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Staff Spotlight - September 2015

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Welcome to Staff Spotlight, the only five star hotel on SMW Central!

We hope you enjoy your time here at Staff Spotlight. To help prevent boredom during your stay, we have an interview from one of our maintenance crew, Vitor Vilela, to tell you all about what the hotel is like.

We hope you enjoy your time here!
Tahixham Hey, Vitor. How are things?
Vitor Vilela Hello Tahixham! Things are been more or less but overall good. Heh, you know, last school year, studying a lot, real life things but I'm here, still alive.
Tahixham Haha, that's good. So you've been staff on SMWC for quite a while now. What's kept you sticking around for so long?
Vitor Vilela Yeah, three years as a staff member, haha.
Vitor Vilela I don't really know honestly. I'm been on SMWC since 2009 when I was just 11 years old. Today I pretty much I know almost everything about SMW Central and specially, SMW Hacking. I think what makes still stick here are my awesome friends I have around plus the motivation of always wanting to make something new, something never seen on SMW Hacking yet.
Vitor Vilela For example making tools, patches and who knows, a new hack that have some cool things. We will see how things will go in future.
Tahixham I see. I believe you're working on a hack at the moment? Tell us a bit about it.
Vitor Vilela Well, yeah, it's Touhou Mario 2, a hack that I'm been working together with Wakana for a while. Probably most people already knows about the hack (if not, go ahead and visit it!), but I will tell a little more on how is going so far.
Vitor Vilela Since 2009 I always wanted to make an interesting and fun hack. I have made various previous attempts but I always failed at. So within time I started liking ASM and I got the SA-1 chip working with Super Mario World. Still, I never managed to make a hack to show everything cool that is possible to do with the chip and various ideas I have in mind. Plus, my level design wasn't really that good and much less in music, graphics, etc.
Vitor Vilela So someday I saw about a hack called Touhou Mario and it looked impressive for me. I'm not really a Touhou player (I barely can beat Touhou 8, the easiest of all games), but I always liked its music and characters, so I saw lot of potential of making something pretty cool with it. So I met now my great friend Wakana and I implemented the SA-1 chip in Touhou Mario 1 to reduce the slowdown.
Vitor Vilela It was cool and overall, the hack ended a quite fun but I wanted to make something new using all SA-1 chip potential and my ideas together, so we decided to make Touhou Mario 2 to show all potential we can make together using all our skills.
Vitor Vilela And we ended up as a good team. Wakana is been getting better on music and level design while me I try making something interesting and fun using ASM and a little bit of creativity.
Vitor Vilela Well, it's there. Two years passed but we still didn't finish it, sometimes it lacks time, motivation, maybe a bit of support, but I hope we can finish it soon and do something pretty good but specially fun, which anyway, is the reason that everyone is on SMW Hacking: for fun.
Tahixham How do you find working on a hack with someone else? Does it present new challenges you wouldn't normally find working solo?
Vitor Vilela Ah yeah, totally. We use Dropbox to share and edit everything. While it makes lot of things easier, you still have to deal with editing conflicts, like when we end editing the same thing at same time, generating two different files.
Vitor Vilela Plus when we end up with conflicting ideas. Often Wakana thinks something needs a certain modification while I think it needs another modification.
Vitor Vilela But overall it's pretty good to work with someone together since we can combine different skills into a single things, increasing quality and ideas. While I'm good at ASM, I can't even imagine myself porting or designing something good, which is when Wakana appears and fills what I'm bad at.
Vitor Vilela I can't even imagine how the hack would work without him.
Tahixham So how did you get into SMW hacking, specifically ASM as I know you're quite skilled in that field?
Vitor Vilela When I was like 9 years old I didn't have any computer nor any knowledge about hacking or programming.
Vitor Vilela Everything started when I was on my cousin's house and we saw the laser suit Mario video. I always thought it was something real and I kept trying for months unlocking it on my SNES haha.
Vitor Vilela Of course sooner or later I figured it was fake and we found out about Kaizo Mario World and some Super Mario World 3 hack.
Vitor Vilela Later when I got a computer and internet connection, decided to look the laser suit video again and I saw in the comments that it was done with Lunar Magic.
Vitor Vilela I quickly got interesting and found out about the editor and SMW Central, which later I registered into.
Vitor Vilela Later I found about great hacks like Brutal Mario and Super Demo World and I got pretty interested into making my own games and have fun with it.
