Skill System Is Absolute Garbage For New Hackers

[LegendofLoog]

@DuffOnTheRun

But oh wait, I didn’t even complain about it. Why? Well, simply because I asked a question about the skill system. One that had a valid answer.

Skill System is Absolute Garbage for New Hackers

People wouldn’t be responding in the way that you’re complaining about if this post wasn’t meant to be inflammatory from the jump, so I’m not sure what the point is in pretending as if all this post entailed was a simple question. I don’t think anyone would care in the slightest if all you did was ask why skills aren’t shorts over bytes, but the tone of both the post and the title is obviously going to rub people the wrong way. Why shouldn’t it? The Skill System is an excellent piece of tech that tons and tons of hackers use. Not perfect, but nothing ever will be, so it’s incredibly rude to say this type of stuff when you’re not willing to contribute to it in any way at all.

Now, to address some of the other things said, since you mentioned that the ideas should be the focus:

@DuffOnTheRun

Doesn’t change the fact that the skill system is frustrating as hell to work with. Hell, it took me forever to give the nihil effect to fortress defense cause I had no idea what to even look for and it’s not like there is any documentation on actually building your own skills because of how hard it is for someone to even learn simple asm thanks to a lack of tutorials.

GBAFE Assembly for Dummies, by Dummies

PLEASE DO NOT POST. THIS IS NOT FINISHED. Greetings, fleshlings! You may have heard that assembly hacking, or “asm”, is incredibly difficult and is only pursued by the bravest of souls after many years of study under an old man on a mountain. This is completely wrong. For starters, do you have any idea how difficult it is to get wifi on a mountaintop? Not to mention the wind and snow wreaks havoc on our creaking bones. It is true that learning and applying it takes time, but that goes for just …

Pretty much as comprehensive of a GBAFE ASM guide that you’re going to find, so not sure what you’re on about here. As for building your own skills, you have a gigantic amount of reference material to work with in the Skill System. Speaking for myself, as someone with very little CS background and not that much time spent working with assembly hacks, it’s fairly straightforward to search around the Skillsys Github page, find how a skill functions, and mimic this. I’ve done it again and again, and the process is pretty much the same each time. If you still have questions after perusing all that material and the assembly guide, the FEU Discord has a dedicated help channel for assembly and other engine hacks. Now, as for this:

@DuffOnTheRun

Coding is supposed to be elegant, easy to understand, and decently modifiable.

I completely agree, and as it happens, the Skill System buildfile is all of these things. Especially in regards to changing out skills themselves, it’s very very easy to replace a skill with another. It’s one of the most modular hacks in the community. That you struggled with doing this using a method that is not intended and only held together by 7743’s huge amount of work in porting it to FEBuilder, says nothing about the Skill System or how “garbage” it is for new hackers. If you or the people that you’re helping out want that extra accessibility, they should consider using a buildfile, as that’s what the Skill System is and always has been built for. I’ll be the first to admit that buildfile documentation isn’t excellent, but it’s out there. I started with buildfiles and referenced other people’s public buildfiles to understand what was going on, asked questions when I was confused, searched around FEU and the discord to figure stuff out, and honestly, it worked out great. The community is super supportive overall, and the Skill System even existing is just one example of that.

All of this is to say that I think the premise that you came in here with is fundamentally flawed and built on not actually making the best of the documentation that is out there and the support available. Maybe one day, we will have perfectly complete guides that say how to do every little thing down to the letter. In the interim, I would suggest to both you and anyone else that is unsure about anything hacking related to ask for help and really take a deep dive into the documentation that is out there, before complaining about something widely appreciated in the community in a way that isn’t going to do anything but stir the pot.