[Essentials script] Pokémon TCG mod

[p.claydon]

how are things going? looking forward to seeing updates

[Maruno]

Things are going fine, I suppose. Prizes are in, win conditions are in, lots of various other things are done too. I don't keep track of what I've done, but things are being tidied up a bit.

It would be nice to find a rulings pdf or something for the Base/Jungle/Fossil sets which describes various scenarios and answers what is supposed to happen (e.g. exactly when Gastly's Destiny Bond occurs, before or after the attack's extra effect if it has one?). It'd help with programming in the various card effects. Actually, rulings for other sets would be nice too, to make sure there were places for any new effects people might want to add.

Aside from effects related to specific attacks or cards, are there really only four factors to keep track of? By this I mean, 1 Energy Card limit per turn, 1 retreat limit per turn, 1 evolution per Pokémon per turn, and (for most Pokémon Powers) 1 Power use per Pokémon per turn. I can't think of any other general game mechanics that would need to be tracked like these are, which aren't specific to particular card effects.

[alphazeta126]

Originally Posted by Maruno

Things are going fine, I suppose. Prizes are in, win conditions are in, lots of various other things are done too. I don't keep track of what I've done, but things are being tidied up a bit.

May I ask what you mean by win conditions? Does this just mean that the player will win after they get all prizes specified for the battle or that there will be special conditions to play by like Pokemon TCG 2 for the GameBoy?

[Maruno]

You win if you take your last prize card. You lose if you don't have an Active Pokémon. You lose if you can't draw a card at the start of your turn. If multiple conditions occur at once (i.e. the first two), then the person who "wins most" wins (or it's a draw). That's it.

I've not played the TCG2 game, just the first one (and not very much). I don't intend to add any gimmick features in anyway.

[alphazeta126]

Originally Posted by Maruno

You win if you take your last prize card. You lose if you don't have an Active Pokémon. You lose if you can't draw a card at the start of your turn. If multiple conditions occur at once (i.e. the first two), then the person who "wins most" wins (or it's a draw). That's it.

I've not played the TCG2 game, just the first one (and not very much). I don't intend to add any gimmick features in anyway.

Okay cool, thanks for the quick reply. By the way do you need any help creating new graphics? I saw in the earlier posts that you were thinking of changing them so that pixel size was not doubled. If so I can help. Just tell me what type of graphics I would have to make

[the__end]

Originally Posted by Maruno

It would be nice to find a rulings pdf or something for the Base/Jungle/Fossil sets which describes various scenarios and answers what is supposed to happen (e.g. exactly when Gastly's Destiny Bond occurs, before or after the attack's extra effect if it has one?). It'd help with programming in the various card effects. Actually, rulings for other sets would be nice too, to make sure there were places for any new effects people might want to add.

Here is what you are looking for:
http://www.mediafire.com/?4379z78ci5q7poo

These could be useful too:
http://www.pojo.com/pokemon/rules/oldbasicrules.html
http://www.pojo.com/pokemon/rules/oldexpertrules.html

For the neo sets:
http://www.pojo.com/pokemon/rules/neorules1.pdf

The current rules:
http://assets23.pokemon.com/assets/c...s_rulebook.pdf
http://www.pocketmonsters.net/TCG_Tutorial

Hope i could help. :D

[Maruno]

Originally Posted by alphazeta126

Okay cool, thanks for the quick reply. By the way do you need any help creating new graphics? I saw in the earlier posts that you were thinking of changing them so that pixel size was not doubled. If so I can help. Just tell me what type of graphics I would have to make

Just up-rezzing the existing graphics would be fine, at least for the ones used in duels. The other existing screens could probably stand to be redesigned to some extent.

Originally Posted by the__end

Here is what you are looking for:
http://www.mediafire.com/?4379z78ci5q7poo

That's exactly what I was looking for! That'll be extremely useful. Your other links will be useful also.

So many rulings on Ditto...

[the__end]

Originally Posted by Maruno

So many rulings on Ditto...

That's why it is not included in the gbc game.

EDIT
Changed a few pixel so the cards doesn't look so "round".


Replaced the Energy icons with better ones.

[alphazeta126]

Just up-rezzing the existing graphics would be fine, at least for the ones used in duels. The other existing screens could probably stand to be redesigned to some extent.

Just logged on and saw this response. I actually have an essay to work on right now but immediatley after that I will start on this.

[fayt666]

if ur lookin for sites that give all details on cards

http://www.serebii.net/card/base/

http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-tr...game/database/

seribii has all cards with details.

pokemon.com focuses from ex to newest seen as alot original series cards were banned.