Vitor Vilela So I was creating my first hack, Massacre Mario World (yeah, inspired by Brutal Mario of course), but I always suffered from the huge slowdown it generated for some reason.
Vitor Vilela Upon that time, dynamic times were a must use thing and effects like HDMA Kit plus the combination of Lunar Magic 1.70 (OH MY GOD, 4X MORE MAP16 AND MORE TWO BG SLOTS?! AMAZING!!!).
Vitor Vilela Which explains why my hack had so many slowdown issues.
Vitor Vilela But because of it, I got interested into special chips because many games had another "type" in ZSNES.
Vitor Vilela And usually these games were pretty impressive, like Super Mario RPG, Yoshi's Island, etc., that had "TYPE: SA-1" and "TYPE: SUPER FX" for example.
Vitor Vilela I just thought: "Oh, these things must do magic to the system get pretty impressive!"
Vitor Vilela At this rate, I started searching about these chips and since I had a bit of math knowledge I started looking on how to learn ASM to put these chips working on a ROM.
Vitor Vilela So within time I just realized that SA-1 was the best chip for implementing and I ended up learning ASM and SA-1 at same time.
Tahixham I've noticed you have made quite a few tools as well. How did you get into programming and what languages do you know?
Vitor Vilela Well, since I got my computer I got really interested on how programs worked. I remember when I tried to edit and create .exe files though notepad and they always turned into broken MS-DOS applications and I never understood why. That was when I didn't have any internet connection.
Vitor Vilela At same time, exploring around my computer I found some .htm, .hta, .js, etc., that were contained javascript code and I got a bit interested on how it worked.
Vitor Vilela So when I finally got internet connection, I learned a bit Javascript and started doing Online Tools (some brazilians may remember my HDMA tool for example, which was a simple online page that generated HDMA gradients) and so I started my programming activity.
Vitor Vilela What about creating programs? Well, I found out Dev-C++, a few programming tutorials but I never managed to understand how C/C++ worked, so I gave up initially.
Vitor Vilela Later, with more Javascript knowledge, I always wondered if it was possible to create programs by simply using Javascript instead of any "complicated" programming language like C++. So I found on a page about a compiler present on .NET Framework that can turn .js files into .exe files. So I found out a JSCript.NET compiler and started searching more about it.
Vitor Vilela Using JScript.NET I created my first known tool, SnesGFX. It was something pretty weird GUI, because I had to code everything by hand, since there was no Visual Studio Form designer or like. So due of that and also because of the poor performance JScript.NET had, I sticked later into C#, which is the main programming language I work until today.
Tahixham What kind of future do you think SMW hacking of a whole has?
Vitor Vilela I'm rather pessimist about that, honestly. While the situation improved a bit recently, most people are pushing all too much about complex level design and a must use a gimmick and so on, making you take various days to just design a regular level but at the end with frustrating results because you can't think anymore to make more 95 different levels for a full-length hack!
Vitor Vilela Yeah, I know it's important to you design good levels and overall, but people often forget that the most important about a level is how fun is it and not on how complex the gimmick is or impressive are the effects.
Vitor Vilela If you take for example Super Mario Bros 3, most of the levels use simple concepts, short levels, but with creativity, making the levels simple to do but a lot fun for the player.
Vitor Vilela Of course I'm not a level designer so I may be wrong, but that's my thoughts about how SMW Hacking is going. We need to bring it the fun back and not the excessive high standards or expectations over hacks. Super Mario Maker is the perfect example. The level concepts are rather simple but so far the levels produced looked very fun (at least to watch heh. since I don't have a Wii U).
Tahixham Well then, that's pretty much all I have. Anything else you wish to add/talk about?
Vitor Vilela Yes. First of all, I want to thank everyone who supported and helped me with all these years. I can't say names because the list is too long, but sincerely, thank you for helping me, since the early days from 2009 to today.
Vitor Vilela Second, a message for who is interested into learning ASM: never give up. Whatever complex you're doing, if it's technically possible to do in the SNES and SMW engine, don't give up and do it. Training is essential to you get good at ASM and on getting everything working together. It may take many time to you do something, but the biggest pleasure of coding is when you finish something and you see
Vitor Vilela it working perfectly as you wanted. That's why I love ASM.
Vitor Vilela And to finish, Touhou Mario 2 will get finished. Often I comment about it never getting finished, nor having motivation, but someday it will get done. I promise. And it will be fun.
Tahixham OK then, thanks a lot Vitor!
Room service is available on the number 5315. For escorts, please dial 16989 #ab{;)}

