Help channels exist on the discord for exactly this reason. It’s not just wizards who can help, lots of people hit the same issues and have experience solving issues you may run into. I learned to use buildfiles largely from asking questions in the relevant help channel and searching the backlogs to see if other people already solved issues I ran into. Nowadays there are far more resources for learning FE hacking than ever before, and there are tons of people happy to help newbie hackers get started.
Creating a good tutorial is far more work than answering questions from time to time. Though if I was a skill system maintainer I wouldn’t be particularly inclined to help out people who call it “absolute garbage.”
Just to put the number of possible skills into perspective:
FE14 has 227 skills in the game (if they’re all listed on the .org wiki which they probably are.)
This is with every single unit having a completely personal skill and every class having two entirely unique skills to themselves. Along with a few skills that are exclusive to nonplayables or are lunatic exclusive such as inevitable end.
FE14 is also three different games with two different casts and class sets for each of the two main routes.
I am incredibly confused why the 255 skill limit is an issue, as long as you’re not bloating your hack with a bunch of skills it should be more than enough (people don’t usually enjoy skill bloat anyway)
I’m not one for all this dogpiling though… I know I’ve made some pretty shit takes in the past and I still feel awful for them so it kind of feels like I’m watching someone make the exact same thing I did.
Reading up on this and it looks like I hit a nerve somewhat. Thanks to those who explained to me the technical reason why without getting all salty. I appreciate it.
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.
However, the 4 bytes for win loss ratio makes sense. I, personally, think I would only need the 2 slots if I was to use SHORTs instead of BYTEs. But to each his own.
Coding is supposed to be elegant, easy to understand, and decently modifiable. It’s literally the first thing any python course teaches you. If you are lucky, they’ll explain how Perl fell out of fashion because there was a million and 1 ways to do anything thanks to the focus on regular expressions.
I understand ROM hacking is the equivalent of modding a .exe file and sometimes typical rules don’t apply, but when you are building something from source (almost) like with buildfiles, you should always consider it’s scalability.
Hell, even in the actual software industry, plenty of companies have fallen into the trap of not making their software easily modifiable for adding new features.
You know, I literally just explained one of the regular struggles I have known people to go through with hacking. I asked why a particular choice was made, and I admit maybe I was a little rude about it. @Contro gave me a satisfactory answer.
But please, by all means, call me ungrateful. It’s not even my hack I’m having trouble working on. If I had a choice, I’d say screw it and not work with a skill system cause I think modern Fe skill systems pre-three houses and post radiant dawn are dumb.
Plus, I am anything but a new hacker. Which you would know if you read the first sentence of the OP. I am at the very least an apprentice and at most a wizard. I’ve made several ASM hacks.
Now, unfortunately, I don’t have the time to revamp an entire skill system just because I’m trying to help out some people who know less than me. All I’m doing is pointing out that not a single one of those people wants to work with an ASM hack like this and asking if other solutions were considered and if so why they weren’t used. Contro gave me an answer, and for that I am grateful, but it still doesn’t entirely change my opinion on the hack.
TL;DR: how can I be ungrateful when I have zero skin the game.
You don’t have to shut up if you either learn how to do it or pay someone. My critique if your idea is that its a you problem. Nobody needed 65355 skills so there aren’t 65355 skills.
My guy the post is still up. You also got away with it.
You thought I was referring to this post? Oh that’s rich.
I’d build it myself if I had the time. But I don’t. I literally just help on this hack as the ASM guy in my spare time.
As for paying someone for code, I think it’s gross. I’m not going to perpetuate a practice that is so firmly against the Linux principals that I follow.
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.
I still feel like there is potential for improvement and scalability should have been prioritized, but I know the reason it is the way it is.
But I got my answer, yet everyone here is still being incredibly rude despite that rule. And I haven’t once criticized a person in this thread with words like “shut up” or “entitled.”
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:
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:
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.
What else is there for me to learn from Teq’s tutorial? I’ve already read it 3 times over and while it covers the basics, and I have some basic knowledge because of it, I had to learn almost all of it on my own afterwards. Literally the only thing I learned from it was how to do very basic things, and how to manipulate branch links and the link register. I had to sit and work out what stuff did.
