CMPGenerator

Generally not really actually. Unless it's done with the intent to taunt avid ASM users.
Challenging yourself to avoid ASM can be a fun puzzle sometimes and there can be some clever looking solutions at times.

Yeah um, Miccs. I'm gonna need to stop you at this point. Just because ASM is challenging itself doesn't mean it's a challenge to take overall, and the same should go for TSC, if anything. Just because there can be alternatives to ASM in some cases, doesn't mean you need to spit on them for what they learned in the other direction. Now, if you wanna put your alternative up as a suggestion, go right ahead. But don't go and shame people for their methods of solving things.

 

I can't believe WTF Story's Tetris section is fucking dead.

Honestly though, I might try making something similar with Puyo if I can find the will, just to see if it can be easily done now.

It's amazing how what we thought was amazing back then is now common place today.

 

Not using assembly for the sake of not using assembly is bad.
There is no novelty of not digging into an arbitrary chunk of code and changing the binary values of an .exe. This kind of thinking really irritates me because this mindsets makes it so that people are willing to put up with "not quite good enough" or "less effective and takes more time". This is 2018, the Cave Story Modding Community has made great strides in many area to make assembly easier to get into, and to make what is considered basic things that should already be accessible to a game for modding, do-able. (Such as weapon editing and the 50 some XML's that Enlight has made for the Haxinator)

Enlight did make the OOB flag chart, but it's a harder version of <HEX because you have to start at the beginning of the flag data and count up instead of just putting in your offset and writing the data. Less effective time wise, more complicated and you can't (at least as far as I know) get to every singe byte in the exe using thsi method so people would just go without.

I'm not aware of Carrotlord's money hack using flags, but if you're referring to his hack that was a broken TSC command and a 7 line hack that gave you one money each time you touched an EXP shard (instead of 5 or 20 depending on size of the shard) that was very incomplete because there was no HUD, or a <SEL command (that by the way I made recently with all these features mentioned above as well as the exp shard being separate from the money npc if you want it to. .)

I get the notion that less is more but is far beyond it. Doing <CMP 10 trillion times is not honourable, it's just wasteful. And while Bray doesn't have a perfect solution to the TSC limit, or otherwise; It's nice to see that he's trying to make something that overall helps people with modding by removing all this time put into nothing more than monotonus BS and redirecting it to making new characters and new weapons better maps, better dialouge, and better mods.

All this stuck up novelty, and split of ASM vs no ASM is just something I'm rather sick of and it definitively needs to go. Look at ROM hacking, they have to use asm all the time and it's a lot harder to do because code is optimized among many other things. Assembly isn't hard or scary for CS, there are plenty of people around now that can and will teach people who are willing to put the time in to learn it. It's not 2008 anymore that was 10 years ago. Let's get the ball rolling and stop this nonsense of not touching the exe because it's sacred or something equally dumb.

To better levels, stories, art, music... mods; and better modders.

Oh dear, I didn't mean for my remarks to start an argument. As someone who learned the basics of ASM and used it a bit before I stopped setting aside the time for CS modding, please don't think of me as being disrespectful to ASM modders. I think it's an incredibly powerful tool, and that it is often much more sensible to use a simple ASM hack over a way complicated non-ASM technique. Efficiency of design is something that someone should most definitely have in mind when undertaking a project. In a really practical situation, perhaps it would be a better option in the end to go the ASM route.

I was defending Brayconn's approach more from the standpoint of what Miccs said, "Challenging yourself to avoid ASM can be a fun puzzle sometimes and there can be some clever looking solutions at times." Even if this technique is the inferior one, it's still interesting to explore the thought process behind it and see what insights can be gained. Still, the fact does remain that if you're super dead set on making your mod able to be ported to Mac, PSP, or CS+, then it would be in the modder's best interest to avoid ASM hacks. Also, I guess I wasn't super obvious about it, but I was also low-key trying to give Noxid a hard time, because that's always a really fun thing to do.

 

Just to clarify, the reason I made this program was simply because I wanted to do some fairly large CMP/SMP command work, but I was fed up/didn't want to make them all by hand, and not because of anything to do with liking or disliking ASM.
That said, when I contacted noxid about the program in early 2017, he suggested I do what he's suggesting now (just copy pasting another part of the map), and I have been actively rejecting that suggestion ever since. Main reason being that it would require you to have the portion of the map you want to copy, actually exist somewhere else on the map, which would cause maps to be way larger than they need to be. And, while it may end up being more space efficient, it just feels like cheating! You're telling me that you have this command that can in theory (and now in practice) let you, seemingly by magic; out of nothing, turn an entire map into something different... and you aren't going to use it... No, instead, you're just going to keep the map you want to have appear just offstage (so to speak) and copy paste it in... Lazy.


...Anyways, I fixed the bug you were talking about @HaydenStudios . I haven't investigated that tileset thing yet though, so please inform me when that happens again.