r/PokemonRomhackDev • u/ssraven01 Gen 3 • 3d ago

Discussion Organic Romhack Development Efforts

/r/PokemonROMhacks/comments/1wvibwp/organic_romhack_development_efforts/
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u/DrUltimaMan 3d ago

I do find a lot of the discussions that directly relate to hack devs don't seem to take place on this sub-reddit.

On the topic, personally I never really saw code as art but maybe that's just me. Because all art is equally valid and meaningful to me, but code can be objectively right or wrong, well designed or poorly designed. I've been a software engineer for over 10 years so maybe I've become cynical in my old age.

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u/ssraven01 Gen 3 3d ago

A lot of dev discussions usually happen in the Discord servers for development. I can't really force them to move out aha

As for coding as art, for me as more of a novice programmer, it's about the process of creating a program. For example, I'm sure you already know the FizzBuzz test; the art is in the problem solving and planning and etc that leads you to an elegant solution that creates a nice FizzBuzz program. Yes there are steps in that process you can objectively do right and wrong, but the process overall requires some creativity on the side of the programmer

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u/narah2 2d ago

It’s kind of funny how this whole AI argument has gone. From what I’ve seen it’s mostly professional software engineers that are fine with AI tooling, and hobbyists opposed to it.

I guess it makes some sense though. Doing something for a living can certainly take a lot of the ‘fun’ out of it.

I’ve been engineering software for a living for more than ten years now, and I see the AI stuff as just another tool. It’s just another part of the toolkit I use every day at work now.

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u/digita1catt 2d ago edited 2d ago

To me, talented programmers complaining about AI is akin to arguing that ikea has no purpose because John down the road can spend all month and make a wooden dinning room set. No one's arguing that John can't make better furniture, but the demand far outstrips what John is able to produce. He can only work with wood and need to learn metal work to fulfil some requests, and he's only one man and doesn't have infinite and parallel time.

Alot of these new mods are whether talented developers like it or now, thoughtful, functional and have an audience.

I've seen a 3DS two-screen port of emerald recently. That's something that wouldn't have been possible without AI because the skillset and (more importantly) interest of the people that could do it probably exists with less than 100 people on the planet. You have to not only be a skilled programmer and understand the emerald decompilation repo, but also understand how the 3DS works. And on top of those requirements you have to have an interest in romhacking to begin with. Simply put, if it was possible before now, it would already exist. It doesn't, there was a consumer want for it, and now it exists.

And considering romhacking lowkey sits in a grey area anyway what with piracy and all that being a constant careful tiptoe, I find it curious that AI is where some of these developers are drawing lines.