Ok, I realize this isn’t the place for it but what is the fascination with Lex Tailonis?
I mean this as a genuine question, coming from a guy who mentally can’t really bring himself to game on PC partially due to growing up on consoles, so why would you want any of these games remade like this?
For one, I can’t really bring myself to play on console anymore due to them all going obsolete after seven years, planned obsolescence is utterly insufferable and I hate it, and I hate that PC still isn’t quite immune.
LT may also have some engine benefits dev side, I haven’t really messed with it myself.
Short answer, you can expand your screen size. You can run the game at fullscreen, 720p, 480p, GBA size, SNES size, PS1 size, 3DS size, nobody can stop you. There are no rules. You don’t have to use GBA music either. You can rewrite any code. Anything goes.
Long answer…
Mario 64 Romhacking is advanced but it’s got nothing on decomp hacking. You can change anything! And it’s easy. You don’t have to worry about a simple change or a bad tool/patch accidentally corrupting the whole rom. You get better source code. You can even alter what would normally be hardcoded into the game. There are no technical limitations. Okay, there are SOME technical limitations if you want it to run on consoles at a reasonable framerate. You get to see and alter human-readable code. I don’t think it would be possible to program complicated functions like possessing foes Mario Odyssey style without decompiling the game first.
You will never have to write “During chapter 4 and 7 and 12 there are graphical glitches please ignore them” in your thread. You will never run out of slots for new weapons or items or skills or units. You will never have to create a “Send units home” map to crush up unwanted units and trade them for Spirit Dust like this is some kind of mobile game. You will never experience stupid bugs in your game like “The Thieves in my army can’t pick up treasure in the desert because they’re female. I am not joking. No, the developer didn’t do that on purpose. It’s because the male thief and female thief classes are under different hex value address areas in the rom. Nobody told the developer the rom he used as a base has this problem and you need an obscure patch to make female thieves competent.”
Decompiled games have to deal with existing code meant for consoles. Existing code written with
limited optimization knowledge from decades ago. Existing code written by rushed underpaid devs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE You can do so much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErkLuoJ_8qk and LT can allow for even more.
LT isn’t a decompiled console game. It’s better. With LT you can go through the menus and check boxes to decide your game has Pair Up now. You can decide kills don’t grant bonus EXP. You can decide the killing blows on bosses always triggers the Critical Hit animation. You can change how much weapon EXP you gain when reclassing. You can alter how EXP gain is calculated. You can recreate Emblem Rings and Skills from any modern FE game and create new ones too. You can create Skills and Combat Arts so complicated you need a youtube tutorial to understand them. You don’t need to rely on some ASM wizard to create a patch that maybe does some of what you want. You get to create without limits.
With LT Python Edition you can look through the raw code of the game and understand everything and change anything. You can just decide you don’t like how FE handles EXP and alter things so you need 1000 EXP to level up and the enemy’s level’s effect on your EXP gain is multiplied by 10. You can turn off EXP gain during battles and make beating levels run a script that autolevels all your units. You can feed an entire python file to ChatGPT and say “Create a component that makes enemies with this Skill give one less EXP and Weapon EXP per stack of the Skill with this component, I’ll make a global hidden skill give it to everyone a player unit hits after combat to fight infinite exp/wexp grinding” and it just works. You can say “ChatGPT, look at how the code works for item components for AOE attacks of sizes designated by the player and create a new one called AOE Cone that fires in a straight line from the user in a number of tiles designated by the player while widening the blast radius by 1 tile every 2nd tile” and it just works, you get a new working piece of code to drag and drop into your game to make something formerly impossible possible. I did that in my LT game. Sure, sometimes ChatGPT gives you bad code and you need to use your python knowledge to fix it, but it’s still a useful tool that lets one developer do the work of ten developers in half the time. That math’s probably mostly accurate. I created a component for restricting attacks to tiles in straight lines north, east, south, and west of the user and I gave it to the Light Magic attacks in my game to compensate for their extreme range. They fire from 10 tiles away. Yes, they have 1-10 range, and the AOEs target a diamond radius 5 tiles wide. You can move 8 tiles north in a single turn and hit someone from 15 tiles away. Yes, I loved Makouha from Persona 5 Tactica and a certain other game with a unit restricted to firing in cardinal directions (Into The Breach), how did you know? Maybe I’ll make a Super Meter in my game next. I loved the Super Meter in P5T and appreciated the Super Meter with EX Moves in Project X Zone. I have yet to make up my mind on PXZ2. I love meters. I come from a Fighting Game background, after all. It would be weird if I made a game without a Super Meter. That crap Pokemon game I made years ago felt incomplete without one.
Sometimes I think of putting my Fire Emblem fangame on hold to make something new and rushed that only exists to let players playtest cursed ideas I’ve been having regarding optimizing and reworking the AI. If it turns out well, it could potentially benefit everyone’s LT games. This is open source, after all.
