Insane Difficulty: Robo Jesus vs BNW descriptions - Insane Difficulty

So, about a year back I made a comment about how item descriptions were both uninformative, "Too damned wordy", and not really that funny. I was told essentially "Not enough room to fix that". Since I know that was bullshit, I got into coding because of it, because nothing helps motivate a person than proving others to be full of it. At some point I stopped caring about throwing that back into the faces of those who said it, but my earlier point about the item descriptions being poorly done still stands.

To prove that, and help out BTB and Synchysi, here is a quick documentation regarding things.

To start with, I'm using FF3usME and BNW 1.8.0. The item descriptions, before any changes have been made by myself, states that it has "10 bytes" remaining.

Let's begin.

The first item to be changed is item #28 "Atma Weapon". The original item description reads "It's not very effective_". I am changing it (along with the Omega Weapon) to read "A beginning_". Item description byte totals has moved from "10 bytes remaining" to "22 bytes remaining".

The second item to be changed is item #23 "Omega Weapon". The original item description for this item reads "It's super effective!", and is now being changed to "_and an end." Item description byte totals have since changed from "22 bytes remaining" to "31 remaining bytes".

The third item description to be changed is item #164 "Bioblaster". The original item description for that reads "Poison damage - foe group
Sets [Poison]". I have changed the "foe group" to "all foes". Item description byte totals have since changed from "31 bytes remaining" to "32 remaining bytes".

The fourth item description to be changed is item #165 "Flash". As with #165, I am changing "foe group" to "all foes". Item description byte totals have since changed from "32 bytes remaining" to "33 remaining bytes".

The fifth item description to be changed is item #166 "Chainsaw". The original item description for that reads "This is not a drill". That has been changed to "Randomly cleaves". Item description byte totals have since changed from "33 bytes remaining" to "36 remaining bytes".

The sixth item description to be changed is item #167 "Defibrillator". The original item description for that reads "CLEAR!". That has been changed to "Cures death". Item description byte totals have since changed from "36 bytes remaining" to "33 remaining bytes".

The seventh item description to be changed is item #168 "Drill". The original item description for that reads "This is a drill". That is being changed to "Sets [Sap]". Item description byte totals have since changed from "33 bytes remaining" to "38 remaining bytes".

The eighth item description to be changed is item #169 "Mana Battery". The original item description for that reads "It keeps going and going_". That is being changed to "Restores MP". Item description byte totals have since changed from "38 bytes remaining" to "52 remaining bytes".

The ninth item description to be changed is item #170 "Autocrossbow". As with all other instances of "Foe group", it is being changed to "all foes". Item description byte totals have since changed from "52 bytes remaining" to "53 remaining bytes".

The tenth item name and description to be changed is item #250 "Bouncy Ball" to "Hand Grenade". The original item description for that reads "Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball". It is being changed to "Gunpowder and shrapnel". Item description byte totals have since changed from "53 bytes remaining" to "58 remaining bytes".

The last item description that can be shortened is item #102 "Hero Shield". The original description reads "A horrible shield to have a curse". If that is changed to just "A strong but cursed shield", then the item description byte totals will go from "58 bytes remaining" to "65 bytes remaining".


So we went from 10 bytes free to use all the way up to 65 bytes open for use by being concise and to the point. Who would have known?

There is a difference between "Foe group" and "All Foes" targetting. The first only hits one side of a pincer attack; the second hits both sides. Although, it only saves one byte per attack, so it doesn't deter much from the main argument.

And I do agree that the jokey jokes in item descriptions are kind of a detriment. They take more space than regular descriptions, and actually occult information that the player might want to know without looking up the manual ReadMe. New attacks and items in particular. Like, yes, anybody (English-speaking...) can guess what a defibrilator does, but not so for the Mana Battery. Or for old items with new functionalities, like how the Drill still ignores defense, but also inflicts Sap now, that's kinda important. Sure, go nuts on the dumb optional items like Gum Pods and HappyFunBallls, but I feel the big items should have regular descriptions.

Referential humor also kinda has its limits. There's the "Ah, I got it, this is a parallel to [situation] from [other media], I can see that.", and there's the kinda dated super effective Pokémon joke where nobody in this day and age would be like "Oh damn, a Pokémon system message, sure got me there, that's clever."

Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy the overall tone of this mod, and feel like it's expressed quite well through its dialogue. I just think there's some areas of improvements in the rest of the text that shouldn't be too difficult to fix. Maybe for 2.0 if you expand the ROM we can have both good jokes AND information.

Robo Jesus, on 21 January 2017 - 03:01 AM, said:

These are subjective quality-wise and don't grant the player any new information.

Robo Jesus, on 21 January 2017 - 03:01 AM, said:

As mentioned above, there is a difference between foe group and all foes, so you're providing inaccurate information to the players with these.

Robo Jesus, on 21 January 2017 - 03:01 AM, said:

These 4 I'd personally agree with you on. It provides useful information to the player in game instead of being AS reliant on the printme.

Robo Jesus, on 21 January 2017 - 03:01 AM, said:

All this does is rename a joke item to appear more serious and removing a reference from a description, this doesn't do anything to inform the player.

Robo Jesus, on 21 January 2017 - 03:01 AM, said:

And you took something with actual arguments to make and undermined them with a "I know better than you" attitude and by proposing adding inaccurate information to the game

Speaking as someone who got my start in modding by looking at other peoples' mods and thinking "I can do better than this crap" while criticizing them to hell and back, I think I'm in a fairly relevant position to dispense some advice: watch your attitude.

The more negative you are in a community, the more substantially you need to improve on an existing product in order to warrant that negativity. For comparison, the last time my attitude was this toxic toward another mod was when I took a music mod for Morrowind, spent months digging through a tangled mess of spaghetti code, and put out a version that was not only about a quarter of the size of the original, but also lagged less, didn't crash the game (as much, anyway - Morrowind is a fucking time bomb), and required no in-game user input. There were subjective changes in my version as well, of course, but I backed up my negative opinions with a substantial functional improvement to the original product. And still to this day I regret being such an asshole when I approached the original author about working on his mod and thankfully was able to end up on good terms with him.

As has been stated, these are all subjective changes to stylistic choices that I made in part because space was so tight. You're free to feel how you wish about them and offer whatever feedback you have on it; an overwhelming amount of the changes in many updates are the direct result of what we hear back from players. But unless your desired outcome of this post is to feel vindicated in being right and then leave because you've pissed everyone off, this is not the right attitude to present with.

Pretty much what Nowea said; you have a point and there are some good suggestions in there, but then you piled it in with a bunch of other bullshit that's equally subjective and a holier-than-thou attitude to boot. Get BARFed

Yep, shitty attitude is shitty, and virtually invalidates the content of the post. But it's not we-against-them. It's just bad form, and let's leave it at that.

Bad dog, no biscuit.

Stop being a cunt.

Consider this a warning.

First rule about making an argument on a mod, should be to respect the modder's work, scope, and the modder itself.

Feedback is appreciated, but only after those three are present.

Backing the warning as well.