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Todays hacking standards.

After leaving a few reviews in the featured hacks section I noticed something, and we all know this. Todays hacking standards are more strict then they were back then. Today if a hack doesn't have any custom material (blocks,sprites,music,exgfx,etc) the person has to work damn hard to make an enjoyable game in the players eyes. Now true, there are hack submission guidelines, but have you actually taken a look at some of the featured hacks on the site? Take The Second Reality Project 1 for example. It was made in 2002. Back then, it was considered good just to make a hack at all. Now don't get me wrong, I think TSRP1 is a classic but if we were to compare it to hacking standards of today it wouldn't last. If someone who just started hacking a year ago made TSRP1 and submitted it to the site, who knows if it would even get accepted much less featured. I think B.B. Link said it best in a post in the featured hack thread when he said this.

Originally posted by B.B. Link
You know, most of these hacks that people are asking to be de-featured has been around a long, long time, before most of you even started SMW hacking. Most since before SMWcentral. Back then, the beauty of just making a playable hack was good in most people standards. Now, 70% of the hacks being submitted here aren't even playable, by new or old standards.


What are the community's thoughts on this subject? I'd like to know, so please reply and tell me what you think of this issue.
While it's true that in some of the more recent hacks, there's more ExGFX, custom music, etc, and that vanilla hacks are seen as less "impressive" as they used to be, the overall quality of vanilla hacks has been very low. Sure, there are certainly some good ones, but so often, you see vanilla hacks submitted with poor palettes, garbage tiles, etc. (then sent to the removal log) If someone has a hack with custom material, people are more likely to turn to it in part because it may have less errors and overall be more playable. If someone puts some serious effort out there to make a good vanilla hack, instead of just "hey guys i can modify yoshi's island and put glitch lava everywhere," then I agree with you, and it's a shame these are starting to be less noticed.
Hell, hacking standards have changed since about 1 year and a half ago when I submitted Pandemonium fortress (the first one). I am amazed and a half that it hasn't been removed.

Then again another big difference is that there used to be 10 hackeers, now there are 10 thousand hackers. With larger numbers come greater odds of "Holyfuckmybrainjustexploded" level of impressive quality, raising the general standard for everyone else.

That being said, the standards for SMWC have gone way way up, but the standards for the majority of hackers are still around the same. Is it playable? Does it not look like shit? It's perfect! Take a finished and polished vanilla hack to youtube and they'll praise you 'til the cows come home.

So basically, standards around here have changed alot, but in the end you've just gotta know your audience.
I made a standalone game once, look for Seabug Stampede on Google Play.
I should hope vanillas become more noticed... There's a chance my hack might not have ANY custom music if I can't figure something out. But yeah, I recall a custom music that sounded close to the original Super Mario Bros. theme won an SMWC Idol contest or something.
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I say we should have a rating system.



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Originally posted by GOTHCLAWZ
I say we should have a rating system.

Hmm? Do you mean a rating system for Hacks? There is already one when you click the number right below the Hack name.
And you can write Reviews too.

Maybe I didn't understand you right?
Originally posted by Neo1000
Originally posted by GOTHCLAWZ
I say we should have a rating system.

Hmm? Do you mean a rating system for Hacks? There is already one when you click the number right below the Hack name.
And you can write Reviews too.

Maybe I didn't understand you right?


I mean have all the hacks in order of rating. Also, be able to have more than one author for a hack.



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Originally posted by GOTHCLAWZ
I mean have all the hacks in order of rating.

You mean like this?
My YouTube channel
Get the official ASMT resource pack here!

Originally posted by yoshicookiezeus
Originally posted by GOTHCLAWZ
I mean have all the hacks in order of rating.

You mean like this?


Yeah, just like that. Who agrees?



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He was trying to tell you that we already have a rating system >_>

Originally posted by Ixtab
He was trying to tell you that we already have a rating system >_>


And I was being sarcastic! へ_へ



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get back on topic here, folks.
Higher standards is only a good thing, I think.

I'm all for every hack getting their chance, but the greatest ideas can be marred by low quality in level design and even visuals.

"Vanilla" hacks that do not make use of custom blocks/sprites/ect only limit their options in game design. You can only do so much with SMW's assets. It's not so much originality here, but variety. We've all played SMW. A new spin on it can be great, but by this time, it's mostly been done before.

I'm a firm believer that graphics do not make games, but at the same time graphics can give a game personality. In that way, graphical quality (or rather, style) matters. Same thing goes for music.

The point is to immerse the player and make your game feel unique; even if it's assets have been seen/heard before, mixing and matching can produce something new and fresh.
The standards for all things should be updated in time, the standards for hacks too. Change is good, but the old or retro is not wrong either. Heck, this whole site is about a retro game :).

