[Misc.] What I'm Working On

[Maruno]

I should weigh in at this point.

Yes, I want Essentials to contain everything needed to make a Pokémon game. Not necessarily a great game, but definitely a complete one. Anything beyond that is up to the user to do themselves. As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much at that stage already (minus a few move effects, etc.).

On the other hand, there are a range of completely unnecessary features I'd like to see in Essentials - trading, swarming Pokémon, dongle encounters, more mini-games, Virtual Trainers (battling other players' teams as mentioned above), multiple save support, a Radio app, improved dungeon maps, a customisable time system, and so on and so forth. However, they aren't quite as important as getting what exists to work properly, which is what I mostly work on.

In the specific case of Virtual Trainers (you come up with a better name!), I've considered the suggestion and decided it would be better if it worked a little differently (i.e. put the teams in a folder rather than download them). This alteration makes the feature almost completely unrelated to the Mystery Gift - the only similar part is saving Pokémon details to a text file, but even that will end up being remarkably different for reasons of purpose and efficiency. That means it's a separate feature, and one I won't look at at the moment. It's an interesting idea, though, and I'd like to see someone have a go at it (or even think in depth about it) and see what they come up with.

Maybe it's a good sign that people are asking (demanding?) hugely complicated features like online battles and trading. It means there aren't many bugs and vital things for them to complain about instead.

Originally Posted by FL .

How about tips for resource hunting in the guide? Something like "Search for a resource before making it, avoid rework." and "with the Essentials resources on the web, is easy to port some of gen 2/4/5 graphics to essentials, gen 5 pokémon and animated sprites.".

That's general advice and common sense. The guide is about using Essentials, which resource-hunting isn't. And before you say "neither is saying you should keep backups", I'll point out that every section of the guide has some information specifically about Essentials (e.g. that you can consider a fresh version to be your first backup, which people may not realise).

Besides, resource-hunting is about changing Essentials, not about using it, and tilesets/charsets is an RMXP thing.



Scripter of the year, eh? I wonder if I've released six versions of Essentials during 2012 which might prove my skills? Nah, it's "Most Talented Scripter", not "Best Script Contributor" or something like that. I'm sure other people have stronger scripting skills than I do. Why there are community awards celebrating talent but not contributions to the community, I don't know.

[FL .]

Originally Posted by Luka S.J.

Sure, that may be true. I'm just saying, that if you do want the extra features that aren't in the kit, a developer should go through the effort to try to make it themselves. But pestering Maruno to do all the heavy lifting for things they personally want, is a bit selfish, considering the large amount of good work Maruno is putting into this kit already. I feel that we get more and more people who just want more and more ambitious systems, functions, etc, but don't want to be bothered to learn, and put work into it.

I agree. When Maruno took over Essentials my first request was to fix the Battle Tower and Hall of Fame, mostly for my use. I end up doing both myself and now they are in Essentials.

Like I said before, when people are suggesting things in Essentials, they need to think "Which features in Essentials can better fit on my game" rather than "Which features in Essentials can better fit in majority of games".

However, I don't agree that everyone needs to learn scripting. There are some people that aren't good with scripting, others with graphics, etc... At least these people need to team up with some scripter if their wish to have custom scripts.

Originally Posted by Maruno

I should weigh in at this point.

Yes, I want Essentials to contain everything needed to make a Pokémon game. Not necessarily a great game, but definitely a complete one. Anything beyond that is up to the user to do themselves. As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much at that stage already (minus a few move effects, etc.).

On the other hand, there are a range of completely unnecessary features I'd like to see in Essentials - trading, swarming Pokémon, dongle encounters, more mini-games, Virtual Trainers (battling other players' teams as mentioned above), multiple save support, a Radio app, improved dungeon maps, a customisable time system, and so on and so forth. However, they aren't quite as important as getting what exists to work properly, which is what I mostly work on.

In the specific case of Virtual Trainers (you come up with a better name!), I've considered the suggestion and decided it would be better if it worked a little differently (i.e. put the teams in a folder rather than download them). This alteration makes the feature almost completely unrelated to the Mystery Gift - the only similar part is saving Pokémon details to a text file, but even that will end up being remarkably different for reasons of purpose and efficiency. That means it's a separate feature, and one I won't look at at the moment. It's an interesting idea, though, and I'd like to see someone have a go at it (or even think in depth about it) and see what they come up with.

