TheKingBahamut

Play the hack here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D7yayrLJXeiCs0fmoum0OYS-b-nA4EvB/view?usp=sharing More details here: https://feuniverse.us/t/fe8-black-dragon-arc-1-the-wolf-and-the-swan-ver-1-0-in-progress/10477 This is very rough and not exactly great, but then again, this build of the hack was made in just over a month entirely by me. Hope you enjoy it, and even if you don't, I appreciate your feedback (provided it's constructive in nature). I'm frankly just glad to even be able to have made this.

I'm very new to the process of ROMhacking and fangames, and have only just started using FEBuilder GBA a handful of weeks ago. I'm really enjoying working with it, and it has helped me learn to enjoy a type of game making that I struggled with mightily for years. However, I have been running into a handful of issues with certain parts of the program that I don't know how to work around, and could use some advice from people who are a little more familiar with the program and how it functions. Normally I like to try and sort out issues I run into on my own, but I genuinely have no idea why some of this stuff is happening and feel like I need outside assistance with some of it. Issue number 1: Text box glitches This is one of the most common problems I've run into, and one of the ones I understand the least (images of examples below). Every so often, a dialogue bubble will refuse to display properly, resulting in text being absent and making the graphics look jank as hell. I initially thought this was the result of the speech bubble overlapping with a character sprite on the map, but have dismissed that idea on account of it not making sense. I'm also unsure if it has anything to do with the size of the speech bubble, the position of the portrait speaking, or what else. Issue number 2: Other portrait jank I'm convinced that the Move command in the text menu has a mind of its own. I've had instances where I attempted to move a character portrait off the screen, only for it to act weird, claim it has erased the character upon moving them, only to either not move the character or not erase them, causing a portrait freak-out. Again, I am completely at a loss for what the issue even is here. Also, I have one instance where two character portraits being erased causes one other character's portrait to decide it wants to turn black like it's about to erase as well, despite there being no instruction for this to happen anywhere in the conversation. (Screenshot of this below) Issue number 3: Unit movement jank I have one instance in one of the maps where two wyvern riders and a wyvern lord fly into the map as reinforcements, and for some reason, the wyvern lord moves ten times more slowly as the others in his group. The units movement is all handled by the Unit Placer in this instance, so I can't individually alter the speed at which the wyvern lord moves. Issue number 4: Boss unit palettes I have altered the classes of a couple of the earlygame bosses (I'm using Sacred Stones as a base ftr; in the base game the first boss is a Fighter, in my hack he's a Brigand), and in every instance where the bosses' class differs from what it's "supposed to be", the character's unit palette doesn't appear in the game even though I have set the unit palette to the correct class in the palette editor. This is not the case for the second boss of mine, who shares his class (Knight) with the corresponding boss from the original game. Not a game-breaking issue, but still annoying. Issue number 5: Issues with unit movement during cutscenes I have one instance in the first chapter of my hack where a cutscene triggers toward the end of the map that causes playable characters to move to different spots from where they ended their turn. When this happens, the sprite of the character who just took their last action stays on the field, running in place (essentially creating a clone of said unit), which while it doesn't majorly affect the gameplay, looks unpolished and really silly. This also happens at the end of another chapter, where the end of chapter story sequence takes place entirely on the map itself, with no portraits-over-background cutscene. This might be something that I can fix by just erasing playable units before the cutscene triggers, but I hesitate to do so as I'm concerned about the game "forgetting" unit EXP gains/level ups as a result of this. On a similar note, the mid-chapter cutscene I mentioned causes the boss of that map to spawn in, and he when he does, he immediately teleports away from the space I set him down on over to the space where the player cursor last was. Again, not something that massively affects the gameplay, but it looks bad. One last thing I'll mention to make diagnosis a little easier: I have not updated FEBuilder to its latest version since installing it due to the screwy way that the program handles updates (I.E., making you download a zip file instead of just applying the latest patch to the program immediately, which makes me afraid that I'm going to either have to reinstall FEBuilder, or something else will go wrong and make me lose a bunch of progress on this hack). If any of the issues I've spoken of here are fixed in updates to the program, please feel free to let me know. Thank you very much.

