Next project

Okay. There is 2 purposes for this thread. First one is to fulfill a long dream, which is to make a poll. I still have 2 dreams and they are to see the Egypt pyramids and meet the Dalai Lama.

Seriously, the second purpose of this thread is to help me focus on something in particular because I have not the free time to do all the following but I am equally interested in each of the projects and I think I have the skill to succeed in each of them.

Please give arguments for your choices, I'm a logic person that need valid arguments. Note that I might note do the task that will have the most vote, it's only to guide me a bit. Feel free to say anything.

The poll is public, will end in 1 month and you can vote for more than one thing. Don't vote for all of them, please...

You should consider pursuing something that represents both a challenge and an opportunity for self improvement.
Based on your strong programming skills and your extremely logical mind, In my humble opinion, you should pursue any of the following:

Code:

My FF3us hacking project
My FFVI Advance editor
FFV Hacking and become a FFV specialist
FF2us Hacking and become a specialist

Continuing your hack or becoming an expert on other games just provides a possibility for you to further increase any ASM knowledge. The skills can be transferred ultimately into deciphering the works of a game for which no information is available, like Breath of Fire I/II, Harvest Moon or Illusion of Gaia. A FF6advance editor would be very nice to have...if you could only get rid of the horrible slowdown from porting the game into GBA, I'd hack that game day and night using your editor

While you could work on your hack using FFVI SDK, I believe it's still being developed and not completely released. Starting a Clone of FF6 could might prove to be a long project...consider this one if you have years to dedicate into this. And spriting does not seem to pose any challenge to you...

if you could only get rid of the horrible slowdown from porting the game into GBA, I'd hack that game day and night using your editor

I like your overall input, but on this , do you mean the GBA version is slower? I doubt this unless I'm totally off track. I think it is slower on a GBA emulator, but I have a GBA and with the cartridge, it goes the same speed as the original.

Edit: And you forgot to vote... You stated publicly which candidate you will support for the election but left you vote paper blank XD

This all depends on what your goals are for your new project. I see a few options here: Are you aiming to test your knowledge or expand on it? Granted these two are always interrelated, but depending on which you are focusing will help narrow your options. Also, Do you want to start something primarily for yourself or will it be something designed for the community? This is another polarizing question that needs to be answered.

Testing your knowledge:
If your goal is to test your knowledge, then you are sticking to things that are already in the realm of what you can do, without having to spend much time learning new techniques. Obviously every project will have challenges, but this is meant more to sturdy the foundation you have already set... Projects that fall under this category are:
-My FF3us hacking project
-My hacking project ported to RPG Maker with the FFVI SDK
-My FFVI Advance editor (depending on your current level of knowledge concerning GBA)

Expanding your knowledge:
Expanding your knowledge focuses specifically on accomplishing new feats, taking on new challenges, and increasing your utility to the rest of the community (as expanding your knowledge also expands the knowledge of the whole community, assuming you stay involved). With this goal you want to avoid carbon copies and simple code translation. Things that fall primarily into this category are:
-My FF3us hacking project (assuming you have anything new added to your game)
-FFV Hacking and become a FFV specialist
-FF2us Hacking and become a specialist
-My FFVI Advance editor (depending on your current level of knowledge concerning GBA)
-Start spriting

Is this project for yourself?
Is the accomplishment entirely for your benefit? If you don't plan to share the project beyond those here and maybe a few who ask, then this project is mainly for your benefit. This is where the challenege is more important than the result because the final product may or may not be something the general public would have interest in. Bottom line, its for you! Most your options fall into this category, however there are a few that may specifically be less important for the community, those are:
-My FF3us hacking project
-My hacking project ported to RPG Maker with the FFVI SDK
-Start a Final Fantasy clone in C# (XNA development)

Is this project for the community?
This is where you put your skills to the greatest use. Here you have a project that is designed to be shared with others, to either expand everyone's knowledge or for the simple enjoyment of others. This category focuses on the appeal of the final product to the masses and includes:
-My FFVI Advance editor
-FFV Hacking and become a FFV specialist
-FF2us Hacking and become a specialist

My personal thoughts:
As you can see, your own personal FFVI project hits 3/4 categories, arguably 4 if its a good one (which id be willing to bet it will be). I always enjoy seeing what people can do with the game and new hacks are a great way to experience what other players love about FFVI. I would also like to see an expanded knowledge base for FFIV and FFV, even though I don't have much practical interest in those games. With your skills you could really benefit community with these, and these could also make you more effective at hacking FFVI as well since they use different mechanics and abilities, but the same baseline concepts. And finally, I think a FFVI advance editor would definitely be a big hit with a lot of people.

Things like making a FFVI port in C# is a good idea in theory, but in the end will only marginally benefit anybody, including you. The port will be useful practice only and the project won't have any staying power once complete. You will have the experience and maybe a little more knowledge of C#, but very few people will play it beyond testing, including yourself, whereas something like a personal FFVI hack project would have lasting appeal because of its originality. A similar case could be made for the SDK project; unless the project is purely for yourself, your hack will get more exposure in the mainstream hack community as an ips rather than trying to propagate it through SDK. Plus a ROM hack allows other members of the community to dive into your code and learn from you moreso than the SDK project would. However, if you are starting to get a little burnt-out on Hex, then a C# or SDK project might be a refreshing change for a little while.

