This is largely why I stepped down and away from SMW Central long ago; will elaborate later when I get home
This is going to be a very messy and unorganized thing but my God, do I have WORDS.
I was part of the SMW hacking scene since the AcmlmBoard era, when it was just a dedicated subforum. My biggest contribution was when someone asked how ExGFX worked and where to get ExGFX; I actually tried my damndest to understand the sparse documentation and figured out how it all worked, then started making some graphics that could be used with ExGFX for custom level assets, which became The ExGFX Workshop thread, which became its own website, which got merged into SMW Central when it was starting out, making me SMWC staff. In other words, I'm the granddaddy of making assets for SMW hacks that anyone can use.
During this time I was also working on a rather ambitious SMW hack called Super Mario's Island Hopping Adventure, which was to be an open world-ish take on SMW; after the first world (which was the demo) you would then sail to 6 other islands at your own leisure to defeat the other Koopalings and unlock the way to Bowser's Lair. And I wanted to add modern features for those crucial quality of life improvements to make the game more enjoyable; progressive power-downs, separate Luigi graphics, and altered player physics for Luigi were all initially developed for my hack! But everything came apart at the seams, because, well... Lunar Magic.
In case you aren't aware, Lunar Magic is the de-facto SMW hacking tool that does far more than it really should. Not only does it allow for editing levels, overworlds, and palettes, but it also injects a shitload of assembly patches to dramatically alter how the game itself actually works. For example, the graphics are generally stored in a 3BPP format. Now you're probably going "Techo what the hell is a 3BPP format" or "Techo the SNES is 4BPP", but Nintendo used a clever trick with how graphics are stored to make things smaller and faster at the cost of color range. This is something that @Frieze should totally cover for RGMechEx, but in short, the SNES uses a planar graphics format, where graphics are stored in 1BPP layers, which are then ANDed together to get the color value for the different pixels. This seems kind of complicated compared to the Genesis/MD's linear graphics format, where each byte represents two pixels, but it allows for easy expansion for higher color ranges (e.g. if you have 8 layers, that's 256 color!), but also allows for taking a shortcut to reduce file size. In the case of SMW, most of the graphics only use 3 layers, with the 4th layer being zeroes. Which means each tile is 25% smaller in ROM without using any compression and reading the tile into VRAM only needs to read 3 layers then skips ahead/writes constants of zero for the fourth layer, speeding up processing. It's hella clever! Heck even Sega used it on the Master System and Game Gear, which also uses a planar image format. Sonic 1 on the MS/GG has Sonic's sprites stored uncompressed in ROM, but in a 3BPP format to save space!
But no ROM image editing tools supported 3BPP SNES. Lunar Magic instead rewrites the graphic loading code to make everything use 4BPP graphics.
Anyway, I ran into a lot of trouble (and project-killing corruption!) because of how Lunar Magic just does things. I wanted to instead start over using a proper disassembly, like the Sonic hacking community had moved to. But that meant getting people to actually, uh, make the effort to migrate away from janky ASM insertion hacks and being tied to Lunar Magic. I tried my absolute damndest to sway the community, showing them what disassemblies have done for Sonic hacking, like the absolutely amazing transformative work Dr. Robotnik's Creature Capture. We could have this in SMW hacking! We could reshape and redefine the game to our wildest dreams! We could bypass the need to use janky patches and just edit the code directly for something cleaner and more stable! The next golden age...
Everyone rejected the notion. Here's the three big reasons they made:
1.) "A proper disassembly would be the same as distributing the ROM, which is not allowed on SMW Central." Except this is already a solved problem; the early versions of the Sonic disassemblies only came with the disassembled code. To get a ROM built, you must first provide a clean base ROM to run an extraction tool on to get all the graphics, palettes, music, sounds, level layouts, etc. extracted and put into their proper directories, so when you go to compile the project, it actually has those assets to put into the finished ROM. In other words, in order to compile a clean ROM of the game, you must first provide a clean ROM of the game. And everyone just ignored this.
2.) "all.log already exists, so why do we need a new disassembly?" Because all.log is SHIT. It is a garbage, low-effort attempt to disassemble SMW. It is a massive text file with data intermixed with code. It does not recompile at all, which means it's probably very, very wrong about what the contents actually are. And yet it is hailed as the bible of SMW's inner workings.
3.) "Lunar Magic won't work with disassembles." Well, yeah, we will need new tooling. Better tooling. This is like saying that SonLVL has no reason to exist because we have SonED. We can't be afraid to break from the past to make things better than they already are.
And then people started ignoring me and began talking about tiny horses as if they themselves were tiny horses.
I quietly resigned from SMW Central the following day.
Thankfully as of now, @Frieze has gone ahead and with the help of others, created an actual ass SMW disassembly!
However, the new tooling has not seemed to have emerged, so don't expect to be able to do things like make levels.
Addenum: Before anyone says anything, I had resigned from SMW Central before That Incident happened. Were I still staff at that time, I would have immediately tried to smack some sense into Kieran for saying such godawful things, and failing that I would have resigned with the other staff that walked. But since I was no longer staff, all I could do was just delete Kieran from all my contacts.
one of the biggest reasons i stopped working on Super Mario Odyssey (the SMW hack, not the official 3D game) was because the thought of having to juggle numerous patches for all the wacky shit i wanted to do, having to worry about them overwriting each other, having to potentially rewrite/relocate existing hacks because a Lunar Magic update decided to stomp all over them (this did happen at one point) was giving me hellish anxiety. i did most of my coding directly in the ROM in a hex editor because it was way easier than patching with .ASM files and i could tell exactly how much space i had to work with and where to hook things into the code. this is a stupid and barbaric way of doing things, and every time i looked at what the Sonic scene was doing with their fancy disassemblies i grew more and more frustrated. at some point FuSoYa, Lunar Magic's author, dropped a bunch of garbage about why LM would never be open-source and i just fuckin left for good.
the SMW scene has managed to pull off some amazing feats in spite of the lousy tools they have to work with, and i can only imagine how much more amazing those feats would be if they weren't shackled to those tools
The patch juggling was part of why SMIHA fell apart. The other part is that Lunar Magic started overwriting level data for shits and giggles on me.