Maybe it's a good sign that people are asking (demanding?) hugely complicated features like online battles and trading. It means there aren't many bugs and vital things for them to complain about instead.

I think that isn't hard to do using serialization on trainer object and, maybe, a cryptography algorithm (like Vigenère) to don't allow for a player (not the developer) easily edit a virtual trainer.

By the way, my time system is working.

Originally Posted by Maruno

That's general advice and common sense. The guide is about using Essentials, which resource-hunting isn't. And before you say "neither is saying you should keep backups", I'll point out that every section of the guide has some information specifically about Essentials (e.g. that you can consider a fresh version to be your first backup, which people may not realise).

Besides, resource-hunting is about changing Essentials, not about using it, and tilesets/charsets is an RMXP thing.

Yes, but some people are lacking common sense. And I saw several people preferring others kits because Essentials has gen 3 graphics. They didn't realise that isn't hard to port some resources to Essentials.

[Maruno]

Originally Posted by FL .

Like I said before, when people are suggesting things in Essentials, they need to think "Which features in Essentials can better fit on my game" rather than "Which features in Essentials can better fit in majority of games".

Although Essentials is by definition a part of every game, and should focus on features that fit in the majority of games, what you suggest is a reasonable idea.

I'm not making a game myself, and I don't know what people are doing and want to do with Essentials. It's always nice to hear what people want, and it's easiest to draw inspiration from what you want for your own game.

I won't implement every single suggestion (e.g. "glitch" Pokémon), but there are some suggested features I hadn't thought of but would like to include (e.g. Virtual Trainers - please give me a better name for this feature!).

Originally Posted by FL .

I think that isn't hard to do using serialization on trainer object and, maybe, a cryptography algorithm (like Vigenère) to don't allow for a player (not the developer) easily edit a virtual trainer.

Certainly it's not difficult to make the data-saving and -loading work. The majority of the effort goes into doing things with that information, like creating new screens (e.g. a list of trainers), events which showcase the feature, and so on.

As far as encryption goes, it depends on how the information is saved (obviously a string, but there are many different ways to put the string together). I've not looked at this aspect yet.



People can now upload .txt files to the wiki. Obviously they'll be susceptible to griefing there and you'll have to keep an eye on them (don't expect any help from me), but it's a simple last resort for people who can't upload their Mystery Gift files to somewhere secure for whatever reason.

[the__end]

Originally Posted by Maruno

(e.g. Virtual Trainers - please give me a better name for this feature!).

- Battle Simulation (i like this one best... )
- Mystery Battle
- Mystery Trainer
- Mystery Challenge
- Challenge Mode
- VS. Battle
- VS. Trainer
- VS. Mode

thats all for now i think...
maybe you will like one...

[zingzags]

Originally Posted by FL .

Yes, but some people are lacking common sense. And I saw several people preferring others kits because Essentials has gen 3 graphics. They didn't realize that isn't hard to port some resources to Essentials.

This is the part that made me laugh. It is true what you are saying it is more for "my game" than "most'.

[IceGod64]

Originally Posted by the__end

- Battle Simulation (i like this one best... )
- Mystery Battle
- Mystery Trainer
- Mystery Challenge
- Challenge Mode
- VS. Battle
- VS. Trainer
- VS. Mode

thats all for now i think...
maybe you will like one...

Battle Sim is a name I particularly like.

[zingzags]

Why not "Smart AI", even though they are not AI's, it is just another person.

[Maruno]

Originally Posted by zingzags

Why not "Smart AI", even though they are not AI's, it is just another person.

It's exactly the opposite of that. The opponent will be AI-controlled, and the party they use is created by another player (which really isn't much different to any trainer in the game).

"Battle Simulation" is sort of vague. How about "Avatar Battles"? Or maybe "Trainer House", since that's the place in GSC which does this.

[IceGod64]

Originally Posted by Maruno

It's exactly the opposite of that. The opponent will be AI-controlled, and the party they use is created by another player (which really isn't much different to any trainer in the game).

