Lunar Magic suggestions and discussion (LM v2.52)

He also has no right to mock users for merely suggesting things.

If you call saying "that feels kinda selfish" as guilt tripping, you're being absurd.
This isn't extorting free art from some deviantArt rando while threatening suicide.

I understand that it's his software, and its his choice whether or not he codes features into it but that is not an excuse to outright attack people.
Nothing about Yoshin's post was confrontational.

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Hack・Ports・ASM・"Uploader"

Not really. It is admittedly just a guess and possibly incorrect, but Quebec does have a long history on the subject of language and how they see themselves with it in relation to the rest of the world. In any case, being told one is being insecure is rather more mild than insinuating that someone else is selfish as Yoshin just did, I should think.



Mock? That certainly isn't my intent. Not sure why anyone would take it that way, but if so, I do apologize.



I'm hardly obligated to answer any and every question put to me. I don't know why you would believe otherwise.



Maybe people should start listening to themselves. While I usually try to believe the best of others, I have started to wonder if there isn't a bit of an attitude problem or some other issue developing here. When people start to consistently jump to the worst conclusions, that's usually a bad sign.

But, alright... lay it on me. Do we have some sort of problem here? Because if so, I'm willing to hear you out on it. Just try and keep it respectful, and I'll do the same.

Fair warning though: if this is just going to be more silly "why won't you add this" and "why won't you release that" type of badgering, I'm going to be seriously disappointed in you guys.

The real question is why, in a community largely built on shared knowledge, building upon other's works, and growth through collaboration, you continually refuse to contribute back to the scene in any way, other than creation of closed tools and assets of which you refuse to divulge their inner workings.

It's a testament to how far Super Mario World hacking has come in recent years despite you, not because of you.

My comparison in this regard is the Sonic hacking scene, which thanks to collaborative efforts and open-source tools and work, can do immense projects with incredible changes -- as opposed to here, where everything is still limited by what Lunar Magic chooses to support, and how much you can work around its limitations.



But you'll brush this off again, as you always do.

At any moment, you could decide to leave, or quit, or get run over, and then Super Mario World modifications would grind to a halt until people could reverse-engineer your work on top of reverse engineering the game itself.

How silly.


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Edit: I actually ran into this issue with one of your works; you have a decompressor and recompressor for a series of games that I was interested in researching. But instead of being able to learn from your work, I had to spend several hours researching and building my own, wasting time I could have been spending on understanding the compressed data itself.

Thanks for that.

i think a lot of the issues here is that people rely on you when you seem to not want them to rely on you. the fact that folks have trouble using lunar magic because they dont know english is an issue that does rely on you, because you are the sole developer of the sole all-purpose smw hacking tool. so when there are these obstacles hackers run into with the tool and wish to be able to use it, these solutions rely on you because others cant suggest code or help out. most people here dont have a lot of tool experience to code their own tools to deal with certain issues, so i think that is what causes a lot of the stress here.

that being said, if you've built a situation in which what is yours remains wholly yours, this kind of outcome becomes inevitable. as long as lunar magic is the sole tool to build hacks in, and as long as you are the sole developer, people will rely on you for changes. and since you are under no obligation to actually listen to any change people suggest, that is what will always cause this clash.

creating a successor to lunar magic is completely unlikely, and more than that just not even needed. it would be great to see alternatives to lunar magic just for the fact that you werent the sole person people could rely on for this kind of stuff, but that is just not the case currently.

as i told you earlier fusoya, i expect the aggression towards people to cease. i also suggest the same to those approaching fusoya - if i see any further incessant flaming, name calling, or "holier than thou" bullshit in this thread you'll be banned for a week. no one is entitled to anything here - this is just a hobby. put thoughts into your discussion, not emotions.


this is the exact attitude that is not progressive and eventually just leads to unnecessary aggression. it's pretty wild to claim the person who is responsible for smw hacking is a detriment to smw hacking. you are just desiring something more out of him than he wishes to give. while i agree the collaborative aspect of hacking is what brought it this far, it's silly to think that to not collaborate means you're virulent filth. it's just entitlement in a hobby scene.

also, don't rereg if you're permabanned. you're always free to appeal stuff, but don't just randomly sign up again. that doesn't work.

Best time to start a new thread might be when the next version releases, but that's just me...