In the end, this is your call, I hope I've at least given you a little bit to think about.

...if you could only get rid of the horrible slowdown from porting the game into GBA, I'd hack that game day and night using your editor

Yeah... There are animation slow down though I never noticed any:

This version of the game...its got minor issues compared to the SNES. Basically, some sound effects didn't transfer properly (noticiable in stuff like Ultima, primarily, but only if you heard the original), music is handled awkwardly (badly timed ending medley, for one, or Figaro Flashback comes to mind, where "Coin Song" keeps playing when its suppose to be silent during the last scene of that, are two examples of what I mean), and some animations have slow downs, though only the real complicated ones, and its more "Its slower than its suppose to be" rather than actual lag.

source: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/930370-fi...e/49881479

And that a huge post by Edrin!!! I'll answer it once I get home. I can spend 5 minutes at work on the net but I cannot push too much

This version of the game...its got minor issues compared to the SNES. Basically, some sound effects didn't transfer properly (noticiable in stuff like Ultima, primarily, but only if you heard the original), music is handled awkwardly (badly timed ending medley, for one, or Figaro Flashback comes to mind, where "Coin Song" keeps playing when its suppose to be silent during the last scene of that, are two examples of what I mean), and some animations have slow downs, though only the real complicated ones, and its more "Its slower than its suppose to be" rather than actual lag.

source: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/930370-fi...e/49881479

The same thing happened with FF5, but a patch was released to fix this issue. In the patch, the songs are restored to the original snes versions, and the animations are sped up. I wish there was a similar patch for FF6advance.

As you can see, your own personal FFVI project hits 3/4 categories, arguably 4 if its a good one (which id be willing to bet it will be). I always enjoy seeing what people can do with the game and new hacks are a great way to experience what other players love about FFVI. I would also like to see an expanded knowledge base for FFIV and FFV, even though I don't have much practical interest in those games. With your skills you could really benefit community with these, and these could also make you more effective at hacking FFVI as well since they use different mechanics and abilities, but the same baseline concepts. And finally, I think a FFVI advance editor would definitely be a big hit with a lot of people.

This s a great analysis, beyond what I thought about so far. My first goal is to have fun, second is to expand and by extension test my knowledge, third would be to benefit the community. In that perspective, I think the FFVI Advance editor was a good project because not only it would be the second editor for that game, but at the same time there is some research that still need to be made on the data location, something that will need to be done for anyone wanting to do a complete editor. Plus, it does make me practice my programming skills and it would benefit the community.

As for my ROM hack, I felt at one point that I would never see the end of it and there are already a bunch of FF3us hack out there. It's sort of mainstream in the community, at least for beginners because of the available editors and documentation. But I think I could pull off a hack that fall into the category of "worth playing" and still have many new ideas for it. Finishing my hack fall into the 4 categories you've described. Nobody knows everything about that game and new things are still documented. It's still a lot of learning and ASM perfection on the programming point of view. But I have the feeling than this project would benefit less the community and will take years to finish, unless I removed some features.

Things like making a FFVI port in C# is a good idea in theory, but in the end will only marginally benefit anybody, including you. The port will be useful practice only and the project won't have any staying power once complete. You will have the experience and maybe a little more knowledge of C#, but very few people will play it beyond testing, including yourself, whereas something like a personal FFVI hack project would have lasting appeal because of its originality. A similar case could be made for the SDK project; unless the project is purely for yourself, your hack will get more exposure in the mainstream hack community as an ips rather than trying to propagate it through SDK. Plus a ROM hack allows other members of the community to dive into your code and learn from you moreso than the SDK project would. However, if you are starting to get a little burnt-out on Hex, then a C# or SDK project might be a refreshing change for a little while.

The C#/C++ project is a great idea, but would take a lot of time too and I would need to take care of all the graphics, AI, battle system and much more. The learning curve would be high but I know enough to find my answers myself. It would be of 0 benifit for the hacking community and might go under the radar in the indie 2D RPG community, if there is one...

The idea behind porting my hack to a RPG maker project was that the SDK will most likely offer more possibilities than a FF3us ROM hack. The thing is I was even afraid that too many good projects would come out before I'm even halfway through my hack, making it obsolete for potential players. But on another hand, perhaps the SDK will bring even more lazy hacks that lack originality if we take in consideration the existing editors and documentation. The only difference is that the expectations will be higher, because you'll be able to do more with less efforts. But I doubt people who can't stand ASM will jump head first in Ruby and RGSS3, which would be my case. The SDK is still a wonderful project and I'll need to test it to have a definitive answer.

As for FFV and FFIV hacking, I felt that it would be a new game to learn and plus, nobody on this board has a decent experience in hacking those games, except JCE3000GT. The thing is I have less experience in playing those game, FFV more than FF2us, so I would need a couple of playthough to get an good idea of the skills, jobs and combat system along with enemies. That is for FFV. I know FFIV a lot but less than FFVI. But it might benefit more the community of this board that might have questions, I dunno.

But, as an example, Slick board has some really good experts on FFV and FFIV and nobody go see them for question. ROM hacking is a bit slow, at least on the final fantasy boards. The difference is we get all the newbie because of the google search of "Final Fantasy" + "hacking", which is a good thing in a way because some people stick here, but a lot leave after a short while for different reason. Ok this is turning in a rant lol...

I'll think about all this.. Thanks for the input Angelo and Edrin.