The standards for hacks will always change. In the next few years, the hacks we consider awsome and innovating now, will be nothing special then. Mainly because of all the handy tools that are made by the smart hackers among us. I'm thinking of addmusic, sprite-tool or more recent, Romi's cutscene tool. Many of us didn't even think about putting a cutscene in our hack. It was too much work or didn't work quite as well as we've hoped. I think that in a short time everyone will be putting in a cutscene or two and will become one of the new standards.

But like I said old isn't bad at all. It's just different, certainly for the hacks that were made in the beginning of smw hacking. It's like apples and oranges.
I think that for those hacks it would be nice if we could put them in another hack section. One for Classic hacks or 'The-list-of-hacks-that-you-must-play-if-you-wanna-learn-something-about-the-history-of Smw-hacking-and-were-considered-top-notch-back-in-the-day'.
Requirements could be: at least five years old and still featured.

Just an idea(might have seen it before somewhere).
Aka Deusscraft
Youtube Channel.
It's that most vanilla hacks are looked down upon because they are mostly made by people who aren't smart enough to use other tools. Vanilla can be good when a smarter person makes it, like the vanilla contest we had.

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Today's hacking standards are a bit strict, but they also keep those god awful noob hacks that come from youtube away from here.
Back then, all there was was Lunar Magic. All people were able to use was Lunar Magic. Because of that, hacks back then were mostly vanilla hacks. As time progressed, new advances in SMW hacking arrived, allowing people to add extra things to their hacks, such as custom graphics, custom blocks, custom sprites, and so on. Because of all these, higher standards were placed on hack submissions, which means that vanilla hacks need to be either really good or not vanilla to be accepted into the community, basically.

I'm not a huge fan of vanilla hacks, as I like to see new things in SMW, but that doesn't mean I would disallow them if I were a mod. Essentially, a hack is a hack, no matter what it has. As long as the creator is experienced in hacking SMW, then a hack will have no trouble living up to the standards.


Edit: Added post to list of Ladida's longest posts.
Originally posted by Kuribo_Shoe
Todays hacking standards are more strict then they were back then.... Now true, there are hack submission guidelines...


The Hack Submission Guidelines 2009 only discuss gameplay standards and the patch format. Hacking standards are more than that.

Hacking standards include the indentation of your code, the naming of your files, the file formats and the copyright license. Some other hacking communities have many standards. GNU hackers have the lengthy GNU Coding Standards. OpenBSD hackers have the style(9) manual page and the OpenBSD Copyright Policy. Hackers of the Battle for Wesnoth have their standards for distributing content.

The Angband community traditionally allows any hacker to take from any hack for use in any other hack. I learned this not from a document, but because I observed the behavior of the Angband community.

The SMW-hacking community does not allow a hacker to take from any hack. I have trouble determining whether I am allowed to use something in my SMW patch. My current guess is that I may take and modify anything from the Patches and ExGFX section, but that I must not modify anything from the Tools section unless I have specific permission. My current guess might be wrong.

I have observed SMW hackers require themselves to use the .asm suffix for assembly files. I follow a different standard to use the .s suffix. Another standard among SMW hackers is to use RATS tags; but I again follow a different standard and manually allocate ROM but never use RATS tags. I want to require to allocate ROM through relocatable sections, but I would need to port my SMW hack to use relocatable sections, because the current version does not use them.

Everything from the ExGFX section uses a standard format. After some guessing, I determined that the 8x8 tiles use SNES 4bpp format and that the palettes use SNES palette format (with an optional TLP header), but I failed to determine how to use the map16 files to assemble the correct 16x16 blocks with the correct palettes. I might need to learn the standard interpretation of map16 files.

Hacking Super Mario World since 28 February 2009
SMWDISC
I don't think that's the exact topic at hand, kernigh, but I guess it's relevant.


From my understanding, if an asset is posted on this site for download, it's open for use. There was a thread a while back concerning exgfx "theft" where people didn't credit the creator for use of it in their hack. I believe the mods decided that ripped graphics are free for all, and original (if posted on this site) merely need credit posted somewhere. I assume that applies to all released assets. Original = give credit, rip/remake = up to you.

If it's in a released hack but the asset is not released separately, it's not free to use. I seem to recall some drama with music being ripped directly from a hack.


In my experience with creative communities like this, "ownership" is detrimental. It only creates drama if things aren't open source. It's not like people are making money off this stuff.
If there's rules about "theft" and the community enforces it, far more creative people are obstructed than those who would be angry over their creation being "stolen." When communities become more about the creators than the creations, it becomes a community centered around people instead of art.

But, that's getting way offtopic.
Heh, I remember back then (although I never saw it being first accepted) before the Great Wipe that FPI made a joke hack; now today, ANY joke hack at all would get removed.

On another note, if I made a hard mode for SMW, would you guys accept it?