Hacking

[Hannibal]

How is it done?

[Pixelman]

How is it done?

Check the Hacking Resources section. There are tutorials and tools you need there.

You'll have to find the ROM yourself, though.

[Crimson Red]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking

[Pixelman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking

Or you can do this xP

[Shin]

Generally through the use of Nightmare, FEditor and the event assembler. It's probably best to read around the hacking boards to get a better idea.

[Brendor]

How is it done?

that's like saying "how do I do math?"

You should ask specific questions on things you want to do but aren't sure how to do

Edited March 17, 2014 by Brendor the Barbarian

[Naughx]

How is it done?

Which fe game?

[Aleph]

~ Hacking: The Thread ~

[MP2E]

How is it done?

Hacking is a very general term that could mean quite a lot of things. In the spirit of not being a jerk, I'll assume you mean hacking in the Fire Emblem ROM Hacking context. Even so, it's still a pretty generic question. Reminds me of this:

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where "

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I'd suggest reading the Ultimate GBA FE Hacking Guide for a good outline on what is possible, and how to do it. Anything beyond what is mentioned in that guide will require you to figure it out, through reverse engineering and your own ability to problem solve. This will probably require at least some programming experience and computer science background. Edited March 18, 2014 by MP2E

[Aleph]

Yes the first step to solving a problem is to clearly identify what it is

"How do I hack" is too general to be a specific problem eligible for being solved

[Crimson Red]

Hacking is a very general term that could mean quite a lot of things. In the spirit of not being a jerk, I'll assume you mean hacking in the Fire Emblem ROM Hacking context.

I was giving an honest response instead of assuming he wanted to hack one of thousands of games out there, not being a jerk (some of us have hacked more than just Fire Emblem)

I could have just said "just ****ing google it" or something, instead in hopes that s/he isn't a troll I linked to something that might help him decide on a more specific question to ask :P

not that it really matters, just felt like saying XD

[Ninian]

How to hack:

1. Find a good quality piece of meat, preferably veal or chicken.

2. Get a knife and sharpener.

3. Sharpen the knife. (If you don't know how to do this, you're doomed.)

4. Put the meat on a cutting board.

5. Begin to cut.

6. Start hacking away at it!

[Aleph]

I still think this should be "~ Hacking: The Thread ~" and it will of course be about "~ Hacking: The Movie ~", the production of which this thread will facilitate.

So, who are we casting for the lead role? Me right

[Agro]

only if i get to play the love interest

[Aleph]

Oh m-my...!

ps I'm still picturing Insane Clown Posse asking "Fucking hacking, how do they work?" as per the OP

[Ninian]

I'll be the on-set chef.

[eCut]

Stop.

[Klokinator]

How hard is it to link to the Ultimate Tutorial instead of being smartasses like people said they'd stop being?

[Naughx]

How hard is it to link to the Ultimate Tutorial instead of being smartasses like people said they'd stop being?

Actually, MP2E did link to it. ^.^

[Aleph]

How hard is it to link to the Ultimate Tutorial instead of being smartasses like people said they'd stop being?

There's so many things wrong here where do I begin

Okay first of all, at least in my case (I'm allowed to speak for myself right?) the one post I made in that thread you linked was

[...]

In response to the first post, though, a lot of elitism may have spilled over from past communities that don't exist anymore. FEU, for example, had loads of hacking resources all laid out in plain sight ready to be digested. People ignored them and made unnecessary posts about things they already had shoved in their faces. The responses to them were appropriately malignant. People made habits of this.

SF needs better resources. Give people what they need and they will make do with it. After all - if all you have to offer is being an ass to them, they can just ignore you...at least, if they have what they need despite.

[...]

There's 3 segments in there emboldened for emphasis. Look at your claim - "instead of being smartasses like people said they'd stop being", which is effectively "you said you'd stop being a smartass D:". Again, in my case at least, I definitely did not promise that. I said that it is not a point of concern to begin with because it is the responsibility of the reader of a post to choose not to let something offensive affect them when it is in fact just text on a forum server however far away and will not hurt their endeavours to learn how to hack unless it is intentionally misinforming them. While it may be an issue of civility to be dealt with by the forum's moderation staff, it is not an issue relevant to the issues this community may or may not have with helping new hackers learn how to hack. To pull a link to that thread up in this context is silly. Of course, that's hardly the most glaring thing about your post, or more importantly, the general responses this thread has received. This discrepancy is more of an amusing anecdote. The real problem with this thread is illustrated in painful detail below.

