How do people create a hack not at all based on the vanilla game?

[Shadowing234]

Like do they clear all rooms and objects or is there a way to start from scratch?

[squishy_ichigo]

Skill.

Nah, in all seriousness, I assume most people do one room at a time, and if they run into issues they repoint the data to freespace as needed. I like cleaning everything out and doing it all from scratch tho, it requires more knowledge of how the systems work, but its more rewarding imo.

This question is pretty silly tho, are you trolling me bro? 8/8 m8 gr8 b8 h8 f8

[Shadowing234]

Thanks for your reply. No I'm not trolling, I'm just new to SMILE and want to like it but after watching a lot of videos online it gets very confusing and drives me away. My main issue is the limits ROM hacking has such as item limit, objects per room limit, and how complicated it is when changing/adding doors.

I can't find a single good tutorial on youtube that doesn't end after two videos or gives shitty instructions.

[Cpt.Glitch]

Did you try ShyGuy's playlist?
[spoiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVxdtLCq2wQ&list=PLtl4l889h2MjzLOt-1zlfcFehwQ79DEol[/spoiler]

[Shadowing234]

Yeah, watched that video a while ago. The door thing sounds really hard to do.

[Quote58]

I can't say that rom hacking super Metroid doesn't have limits, because it does, but the limits are far far greater than most people think. You just to work at it the way people did when making games in that time. Yes there are limits, but that's where a huge amount of ingenuity has come from in the industry. You can find examples of games on the SNES that lagged like a mother fucker with less on screen than super Metroid, and you can find other games that are extremely intelligenty programmed. It comes down not to the limits being really small, but rather, thoroughly understanding those limits and how to work within them while maximizing the quality of the things you create.

The other thing to keep in mind is that many of the limits are coded into the engine, not a product of the system. For example the lag from too many enemies on screen is a product of the processing speed of the SNES, but the number of items, or the size of allocated data, or how FX is rendered, these are all things that can be changed to fit your own purposes. You just need to understand how they work, and that's where both the difficulty, and for many the fun, of rom hacking is. I personally love picking the game apart to see how to really push the system, but that's because I enjoy things like optimizing cycles and structures, but not everyone does. It takes work but if you enjoy it, the work pays off.

E:I hate typing on my phone so much

[Shadowing234]

I see. Thank you for your insight. But this brings me back to my original question: how do I start a hack from start without having to use any maps from the original game?

[FPzero]

Learning how doors work will definitely be a part of making a unique map design. While I've worked on projects that didn't require making new doors, they always felt like they were weaker or more difficult just because I was looking for rooms that fit the criteria I needed. Like many other things with this game, once you learn how to do something it turns out not to be particularly difficult to repeat over and over. Taking that first step can be tricky though.

In terms of actually building new rooms though, I know what I used to do was delete all tiles from the room with the exception of the existing doors (since you can re-purpose them). Then I would usually have a vague plan of the general room shape I wanted to make. From there I would take a 2x2 tile of solid dirt or inner filler tile (like the crateria dirt) and just paint tiles semi-randomly into floors, walls and ceilings. Wavering your hand as you do this will help create some randomness in your design so you don't end up with a lot of long horizontal or vertical surfaces, which makes the room more believable in most cases. Though if you're making a ruin or using the wrecked ship set, you probably want your terrain to look a little more "man-made" than "natural". It's also at this point that I decide and place my doors. After I've painted a bunch of tiles in the general shape of the room, I start adding details like proper floor, wall and ceiling tiles, floating platforms, pipes, etc. This is the meat of room creation and probably what will take up the most time. Once I'm satisfied with the level of detail I've added and made sure the room is functional then it's time to move on to a new one.

This is just a very broad overview of one person's methodology. I haven't worked on a project in a while but were I to get back into it I would probably still be following these guidelines. Just note that I've left out some stuff, like room expansion, room headers and making sure you've properly allocated enough free space so that you don't overwrite other rooms and break things. I didn't want to get into them because I'm no expert and it sounded like you were mostly interested in how to actually begin designing rooms. There are plenty of guides on this site and maybe a few on youtube as well that can help you with those things. Hope this helps!

[benox50]

I'm myself still new and like everybody we started somewhere. The best thing to do is to practice on a test ROM of Super Metroid by copying what Shyguy is doing on his tutorials videos => Look for Cpt.Glitch link, his tutorials are the ones you need. By doin that you will understand how basic stuff work.

Also Shyguy tutorials isnt enough for all info so read that Guide and dont read diagonally http://www.metroidconstruction.com/SMMM/
Like read all the intro called ''Getting ready to ROM hack Super Metroid''

Then read the parts you want/need to understand

[maxipower]

Yea it is frustrating. My hack crashed when I entered a certain room for no reason, so I gave up lol. Literally tried everything but to this day I haven't a clue what went wrong.

[Scyzer]

There is always a reason for a crash. The easiest way to figure out what caused it is to create a copy of your hack as a backup, then go into the room that crashes.
First, remove ALL enemies (set the slider to 0), then test. If it doesn't crash, then you just need to check to make sure your enemies don't have values they shouldn't. If it does, then do the same with the PLMs.
If it still crashes even after removing all PLMs and Enemies, it's likely caused by a bad pointer. If all pointer boxes are green (they show up green/red in RF to tell you if you have an invalid pointer), then it's either one of the ASM Pointers (Initiation or Main) pointing to bad code, or something obscure for that particular room, such as FX1 code getting corrupted.

If the entire game crashes when loading, or if all rooms are broken, then the easiest thing to do is to just go to the last working backup unless you want to play "which half of the rom is broke" for a bit to find the exact data that is causing the crash.

[PHOSPHOTiDYL]

Check all the fx options too.
Literally had a room keep crashing last night cause of a bad pointer to an area dependant fx palette.