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Let's milk Sunny Milk. Then she'll have enough money to fund Sunny Milk Real Estate.
Everypony's digging with a shovel

It seems like a lot of people are upset because they feel that without the source code to Lunar Magic/direct support from you, they're unable to add in-app support for the various tools and patches that have been developed to improve smw hacking. I think there's just a desire to try to centralize all of the different aspects of smw hacking to a singular place, rather then requiring folders upon folders to accommodate all the different ways a hack can be modified (and in some cases, all the tight-rope walking required to make sure nothing breaks in the process).
I think that this inherent desire is just enhanced by what seems like a complete lack of willingness to cooperate on your end. People want to feel like Lunar Magic is a more community driven project, so having it being gate-kept by a singular person is frustrating to some. I think for a lot of people it's like, there's literally no reason to be secretive about LM or so protective of its source code, so they dont understand why it's so heavily guarded.

I'm on the outside of this argument (tho i'm definitely on ur side and don't see any actual problem with the way things are being handled), so this is just what i've gathered from my position.


Feel free to expand on what I've said//tell me im wrong and missing the point; I think that if this issue is effecting certain people in the community so much it should be a conversation that can be had without resorting to name-calling.


e: the only thing i have a problem with is you deciding you're not interested in offering a translated version of Lunar Magic because "it wasnt built with translations in mind". That's a shitty mindset and you're keeping people that struggle with english from truly utilizing the resources available for seemingly no reason at all... tho that could also be applied to smwcentral as a whole. eh
e2: and you did offer to meet them in the middle with a semi-translation, which is good. But the reluctance seems to be a good representation of your overall approach to improving Lunar Magic with the greater community in mind? idk again im staying out of it, i just wanted to get the dialogue started

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ask me if i give a f*ck...

I think this issue should be resolved with a website wide referendum.

We have no say in this, it's his decision and his alone.

The arguments for releasing the code have been said and he said that he won't do it.
That's ok, so you have to deal with that.

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My Youtube channel

Currently working on:
Project C

Finished project:

That's true I suppose. While there is rather more collaboration in ROM hacking now, I still hail from closer to the early days of SNES hacking where it was basically you, a hex editor, a tracer, a couple hardware docs and that was pretty much it. If you wanted something done, you more often either did it yourself or did without. That might sound harsh for some, but I enjoyed it. That's ROM hacking to me. The tinkering, the learning, the building. And a lot of it is solitary. So if I do seem to unconsciously expect that kind of self sufficiency in others at times, that's probably why.



I thought someone in the Chinese thread had already made a tool that could get around this some time ago. Not sure if he updated it for the latest version, but it seemed to work by intercepting calls for dialogs and so on without having to change the exe file. Didn't try it myself, but it looked like it should work. (I do recall a thing or two in LM that could cause some potential wonkiness for that, but I think a new release of LM could clear that bit up.)



You sound almost resigned about it. Maybe I'm being a hopeless optimist, but I think the community can do better on this.

After all, merely making suggestions is fine. Yes, not all suggestions will get implemented. Some disappointment on that is to be expected, even frustration at times.

However, that's still no excuse for personal attacks, harassment, questioning of motives or badgering when someone doesn't get what they want. That's been happening rather too often lately, and it needs to end.



Fair enough. I should probably summarize some bits of the post as advice for the new thread. Having some clear ground rules should hopefully help head off this sort of thing in the future.



Ehhhh, probably no reason to wait quite that long. It means having more repeated suggestions that have already been answered.



Ah. Well, this is an fairly old topic too, though the scale has increased over time. There are advantages and disadvantages to centralization (convenience vs program complexity and so on), and for myself I've always leaned towards not everything needing to be put into one tool. But ignoring all that, it's just not realistic to expect me to put everything under the sun into LM and maintain it all myself. And the source isn't available, so... yeah. It tends to end up being a dead end topic.



Indeed. That's pretty much the sense I'm getting as well. To take it a step further, it seems like some are even behaving as though LM already is a community project. Which is a dangerous assumption, as it's really not. Community influenced, sure. But not community led.

Not that there's anything wrong with community led projects, but that's never been a goal for LM or how it was started. And it's not something I'm looking to change at the moment either.



One can always hope...



It's really not. LM was developed and gets compiled as a win32 ANSI program, not unicode. All internal string manipulations and functions assume that. It doesn't make it impossible to use a different language, but it's not ideal. Dialog resources are natively unicode at least though.

Time and maintenance is also a thing. I've noticed non-developers (and even young developers) tend to ignore or understate that fairly often. Which isn't surprising, since it's hard to know or explain what building and maintaining a GUI program like this one for this length of time is like without actually doing it. I didn't know myself back in 2000 (which might be a good thing... if I had known then, I might of put the compiler down and went to play another RPG instead ). But if I had to name the number one thing that I think tends to kill most editors of this type before they get off the ground or get developed much past the first few years when they do, it wouldn't be technical skill or even information on the game. It'd be the amount of free time you have and are willing to invest into it.

