand what you mean.)
But… if you complained about the bug, then you’ve already gone more than half the way to letting someone fix it? (Though I suppose that is the “people aren’t lazy” part.)
Also, you don’t need to pass over your work-in-progress project in order for someone to debug your issue at all! You only need to list your replication steps. This is only difficult if you can’t track what they are. (Which is a big part of why a buildfile is cool.)
In so much as design stands, I’m quite curious – while we can probably generically agree “Having too many skills is bad”, where is that division based?
Is it on the number of skills per unit; or on the number of skills that the game has in total?
A lot of consolidation of the skills (as per BwdYeti / FE7x) can make different classes feel less distinct than otherwise, but a very strong thought in that line is that you can differentiate classes from their bases and skills are just one more way to do that. Thus, each class can stay very unique with only a small collection of skills available to base class units.
Having one skill for each class makes them stand out more, but forces the player to dive into reading them until the player remembers the skills the system has, which can take an extremely long amount of time, especially if the skills aren’t concise. (It’s me. I’m guilty of this.)
If you have a small number of skills but they’re all walls of text, you still haven’t solved that burden-creation issue, though it is lessened.
I feel like the crux of all of this comes down to simplification and merge-down – “If you have ten systems but only two matter, you should redo or remove the other eight”.
Each time you do something like that, you can carefully curate your experience to only include the most cool, most fun and interesting, features; so that each one actually adds something.
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a couple guys mentioned using the skill system to highlight what already exists in the game like “crit +15” or canto and whatnot. But honestly, that sounds to me like you’re trying to fix what is never broken.
Its pretty implicit from simply playing FE that cavaliers will have canto or that myrms/ swordies will have higher crit because that’s just how they work. I get the need for transparency but in all my time playing hacks or even the vanilla game, i never once thought “man i wish they just clarified what this was.”
I believe the majority of players don’t actually give a hoot about specific numbers on crit, hit, avoid etc at the end of the day. Most people rely on the combat forecast to tell them if there’s a reliable crit rate or not. And most people can tell a cavalier has canto immediately after making a move.
So i wouldn’t even bother with using skills for that either.
You know what, scrap skills in hypothetical entirely. I’d like to incorporate combat arts over skills
FEUniverse in 2025 will have the following trending topic: “On the misuse of the FE8 GBA Battalion/Gambit System!”
(also three separate posts asking for help using the Mila’s Turnwheel patch that all get redirected to the main patch thread)
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Why is checking for skills an hassle if combat arts are okay in your book? You can be surprised all the same. The problem isn’t the skill system itself, but what people do with it (like skill bloat). You shouldn’t throw it all away because some projects used it in a way that annoyed you. It’s a great optional tool that offers a lot of benefits without taking anything away.
Also, using it for the sake of transparency isn’t needed? Maybe, but… it doesn’t take away from the experience. It uses like no space whatsoever on the stats screen. Complaining about that is just silly.
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