[Plint Michigan]

Meh, I've been here for a while mostly to get help for MegaMiraj, which is a hack I'm working on that's currently on hold because I'm not sure what I'm doing anymore. Most of Megaman X's sprites are editable in Tile Layer Pro except for some of his cutscene sprites, but almost everything else in uneditable, and I'm wonder how I'm supposed to edit them. Of coarse, I'm assuming I have to extract them, which I sort of know how to do, what I don't know is how to reapply them.

But with all the questions I have about hacking, sometimes I worry about people's opinions on those who ask hundreds of questions. I know it sometimes gets annoying where people ask questions to a point where everyone gives up and yells "Figure it out yourself, moron!" But there are also some questions that are hard to find the answers to. Even tutorials on this site might not answer every question you have about a topic. Like, you know Hex Code like 1F = 31, but you're still unsure how to edit it in Hex Editor. There's also questions like "How do I edit text," and "Where do the level hexes lie?" Sometimes questions have simple answers. I remember when I ask where Music Hexes lie, someone suggested me an emulator to find them. Then I had a bunch of other questions, eventually people stopped answering them. Maybe I ask TOO MANY questions.

...So anyway, what is your opinion on those who ask too many questions?

[DarknessSavior]

It's not the amount of question one asks, so much as how one responds to the advice given.

If I can point you at a (well written, since they're plenty of terrible ones) document that has your answer in it, and you find it? Awesome.

If a few people answer your question, and you put it to good use? Awesome.

If you want hand-holding every step along the way? That's where most people will get annoyed.

~DS

[curses]

I think it has a lot to do with what people think your intentions are.

[Auryn]

Well it's difficult to answer you poll because actually there is not the right answer.
There is not 1 answer to your question but it's the sum of this factors:
-what is you skill level and if you can show you really have it
-what is your plan and for what game
-the way you ask the question and what you ask
-show somehow that you are spending time trying and not just ask ask ask.

What this means:
i take an example from another forum where lately a guy was trying to start a project to translate ALL Zelda for EVERY system but don't know anything about hacking. He was saying that he has a group of translators already working on some text dumps but he could not show anything.
This guy can ask even the smartest question but he will never get help from anybody because it's just pointless and a lost of time to the one who could help.
How many times you see in this forum newbies that don't have the knowledge but want to translate RPG??
I believe that in every guide in the net there is written to start with a simple game with little text (example a puzzle game).
You are right, there are many questions that are not answered in those guides but hacking/translating is a journey to discover the code of the game and change it on the way you want to so in this journey you will need to find answers to questions that are unanswered.
Taking your example, there is maybe not a guide to tell you that 1F=31 but you get the name "hexadecimal" from the guide on RHDN and then you can go deeper into this topic in less than 10seconds using google.
Other questions like where the sound data is, are more difficult to answer especially for the older system (before the advent of the CD/DVD) because there are maybe dedicated areas in the rom but probably nobody mapped the whole rom out (even if there are many rom exact rom maps for some games out there).
So this part is another part of your journey and nobody will give you an exact answer because probably nobody know that rom as you do.

I have to admit that the older system was more difficult to hack than newer systems and I an aware that for a newbie, reading the old guides, could make the ideas more complicated as what it actually is but if I think back to my first days trying to hack SNES and PSX even before i knew if i could burn the game back to CD, think about all those people that translated NES/SNES games without having guides and working on those complicated system, think that at that time only a view had PC/programming lessons at school, I have to wonder why newbies of today that have PC/programming lessons, have all a PC at home, that have the internet and now want to translate this much easier game to work with, why they can't figure it out by themself???
I don't want to say that the newbies are not to ask questions in the forum but if you look at the questions they mostly ask, it's ridicule and show mostly that they don't have the mindset, the constancy or the spirit to be romhackers/translators.

[Jorpho]

It's all about Asking Them the Smart Way.  'Nuff said.
http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Of course I am hardly immune from asking stupid questions; I don't object to being reprimanded for doing so.

[Plint Michigan]

Well, so far I've hacked quite a bit of Megaman X's sprites in Megaman Xtreme, and now I'm trying to get a better mindset on extracting and compressing so I can easier edit sprites that don't show up in Tile Layer Pro. I also want to learn text editing as well, but... I'll ask when I get to that.

I suppose you want a few screenshots.



I'm not too shabby at sprite work, but I'm mostly just good enough to get by. Haven't done anything really fancy yet.



This is MegaMiraj firing off his gun. As for how the graphics look, that's mostly sprite scaling effects that happened to the original sprites as well, nothing I did.



You can run MegaMiraj, but you can't fly!



This is where spriting gets a little tricky. Since the sprite constraints won't let me draw the ears any bigger, I had to make due. Also, it took me a while to find the helmet corner piece for the aerial shooting sprite. ...I think I might need to find it again, though, so I can fix his ear.



Last one. Megaman had just defeated Magna Centipede (Which will be called Ninja Echidna after the granddaughter of Gaia) and is throwing his fist up in victory. And... I'm not going to lie, this sprite came out ugly. I was kind of a hard sprite to edit, actually.

(Note: Magna Centipede is a total pantywaste in Megaman Xtreme. ...Although he wasn't all that difficult in Megaman X2 to begin with.)