"Battle Simulation" is sort of vague. How about "Avatar Battles"? Or maybe "Trainer House", since that's the place in GSC which does this.

I'm inclined toward the use of Trainer House. I would go with that, including having CAL there by default.

I'm guessing the inclusion of being able to choose what Trainer Type of your Gender you want to be like the official games ave isn't something that's going to be included with this though, as it is something that's arguably unnecessary (Though the entire feature is actually technically unnecessary)

[FL .]

Originally Posted by zingzags

This is the part that made me laugh. It is true what you are saying it is more for "my game" than "most'.

I'm voting on Trainer House, Avatar Battles and Trainer Simulation. Side note: This "Trainer House" feature also exist in RSE when you mix record. You can battle versus several "Virtual Trainer" in their Secret Bases.

How about, in the "How to use Essentials" guide, a remider like "Look at this wiki when you have doubts and/or want to better understand the possibilities with some feature". In a beginner perspective, some of Essentials systems aren't easy to figure only looking the example maps, specially the PBS.

Originally Posted by zingzags

This is the part that made me laugh. It is true what you are saying it is more for "my game" than "most'.

I prefer gen 3 graphics. I really saw several people quitting Essentials and choosing other inferior kits (not related to Essentials) because of graphics.

[IceGod64]

Originally Posted by FL .

I prefer gen 3 graphics. I really saw several people quitting Essentials and choosing other inferior kits (not related to Essentials) because of graphics.

Remember what you were saying about people lacking common sense? If people don't have the capacity to figure out that you can swap out graphics, just imagine what else we're going see them posting.

If somebody is foolhardy enough to refuse to use essentials because the base graphics are Gen III, then frankly, I'm glad they aren't here.

[DarkGrey]

I say trainer house. Since that is what it pretty much is.

[zingzags]

Frankly speaking this is the best pokemon engine out there, if people cannot figure out that they can change pictures then it leaves me to believe common sense is going down the drain. Essentials may be lacking some features to the current game, but it is nothing all that important. Secret bases? Online Trading? Online Battling? Current battle system? I am the type of person who believes before you do a upgrade, make sure your current stuff is working. Or functionality first, then graphical eyegasim. The only thing I can see people having a hard time with is with programming in essentials. But if they look around like most of us did, then they are able to find out many things essentials is able to do that one does not know about.

[Maruno]

Originally Posted by IceGod64

I'm inclined toward the use of Trainer House. I would go with that, including having CAL there by default.

I'm guessing the inclusion of being able to choose what Trainer Type of your Gender you want to be like the official games ave isn't something that's going to be included with this though, as it is something that's arguably unnecessary (Though the entire feature is actually technically unnecessary)

It wouldn't be difficult to let the player choose their trainer type. I'm not even sure they should be restricted by gender (although perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to impersonate a Gym Leader or Rocket grunt). Things like intro/win/lose messages could also be customised. All this can be part of the trainer's "profile" and can be changed at will. As you say, it's not required for this feature to work, but it's nice to have.

The question is how exactly should it work? At the moment I'm thinking something like the Trainer House from GSC, where you choose a trainer from a list, then move to an area where you battle them. A bit like the Battle Tower, but just the one opponent and no prize. These battles wouldn't provide Exp or EVs.

I don't know if it would be a good idea to let the player rate the trainer after the battle. This rating would only be for personal use, and one of the options would be "Erase this trainer" which means they don't have to muck around with files and accidentally delete the wrong one. Ratings would only really be useful if players would want to save their favourite opponents for rematches, and I don't know how likely that is.

Originally Posted by FL .

How about, in the "How to use Essentials" guide, a remider like "Look at this wiki when you have doubts and/or want to better understand the possibilities with some feature". In a beginner perspective, some of Essentials systems aren't easy to figure only looking the example maps, specially the PBS.

I think you'd have to be some kind of moron if you were reading that guide on the wiki and not realise that maybe all those other pages were actually there for a reason. They're not difficult to find.

[FL .]

