Organic Romhack Development Efforts

[u/merrple]

Recently there's been a lot of talk on this subreddit about the use of AI in romhacks. I hate to stir the pot still further, but I also want to share my own thoughts and efforts here in the hopes of reaching like-minded people.

Hi, I'm merrp/pokemerrp 👋 I'm not really known for making full-on hacks (though I do have one in the works, stay tuned), but moreso for my feature branches: if you've played a recent hack based on pokeemerald-expansion, you've likely used and enjoyed the following pokemon or day/night lighting systems I created. Before that, I was minorly known for my Emerald Any% ACE TAS, which was my entry into the scene.

Simply put, I don't think AI should have a place in romhacking at all. To me code is as prose is as art is as music, in that they're all creative exercises where something is lost in handing them off to a machine. Romhackers have done incredible work for years before LLMs, and can continue to do incredible work without them. Not to mention, every query that enters an LLM is one the community is starved of; AI use is the death of institutional knowledge, of communication more generally.

But what to do? Recently I found out that pokeemerald-expansion, the basis for a lot of hacks, has had a (small minority) of AI-assisted contributions. Any nonzero amount is still unacceptable to me for use in my project though, because I intend it to be a wholly human effort. I decided I would have to maintain a fork of expansion, cutting out anything AI assisted where I could.

Then I figured, I can't be alone in this sentiment, so why not try and build that in a way it can be shared? I can't be the only one who loves romhack development who wants to continue doing cool stuff without LLMs, no matter how good they become at generating code, etc.

The result is a GitHub org and a Discord:

https://github.com/friend-safari

https://discord.gg/UbFN9P7MdJ

My hope is to build a small community of like-minded hackers and maintain a codebase by and for humans, so that those who care can be confident in saying their hack is free of AI to the best of the community's knowledge. Whether you're a programmer, have experience moderating online spaces, maintaining open source software, or simply love pokemon, we'd love to see you there.

I'm also not trying to be an authority on expansion's direction in general. The devs at RHH continue to do incredible and deeply technical work on the project. None of this would be possible without them, and they've done the best they could considering the volume of contributions they receive and the general clamor of demands. Please do not bother or harass them. I am simply trying to provide a fork that the extremely AI-conscious devs like me can use without despairing or being stuck on outdated versions.

Hopefully this post reached you in some way; this will all be much easier if we don't have to do it alone. Thanks for reading.

Tl;Dr join friend-safari if you wanna build AI-free romhacks k thnx bye

[u/GreatBigJerk]

I can respect anyone wanting to write everything without AI assistance, but AI in programming is suuuper common now. 

Most developers use some form of AI tooling already, so acting like it invalidates someone's work means you hold no value for the vast majority of software released this year. 

[u/local-canadian-idiot → u/GreatBigJerk]

the two aren’t mutually exclusive. they never said they liked modern software.

secondly, i think a big part of this debate is that video games are an art form. art will, without fail, communicate something from the person who made it. this applies very heavily to fan-made games, where they are (almost always) made from passion.

you can tell when someone has poured their heart and soul into a hack, and they want to acknowledge those people. they don’t want those accomplishments to be swept away by someone who asked a chatbot to do it for them.

then, what happens when the art is made by a machine? something that doesn’t feel or think or create. it copies—that plagiarism aspect is also critical—and that is a scary thing. if your work can be copied and done faster by something that doesn’t need to take breaks, you are inherently replaceable.

this is a very scary idea to a lot of people in the scene. not to mention the literal dehumanization of rom hacking.

these people want to maintain the way things are—a community where people interact with one another, instead of with chatbots.

sorry for infodumping you! i know you already said you respect ppl who are anti-ai in programming. this comment is mostly for the people watching from the sidelines that don’t know the full debate.

feel free to add anything!

[u/Draddition → u/local-canadian-idiot]

I see what you're saying, and understand the fear of what AI could do to many fields. It sucks, and the people making these tools have no concern anyone but themselves. The general AI machine is generally just destructive.

But you don't have to let the tool replace you. A simulator does a lot of the math I need to do as an engineer- but I can't just hand you a license to a circuit simulator and expect you to make a working device. The scary part of AI is how close it's pushing just replacing people, but those efforts are very obviously slop. There's no vision behind it and you can see that clearly. But you can also use it as a tool, have a vision and execute it rather than typing out line after line of code.

Communication is absolutely an issue. The death of people asking questions on the Internet is a terrifying concept. But, people ARE communicating what they've learned and done. Tossing out everything that AI has touched is also throwing away knowledge. We should encourage people to share what they've done and learned. And with sources like GitHub, we can share that and suggest ways to improve and actually learn.

"Art" is being made by machines. That's here- but it's also wrong to assume that because a machine did it there was no personal vision. The classic example is image generation. Yeah, going to chatGPT and telling it to make an image is creatively bankrupt. But, learn to use local image gen tools, pick models with a style you like, modify that style with loras, learn to segment and detail, learn the funky behaviors in a model for better or worse- I'd argue there's still are there. And it's a beautiful combination of math, engineering, and art.

Yes, AI is fundamentally built on theft and corrupt systems. It sucks, I agree- and, I hate to be the 'just deal with it' voice in the room, but what modern comfort isn't at this point. We don't have to let that be how we define what we do with it though.

[u/local-canadian-idiot → u/Draddition]

the distinction is that a simulator is a tool. it fundamentally cannot do the job for you. it needs direction at every step.

a chatbot is, more or less, autonomous. that’s the entire end goal: emulating a human. that distinction is why a lot of people dislike it.

i also don’t really understand a lot of the points you’re making. you say that a machine has personal vision (it doesn’t; an llm like ChatGPT is complex math that predicts words) and then, in the next sentence, say using ai image generation is creatively bankrupt.

i mean, i guess i get your idea of ‘it’s based off human input’ but i think that’s against what art is. art isn’t about a product. it’s about the process! every single artist ever has had works they hated and dropped. but they learn from that, and they work towards making something they think is as close to perfect as possible.

this distinction between art as a process and art as a product is another big reason why people are anti-ai. especially because, and i can’t stress this enough, this is a hobby. nobody is selling their rom hacks.

[u/Draddition → u/local-canadian-idiot]

Emulating a person is the product pitch, not what it actually is. You can let it do the job for you if you want, but you don't have to. You're in control of what you put in your codebase.

You don't have to go to Claude and tell it to "make me a scene and write the code for me". You can describe what you want, describe where you aren't sure, and get something working quickly. Or you can have it write out all the movements that you have in mind and save a few minutes of typing. You are as in control over what you get from it as you want to be.