Noob Hacking Confessions

Units disappearing from the roster, proccing sol crashing the game, viewing certain screens eventually crashing the game. Honestly, it was okayish during the prologue, but by Chapter 5 it was unplayable.

Oh, also, every single Seth that was used as unit placeholders during battle preparations ended up being recruited. I saved the ROM because it was such a spectacle.

I do remember doing something that created a prompt that said “doing this will result in an erroneous bomb” or something like that. i didn’t know what it meant and just YOLO’d it. It was far, far worse than what skillsystems did alone, but skillsystems still caused me trouble after I redid everything. Especially the infamous debuff issue that persisted between maps.

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Not being able to figure out how unit placement worked for the prep screen, so I just ended up never using preps until I figured it out.

One time, for some reason I decided to get rid of the ALIGN 4 after Trap Data, and for like the whole day my events didn’t work and I was so angry. Turns out all I had to do was just ALIGN 4…

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YOOOOO it’s him!

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Just to name a few:

Last summer, I was working on a hack and I didn’t wanna use F2U sprites, but I also didn’t know how to splice. So instead of just, learning, I made a bunch of face images in RPG Maker, resized them, and put them into the game.

I had Ogier’s FE8 colors portrait in as my main lord in a hack for like 2 months before I realized he was an existing FE character.

I uninstalled skill systems twice.

I didn’t save backups of my ROMs (and I still don’t oops) and I lost a bunch of stuff.

Biggest one was having playable units after ID45…causing many issues with autoleveling.

How is this done?

reinstallation.

“Hey I don’t really wanna use skill systems anymore let me just-”
-Top 10 images taken before disaster

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On multiple occasions still I spend a ton of time changing stuff in my buildfiles, make changes and wonder why tf the changes aren’t going through.

Only to realize I’m editing a file with the same name in the wrong directory.

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Noir ahora si de verdad - copia
Trying to imitate vanilla palletes without actually knowing what you’re doing will rarely end well .-. .

imageimage
Also, trying to edit splices without knowing what you’re doing won’t end well either.

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I abandoned an entire project because I thought I had irreversibly corrupted the entire rom, since I was experiencing a softlock glitch in my latest chapter.

Upon later reflection I realised my mistake. I never used the ENUN command in my events. :sweat:

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Oh jeez.
This is why we have #febuilder_help on discord! And the fe_builder_gba thread.

:disappointed_relieved:

To do character palettes, the first time around I tried just guessing which was what in FeBuilder’s palette section, and I ended up with pillow shaded atrocities I never saved and hence can’t show. I ended up exporting the palette to Aesprite, changing the first frame of the animation, and then just copy pasting the color palette over, and then importing the palette back into FeBuilder.

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A too recent experience:
-Spending 1 hour trying to figure out why the patches for changing summoned class weapons wasn’t working, assumed it was because of class changes, turns out I had just specified the unit ID of another character with the same name for the summoned class.

An older experience:
Trying to figure out why an edited death blow seemed to be giving the wrong damage values for quite some while. Turns out I just forgot the obscure feature of the weapon triangle.

Hope these make others feel more professional about their own hacks.

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Removed a spam post and some replies. Please just flag these and don’t engage, thank you.

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I have an Unfunny Buildfiles story
Buildfiles Ascii dont have the “é” so when the file that builds the game runs didnt recognized the filepath because my user was “Kokué” and i take like 2 months to realize that :frowning:

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I had too much text in my walla text so it froze when it came to the seen that had it in it, and it took me too long to find out that that was the reason.

Back in the day, I still use FEditor for inserting portraits. When you loaded a portrait into the rom, the blinking and talking frames would not be in place of course. I would edit the portrait to fit the blinking and talking frames, rather then correcting the blinking and talking frames in FEditor itself. I had a big brain moment when I found out that you can manually correct the frames in FEditor.

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My hack makes use of LOMA to swap between areas. Neither area has exceeded OAM / sprite object limitations, but combined they have.

eK59aepyPt

Now this wouldn’t occur when I used “Goto next chapter” (MNC2), so I blamed LOMA as a stupid command causing my glitch. I swapped maps and cleared all units, so what’s the problem?

image

I spent about 3 hours troubleshooting this, looking at the asm behind MNC and pretending I understood a little bit of it, but mostly just trying various event commands to see if anything made a difference. (Such as locking the game graphics, or hiding the sprites by having a BG set when clearing units, etc. etc.)

As it turns out, all I had to do was put CLEA+CLEN+CLEE before the LOMA command.
image

:sob: forever a noob

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