Tpcool said:
Hayden, you won't believe all of the music I've transcribed over the Summer. For someone with absolutely no musical talent or experience, I think this is an accomplishment. It's getting me pumped and motivated to work harder on the things I want to get done.
That's fantastic! Glad to hear you've been getting stuff done, and indeed transcribing songs does feel good. I really don't have any musical talent either.
Tpcool said:
Now a question for you: approximately how long did it take you to learn assembly for Cave Story and how tedious was it?
The answer to the first part of your question is very convoluted, so I'll answer the second part first. At first it was a bit difficult grasping how registers, memory locations, and bytes work, as well as memorizing the ASM commands. But after that, learning everything else I know about Assembly was quite fun and easy. Although the latest challenge for me is reading and understanding how an NPC works by looking at its code, even with the documentation that exists on it. I haven't buckled down and dedicated myself to tackling it because I haven't needed to yet, but I'll need to before long.
As for how long it took me to learn it... There are several varying valid answers I could give to that question. I have technically completed Carrotlord's beginner guide, read through the whole Assembly compendium, and read all the threads I could find on Assembly, but it would be inaccurate to say I've finished learning Assembly. I still have more to learn, but most of this knowledge will be learned by actually hacking and getting my hands dirty, rather than consulting the books. I'm certainly not prepared yet to make my own custom <ANP functions and bosses. But anyway, back to how long it took me. I actually first started looking at Carrotlord's tutorial in January 2012, but didn't get real far because I was still debugging my fourth ending mod and school was tough then. I was more dabbling in it, and hadn't dedicated myself yet. Later that summer I looked through it a little bit more because I was very tempted to and was getting tired of working on a project that I told myself I would finish that summer. But again, I didn't get real far, and didn't spend much time on it because I was intentionally not getting to into it, even though reading it was fun. A couple of other times I referenced to it, but still didn't really buckle down yet due to fear of excessive immersion possibly causing abandonment of another project. Earlier this Summer when I finally had both the free time and the peace of mind to really dedicate myself to learning assembly, I was able to reach the end of Carrotlord's tutorial in twelve days, and that's counting a week in the middle of it spent at the beach during which I was too busy swimming, winning over some cute girls with some awesome sand constructions (true story), and having fun with my cousins. Once I got the time to do it, it was pretty quick and fun. Basically I blazed through the second half of Carrotlords tutorial over the period of a few days. In a way you could say it took me a year-and-a-half, but you could also say it only took me a couple of weeks to learn assembly.
Bombchu Link said:
I've been doing really well this summer! Much, Much progress on Sue's Story, I should have 0.2.0 out before thanksgiving at my current rate! I'v been haying bales part time, and having a blast without having school to worry about...
Great! Glad to hear that you're making progress on stuff.
Bombchu Link said:
*Ahhhhh*
I wish it could last forever...
Tell me about it... At least for me this school year won't be as bad as the past two were.
Bombchu Link said:
As for a question, to follow up on Tpcool's:
What's your specialty for ASM? (NPC's, Blind edits, TSC commands ect.)
To be honest, I don't have very much experience doing ASM. The most I've done is do Carrotlord's examples, speed up an NPC for the purposes of my mod, and make a custom TSC command that allows more precise placement of the character. So it's hard to say what my strength is. For modding in general, cutscenes are my strength, so perhaps cutscene-related ASM tasks will turn out to be my strength (at least, that's where I plan on most heavily using assembly). But right now it's hard to say.
Randolf said:
With a spoon. I'm actually quite skilled at it. I've even gotten so good at it, that I was able to do it last summer, even when I had had my wisdom teeth taken out less than twelve hours earlier.