Hack’s kinda dead
3 Likes
I’m kinda dead too vro
Tactical F incoming?
The hack will be ready when it is ready - no one on the dev team should feel pressure to complete this anytime soon. It’s an ambitious project with a lot of stakeholders. It will take time.
6 Likes
In terms of when an actual update is coming, only time will tell.
However, that doesn’t mean nothing has been happening behind the scenes. In fact, we have a lot to show you in terms of progress, and we hope to update this thread in the following week with said progress.
Of course, progress isn’t as smooth as it was last year. A lot has happened behind the scenes that lead to a lack of motivation post-first release. We apologize for that. A lot has/had to be changed due to what were back then unforeseen circumstances. So I would like to issue an apology for any further retcon/modification/removal from the original release that will be caused by the updates. Keeping this afloat has been hard, mostly due to the “each user submits a character” nature of the hack we began with. Thankfully, nowadays most of these problems seem to have been resolved, and developpement has been pretty smooth sailing recently, thanks to the work of the dev team, and especially Sme.
After the initial release, I experienced a burnout from this project; That was why I decided to appoint @Sme as the project lead. He has been doing an amazing job so far, and without him the project would be basically dead. As for me, I’ve recovered from said burnout, and as such will be resuming my work on this project(however, I will leave the project lead position to Sme, as I wouldn’t feel good retaking it after not doing anything for months.).
I will try my best to update this post with news on the project whenever possible, however, please understand if sometimes the project seems inactive.
TL;DR: Sorry for the lack of updates, lots of behind the scene stuff happened, we hope to give you news as soon as we can.
18 Likes
Well, it was a good run.
Tale of Ternon is officially cancelled.
After the initial demo’s release, development begun to slow down. The team working on this hack was large; too large. We were massively overambitious, attempting to create three unique routes, and with the writers demanding more and more extensions to them all. For all the artists and writers, there were very few actual hackers. Last night, we had a discussion about how Ternon rose and fell; I feel like the public deserve a recap of this as well. So, for posterity…
The History of Ternon
The beginning. The deleted user is likely Peerless.
So it all began as it usually does with these things; someone had a dumb idea pop into their head and we all started running with it. In this case, Three Houses had just been released, Arch had recently finished the game, and he was drunk. Ternon was originally an unabashed Three Houses knockoff. Characters were directly mapped to 3H ones, and these characters were made up of FEU members, in the vein of Destiny parodying Fates. In these earliest days, Ternon was known as “Three Universes”; Fire Emblem Universe in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Usernames were wildly thrown onto the sheets, with FEU admins leading the houses and Serenes members representing the Slithers. People were constantly bouncing from house to house. This soon got cleaned up so random members who had no interest in the project had their names taken off and the villains were no longer another community.
An early screenshot of the character list; everyone was explicitly an FEU user
A big pile of names were on a spreadsheet, but what were we going to use it for? 3H has three routes, let’s have three routes too. 3H has punching, let’s let our guys punch as well. 3H has Reason and Faith instead of Tome and Staff, let’s use 3H magic. Did they do it in Fodlan? We’ll do it in Ternon. The world was based off the FEU Minecraft server in existence at the time, because why not? From there, the countries were drawn. Adestria became Novingale, Faerghus became Seraphyn, and Leicester became Hevursa. Peripheral countries remained unchanged initially; this can be evidenced in the FEE3 videos. Of course, 3H and GBA work very differently. Anyone can use anything in Fodlan. The class structure is completely different. How would that be reconciled to the GBA?
The class selection menu in action. Michael could be any of the four classes listed; his weapon strengths are on the right of the screen.
Once Arch had sobered up, the hack team had formed up. Kirb was to be the project lead, and created most of the custom ASM to be used for Ternon. When a new game is started in Ternon, there’s a fancy route selection menu, and once a route is chosen, a menu allows four classes to be chosen for each character. Characters can also equip accessories, which boost stats or give skills. These hacks were all Kirb’s work. The GBA GUI was swept away in favour of a new 3H-style one. This work was performed by Hypergammaspaces. Myself, Sme, and Ganzap, along with Kirb, handled most of the behind-the-scenes hacking work. In particular, I was the one who formatted almost all dialogue text. The development itself would take place in the Under, Arch’s personal server.
