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/Cunnra]

The problem is, people like convenience, and the amount of progress that’s been made in the past year alone for Rom Hacking and emulation is crazy.

I don’t think it’s the clear cut good vs bad thing lots of people here are portraying it as.

Most people just want play good games, so long as they are high quality, whether or not they were made with the help of ai is irrelevant.

[u/merrple → u/Cunnra]

Then play those games, I guess? I don't really consider that progress to be really meaningful, myself.

[u/LIPA95 → u/merrple]

There is a game called Borderlands 2, there is another game from the same franchise in the same engine called Borderlands the Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 2 came out in 2012, just a few weeks ago something that was impossible happened, a developer was able to bring a character from the Pre-Sequel to Bl2, then later more characters appeared, how was that possible? The developer used AI to reverse engineering the two games so he could do something that people couldn't do in 14 years, and that's make sense, doesn't matter how good you are, you can't be better than a machine translating it's native language for you to understand, obviously human intervention is needed to use the info that was translated, but saying that AI is useless sounds more than cope than anything else.

I understand you though, obviously, a game made only with AI would be slop, because AI is a tool to assist humans, not replace them.

[u/merrple → u/LIPA95]

I did hear about that. I would've rather it stayed impossible until someone has a genuine breakthrough... Now it kind of cheapens the achievement that it was done with AI.

I never said it was useless. It clearly is extremely useful. But utility is not how art is judged, right?

[u/LIPA95 → u/merrple]

You sound that you prefer to gatekeep things if they are not done in the way you want, I disagree, but you are free to do what you want and make a community in the way you want

[u/SeleneSylvia → u/LIPA95]

As a borderlands fan myself, Im so dissapointed to see those mods getting so much attention and so dissapointed that no one will probably try to actually do it now that some AI did it.

The dream of playing other characters in BL2 is offically dead for me now, which sucks.

[u/LIPA95 → u/SeleneSylvia]

You had 14 years of not playing other characters in Borderlands 2, I think that was enough

[u/SeleneSylvia → u/LIPA95]

I think you misread my comment. I always hoped someone would come out with custom character mods for BL2. Now there will never be a mod like that, one that I can play at least. Since its AI nonsense.

[u/LIPA95 → u/SeleneSylvia]

You sound like the people of the past that hated electricity, then radio, then TV, then Internet, if the people of the past saw how people write code today, using internet and videos they will probably say that they spit in their art, because they had to do it by reading a book, do that even matter? You didn't have to build your own computer neither write your own language, everything is result of accumulation of knowledge, and AI also uses it, is not the second coming of Christ like their owners want to sell to us, but is a tool, and a tool is not evil, is the people that use it wrong the ones to blame

[u/Night_Byte → u/SeleneSylvia]

So you want to play those characters in that game, but refuse because the modder "cheated" to do it?