Originally Posted by IceGod64

Remember what you were saying about people lacking common sense? If people don't have the capacity to figure out that you can swap out graphics, just imagine what else we're going see them posting.

If somebody is foolhardy enough to refuse to use essentials because the base graphics are Gen III, then frankly, I'm glad they aren't here.

I partially agree with you, but remember that a Gyarados once was a Magikarp.

Originally Posted by Maruno

The question is how exactly should it work? At the moment I'm thinking something like the Trainer House from GSC, where you choose a trainer from a list, then move to an area where you battle them. A bit like the Battle Tower, but just the one opponent and no prize. These battles wouldn't provide Exp or EVs.

I agree (at least for now). Another alternative is to put all overworld sprite in a room like Union Room, but I prefer your idea.

I disagree about EXP and EVs (and maybe money). The GSC Trainer House and RSE Secret Bases allow to gain these things and are the best locations for training. I suggest you to, at least, make a setting.

[Maruno]

Originally Posted by FL .

I agree (at least for now). Another alternative is to put all overworld sprite in a room like Union Room, but I prefer your idea.

I disagree about EXP and EVs (and maybe money). The GSC Trainer House and RSE Secret Bases allow to gain these things and are the best locations for training. I suggest you to, at least, make a setting.

Union Room-style should be easy enough, except for allowing the player to choose which trainers to be visible. A player could have a hundred trainer files at once, which means there would need to be some way of filtering them in order to decide which ones appear - the player would need to do this anyway, so why not just go for the GSC Trainer House-style?

I just don't think this feature is supposed to be used for training. It'd certainly be easy to set up pushover parties to allow grinding (Gyarados with Splash, etc.), and it would keep the player there rather than playing the game.

Players will not be able to battle versions of themselves, because that's some kind of paradox.

[Maruno]

I'm bumping this thread, because I have something new to show. Don't worry, I got permission to necropost from the guy who mods this section. :D

Here's "What I'm Working On" at the moment:



Currently it mostly works. I need to finish off the data-saving, and add in ways to edit some of the things (moves, egg moves, evolutions, form names), but the rest already works.

So while we're on the subject, is there anything you'd like to see done to the PBS-editing parts of Essentials?

[FL .]

Maruno backs to Essentials, weee!

I only used the editor for repositioning sprites (aside for quick looks). I suggest you showing sprites and icons when possible, in pokémon encounters for example.

An idea: For trainers, when defining the party, how about showing the moves that the pokémon get by default? Several times I need to look at the pokemon.txt to see some default moves.

[IceGod64]

Originally Posted by Maruno

I'm bumping this thread, because I have something new to show. Don't worry, I got permission to necropost from the guy who mods this section. :D

Here's "What I'm Working On" at the moment:

Attachment 67791

Currently it mostly works. I need to finish off the data-saving, and add in ways to edit some of the things (moves, egg moves, evolutions, form names), but the rest already works.

So while we're on the subject, is there anything you'd like to see done to the PBS-editing parts of Essentials?

In my project, I'm listing Pokemon in a specific order (I have an entire regional dex planned out), but I'm actually adding them on an "as-needed" basis. For example, everything up to 102 is added, abut some Pok¹mon that can't be caught until later in the game appear earlier, so the Pokédex order goes from like 101,102,123.

Will this be able to manage that properly?

[Maruno]

At the moment you can edit:

• Trainer types
• Trainers
• Items - (External Editor only)
• Map connections
• Encounters
• Global and map-specific metadata

I'm thinking of adding ways to edit:

• Pokémon species - (already doing it)
• Regional Dex lists - (only the species therein, not the Dex names; possibly also National Dex numbers but that might be too much hassle)
• Moves
• TM compatibilities

The things I'm not planning to do anything about (because it's not worth the effort and/or the PBS file is easy enough to edit directly anyway) are:

• Types
• Abilities
• Shadow moves
• Phone messages
• Town map point details - (townmapgen.html file already does this)
• The various Battle Tower/Challenge Cup files

I think that covers everything. Comments?

Originally Posted by FL .

Maruno backs to Essentials, weee!

I only used the editor for repositioning sprites (aside for quick looks). I suggest you showing sprites and icons when possible, in pokémon encounters for example.