The original sketch of Ternon, then called Feudlan as a take off Fodlan
The storyline of Ternon proved to be a complicated one. There were three routes; the Red Lobsters, lead by Rodin (Kyuzeth, an FEU Discord mod), the Purple Jaguars, led by Vergil (Arch, creator of FEU), and the Amber Bears, lead by another user, with no particular authority. The 3H parallels were strong; the basic colour scheme were the same as the 3H houses. The Lobsters and the Jaguars, old rivals, paralled the Eagles and Lions, while the Bears took like the Deer and tended to keep low down. Another 3H element planned to be included was a time skip. One big fight between all three factions, in the vein of 3H’s Battle of Gronder, was to serve as the midpoint of each route. From there, five years would pass and the war would rage once more. However, this would require co-ordination between the three routes. This was something that Ternon desperately lacked.
Samples of each of the three routes.
The Red Lobsters were generally the most polished route in development. Kyuzeth actively worked and wrote for his route. He had a story planned out, and generally attempted to work with the other people who had characters in his route. The dialogue wasn’t too long, but wasn’t so short it couldn’t capture the audience’s attention. Arch brainstormed ideas early on, but generally left other people to work on their execution. The script writing was largely delegated to Raymond and another user. Their dialogue was long-winded, but generally tried to give every character a significant role. The Amber Bears head didn’t care at all about what was going on. Theri and Ruffles were the figures who wrote the story on this route. They simply ignored the other characters and focused on the trio of their own self-inserts, Lazul and Reginald, plus Diana. Other characters were completely ignored. Regardless, all of these writers lacked one important ability: the ability to format their dialogue for in-game insertion. This duty invariably fell to Darrman, the one who is writing this essay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DexJv3WdQbM
The 2019 FEE3 videos
People worked hard throughout September and October of 2019, eager to submit for that year’s Fire Emblem E3. The deadline for a self-recording was the 31st of October. However, behind the scenes, that year’s FEE3 was incredibly hectic and most project recordings had run late. The initial expectation was that Xenith would record the Red Lobsters route, being the most polished. The other routes were labelled “Unavailable in the FEE3 Demo”, further emphasising the original intent. Unaware that Ternon already had a recording scheduled, MageKnight404 streamed the Amber Bears route. Xenith was not pleased about being upstaged by a better known Youtuber, but thankfully, a peaceful agreement was reached. “Ternon has three routes; can’t we show off all three?” Pandan recorded Purple Jaguars and all three routes received FEE3 coverage. On the surface, all seemed well.
But in reality? A few days prior to the FEE3 video’s release, severe allegations were raised against the head of the Amber Bear’s behaviour. I won’t get into the details of what these allegations are, except that they are severe ones. As part of the fallout of the revelations, they were banned from FEU and the Under, where Ternon was being developed. Her character was replaced by Elle (L95, ex-FEU mod and member of the old guard). FEE3’s videos were already recorded and there was no time to record a version with Diana removed. This was the first real stumbling block the Ternon team had run into. Confusion abounded as the Amber Bears route needed to be rewritten to accomodate the new protagonist. Several members of the team had lost interest and silently left the Under, never to return. Still, a demo had been promised, and the team’s internal deadline was the new year. And so, the artists returned to drawing art, the writers got back to writing, and the spectators continued watching from afar.
Caduceus, one of the first Ternon accessories and originally taken straight from 3H. Granting +1 range was far too powerful, so it got altered to the above effect.
Ternon being a community project, Kirb felt that a community participation element would be interesting. As a result, he opened up the Ternon thread to accessory suggestions. After filtering out generic and impossible accessories, a poll of 25 choices were left available for selection. Most of the accessories on the poll were incredibly powerful, including the almighty Angel Ring from FE2 and the ability to allow any unit to fly at will. The top ten accessories were added into the game’s data and gifs were posted showcasing their effects. Due to their high power, these would not be present within the first demo. Many team members were more concerned about keeping the game well-balanced above anything else.