Thank you! I've never been much of an Ike x Elincia supporter myself, but a support between the two would be fun to make. I like to imagine that Ike does eventually grow to accept being a hero and even enjoy it somewhat, I just felt that at this point in his life, he's not quite so happy with it. He always struck me as the sort of guy who just wants to do the right thing, or at least what he thinks is the right thing, just because someone needs to do it.

Figured I ought to show this off for shits and giggles. This is an ongoing project of mine to write some custom support conversations for my favorite game in the series and then turn them into videos. Headcanons and hi-jinks ensue. This project is mostly just me giving myself something to do to flex my creative writing muscle while I do some brainstorming for bigger projects. I have ambitions to make my own FE-style game someday, so I might as well practice some character/dialogue writing in the meanwhile. Enjoy!

The issue I have with the EA Buildfile method is that building stuff from scratch kinda... makes my head spin. I don't really know how to explain it very well without showing it to someone, and I'm not sure how I'd show it off.

Yeah, I figured. MAKEHACK is probably better in the long run for full projects, but trying to track all the data in it makes my head hurt. And honestly, I'd rather work with just a test chapter for now.

Lol I actually do theatre in real life so that's a perfect analogy. A thought occurred to me: it's possible that the MAKEHACK method of hacking isn't the best way to start learning. Even though I've heard a lot of horror stories about FEditor, it looks at least a little more user-friendly in some ways.

Actually, I think that reading this helped me isolate the problem. It's not necessarily that I can't do eventing, it's that while I can do certain bits and pieces of it just fine, I have issues with turning those bits and pieces into a cohesive whole. Which is to say, I can write out the whole chapter events thing or do the "tell the game to put this text at this offset id" thing, but am less certain about how to turn those bits into a full-blown chapter. And that's probably a bigger problem to have than just simply not getting eventing at all.

There's a part of me that wants to continue learning about the technical aspects, if only because knowing at least a little of what to do yourself is kind of important. However, the issue I'm having is that for every one thing about modding I understand, I don't understand 2 more things. As for screenshotting what I've got... not much, honestly. I had an idea about posting the script for the chapters I've written so far (it's text only), and maybe putting some links to music I've written is an idea. But with no real visual aid... not really going to grab other people. Also, to quote InvdrZim: "Getting other people to do eventing for you is kinda impossible." Now this is an interesting idea.