Again, thank you for choosing to stay at Staff Spotlight and we hope you enjoy your time here.
This place is filthy! Please bane Vitor to make up for his lack of cleaning.

But no, I'm honestly surprised it took this long for him to be featured. He's a very knowledgeable guy who's pretty easy to talk to. Congrats, man.
You definitely deserve this man, very nice job. You've been doing a lot of work for the staff for a long while, so I'm glad to see you get this feature.
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Vitor Vilela Second, a message for who is interested into learning ASM: never give up. Whatever complex you're doing, if it's technically possible to do in the SNES and SMW engine, don't give up and do it. Training is essential to you get good at ASM and on getting everything working together. I may take many time to you do something, but the biggest pleasure of coding is when you finish something and you see
Vitor Vilela it working perfectly as you wanted. That's why I love ASM.

excuse me while i staple this to my forehead [canned laughter]
HackPortsASM"Uploader"

Now you got both MoTM and SoTM!

I'm not very active, but from what I see/saw, you're one of the best users and staff members of SMWC, always helping others, working for the best of SMWC and making many revolutionary tools to make SMW hacking more interesting. It's also impressive how you manage to both work for the site and work on such a big hack like Touhou Mario 2. I know we had some inactivity, but I promise to give all myself for it once we get more free, since working with you has always been incredibly fun. I still recall those days when we used to talk via PMs to make SA-1 work in Touhou Mario 1, you were always kind and gentle with me.

I hope you'll be in SMWC for more and more years. Big congratulations for the nomination, it's totally deserved.
finally someone who deserves it congrats vitor. you are one of smwc's hardest workers, always putting in effort into whatever you do. you may feel down and out sometimes, but i (as well as the rest of the community hopefully) appreciate everything you do, acknowledging that it takes a skilled mind to accomplish said everything. best of luck to your future endeavors, and hope you and wakana can finish touhou mario 2 #thp{;)}
two brs in a row, hue
congrats, vitor. you've always been a hardworking member and made a lot of useful tools. this was bound to happen.
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PENIS
You've certainly improved quite a bit since I first met you, not only on ASM and programming (yes, I still remember those times when you just started moderating the PT forum, heheh). I'm glad to say that you're a pretty nice guy to talk to now, and also gets along well with everyone. Like some people said, you're a very productive person, and I've always respected that.

Parabéns, xará! :D huehue
Contratulations Vitor! I've always liked your works because they're so useful and polished plus you're a great person :D
Merecida também #smw{:peace:}
It's easily the best thing I've done
So why the empty numb?
Award more than deserved! You've been a hardworking member for some time, and I can say I'm glad to have met such a great person that also knows a good bunch of ASM and programming enough to make revolutionary tools (I remember when you were first promoted to staff as well and you've improved amazingly ever since). Congrats, man!
Windowless ride, feeling alive
Are you alive or just breathing?
Contratulations Vitor Vilela!
Well desserted!

O bonde dos BRs está atacando!



But seriously, congrats Vitor! You're certainly one of the most hardworking staff members/ASMers we have around, always helping other users and making some really awesome tools as well - you really deserved it.
THE SECOND BEST BR STAFF




É OS BR
TA ATACANDO
bless
Before I forget again, thanks everyone for the kind comments. I may not be the perfect person, often I do some silly things like with english and some confusion I had with some users in end-2014 but I'm here, I try to do everything possible to improve everything important for the community.

I hope now also I can improve the ASM sections performance (for who don't know I'm leading ASM team now) and hopefully do some progress in everything.
GitHub - Twitter - YouTube - SnesLab Discord
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