The results of the poll. 593 votes were cast; the Knight Ring, the most popular submission, received 41 of those.
Ternon’s title screen, based off 3H’s title screen but with Sothis removed
The aim for Ternon’s demo was to complete the first three chapters of each route, for a total of nine chapters playable. The deadline was set to be for New Year’s Day. The team frantically worked to ensure the content for the demo chapters was completed. Although the dialogue was absent for the later Amber Bears chapters and spotty in Purple Jaguars 3, the demo was released on the scheduled date. There were many bugs and oversights, and a hotfix was released to cover some of them over soon after. With the first demo successfully released, the team was on a high. The demo was out, the hack was happening. People generally received the demo well. The next plan was for demo 2 to cover the rest of the pre-time-skip for each route. But, that’s not how things went down.
A character contributor annoyed at the rushed story and wanting to lengthen it
The routes were planned to be 15 chapters long each. However, a common complaint amongst players was that the story developed too quickly in comparison to a normal Fire Emblem game. The plan was to defeat the main arc villain pre-time-skip by chapter 6, in time for Ternon Gronder in chapter 7. The writers concurred with this line of thought, and expanded all the routes to spread out their stories. There was no thought given by them to the hacking requirements. The five additional chapters initially suggested here was scaled back to two, bringing each route to 17 chapters, 51 in total. Eager to add content, the writers agreed on extending the hack and begun drawing out plans to use their new chapters.
The beginning of the end
Due to some serious allegations, several users got banned. Of these, one particular user’s ban had an incredibly severe effect on Ternon. He had created several maps and wrote a large amount of the Purple Jaguars’ script. Having been removed from the project, he wanted every single one of his contributions to the hack to be taken out with immediate effect.
I believe, in no uncertain terms, that this is what killed Tale of Ternon.
The withdrawal of his work forced massive rewrites to the Purple Jaguars. At the same time, the Amber Bears team, facing criticism for the poor integration of characters, was also going through a rewrite. New recruits were sought after to fill the void of the missing characters. New maps needed to be created to replace the banned user’s maps, which was complicated as who made what map wasn’t properly recorded. To compound the turmoil Ternon’s development went through, Kirb stepped down as project lead, handing the torch to Sme. From here on out, Ternon slowly, steadily declined.
A spriter’s request for order amidst the growing chaos
Throughout February, ferocious arguments were had on what course the project should take. But after that, people just started losing interest. The constant arguments drained people’s energy. More people withdrew their characters. Activity begun to slow down. The casual character contributors who placed their name and mug on a character sheet had long since disappeared. Ternon’s last few months consisted of Sme maintaining things as well as possible, while the Purple Jaguars and Amber Bears rewrites were on a very slow burn with nobody capable of inserting the text. The inevitable had happened. The project, which had once had dozens of people eagerly working on various elements, was basically on life support.
One last attempt at resusitation
It had come to a head. On one side of the coin was myself. I felt that Ternon was too far gone and couldn’t be saved. Rather than let it rot into nothingness, I believed that explicitly cancelling it would give Ternon a dignified end. Towards the middle of the scale were those who believed that cutting down Ternon’s ambition would save it. An example proposal was to cut out the post-time-skip period, which had no work done on it. Finally, there were some lurkers dragged out of the woodwork who argued to retain the project as a whole. Everybody involved had fond memories of the project, and it was sad to see it go. In the end, the cancellation proposal was rejected with the hope that the project would continue.
It didn’t.
A bystander mourns Ternon’s passing
The main playtester sums it all up
A year has passed since Three Houses was released. It is the early morning of the 27th of July. FEU was taking a trip down memory lane. The topic of conversation turned to Ternon. No work had been done in about three months. People had other commitments. The Three Houses hype had faded. While the memories of Ternon were good, the project undeniably was no longer active. Tale of Ternon was dead. Now, it must be given a proper funeral.
The end
Ternon has left behind vast amounts of assembly and graphics. I encourage each spriter to make their own statements. Assume all portraits are not free to use unless stated otherwise.
hypergammaspacesToday at 03:43
feel free to reuse the UI graphics tho
BeerlessToday at 07:25
I saw the discussion about the assets but what about code? will kirb's awesome asm be released?
