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I guess I can throw my opinions on the current "issue" here, specially about seeing this post here:
Well. I guess I am not the most entittled person to comment on this because my field is Art, not programming. However. There are these things called categories, you know. Hacks with layout modifications. Hacks with Music Modifications. Graphical Hacks, Hacks with Engine changes....
People who become one-man-shows and fail at making their own hacks often fail, because as you said, they try to do everything at once. What happened with starting with a few simple layout edits, then adding chunks, then importing those chunks into the tileset, then redrawing all the chunks and re-importing them back? That simple methodology for a relatively simple layout hack implies that the author not only has created new content, but figured a way to implement those inside the engine. It's not the most advanced coding work on existence, but it's something. Most hacks have failed to even accomplish this, presenting quite broken layouts and retina-melting color palletes.
It all boils down to don't chew anything larger than what you can swallow. I have sadly provided art to many lame, incomplete and butchered hacks like to know how things go when the authors look at things like Megamix or Retro Remix or even E-122 Psi's hacks and promptly say. I CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS! then fail miserably. One of the reasons why this happens is because we are giving the false sensation that everyone can make a good hack when it's everything but true. It's not the tools you use to make a hack, but the talent within the person doing it.
So, it is not about high expectations. It is about being honest with yourself. If you can't do palletes, just do a green hill layout change, after all. it's not like the chunks are too hard to edit anyway. If you are just good with music. Just import it away and focus it on your music, try to change some things but keep your hack on your field of speciality. Same if you just know how to code new things. Maybe you can code fancy menus and add some features to the game, but suck at character moves or things that need to interact with eachother. Well. as I said. Keep it under what you know specially if it's your first hack. Chances are that if people notice you are good in something but the other areas look untouched, you may get a few messages from people who may be skilled on other areas and eventually work together in something that is not a literal turd.
I do agree on this part. However. while one thing is to expect everything to be the next big thing. And another one completely different is to have an excessive number of entries that... well, are not even amusing and are repetitive at best. We had innumerable joke hacks and two of them ran with the same joke( three? [given than Gotta Go Fast seems to be a tie-in with Egg on Toast given the extra level. oh, it also ties in with The Useful Engine. Sharing art even.] )
Ambitious projects usually tend to die, but not because of that we should expect mediocrity. That is just wrong. Though, I guess it was to be expected given where the entries came from, who made them, and entries that I don't even think they should be considered valid ( a Java application that patches stuff on the fly and expects to have content ready by the contest date for showing itself off? Seriously? )
I don't have much to add to this paragraph as I agree enterely, but I want to point out that the issue is that while it is understandable that all the big hacks are either on halt or being developed slowly. Noone else is trying to go the same route and deliver a good quality hack anymore. And it feels, like you mentioned, that most of these entries are quick hacks with rushed effort in about two weeks. With only one or two exceptions. And this is the thing. You usually prepare the thing and plan it carefully and make things SLOWLY, one by one. Not try to rush a metric ton of unfinished gimmicks and general bad stuff into a binary in less than 14 days and call it a day after presenting it to the contest. Which is what most of the notable examples of bad hacking this contest has provided feel like.
Beyond that. I do need to agree with Josh's suggestions though regarding the trophies and the site. It was kind of hard to navigate through the things on a desktop, and on embeebd devices it was a pain.
What a terrible topic. The whole point of making stuff easier for people to have access to is to expand the people interested in the hacking/modding community and make them not reinvent the wheel in the first place.
The more people that aren't programmers/highly skilled in reverse engineering I get interested in modding, the more my job is justified.
I started modding Sonic Generations having basically no programming/reverse-engineering skills whatsoever and not having much of a good understanding of how games work on the most technical end. Now I'm actually developing my own modding tools for completely different games and seeing decent results from it. If the community's attitude had been "if you can't program then we don't want you here", I'm not sure I would've ever gotten to this point.