I agree. That's also why I don't think there's much point in the community attempting to code their own "Lunar Magic" from scratch. Way too much time would be required just to get to a point that felt somewhat close to Lunar Magic, yet there would still always be some minor Lunar Magic features missing, plus, trying to follow in Lunar Magic's footsteps would just hold it back. In fact, if I were to start my own SMW editor (which I would love doing, but as FuSoYa stated, it takes way more free time than is reasonable for me and I don't even know that much about SMW or SNES coding yet), I would surely make one that took a few inspirations from Lunar Magic (as well as from many other applications like RPG Maker, Unity, Unreal Engine 4, Visual Studio...) and was otherwise completely different. Maybe even so different that many people used to Lunar Magic wouldn't want to use it, while other people might prefer it over Lunar Magic because it suited their needs better (I know it would suit my own needs better, because there are many inconveniences about current SMW Hacking that I don't like, coming from a game development background and being used to more convenient development tools). But yeah, that doesn't change the fact that such a project would just take way too much free time for me, which means it would probably be forgotten as quickly as all the previous attempts at SMW editor's besides Lunar Magic (I can think of at least two).

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Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!

I think the SMW hacking community should at least try to get together and work on a community-contributed editor. (Maybe FuSoYa can contribute code for the most basic features found in LM, as a form of compromise.)

If this editor never takes off, then obviously SMW Central is not ready to handle an open source Lunar Magic... which means the topic can finally be be dropped.

I'm pretty sure SMWCentral could handle an alternate editor.

The only requirement necessary is to not differ too much from the standard outside of necessary changes for improvement's sake.
Compare PIXI's adoption to Tessera's lack thereof, even despite PIXI's jankiness.

To say a new editor anyone can contribute to is "unnecessary" is half-wrong, half-right.
Lunar Magic is good for the time being but due to how limiting it can be compared to other editors in other hacking scenes, as Xkeeper demonstrated, shifting gears to a new editor once a reliable one comes out is important.

Hopefully we can make Katrina's editor a site-wide project like Daiyousei was meant to be.

Exploring split disassemblies should also be something the more technical side of the site should keep in mind, but that's another can of worms entirely.
Just so people don't shit on me, I'm not deminishing FuSoYa's work.

SEE YOU NEXT THREAD, LUNAR COWBOY...

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Hack・Ports・ASM・"Uploader"

Were people to make a new editor, would there be a problem with reverse engineering and reimplementing LM features, like exanimation? Not directly ripped code, but original reimplementations.

It'd be a huge headache if some sort of patent were claimed over them.

Despite his program being copyrighted, I do not think FuSoYa would disallow this, considering how he actually advocates people gathering knowledge by themselves and tinkering with the game with an expected "self-sufficiency", and in fact encourages people to build their own alternative editor to some extent. Claiming a "patent" over LM's features would just guarantee the new editor never takes off, which would likely kill SMW hacking if said new editor is to become the new main tool after LM stops being worked on (which is bound to happen at some point), and would also be quite absurd in light of his stance. In addition, this would mean the two main alternative editor projects (katrina's and Horrowind's) should've been probably stopped long ago.

I don't think I misinterpreted anything in the process, but I wouldn't refuse confirmation from the man himself.

Excellent point. While I don't think I've heard FuSoYa state the reason in his own words, it's a redundant gesture. Just about guaranteed everything has already been covered by others.

Personally were software as important as LM in my hands (I'm not a programmer) I know I'd open up more, and be more willing to rewrite the parts that make source code difficult to release, if the community improved their maturity.

As far as suggestions go, I was wondering if there could be some way to start in-editor emulation from the midpoint rather than the entrance. Not sure if it's worth implementing when you could just move the entrance temporarily but it can get slightly annoying when you have to do it all the time.


So far there's been some attempts but nothing really came out of it. Either way, I'd imagine this kind of topic would be a better fit for its own thread.

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You literally cannot reasonably "patent" the idea of animating tiles in a SNES game. That would be ludicrous. Like, if that were to turn into an issue I think the general response would just be "too bad, we're doing it anyway".

Unless it somehow actually turns into a legal thing (which I doubt it can given the nature of it just being a level editor tool) I'll just go ahead and say that LM existing or having something would not stand in the way of anything because quite honestly that would be incredibly silly.

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