You’re not limited to making FE games that are only like GBA FE games or what someone with a master’s degree in ASM magic wanted to make possible. I could probably create an entire system that recreates that awful Judge and Law system from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance if I wanted to. Or recreate the better Law system from Persona 5 Tactica with law zones created by destroyable speakers. So many things are possible, keeping the scope reasonable is a serious challenge for me. There’s already a system for moving around without a grid, interacting with scripts and objects and talking to NPCs. I could recode the cutscenes to show images with text over them like in Tsukihime. I could expand the size of the portraits for cutscenes to match the 3DS. I could even code something like a Legend Of Zelda Minish Cap sequence or Baba Is You segment or Pokemon-style frictionless sliding ice puzzle or an Undertale boss battle or a Touhou Artificial Dream In Arcadia shoot em up segment.
alotta it is just that its neat and provides a unique niche in the fe sphere.
thing’s just a good tool for creating fangames that’re fairly “out there” design wise without needing to be as much of a superwizard to get it there, since it’s all in python.
You can bypass the limitations of the GBA engine and do incredibly cool things as showcased in the LT projects in this late FEE3. That’s the quick gist of it.
You can also play LT on your phone, as showcased here, so there’s no longer the PC limitation, and I am a mobile-only player for the time being.
Ignore Jason’s reply it’s too much text to actually say something relevant within a reasonable amount of time.
The replies above mention the numerous advantages of LT in developing FE fangames. However, GBA hacking also has its appeal. As a dev who has experience in Unity, Ren’Py, and other ‘mainstream’ engines—I cite two major advantages of GBA hacking over using a proper game engine like LT: project size and cross-platform availability.
These advantages shrink by the day.
I cracked Lex Talionis on Android quite recently. Other devs are working on deploying LT through a web browser and are seeing favourable results.
Project size is being worked on through avenues such as MIDI support. MIDI support will probably be a long way coming due to pygame’s implementation on Windows being shaky. The minute this issue gets addressed, it will be another win for LT.
It’s just a matter of time.
But honestly, if I’m gonna get paid the same either way (zero euros for making FE hacks), I’d rather write Python instead of C or ASM lmao.
Ok, while I do grasp a good chunk of that I can at least now break down some of my personal hang ups, with PC gaming and why I have difficulty “getting” something like LT.
Minor mental imprinting of controls. While many games use WASD for movement and space for jumping etc, I have also seen and played a few games that had the most awkward keybinds I’ve ever seen. At least with a controller there isn’t much to muck up.
I really don’t play anything on mobile, due to never having a good running phone, plus I just don’t like being on my phone more then I need to.
I quite literally dump any Rom Hacks I play onto my 3ds due to seriously not liking how emulator screens look no matter how much I tinker with it.
Now to point onto some more specific aspects of ya’ll’s replies.
I quite literally know nothing about coding, even with somehow having helped a few hack makers finding code specific issues before, so saying something like that is kinda useless to me.
I’ve always seen the Console VS PC debate like this.
Do you want something that plays your games well and you don’t want to think to hard about it, get a console.
Do you want something that you can sit at and play games, listen to music, watch a movie, read a book, do your taxes AND talk to ya bois all at the same time? Get a PC or a Mac.
Do you want to talk down on both while contributing nothing of value to the points of either? Learn Linux and go away.
Finally
Oh believe me, I know. I think this is the like 5th one of his topics I’ve jumped into where this has happened. At least this time I’m not crossing proverbial swords with him over some bassawkwards design idea he has.
I am not sure of how exactly, but I believe I saw somebody run the above LT-Android method through a Steam Deck
tldr LT’s mouse controls match Windows. left-click for A/Yes, right-click for B/No, it’s perfect.
Also they make Windows-like Linux versions, I use one. Bumper-sticker opinions about how “Consoles are for gaming, PCs are for everything else, Linux is for NERDS” are lame lmao.
long version:
I understand your frustrations with PC games that have nonstandard controls. ZXC are used by Pokemon Essentials instead of the normal A and B buttons, and that’s terrible. But most PC games let you remap controls (and most console games don’t) so I don’t see any issue there.
LT’s controls are intuitive and perfect, your left-click does everything A does and your right-click does everything B does. Using a mouse in these games makes things so fast I usually don’t even bother using the button for moving my cursor to the next guy in my army who can move. If you don’t like that, LT also supports ALL controllers. I made the HUD display damage/def/skills/items and moved everything on FE GBA’s multiple pages onto the first page and replaced the weapon uses indicator with a damage and range indicator.
Name any Fire Emblem game. Its LT remake can be modified in all sorts of ways, even ones that would be impossible with our current tools for binary-hacking that game and our ASM knowledge for the console the game runs on. You can run FE4 at 1080p. You can even use If Statements and Variables set by a script to make a 1:1 remake of an existing FE game with optional bonus features activated if you make certain choices during the start of a new run. You don’t need a folder with 30 different patches and mods for 30 different games, the game itself can contain all of them.