The first bold segment of my quote is a description of how the community operated at an example forum, and it is applicable here. We have an entire sub forum called "Hacking Resources". In fact, the Ultimate Tutorial link you claim wasn't posted is sitting right there in Blazer's signature. Disregarding this:

Actually, MP2E did link to it. ^.^

even though it only helps with my argument,

His post was the second response to the OP in the thread, by the way. All of the posts up to mine, except for Blazer's, were unusually sincere in their attempts to help the TC. The posts of Blazer and I seem a bit out of place, until you consider these inexplicably ignored details:

Blazer and I have links to his tutorial and my hacking notes (respectively) in our bloody signatures because we got tired of posting links to them and made the process automatic in the interest of the community. Suffice to say, a link to the Ultimate Tutorial WAS posted (although admittedly it's hard to tell the link to the "Ultimate Tutorial" in his signature is indeed the "Ultimate Tutorial for Fire Emblem Hacking"). I could even argue that I contributed positively to this thread just by posting in it because of my gracious choice to reserve space in my as-such less creative signature for all of you. Think of all the lovely things I could fit in my signature instead if I had that extra bit of space. Yes, I recognize that my signature has finite space, because as it turns out I am actually pretty damn experienced with forum etiquette. Probably from being on them longer than some of you have been alive.

Now, despite the above, we have this thread. Look at the OP again, since you and the moderator have apparently forgotten that it is literally just this:

How is it done?

That's it. That's the entire post. This is about as bad as making a post that's just the letters "lol" given how vague it is. This entire thread is effectively a spam thread to begin with, and the correct choices for moderating it are to move it to the spam sub forum (Far from the Forest) and/or to warn the topic creator and lock the topic. That is not what happened, so a few of us took the opportunity to make light of the situation and give anyone who wasn't too much of a humourless brick a small chuckle and turn something negative into something positive and fun. I think that's more in the spirit of not being a smartass than posting a link to Cam's thread and rather cynically asking if it's difficult to do something we "didn't" do when you know it's not. Seriously, how many people honestly saw that first post and thought anything other than "this is a joke topic, the TC is not serious"? Normally I'd ask that question with the same cynicism that you apparently asked about the difficulty of posting a link to the UT, but no - I genuinely have no idea how many people took this thread seriously. I'd hope the answers to both of those questions would be obvious, but now it's not. It actually seems like some people thought "this question is so general and hard to answer how will we help this poor person".

Now, the second emboldened part of my quoted post reflects on how many of the poor threads there are resulted from people asking questions already answered in resources they had ignored. One can presume that such threads have poor quality, and that a spam thread would have even lower quality than that. This does not appear to me to be a thread that was created out of ignorance of available resources. This appears to just be a spam thread. I will not take you seriously if you believe otherwise.

If for no other reason, here's why:

The original poster has not responded to this thread at all.

They are probably not even here anymore except perhaps to glance at what their spammy thread has become and chuckle at it, for it has served what is likely is true purpose - to cause a kerfuffle. How did nobody notice that? These are all common signs of a spam thread. We did not make it that way. That's like getting blamed for knocking over a domino that was already laying down. If the poster had returned and played the victim then I would suspect them of doing so and not fall for their ruse of pretending to be upset by our responses, which they would have no right to be.

Now hopefully the inundating amount of detail in this post is enough to explain the actual situation of this thread that has, again, inexplicably failed to be recognized by so many of its viewers. If human nature is as predictable as I think it is, though, undoubtedly someone will see the length of this post and the effort to be explanatory and mistake it for "raging", or whatever the parlance is. They might then try to dismiss any or all of the valid points this post makes out of fear of being incapable of countering any of them. That may unfortunately be the case, but that's not my problem. If you can't handle a bit of reading you need to make a personal journey.

It's that depressing kind of funny to think that people who "can't handle a bit of reading" are often the cause of the sort of poor threads which plague the community. While this is a spam thread and not really an "unnecessary question thread", if the moderation principles I described other forums using were employed here, this thread and a thread asking an already answered question alike would be dealt with swiftly and accurately. In this view, it's actually relevant for you to link to Cam's thread. I think the solution to the poor handling of this thread, as well as a valid response to Cam's claim that we need to be more supportive, is to renovate - or perhaps define in the first place - the process of identifying a new thread, verifying the integrity of the OP with respect to generating a helpful thread (one that asks a unique question and receives an accurate answer) and actually enacting the proper response. With respect to the last part of the process, this thread, for example, was not immediately locked and removed from the sub forum as it should have been, and now it is taking up precious space in the thread list.

With such a clearly established process for handling new threads, all of the poor threads would be removed or otherwise appropriated such that all that remains are threads which only warrant helpful responses. Then, instead of worrying about whether people are being unsupportive, we have only to worry about whether people who are discourteous are appropriately moderated. These things really can be streamlined. The human elements mean it won't quite be automatic, but it will be close. I think this would be facilitated by having one or more members of the community with the technical background associated with hacking be appointed to positions for performing the scrutiny I've implied when describing a phase of "verifying the integrity of the OP". Indeed, FEU had several such moderators appointed. They weren't even really moderators - they had their own usergroup and their sole distinction from other members was that they were qualified to identify whether or not a thread was contributory.

A lot of you were on that team. How quaint, that so many members of that forum, the model of which I am using as an example as a solution to the problems we're having here, have migrated to this forum. We basically did all of this already, why is it so hard to just do it again?

Edited March 31, 2014 by Izayoi