WARNING: This will likely be a fairly long post. I'll try to trim the fat as much as possible, but I can't guarantee that I'll be able to get all the points I want to make across without a fairly long wall of text. But hey, I'm a 'Merican. Building walls is apparently a thing we like to do X( At any rate, a short story: some months ago, I got an impulse to try my hand at hacking/modding Fire Emblem games. What happened was, I started out by writing a short "blueprint" for a story that I thought could work well as the story for a Fire Emblem game. I didn't have a lot of specifics down, merely ideas for characters that I thought would be interesting to work with. I didn't exactly plan of expanding it too much at the time, but it was fun to brainstorm how such a thing would play out. Then, a friend of mine who makes content on YouTube posted a video debating about the quality of the newer Fire Emblem titles versus the older ones. Regardless of my opinion on the quality of the various titles (And I do like Awakening and Fates, for the record), after watching the video, I felt compelled to share the story blueprint I created with him. He said it was really good. Some days later, another friend of mine posted a similar video about what the FE franchise should do to get "back on track," so to speak, and once again, I showed him my blueprint I made. He also thought it was really good, but he also told me that it might make a good idea for a hack of some sort. He pointed me in the direction of Ghast, and watching his videos about Bloodlines, as well as Mangs' playthroughs of similar hacks like Staff of Ages, got me interested. I henceforth began looking into the process of creating FE ROMHacks, which led me here to the forums. Originally, I went in with the n00b mentality of "I can't do technical stuff. I should ask for other people to do that for me and focus on the stuff I'm good at!" That obviously did not end well. I made two separate threads asking for people's help and got nothing in the way of responses. Frustrated, I decided to ask for advice about finding help, and I got a pretty overwhelming response for it. The answers people gave me mostly boiled down to "start with a smaller project to learn the basics. Prove that you can do the basic stuff by yourself, and show that you are worth the time for others to invest into you." And I did take that to heart. It has been about a month since I made that post, and I've done just about everything I can to learn what I can about hacking. I started a small project with which to learn how to create a chapter and units and maps and the like. I've downloaded the tools I need. I've poured over many tutorials, including InvdrZim's FE8 eventing tutorial. And I have learned many things from it. And yet... some things just aren't clicking. The truth is, I'm just not that much of a tech guy. My aptitude is more towards storytelling, creating characters, and music (and even then, I'm not that skilled in those things). That doesn't mean I can't learn technical stuff, or that I don't understand the basics behind making a hack. Yet, with the project I'm doing, I find that even though I might know at least some of the steps I need to take, keeping up with all the data or trying to wrap my mind around certain steps makes my head hurt. I think at least part of it has to do with the way that I learn. When I started learning how to use Pro Tools, the way that I learned it was that my teacher showed me how the different aspects of it worked, and we started certain projects together, and then as I grew more comfortable with the program, I started doing more and more of the work by myself. That's how I learn best: with one-on-one tutoring, watching someone go through the steps, and then trying it myself. And I can't exactly get that from the hacking community, given that most of the knowledgeable people are already busy with their own projects. Hacking is, by and large, a do it yourself kind of thing, and that doesn't really click with me that much. It is entirely possible that hacking and programming games isn't my calling. And I don't have a problem with that, except for one small rub: I'm very passionate about telling this particular story. And I want to tell it as a game, not as something else. Even beyond this one story, I have other story ideas that I want to make into games, each with interesting gameplay ideas and mechanics that I think would be fun. But they are just that: ideas. I'm an ideas person, and as I've learned, ideas aren't worth much, especially if you have nothing else to back them up with. Learning how to back these ideas up is fine, but even with my best efforts, it doesn't mean I'm going to get it, especially if I'm learning by myself. I firmly believe that if someone's passion for something is strong enough, they can overcome any obstacle. It could be that all I need is just somebody telling me "nut up, shut up, and git gud" or to have my determination stoked by someone telling me I should quit and I won't amount to anything and feeling compelled to prove them wrong. The point is, I have a dream in mind. I don't want to give up on that dream, no matter what, but even taking the small steps towards it is proving difficult. I feel stuck. And I need advice.

So I downloaded Anvil Studio because I heard it was useful for implementing MIDI files into a ROM. For making actual MIDI files and songs, however, the program is incredibly frustrating to use. Anyone have suggestions on what programs others use to make music for their hacks?

OKAY! I figured out what it was. I needed to but the ROM Buildfile text document into the ROM with EA before using MAKEHACK to save the changes. Feeling stupid again, but hey. Sometimes you need to make obvious errors so other people can learn to not make them.

The buildfile comes with EA. Do I need to put it in the same place as the MAKEHACK program in order for it to work properly?

Sort of a follow-up to my last post here. Currently learning how to use the MAKEHACK command to apply changes to ROMS. I downloaded the buildfile demo and am currently trying to apply the changes made to it to a clean ROM. Originally, I was having trouble because thee .ups file needed to patch the game wasn't appearing, but after some experimentation, I discovered that it was simply a case of "wait around for the program to actually make the file before closing it." But now I've encountered a different problem. When I use NUPS to apply the patch to the hacked copy of the ROM, it says that the patch has been applied. Yet when I open the ROM up to test it out, none of the changes have been applied at all. I have tried this a few times and I cannot get any of the changes to work. Does anyone have any clue as to what's going on?

So apparently it DID make the file, it just took some time to do it. I hate when questions like this get answered immediately after posting. >.<