Consoles always frustrated me with their technical limitations and the anti-computer culture they bred. The N64 and PS2 and Xbox games that let you make new levels and items are rare, and they’ve got nothing on Doom modding. You drew a pingas on your kart in Mario Kart DS? Cute, Doom players modded their game to make every texture a pingas.
Console culture is paying for microtransactions and DLC for content already on the disc.
Console culture is making excuses for the multinational megacorporation when they patent aiming in video games and use a broken law system to abuse a better company for making a better game.
Console culture is grinding for weeks and paying hundreds to gamble for more content in a game you paid for and don’t own instead of making and enjoying fangames.
Console culture is hoping the PS6 gets a remake of the PS5 remake of the PS3 game Demon’s Souls, which is literally the one and only game advertised by Astro Bot you can run on PS5 AND need a PS5 for. What does a PC cost? The price of a resold classic console and how many overpriced resold games? The price of a modern PC and how many new games with no business charging 70 dollars or 150 dollars or more and a monthly subscription fee? Between FREE online play, piracy, emulation, literally making your own games, learning anything you want to know, experiencing anything from over 2000 years of human art, music, literature, culture, or anything from the 70ish years of gaming, I legitimately don’t get why console players keep trying to have this discussion if they’re not going to admit the PC actually has every possible advantage over any console on the market. Price? Already said that. Games? PC has every game consoles have and every game consoles don’t. Portability? Portable PCs exist, the Steam Deck is one of them and it’s cheaper than the Switch.
It’s like comparing a katana to a gun. What gun? Whichever outdoes a katana at whatever the katana lover mentions. The abstract concept of a gun that can have any number of bullets at any size and do anything a katana can do better. If you find a katana more comfortable you’re screwing yourself over by not spending enough time experiencing for yourself the wonders of guns. Or PC gaming. The abstract concept of a PC can run anything, cost anything, it might be portable, it might even run Batocera to replicate a child-friendly console-style interface you can navigate using a controller so you never have to touch a mouse and keyboard.
I don’t say this because I want to “Win the console war”. Some people make excuses for modern Sony, those people will never know freedom. They will never leave the walled garden and learn of the bigger garden outside. They’ll never see the ocean. I’m not mad at them, I pity them. I feel bad for people who never experience the freeing magic of a real computer and the limitless free backlog it opens up. When I was ten and I found Game Maker tutorials on Youtube, and I did what they said to do and made shit ripoffs of Pac-Man and Mario I felt like a GOD, even though I only made trash and I never uploaded anything good. I played Super Mario 64 and activated stupid cheats. I made a shit Sonic game full of ugly overpowered OCs with jank physics. Still… The process of creation was JOY INCARNATE. It was like a whole new world had been opened. CoolMathsGames, Newgrounds, Kongregate, I spent so much time on those sites… though I wish I spent less time arguing with morons on the internet about Sonic The Hedgehog opinions. I want to go back in time and kick my own ass over that.
I know a guy who bought a Batocera machine for his kids, so he can be sure they’re only playing age-appropriate games (mostly multiplayer games) and watching age-appropriate shows using VLC with zero access to the internet and TV networks and online stores. They don’t know what a Genshin is. They don’t know what a Skibidi is. They also have a huge bookshelf for kids books up there. I think that’s something good consoles will always have over PCs. Their limitations are only good for creating a walled garden… which can serve a good purpose as a safe space for children. They’ll never be 10 and experience someone calling them slurs while playing COD. They’ll never be 10 and be tricked into looking up horrifying fanart.
yeah i was moreso saying it as part of what i find feeds into the appeal of lt for people. since the question was on what the fascination/appeal of it is rather than trying to sell it to ya specifically lol
I do this too because i love playing FE on it
I getcha, its why I actually said how while I don’t know anything about coding I have actually helped out with a few different hacks with small coding errors through sheer chance with some ideas I’ve spitballed to them.
It’s a kind of “I somehow understand parts of it without any clue of how its done” kind of deals.
See, I don’t really know how to do that, do not have a modded 3DS, and am terrified of fucking up the process even with how simple I’ve been told it is and permabricking it. I also kind of assume I don’t have the hardware to really do parts of it- my PC doesn’t have a native SDCard slot, and would need a USB-SD adapter or something, aaaaand I can’t even conceive of a USB to GBA cart adapter being available on the market.
Please share your arcane lore. I’m not actually gonna do the things, but I Want To Know™.
as somebody who does play hacks on my 3ds, it is really easy to set up, but you do need a way for your pc to read an sd card
It’s not exactly that hard, and to be fair I was extremely worried myself, but thankfully there is a dedicated website with step-by-step instructions on how to do it. I’ll message you the site if you want since I don’t know how well linking directly to it would go over here.
as far as SD card stuff goes, as long as you can connect your 3ds to your PC through a wireless internet connection then your fine since the 3ds naturally has one.
No, it’s fine. I’m not particularly interested, and don’t do a lot of travelling.
On Amazon I found a USB stick with a SD Card and Micro SD Card slot.
The Micro SD Card I bought came with a Micro SD to SD Card Adapter I didn’t need.