I'm with Ultimaximus and S.N.N. on part of this...copying palettes from one level to another, color by excruciating color, is SO tedious. Of course, now I know how to turn off the save prompt, so that speeds things up a little, but it's still a huge pain. And yes, nonfunctional ASM is probably the single most annoying thing about SMW hacking for me. I also hate setting up backgrounds without a sample level, and copying a lot of Map16 tiles from one page to another, especially if I have to change their palette, is really mind-numbing as well. (Or is that what you meant by setting up tilesets, S.N.N.?) Setting up large amounts of ExAnimation is another tedious task...I had to do 12 separate palette ExAnimations in my vanilla contest level, and I am glad that's over. Another thing for that category is making vanilla cutscenes. Blaaaaahhhh...now that we have Romi's cutscene tool, even though it has its problems as well, I'll never go back.
Most of those things aren't really pet peeves per se, though, more like really boring and annoying work to have to do, except the ASM thing. As I said, coding a sprite or patch and spending hours trying to get it to work without succeeding is my number-one biggest pet peeve as far as SMW hacking goes. Another big one is when two patches don't work together for no apparent reason. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to make a mistake with your freespace, even when you have it all laid out, but when it's
not just a freespace error, then it's really annoying. Now that I think about it, unexplainable errors in general drive me nuts. Another thing I find annoying is extensive recoloring of graphics. I've wanted to chase mikeyk with a shovel on various occasions for making some of his sprite graphics use the second half of the palette, which is completely different from the norm in my hack and therefore doesn't look right. It gets especially annoying when those colors are actually semi-necessary, like color 8 on the Para-Beetle (which I have to change to color 7).
Edit to HuFlungDu: Yeah...I'd have to agree with you there, at least partly. I don't believe in locking hacks, although I'd definitely want someone to get permission before taking anything from my hack, and as for not releasing things...depends on what it is and how often that happens. When somebody makes a bunch of stuff that they never plan on releasing, especially if they're not really using it, that is rather irksome.
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I'm working on a hack! Check it out
here. Progress: 64/95 levels.