An idea: For trainers, when defining the party, how about showing the moves that the pokémon get by default? Several times I need to look at the pokemon.txt to see some default moves.

Icons/sprites all over the place would be very difficult.

Good suggestion about filling in the moves in, though. When the game/Editor saves a fresh version of trainers.txt, the moves are filled in anyway, so they might as well be visible immediately. If the Pokémon's level is changed, I can add in a prompt which refreshes the movelist. The only shortcoming here would be that form-specific movesets aren't accounted for, but that's a minor thing that can be ignored.

Originally Posted by IceGod64

In my project, I'm listing Pokemon in a specific order (I have an entire regional dex planned out), but I'm actually adding them on an "as-needed" basis. For example, everything up to 102 is added, abut some Pok¹mon that can't be caught until later in the game appear earlier, so the Pokédex order goes from like 101,102,123.

Will this be able to manage that properly?

Gaps in a Regional Dex simply look like unseen species, so there's no problem there anyway. I've just finished making changes to the scripts which should allow gaps in the National Dex (i.e. missing numbers in pokemon.txt) to work properly. Basically, come v12 you'll be able to give Pokémon whatever numbers you want without worry.

Plus there's also the Regional Dex Editor idea, which I'm still figuring out how it should work.

[FL .]

Nice!

I suggest you for editing TM compatibilities in the Pokémon species screen with a TM compatibilities list. When adding new moves in TM compatibilities, divide the search in two groups, moves that already have at least one input in tm.txt and all moves.

By the way, I suggest you to move the Global Metadata to "Settings" script section, except the character specific metadata.

[Maruno]

I was thinking of having TM compatibilities be a separate script, actually, since it's a separate PBS file. Choose from the list of moves that are already defined in tm.txt (or add a new one), then modify a list of Pokémon that can learn it.

I'm not sure what to do with global metadata and stuff in the Settings, really. I've not thought about it.

[pkmn.master]

Always glad to see more editor features, since they give me goosebumps when I tear open a new version of essentials and notice them. Good work as always, Maruno.

[Maruno]

Here's an unrelated feature I've just added in: any file which includes the ID number of a thing can instead use the internal name of that thing instead. This applies to:

• Pokémon sprites/icons
• Pokémon cries/footprints
• Item icons/mail backgrounds/berry tree charsets
• Trainer type sprites/charsets

This allows you to rearrange Pokémon/items/trainer types in their PBS files freely without worrying about having to also rename multitudes of files. While this isn't important for items/trainer types, it's a huge bonus for Pokémon, since now you can rearrange the National Dex at will!

The only downside is that all the files would need to be renamed first to include internal names rather than ID numbers, which is a big task. Should I do this (for Pokémon only)? Bear in mind there's over 3300 battler sprites alone which would need renaming, plus at least 649 of each other kind of file. It'd help if I had some program which could automatically rename bunches of files - does anyone know of any?

One other downside is that it'd be harder to spot missing files, since you couldn't just scan a list of files to find a missing number. I don't know how useful it is to be able to quickly scan through lists of numbers to find gaps, compared to the usefulness of freely rearranging the National Dex.

[the__end]

Originally Posted by Maruno

The only downside is that all the files would need to be renamed first to include internal names rather than ID numbers, which is a big task. Should I do this (for Pokémon only)? Bear in mind there's over 3300 battler sprites alone which would need renaming, plus at least 649 of each other kind of file. It'd help if I had some program which could automatically rename bunches of files - does anyone know of any?

One other downside is that it'd be harder to spot missing files, since you couldn't just scan a list of files to find a missing number. I don't know how useful it is to be able to quickly scan through lists of numbers to find gaps, compared to the usefulness of freely rearranging the National Dex.

I don't see the benefits of this. The way it is right now it is sorted like the national Pokedex. If you rename it to their species name it will be sorted alphabetically which will make it harder to find a Pokemon if you didn't memorized all of their English names. Right now the Pokemon are sorted after their generation as well. So if someone wants to remove a generation he has to search all of the Pokemon he wants to remove manually. I think the names are fine the way they are right now.

By the way...
With IrfanView you can batch rename files.