And if you want to call the skill system elegant, I’m sorry, but having to choose which skills you want to put in the ROM is not elegant. Even if it’s a few definitions.
That is how learning how to program usually works.
How is it not elegant?
The limitations are explained in a cohesive way, and all you as the user have to do is keep track of which skills are in the game, if not, they’ll have a 255 next to the definition.
If you don’t like the order they’re listed in then just change the order.
If you don’t like the fact GBAFE hacking comes with limitations due to the hardware the original game was developed on then I highly suggest using an engine like LT or Tactile instead that isn’t restricted by said hardware limitations.
By that same logic only being able to have 255 character slots in your ROM is inelegant as well because characters use a byte.
I also completely disagree that skill system is a mess. Over the past 5 years it’s been streamlined and developed further to make it more user-friendly and add more skills in the package for new users to have at their disposal. There’s plenty of options in config.event alone that gives the user easy toggle switches for how they want certain custom ASM hacks to work, granted it doesn’t always work as there are some compatibility issues so it’s not ideal but I think it still works really well for what most people want to do with their games.
It’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll ever need to go over 255 skills so making the byte a short really isn’t necessary, complaining you have to “swap out skills” to work with GBA hardware limitations given how skillsys had to be coded in the first place to work with it is incredibly inconsiderate of why it was made that way. And you have the technical reason. So if you don’t like it, calm down and move on.
As for it being “garbage for new hackers”, it has a learning curve. Unfortunately, buildfiles are very intimidating to learn and not beginner friendly. But tutorials do exist and have made buildfiles easier to learn with less complex builds that don’t use skillsys. There’s also sme’s tutorial which details how to get as much use out of skill systems as possible which is very useful.
But another thing, not every hack needs to have skillsys, and not every hack needs to contain skills. You can make a perfectly good hack without them, if you don’t want to use it because you don’t like it, then don’t but coming in and claiming “it’s garbage for new hackers” and blowing the con of “I have to learn how this hacking method works” way out of proportion.
Nobody here has a problem with legitimate discussion about ways to improve code. However, the tone you consistently use with others is defensive and rude. You seem to be goading others. Perhaps this is not your intention and not who you are, but this is how your words are coming across.
Various quotes without context:
It’s not like any of these quotes are egregiously out of line. But when they’re this regular, it’s not a good look for you.
Avoiding a few specific key words does not make you polite. Have others also been less than polite? Yes. That doesn’t make it right to be rude, and I’m sure the worst offenders will be spoken to about it.
I wouldn’t necessarily call you as a person entitled, but your initial message was worded in an entitled way. Likewise, I wouldn’t want you to stop sharing your suggestions and opinions, but I would encourage you to really think about the ways you phrase what you say. Criticism isn’t constructive when it sounds like flaming.
As it is, this thread feels like it’s trolling and baiting others. If it were up to me, I would’ve simply closed it and asked you to rephrase your messages in a more polite and constructive way.
Here is my one criticism of SkillSys and the 255 skill limit:
If you want a specific version of a skill, such as the FE4/5/9/10/whatever Wrath, it may not be in the system. After all, skills change from game to game, and some people may prefer one rendition of a skill more than another.
Over the course of the franchise’s history, there have probably been at least 500 skills in the mainline FE games, assuming we split different iterations of the same skills into their own unique skill.
Therefore, the skill system may not be able to accomodate all of those different iterations in one clean FEBuilder package. Some sort of ‘install the skills from the games I want on demand’ system would certainly be nice.
But I imagine that will take quite a long time to get to that point. And saying ‘the whole system is garbage’ because a point like this isn’t accommodated is quite rude to the people who devote their days to improving SkillSys.
I said it’s ease of use is garbage for new hackers. I understand a lot of time and effort went into it. Forgive me if my bad word choice didn’t make that clear. I got an answer as to why it was only 1 byte as well. And I’m willing to accept that answer.
