S1 Hacking Studio

I'm a little saddened towards this attitude honestly. Firstly I've never denied anyone help before, if someone needs help and they're willing to learn I'd never refuse. Secondly coding is a huge part of the piece as well, and to have it dismissed so abruptly is just discouraging to see from someone who plays others' hacks. Honestly, I think the program is a neat idea, it is going to cause others to use it without learning how, yet the great hacks will still be separated from the hacks that just use this.

And really I believe anyone (without any sort of disability) can learn to code if they have the will to understand and take time to learn. Took me a good year or so of hard work and learning to get the basics of Motorola 68k and programming concepts in general down and I'm still learning every day.

 

Reading this thread makes me realize how much of a 'hexadecimal hacker' I am in an ASMs world.

I think all this fighting is just ridiculous, it is the result of what happens when two perfectly valid opinions clash.

Again, I'll just state this again. This tool can only bring good as long as we ignore all the bad hacks (Or better yet, actually try to help the people making those hacks into making their hacks better), and if there are truly dedicated people out there that start off using this tool? Well, perhaps they'll have got further quicker then they would have otherwise with the same end result.

Granted, truly dedicated people are much harder to find, but they exist.

And I'll state some personal experience of mine, guides (Such as the Sonic compressed art guide) and hacking tools such as SonMapEd helped me learn more then I otherwise would have if they weren't released (Though, I never actually made a good hack with it... Somari in Sonic 1 never got far, but the point is, I learned from the experience and was more motivated then I would have been otherwise).

Skip forward a year, I have started hacking Shining Force, and using my knowledge of how to hack the Sonic games in hex (Such as the knowledge of the Compressed art hacking) actually helped me find previously unknown data in Shining Force.

My point is, though it will seem all jumbled up and confused in the previous text, tools such as this one give people motivation to hack games, and assuming we're mature about it (And that the hacker is actually motivated), we can help teach those people how to do more advanced hacking, fueled by their motivation.

 

No, they don't. The proper means of this are tutorials, which force the user to at least put in a marginal amount of effort to achieve results. Making them a result of a single button press is the result of a lack of effort; people who think hacking is a result of a single button press will be disappointed and deterred when they realize that nothing else about it is—or should be—as easy.

You people are making the same tired points and they're not making any more sense. I'm basing my viewpoints off experience and observation; your viewpoints seem to be based purely off assumption. I'd say concrete examples hold just a tiny bit more water than something pulled out of your ass. Call it elitist or whatever the fuck you want, but seeing this shit happen and doing nothing about it is just as bad as being a part of it yourself. I'm not going to let it happen.

 

If someone doesn't want to spend the time and effort to understand how the Sonic engine works, then they're not going to get anywhere substantial with or without this tool. So there's no use complaining about it.

 

Alright, I see this going out of hand. Sitting back and watching this was interesting, but now I'm going to speak. Everyone brought this problem out to the world, about this destroying everything about making Sonic hacks. Well, I never saw anyone say anything to MainMemory when he released his editors? (I'm not dissing you MM, just using what I did silently as an example.) I silently complained to myself because while it is an amazing piece of software, it opens pandora's box with the crappy SADX modders, who'll never amount to anything because they refuse to learn even the simplest things. It seems to be the same case here. I did notice that both sides here are at a tie with valid points. Tweaker and the other few who say it promotes laziness, well yes, it quite truly can. The others say it promotes the wanting to learn more to do more, well, yeah, it does that too. It's all about the person, either someone who's lazy to begin with, or someone who's willing to work for something. I'm not really sure where I was going with this after that last statement, so I believe I'm just gonna end my statement here.

 

Nobody's complaining about someone making an editor, dude. I don't think you quite understand the actual issue here.

 

I quite do, I just say things strangely, and being tired isn't helping me here. I do keep seeing complaining here though. Well, let's see if I'm right. The underlying problem is this can promote laziness and mislead people about what hacking is. If that isn't right, then why does that seem to be what everyone's been disussing here?

 

I was actually going to say something similar about SADXTweaker. It's designed to do everything for you and make code changes simply by ticking a checkbox. And yet, nobody complains about it making hacking too easy. Is it okay because nobody hacks it anyway?

 

More the fact that most of the things SADXTweaker do are only a few byte values changed, while adding a spindash to Sonic 1 is a lot more complicated than that. At least that's how I see it.

 

No

1) Megamix
2) Extended edition
3) With fries
4) Zeta Overdrive
5) Remastered
6) Sonic TH
7) electric Mouse
8) Sonic Boom
9) Revelation
10) Retro Remix
11) S Factor
12) S3 Editon

And the list goes on and on and on.

 

Oerg, he meant 5 hacks made in his Russian forum.

 

I think it's self-explanatory, since any other forums are not as big as Sonic Retro, plus the fact, that forums on another language are having a lack of members anyway (IMO).

 

The purposes I would use these tools for is making personal hacks just that I can play around with. I don't really care about releasing anything unless it's actually worthy of a release. Still, being able to screw around with the game and see what happens when you push this button is kind of entertaining.

I think you should continue adding as many features as you can fit into it. But maybe to curb the cheaters using this tool you can get the program to force a logo on the title screen that says "made with S1 Hacking Studio." Just a thought.

 

Man, this is the best idea ever (I'm serious)

 

That's actually a brilliant idea.

 

This. User. Wins.

 

Personally, I'd like to see that done for all utilities. Credit where it's due, and all.

Anyhow, this is a very interesting little program. Gave it a quick test, and it is giving me thoughts about attempting a hack. My talents (if they can be called such) extend only to pixel-art, so simplifying the music and level select editing is very useful. Looking at the SCHG articles just make me giddy! The only thing I wondered about, why are only certain S3K songs included? Is it to encourage people to port the rest themselves, or limitations regarding certain tracks, or something else entirely?

 

Wow. This is a great Idea!

That would solve the issue of knowing it was done in ASM or using this tool.

 

I'd of thought the work around for that would be to copy the files from the source folder into a normal dissasembly folder, after applying the one button moves and saving the ASM file.

 

You guys flip shits whenever somebody makes this the slightest bit easier. I always viewed them as an SDK of sorts. Then again, I've only messed around in the Source SDK, so others may generally not be as easy to use. I'm not saying either argument is invalid, just voicing my opinion.