Slithermond 🐍Today at 09:38
its already in the source code thats available so i think thats technically counted?
KirbToday at 13:08
Yeah that's usually my excuse
Some artistic permissions (thanks Nat):
feier: volta, jonathen, and mimi are offlimits, kaiden is up to kaidenmelon
miik: adam is free to use
serif: konatsu and larissa are offlimits
gamma: kelly is offlimits but menu stuff is fairgame
theri: lazul is up to them
grated: bear is free to use
daffodil: lilac is off limits
randomwizard: yanndahl is offlimits, everything else is f2u
shep: stephen is offlimits
tewi: serine’s mug was already f2u (belongs to ciraxis)
l95: everything is free to use
levin: khris is off-limits, larissa goes to serif
I wish everyone well, and perhaps another project will start up some day.
– Darrman, Tale of Ternon hacker and primary text formatter
30 Likes
Ternon’s various assembly hacks will be released individually when I am able to, right now life has been kinda rough so i haven’t been able to do much. A proper statement from me may follow, but I think Darrman summed it up fairly well.
I would like to formally apologize to anyone who was interested in/anticipating this project. I hope you can understand the situation for Ternon was pretty rough after the first showing.
17 Likes
I made a cool bear mug for this I need to see it in literally every hack going forward
Also rip
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It was fun while it lasted. I’m truly honored and blessed to have had the privilege to contribute to the project, despite bickering with other users and my already shaky state.
As mentioned above I compiled the asset usages of what I saw above, and Darrman added them to his post; if I missed any or got any wrong please please please let me know, I wouldn’t want assets that aren’t meant to be f2u to he accidentally used.
Also assume anything that’s not on the list isn’t free to use unless any spriters make their statements.
Aside from that, I’m very happy I got to work on the project, even if it ended up being cancelled.
-serif
4 Likes
rip bear phase theme, quality meme
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Cool project and idea. Ternon certainly moved FE8 hacking forward and I look forward to seeing what gets done with its innovations and ideas.
Feel free to distribute the maps I made if anyone wants to use them / reference. Not sure if any actually made it into the game, though.
It may be best to do a .zip asset dump of everything that is F2U to avoid any potential issues.
2 Likes
There is a Ternon shaped hole in my Ternon shaped heart
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Sad that it’s cancelled, but not at all surprised. Thanks to everyone involved for building the hype machine that I never bothered to play
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I feel we’re not getting the full context for this but i don’t know what you were expecting, “i fully understand being thrown out of the project so please keep enjoying all the (presumably) unpaid work i’ve done on it”…?
To be honest i never really paid attention to this hack and i think i kind of assumed it was more like a cheeky shitpost-esque excuse to show off cool hacking wizardry. But whatever the goal was, it seems like it did accomplish some impressive things and even if the end result is bunch of new resources available rather than a fully playable hack then that’s still more than most projects manage :v
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We all talk about UI stuff and ASM getting released, but I’m just chillin’ waiting for Tempest of Seasons.
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I don’t think anyone would realistically expect a banned user to keep their work around. But if someone got banned, they got banned for a reason and keeping them around is a bad idea unless you want to make some ideological point. Bans don’t usually happen for no reason so whatever actions led to them getting banned could be said to be responsible for killing the project.
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[screenshot redacted]
What is the point of removing the names of the users in question?
Probably to avoid drawing attention to them.
Also, goodbye Tale of Ternon.
Your tale will never be truly forgoten going by what I’ve read- and ultimately, I think that’s the best possible fate for these kinds of things.
The tools that were made for it and whatnot- I’m certain that they’ll be handy down the line.
Because I think that dragging these users’ names through the mud is unreasonable and asking to stir up shit, and I’d appreciate you not digging through the edit history for this purpose.
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It’s also worth mentioning that giant, exhaustive retrospectives are kind of Darr’s thing. Despite the bold text reading a little direly, the post was clearly intended to be a postmortem, not a callout.
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