The community's attitude is not "if you can't program then we don't want you here", it is "Do not make a fool out of yourself and make something that is worth it under the spectrum of your own talents without fucking up too much overall" There is a difference between small, modest, simple, and limited hacks released ocassionally, and rushing a buggy impresentable turd to a contest.
And going back to some of those nested quotes. It is definetly great to have access to easy to use tools that allow one to modify the aspects of the game with ease. That's definetly awesome. I am myself working on a small little thing which so far involves redrawing the chunks for Green Hill and improving Sonic's Sprites, but my programming skills suck so I am just doing the art and I will see if I can learn enough about programming logic to force my way around the dissasembled binary and shove my art in. Which is something that I would never, ever dare to submit into a context.
Again, the point here is not to ban amateur entries from the context, or about how we should prohibit non skilled people from even trying to tackle their passions, but to expose the real problem that having a lot of disorganized individuals presenting stuff at the SHC is, and since these things are usually one of the things that draw the attention of most people, even those who are not in the communities per se, a bad management and a bad list of entries says a lot about who and on whose behalf are they presented. That's about it.
My apologies for the post length. but there really seems like we are facing things in the completely wrong direction here. ( or I am taking things erroneusly, that can happen too. but those are my two cents anyway )
Dude, on 28 August 2014 - 02:13 PM, said:
Oerg, your expectations on programming are far too high, because you are a programmer. Here's the thing: when you have one person attempting to fill all the roles of an entire development team, they're going to have to be generalists. This means that eventually something is going to give. Whether it's the level design, the artwork, the programming, or the sound/music, eventually something isn't going to be up to snuff.
Well. I guess I am not the most entittled person to comment on this because my field is Art, not programming. However. There are these things called categories, you know. Hacks with layout modifications. Hacks with Music Modifications. Graphical Hacks, Hacks with Engine changes....
People who become one-man-shows and fail at making their own hacks often fail, because as you said, they try to do everything at once. What happened with starting with a few simple layout edits, then adding chunks, then importing those chunks into the tileset, then redrawing all the chunks and re-importing them back? That simple methodology for a relatively simple layout hack implies that the author not only has created new content, but figured a way to implement those inside the engine. It's not the most advanced coding work on existence, but it's something. Most hacks have failed to even accomplish this, presenting quite broken layouts and retina-melting color palletes.
It all boils down to don't chew anything larger than what you can swallow. I have sadly provided art to many lame, incomplete and butchered hacks like to know how things go when the authors look at things like Megamix or Retro Remix or even E-122 Psi's hacks and promptly say. I CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS! then fail miserably. One of the reasons why this happens is because we are giving the false sensation that everyone can make a good hack when it's everything but true. It's not the tools you use to make a hack, but the talent within the person doing it.
So, it is not about high expectations. It is about being honest with yourself. If you can't do palletes, just do a green hill layout change, after all. it's not like the chunks are too hard to edit anyway. If you are just good with music. Just import it away and focus it on your music, try to change some things but keep your hack on your field of speciality. Same if you just know how to code new things. Maybe you can code fancy menus and add some features to the game, but suck at character moves or things that need to interact with eachother. Well. as I said. Keep it under what you know specially if it's your first hack. Chances are that if people notice you are good in something but the other areas look untouched, you may get a few messages from people who may be skilled on other areas and eventually work together in something that is not a literal turd.
Dude, on 28 August 2014 - 02:13 PM, said:
When you bemoan the lack of ambitious projects, it shows a lack of perspective. Most large and ambitious projects never get finished. Even when they have the most dedicated staff in the world. Why is this? Because we vastly overestimate our productive capacities. I am actually kind of glad we're seeing more small projects. It shows that people are starting to value a finished project over one that languishes in development hell. I know it isn't as exciting to play a bite-sized game.