[●•ΛΣЯӨЩ•●]

This would certainly be interesting, compared to the normal Pokemon games, the TCG is also a great game when one gets the hold of it.

[TheDarkShark]

*blows away dust*
Sorry for reviving this thread (I'll assume these rules apply in this subforum, too, because no limit to thread revival is mentioned in the specific rules), just found it again.
Since you already said, you'd finish this definetly, I'll gladly state that I still have interest in this project. In fact, I think I might be able to help you with the AI, though I still haven't looked into Ruby. I'm probably the only one who recently read the entire thread, so I'm going to quote the particular part I'm talking about:

Originally Posted by Maruno

I really don't think such strategies need to be separated. It all boils down to "use the best cards", and what constitutes a "best card" depends on the environment (i.e. what other cards are in play, etc.). This can certainly become convoluted very quickly as the AI develops, as there'll be all sorts of checks and evaluations. This is especially true when you start thinking of combos.

Of course, the AI is going to cheat. That is, it'll make its choices while knowing about cards it shouldn't be able to know about (e.g. cards in the player's hand, which prize card is best to take, whether it'll draw something good because of Professor Oak). However, it won't influence the outcomes of coin flips or whatever, so it'll be fair that way. I think making the AI omniscient is the only way it can be made to stand a chance against players.

As for how the AI will actually work, I have a vague idea. At the start of its turn, it looks around the duel and lists everything it is able to do (play a card from the hand, use an in-play effect such as a Pokémon Power, retreat, etc.), and then assign a desirability value to it. Calculating this value for each action depends a lot on the environment, and is the convoluted part. Once all the values are calculated, it will do the most desirable action and repeat (recalculating the values for what's left). Once there's nothing left to do, it will attack if possible and desirable - the good thing is that an attack is always the last thing in a turn (and there's always just 1 attack per turn), which makes it a bit simpler.

It sounds simple when I write it in just one paragraph, and some actions will always be desirable (e.g. play Bill) and some will never be worth using (e.g. Mankey's Pokémon Power, as the AI will know all those cards via cheating anyway). However, when is the best time to play Energy Removal, and which Pokémon/energy should be hit by it? How about Super Energy Removal, which involves a cost to the user and may not be worth it (and if so, which card should the AI pay)? There's a huge amount of thought that needs to go into the AI for even a single effect, and I think that such thought needs to be done in order to make the AI worthwhile.

Tuning can come much later, e.g. deciding the threshold desirability value below which an action shouldn't be done, and how much randomness to involve in the choices.

As you can see, any emergent "strategy" will depend entirely on the make-up of the deck. It can only depend on the cards you've got available ("work with what you've got"), and it's up to the AI calculations for each card to decide how useful (and therefore desirable) it is. The overall behaviour of the AI will simply look like what it does the most, which depends on what it's got (e.g. an energy-controlling strategy will appear if there are a lot of energy-controlling effects in the deck). I don't think there's any need to include deck-specific AI profiles (particularly as it would tend to rail-road and hurt decks which could sometimes benefit from profiles they don't have), and instead throw every situational calculation into the one AI used for everything.

This reminds me a lot of Dragon Age's threat system, which basically makes each individual enemy attack the character that poses the greatest threat to them. If you're interested in it, as some kind of reference, a better explanation can be found here.
Why do I think this is relevant? Well, depending on the game's difficulty settings, the equipped armor and weapons increase the threat, making enemies on lower difficulties more likely to attack your tank. Let's think this idea through a little bit:

Let's say there's a number of variables that scale the desirability of each action. This could be used to individualize the playstyle of characters and adjust the AI to the deck. Assume, for instance, the previously discussed evolution-/base-decks, where evolving pokémon and getting energy on base-pokémon should have different priorities. If there's two floats named evolution and baseEnergy, respectively, these could be set in the PBS-entries. In the evolution themed deck, you'd set evolution=1.1 and baseEnergy=0.8. The desire to play an energy on a base pokémon would be multiplied by 0.8, and the desire to evolve a pokémon by 1.1.
Of course, you'd need more variables (and better names), but I'm pretty sure this would pay off, since you'd have to do a lot less fine tuning (except for standard values, when the user doesn't set them for the deck).

