Ugh. I'll try not to be overly harsh here... but man.
Quote:
But the difficulty of making SMB1 use a new attribute engine is too hard for me!
Then maybe you should work on something simpler.
It seems like every other day you're in here asking someone to do something for you -- you've done this for years. Not just on this board, but on other boards I go to, too. And I don't think I've ever seen you actually produce anything.
That said... I don't think there will be many people willing to help you since you seem to be incapable of doing things on your own. Why would someone join with you to do a "team hack" when they'd basically be doing all the work and giving you half the credit?
Your visions are too grandios. Everything you want to try to do is always out of your reach. You need to tone things down and set your sights a little lower so that you can actually accomplish something... because when you accomplish something, you learn from it, then can accomplish more on your next go around. If you keep working at it, these grandios ideas you have will be within your reach eventually. But banging your head against the wall won't accomplish anything.
Here's a few things you should really take to heart and consider:
If you have to ask someone else to do the work for you -- then try something else instead. You're not going to learn anything by having someone else do the work -- not to mention you're not going to make any friends by constantly hitting people up for huge favors without ever really offering anything in return.
Asking for help is fine. There are a lot of people who are willing to help, but you'll be much better received if you actually look like you're trying to learn, rather than if you're just trying to accomplish X goal. Don't ask for a solution, per se, but instead ask for how you can go about finding that solution. Expect to be frustrated, expect to mess up a lot, and expect to do lots of work -- ROM hacking is a very slow process and it takes a lot of doing stuff wrong before you learn how to do it right. If you can show people that you're willing to put in the work and make the effort to learn, you'll get much more help than you would otherwise.
Asking for someone else to do the work is not the same thing as asking for help. Just don't do it. We have better things to do with our time than be your personal software developer. This is bad on SO many levels -- not only does it give the impression that you're just not willing to work at all -- but it also is just generally very irritating.
Avoid singling people out unless you're asking specifically about one of their projects. Dwedit suggested you talk to DD because he worked on SMB a while back -- but I would argue that's bad advice. Maybe post places where DD visits so he would see your question instead. He'll see your question all the same there, and if he has an answer he'll answer it... but other people will have the opportunity to answer it as well. If nobody responds to your public post,
then maybe consider sending him a private message. This depends on the person, too... DD might not mind being singled out, but some people (like myself) do.
Learn to ask a good question. This involves:
1) Being clear about what problem you're having
2) Listing as much about the problem as you know (including what could be causing it, when it happens, etc). This doesn't really apply much to this paticular SMB attribute problem though.
3) Listing things you tried to fix the problem, and how well each of them worked.
Don't expect an answer. Don't expect people to offer to help. Sometimes people just don't have an answer or aren't willing to help. If that happens, move on... don't keep repeating yourself.
Don't be pretentious. Saying "thanks in advance" is a good, polite thing to do, but saying "Good luck!" after you've 'assigned' one of us a project is a terrible, aggrivating, and just incredibly annoying thing to do. You've done this multiple times in the past and each time just made me want to punch you.
That's all I can think of right now. If you want to pursue this SMB attribute problem, I would suggest examining the drawing routines in the SMB disassembly:
http://www.romhacking.net/docs/344/
It doesn't get much easier than working with a reassembleable, commented disassembly. Though any major engine change like this is going to be a lot of work. Like I say you might want to start smaller.
