My personal view on Pokémon Hackers ("Tool Use")

[SSJ4 Furanki]

Yeah, I'm one of those people who use tools, I'm the lazy [Insert S-word here] that true hackers probably don't like. However, I have started using HEX editors. Mainly to find Free-Space, alter a few things here and there.

BUT, although I'm one of those people using tools, I don't take them for granted and I've tried going out of the norm, but doing my initial hack: DarkCopper on Emerald rather than FireRed. Emerald hacks are almost as rare as a Gen 1 or 2 hack.

Although, it's lazy to use tools, I don't feel lazy using them. DarkCopper has been extremely time consuming. Most of the time last school I'd get home and work on it non-stop. That's about 6 hours right there x 5 is equivalent to 30 hours a week. Plus, just about working on it for another 12+ each day on the weekend (so 30 + 36, 66 hours a week). I'm still nowhere near completion, I've easily put, over 650 hours + worth of time into editing this and trying to make it different enough so it doesn't seem like a lazy edit of Emerald.

I agree that the 1st and 2nd Generation hackers are way above the 3rd Generation's league. But, it annoys me that although someone like I has been using tools, it feels like I don't know whether I'm actually lazy or not. I doubt your average GBA hacker has put as much time into their hack. There are a few standouts that I'm have put time and effort into it; but, I don't know.

I honestly feel slightly awkward posting the hacks I've done here since this mainly a GB/C friendly place.

Also, I felt I've matured as a hacker, yeah there's some adult themes in my hacks still, but it's no longer the badly edited, South Park hacks, I did 3-4 years ago.

What do you guys think?

[Miksy91]

Myself, I didn't really catch the point what you wanted me to answer to :S

But, I think it's okay to use tools as long as you could do the exact same without them (including script editors)

I too use a lot of tools for my Gold hack,
for example Poketext for editing text I add/edit (it takes just too long to write every single byte in there and check if it crosses the row or not...).

[SSJ4 Furanki]

Aug 29, 2010 12:50:48 GMT -5 Miksy91 said:

Myself, I didn't really catch the point what you wanted me to answer to :S

But, I think it's okay to use tools as long as you could do the exact same without them (including script editors)

I too use a lot of tools for my Gold hack,
for example Poketext for editing text I add/edit (it takes just too long to write every single byte in there and check if it crosses the row or not...).

Oh, yeah. I was just wondering what you guys thought on the whole GBA/Tools issue. I probably should've specified that.

[~Red]

I think that it's ok to use tools if it's a last resort. If you really have tried Hex editing and all and it's really not for you then you can use tools. But I hate the people that seem to think there's a tool for everything, and the lazy fuckers don't even take time and effort to make their own hacks.

I also hate the fact that that is 70% of the pokemon hacking community today. Little 12 year olds who cannot and will not use a Hexadecimal Editor in their lifetime. I'm hacking Pokemon Red for example, and using tools such as PokeText often screw things up, so I've stuck to a Hex Editor for mostly everything (except mapping because it's very hard to visualise a map from raw HEX).

The tools I've used for Pokemon Red are:

A Hex Editor (I use a combination of 3 different ones since they all have different features)
RedMap (It only modifies maps and Wild Pokemon, it cannot modify warps or events)
Modified PokeMap (I modified the .ini file manually to include trainers from almost all maps, if the map doesn't exist I swap the trainer data with route 1 temporarily to modify it visually)

And that's it.