To simplify the decision on what trainer card to play, you could also categorize them and apply values. Let's say both Bill and Professor Oak are in the category deckspeed (that's what this kind of cards are used for in YGO, anyways), Bill would have the value 20 and Professor Oak would have the value 40 (arbitrary example, don't count on me for the exact balancing). If you assume a float deckspeedPriority, similar to the previous evolution and baseEnergy variables, the cards would get assigned the proper desire. If deckspeedPriority=1.5, playing Bill would stand at 30 desire, and Professor Oak would stand at 60.
I'll admit though, that this is not optimal, since Professor Oak makes you toss all cards in your hand, so the desire should be decreased depending on what cards the CPU player currently has. Applying multiple properties to a card might help. To keep the example going, assume Professor Oak had the properties deckspeed 70 and toss 0, where 0 basically means all. The desire to play Professor Oak would then be 70 * 1.5 = 105, reduced by an appropriate amount of desire, depending on the number of cards.

If you want actual strategy, as in playing combos of cards that work well together, consider having the user specify them for the deck. If none are specified you're fine. However, if the AI's supposed to wait for this card in the deck before playing that card, the desire to play that card would be drastically reduced, maybe by the priority of the combo.

All of these are ideas I came up with while brainstorming, haven't really done much more thinking, though. I know, they look like a lot of extra work, but please consider them at least.

[Maruno]

This section's description says the thread revival limit doesn't apply in here, so don't worry about that.

Your first suggestion, defining a deck with one or more keywords that are used to alter AI calculations of how/when cards should be used (including as parts of combos), is reasonable enough. It'll be fiddly to insert those alterations into the scripts to actually produce the desired style, of course, but that's a matter of balancing and tweaking. Any rail-roading (forcing one style when another would be more preferable) would probably not be too blatant, because if another style really is more preferable, the effect of the defined style won't be enough to override it. Again, that's a balancing issue.

Your second suggestion, categorising cards by their effects, doesn't seem that useful. Every unique card effect has its own function code, and the calculations for how/when to use it can depend on that. Basically, the effect function codes already serve as a kind of categorising, albeit a very fine one. Similar effects will have similar desirability calculations; it's not hard to copy-paste. While this does make the AI for using a card hardcoded, I really don't think that's a problem. In the end, the code's going to be the same as using card keywords, and in fact function code-based calculations can allow greater customisation of a card's AI since you can easily edit the AI for just a single unique effect. So no, this idea doesn't convince me.

There's currently no AI at all. I'd prefer to get something simple in first and then possibly modify it later, than worry about loads of different subtleties from the beginning. The AI style keywords are definitely one of the "ignore for now" things, but I've written it down.

[TheDarkShark]

Well, the mechanisms I suggested are only tweaks to the original idea, so implementing the simpler version first is only reasonable.

Hardcoding AI for every single card seems really tedious to me, though, even if it's only copy/paste. Other than using keywords, I can only think of reflection to calculate their desirability, which would give you a really tedious, hard to understand AI code (depending on how well reflection is implemented in Ruby, if it is in at all). I won't judge you for refusing to do this, especially since this is a kit for other game developers. Maybe hard code really is the best option, though I usually don't like to think that way.

If currently no AI is implemented, what are you currently working on and what have you achieved in the 2 months since your last post here? Have you progressed at all, seeing as people's interest in this has decreased recently? Not trying to be rude, just curious.

[Maruno]

I know that hardcoding is frowned upon and harder to change. However, it's simpler to do, will be pretty straightforward to edit anyway in this case, and this is only a small little project of mine which was never intended to be massively customisable, so I don't need to worry about it.

I never learnt the names of things like reflection (which Ruby has); all I know is how to use them. I use reflection to check whether a particular attack or trainer effect exists, and if so, to call it. However, I might as well just make one huge method to do all the desirability calculations for a particular kind of action (play trainer, play energy, retreat, use Power are all different things), like Essentials does for using moves - it'd be practically the same thing as using reflection anyway, and good enough for this project.

I've done very little since whenever my last update was; I've drifted back to working on Essentials a bit since then. I don't keep a change log for this, so I couldn't list what I've done. I've looked through the rulings posted above and clarified exactly how the various card effects should work, and I've done a little background work for them (e.g. making an array which remembers what an attack's result was, for the purpose of Mirror Move and Leech Life, etc.). I've fiddled with prize cards. I've generally been tweaking things to work smoother or better, and been planning out what else needs doing. A lot of what I've been doing is incomplete, and there's not much to show off.

This project was only ever a "because I felt like it" thing. Because I like sharing, it'll (probably) be available for anyone to use, but that's not specifically a guideline for the project, nor is making it easy to customise. I'm just doing what I want to do, and if it happens to be user-friendly, that's just a bonus.