I do agree on this part. However. while one thing is to expect everything to be the next big thing. And another one completely different is to have an excessive number of entries that... well, are not even amusing and are repetitive at best. We had innumerable joke hacks and two of them ran with the same joke( three? [given than Gotta Go Fast seems to be a tie-in with Egg on Toast given the extra level. oh, it also ties in with The Useful Engine. Sharing art even.] )
Ambitious projects usually tend to die, but not because of that we should expect mediocrity. That is just wrong. Though, I guess it was to be expected given where the entries came from, who made them, and entries that I don't even think they should be considered valid ( a Java application that patches stuff on the fly and expects to have content ready by the contest date for showing itself off? Seriously? )
Dude, on 28 August 2014 - 02:13 PM, said:
And for the few of us that *are* building large, expansive projects we have our own entirely separate set of problems to handle. Coordinating a team, getting contributors and ensuring that their styles all mesh in a cohesive way, as well as playtesting these epic monstrosities are all non-trivial challenges. The other important thing to remember is that large projects are built slowly. I've shown off at every single Hacking Contest since SA:Gens started, and I even entered RDX in the ones before that. Each new build was only as different as it was because I spent an absurd amount of crunch time in the 2 weeks before the contest deadline. Most people can't take the time off of work to do that. I'm considering only showing at every other hacking contest just to make sure there's enough new content to make it worthwhile.
I don't have much to add to this paragraph as I agree enterely, but I want to point out that the issue is that while it is understandable that all the big hacks are either on halt or being developed slowly. Noone else is trying to go the same route and deliver a good quality hack anymore. And it feels, like you mentioned, that most of these entries are quick hacks with rushed effort in about two weeks. With only one or two exceptions. And this is the thing. You usually prepare the thing and plan it carefully and make things SLOWLY, one by one. Not try to rush a metric ton of unfinished gimmicks and general bad stuff into a binary in less than 14 days and call it a day after presenting it to the contest. Which is what most of the notable examples of bad hacking this contest has provided feel like.
Beyond that. I do need to agree with Josh's suggestions though regarding the trophies and the site. It was kind of hard to navigate through the things on a desktop, and on embeebd devices it was a pain.
Paraxade, on 28 August 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:
Dario FF, on 28 August 2014 - 01:46 PM, said:
Oerg866, on 28 August 2014 - 12:08 PM, said:
Let me link you to this thread from jman2050, created way back in 2008. It seems to ring true again.
What a terrible topic. The whole point of making stuff easier for people to have access to is to expand the people interested in the hacking/modding community and make them not reinvent the wheel in the first place.
The more people that aren't programmers/highly skilled in reverse engineering I get interested in modding, the more my job is justified.
I started modding Sonic Generations having basically no programming/reverse-engineering skills whatsoever and not having much of a good understanding of how games work on the most technical end. Now I'm actually developing my own modding tools for completely different games and seeing decent results from it. If the community's attitude had been "if you can't program then we don't want you here", I'm not sure I would've ever gotten to this point.
The community's attitude is not "if you can't program then we don't want you here", it is "Do not make a fool out of yourself and make something that is worth it under the spectrum of your own talents without fucking up too much overall" There is a difference between small, modest, simple, and limited hacks released ocassionally, and rushing a buggy impresentable turd to a contest.
And going back to some of those nested quotes. It is definetly great to have access to easy to use tools that allow one to modify the aspects of the game with ease. That's definetly awesome. I am myself working on a small little thing which so far involves redrawing the chunks for Green Hill and improving Sonic's Sprites, but my programming skills suck so I am just doing the art and I will see if I can learn enough about programming logic to force my way around the dissasembled binary and shove my art in. Which is something that I would never, ever dare to submit into a context.
Again, the point here is not to ban amateur entries from the context, or about how we should prohibit non skilled people from even trying to tackle their passions, but to expose the real problem that having a lot of disorganized individuals presenting stuff at the SHC is, and since these things are usually one of the things that draw the attention of most people, even those who are not in the communities per se, a bad management and a bad list of entries says a lot about who and on whose behalf are they presented. That's about it.
My apologies for the post length. but there really seems like we are facing things in the completely wrong direction here. ( or I am taking things erroneusly, that can happen too. but those are my two cents anyway )
This post has been edited by ZanaGB: 29 August 2014 - 10:42 AM
