Ah, but then you run into the problem that all programmers face when debugging.
There is no "simple fix", and all code is spaghetti code. What you're suggesting is to make a unique edge case for one specific spell, which wouldn't go back to affect all the other spells with similar attributes.
Like, mmh. For all I don't like how the stats in Brave New World were tweaked, the whole hack is a technical marvel. There's so many tiny changes and tweaks on a game that was ALREADY a Pokemon Red/Blue level abomination crammed into a cartridge three sizes too small. Like, the hacker made repeated mentions of "oh this was programmed by monkeys" but no, this was programmed by a dedicated team under a very clear time crunch and a much less obvious but far more limiting data crunch. By all rights, Final Fantasy 6 should not have fit on a Super Famicom cartridge with all the conditionals and tiny changes between plot events and plot flags it had. But they made it fit anyway.
The hackers have three advantages that Square themselves didn't have: 1) The luxury of time. If it doesn't work, they can tweak it until it does work. It took them seven years to get to this point, the entire team at Square had one. 2) The luxury of storage space. Being a ROMhack, they don't have the restriction of needing to fit in a 4MB cartridge. They've mostly managed to stay at that point for the final release, but I would be incredibly surprised if test builds didn't swell in size as things were tried. 3) The luxury of technology. Coding techniques and optimization have advanced since 1994, meaning it's easier and less eldritch-magicky to get a spaghetti code crunched down to fit the space required, plus FF6 is one of those games that has been dissected so thoroughly that they had an easy (well, "easy") reference guide for where things are in the code.
So yes, two guys fixed a lot of problems that a team of far more than that left in. It also took them seven times longer and they had more arm room to figure things out.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2020-01-18 04:52 pm (UTC)There is no "simple fix", and all code is spaghetti code. What you're suggesting is to make a unique edge case for one specific spell, which wouldn't go back to affect all the other spells with similar attributes.
Like, mmh. For all I don't like how the stats in Brave New World were tweaked, the whole hack is a technical marvel. There's so many tiny changes and tweaks on a game that was ALREADY a Pokemon Red/Blue level abomination crammed into a cartridge three sizes too small. Like, the hacker made repeated mentions of "oh this was programmed by monkeys" but no, this was programmed by a dedicated team under a very clear time crunch and a much less obvious but far more limiting data crunch. By all rights, Final Fantasy 6 should not have fit on a Super Famicom cartridge with all the conditionals and tiny changes between plot events and plot flags it had. But they made it fit anyway.
The hackers have three advantages that Square themselves didn't have:
1) The luxury of time. If it doesn't work, they can tweak it until it does work. It took them seven years to get to this point, the entire team at Square had one.
2) The luxury of storage space. Being a ROMhack, they don't have the restriction of needing to fit in a 4MB cartridge. They've mostly managed to stay at that point for the final release, but I would be incredibly surprised if test builds didn't swell in size as things were tried.
3) The luxury of technology. Coding techniques and optimization have advanced since 1994, meaning it's easier and less eldritch-magicky to get a spaghetti code crunched down to fit the space required, plus FF6 is one of those games that has been dissected so thoroughly that they had an easy (well, "easy") reference guide for where things are in the code.
So yes, two guys fixed a lot of problems that a team of far more than that left in. It also took them seven times longer and they had more arm room to figure things out.