How'd you learn your stuff?

[The Pezman]

I'm very impressed with all the work that's being done here.  Before I'd heard of this place, I was wondering if FFVII, VIII, and games from their generation were always doomed to look the way they were barring a full-blown remake.  I'm very glad that there are so many projects being worked on, but unfortunately, nearly all of it seems very much out of my reach because I don't know programming.

I consider myself very well-acquainted with computers.  I was working on their innards when I was three, I helped my dad install some early OCR cards when I was four, and am now hard at work passing my A+ and Net+ certs.  But the combined facts that I kept myself busy with afterschool activities, there were no programming classes at my high school, and that I have little talent at seriously teaching myself anything have resulted in me not knowing a lick of C, Java or even Basic.

I tried to resolve this with CS I (Java) my first semester freshman year.  Unfortunately, that was not a good semester for me.  Many bad things ended up going on at once and I had to drop CS early on.  Second semester provided its own unique, soul-searching challenges that prevented me from trying it again. 

Now I'm a rising sophomore, and I'm going to give CS I a second shot.  Assuming I have a strong enough interest and talent in it (my interest in computers may not extend to programming, after all), I hope to increase and hone my knowledge within the next year so that I can start to code something useful.

Now (finally) for the point of my post: How did you all learn the skills you did in order to successfully mod these games?  What did you learn, and from whom?  How much of your own time did you put into it, and how much work did it take to actively make a change to the game?  I'm basically trying to see how everyone got to the spots they did, so I have some idea of what's involved.

[Covarr]

Learn to work with hex, binary, trinary, and Latin. Then read gears.pdf, which I'm sure somebody around here has a copy of.

[Cyberman]

In simple words, 'educate thyself'.
Most sat down and thought "how the heck does this work?' then played around with it, read a lot and continued learning.
It's not a big deal, however there is a difference between stuffing parts together though and knowing how each part works down to the IO buffer transitors of a CMOS gate in the SMB bus (used for temperature measurement on Motherboards mostly).  All of this takes time to learn.  Thus just start reading believe it or not, it is all useful.  It does take time, you can't get there from here in a month!

Cyb

[mirex]

You can fix your car without being a mechanic when you try really really hard, take it apart and keep trying for long time. You'll learn how to disassemble it and assemble it back to make it work. Its the same with this stuff.
You see we're still not best at it, because our car ( in this case FF7 ) is still not fully moddable and when we disassemble it and reassemble it back it sometimes does not work properly.

I recommend to first learn programming and find out how hex-editor works.

[jamesyfx]

All this stuff is way over my head. I don't think I'd ever be able to learn it.

I can only sit down and learn languages like xhtml and css etc, cause they're simple. But programming languages? Duh. :0

.. haha. This sounds dead tragic, I'm installing FF7 again and that musics on in the background. >.>