How about a "general knowledge" topic?

Several times already, I found some pieces of infos I see no reasons to hide (well, I know "Knowledge is power, hide it well", but really, in some cases ^^' ), that could help to improve quickly many hacks and not waste too much time working on some problems, but couldn't share them because there's nowhere on the forum to do that (or I'm missing something big). The entries would be less than tutorials, maybe a description of the problem and what's going wrong. So people can look for solutions by themselves, but won't just copy/paste some stuff in their hack.


I'll give some simple examples.


Some days ago, I wanted to know what was causing the flickering on some sprites. The answers were really logical, but wrong, and I don't think it would be welcome to steal the focus again the basic Q&A thread to tell about it, and it would be lost really quickly anyway. Now, I know for sure it's the number of pieces on the same horizontal line that causes it, so the more you "optimize" a sprite to use tiles that have been used before, the more likely you are to make the flickering happen. In that thread, it would say something like:


"What causes flickering of sprites? - too many pieces of sprites aligned horizontally"


And so, people could save hours of useless sprite optimization.


Another example, a little glitch that can appear if you modify S1 to jump higher or a similar function: the lava wall in marble zone 2 will move if you get out by the top, so here it would read, in a "known glitches" section:


"Lava Wall (S1-Marble Zone): the lava wall will begin to move if you jump out of the corridor


- reason: the object checks if you went out of its activation area,


- solution: deactivate it when you're out of range vertically but not horizontally"


I'll stop here with examples. I think such a mini database could be useful, both to avoid the copy/paste so many people hate and to list hints and glitches so people can debug their hacks more easily, correcting glitches they may not notice otherwise.

 

I like the idea, but I can see it not being used too often. If you'd like to make a general knowledge topic, then be our guest and we'll see if it's as useful and productive as you're anticipating =)

 

Indeed, it's hard to tell whether it would be useful or not, since it would essentially depend on the ease of use, and the amount and quality of entries and informations. I'll gather a few ones not to begin with an empty thread, and i'll try to find a way to organize them and make each entry easy to find. It should take a few days.


Suggestions and critics welcome, of course.

 

I can't think of anything to add myself. What is t here to add? =|

 

The problem is precisely that the informations that would belong in the thread aren't things you always have in mind, rather things you notice from time to time, fix and forget. So the thread may take some time to reach a reasonable and worthy length. I already have a few more of those for s1 though, and I'm sure there are more in the other games.


The point is to create a thread where people can drop such informations without giving away their solutions and code, in other words to list issues and give directions to resolve them.


I think I'll also add some basic informations about how to "read" some asm functions so people can avoid mistakes easily. For example what the dn/an mean, or the "i" after some functions, etc. Once you have those in mind, you're less likely to mistake add.w for addi.w, and knowing what things like "$18(a0)" really mean can't hurt. Maybe some tips about a few asm functions could fit as well.


Trying shouldn't hurt anyway, I don't think it can be counterproductive. At worst it could be useless. ^^'

 

Sorry for the double post, I have a question.


So, I've collected some infos so I could have at least one entry for each section I had in mind (excepted some level subsections and s2, s3k, s3Db etc. sections). Not a huge lot, but it's hard to find back things that only floated around the mind for a few minutes, and it isn't meant to be complete on day 1.


Now though, about the way to post it, I think the best (most optimistic) if the topic was to grow in the future would be to use several posts, to clearly separate the sections (and avoid reaching the max size limit per post) and update them when necessary. Is it ok?

 

That looks weird :lol:


Well, if there's no maximum post length to worry about, I guess some good text formatting will be enough. I'll do that tomorrow.


Thanks.