Crystal hack: Pokémon Polished Crystal (update 2.2.0)

[uchihamadada]

Quick question: I'm trying to adapt RSE's boat to GSC, given that tiles are 8x8 and the "white" hue on the blue tiles cycles white→sky blue→dark blue due to the water animation. Does this look acceptable?

Or this:

Also, happy new year! :)

Well, both looks good for me Rangi!! But I preffer the second one...
And HAPPY NEW YEAR 2017!!! :)

 

[Master Terrador]

Quick question: I'm trying to adapt RSE's boat to GSC, given that tiles are 8x8 and the "white" hue on the blue tiles cycles white→sky blue→dark blue due to the water animation. Does this look acceptable?

Or this:

Also, happy new year! :)

Happy new year, is there any difference I honestly can't tell...both look acceptable though

You planning on adapting some things from the Prism leaks? (Animated sprites, menu icons, updated cries etc.)

 

[Rangi]

Happy new year, is there any difference I honestly can't tell...both look acceptable though

You planning on adapting some things from the Prism leaks? (Animated sprites, menu icons, updated cries etc.)

I already have individual icons for each Pokémon. I do plan to color them by species instead of all red; however, an attempt to copy Prism's code directly failed, so I may end up designing my own.

Prism has an entire separate audio engine for playing its new cries, and I don't want to copy signature features like that. (Same goes for the compressed text engine, printing variable-width text, trainer appearance customization, the calendar, and so on.) If I manage to use the existing cry system to better approximate the official cries, that's something I can add in a later update without breaking saves.

There are a few smaller features of TPP Anniversary Crystal and/or Prism that I'd like to have: playing the "low HP" beep for just a few seconds, a sparkle animation for successful captures, a Surfing icon that has the player's head instead of always Lapras. But most of those are just because we both want to copy the new official games, which do all of those things. It might be easier to implement some of those myself than to adapt existing code.

(I thought Polished Crystal would be the first GSC hack with official abilities, thanks to FIQ's help, but then the TPP Prism playthrough disproved that. So congratulations to Koolboyman and company. It'll be interesting to compare our separate implementations. I think the Prism devs did more refactoring of the original pokecrystal code than FIQ and I have, at least in some parts.)

(Oh yeah, apparently there's a Haunted Mansion in Prism? Total coincidence, I'm adding one in Polished Crystal 3.0 based on an old idea by Mateo. :P I hope they don't end up too similar.)

 

[FIQ]

The way the low HP beep is implemented might make it trivial to implement. I haven't looked at it, but IIRC, it plays the beep if a certain var is nonzero. So I was thinking that the function that triggers it (StartDanger iirc) could set said var to 255, and then have VBlank functions decrease it by 1 if nonzero. That'd make it play for little more than 4 seconds (if that's too long, just set it to something lower than 255).

EDIT: Speaking of abilities, I've found some issues with Prism's implementation in places. Trace in particular seems to be completely broken, and overworld abilities are largely non-existent (Pickup is there of course, and Flame Body/Magma Armor is there, but encounter-changing abilities and "overworld" Compound Eyes isn't around). Of course Polished Crystal has its own set of issues/bugs at the moment.

Also I still prefer Polished Crystal's presentation of abilities (in-battle and in status screen), but that might be due to bias :p

 

[Rangi]

The way the low HP beep is implemented might make it trivial to implement. I haven't looked at it, but IIRC, it plays the beep if a certain var is nonzero. So I was thinking that the function that triggers it (StartDanger iirc) could set said var to 255, and then have VBlank functions decrease it by 1 if nonzero. That'd make it play for little more than 4 seconds (if that's too long, just set it to something lower than 255).

EDIT: Speaking of abilities, I've found some issues with Prism's implementation in places. Trace in particular seems to be completely broken, and overworld abilities are largely non-existent (Pickup is there of course, and Flame Body/Magma Armor is there, but encounter-changing abilities and "overworld" Compound Eyes isn't around). Of course Polished Crystal has its own set of issues/bugs at the moment.

Also I still prefer Polished Crystal's presentation of abilities (in-battle and in status screen), but that might be due to bias :p

I'm quite happy with your implementation choices for abilities. :) I think we can skip the more obscure out-of-battle ability effects relating to encounters (e.g. Magnet Pull encouraging Steel-types), since they would involve redesigning the encounter system with very little benefit.

I was planning to get Dim Cave laid out next, so if the low HP beep is that simple, can you take care of it? Thanks.

Edit: Speaking of the small details, these are my planned Surf sprites:

 

[Rangi]

What do y'all think about this Bag concept? Does the item picture take up too much space?

 

[Keetongu856]

Question , for prism's features like the compressed text engine you mentioned you didnt want to copy it is that because of personal choice or ?

The boat and port looks kinda out of place for me. Because the harbour is so brightly coloured but the port and ship is all grey except the bluish part which i understand is due to colour limitations?

Abilities overworld effects you could choose to only implement a few useful ones if you wished to like flame body and compound eyes.

I like the bag concept! But maybe a tad smaller? It looks larger than the bag now which i find personally weird but it's still okay and a really neat concept .

 

[FIQ]

What do y'all think about this Bag concept? Does the item picture take up too much space?

It has been something I've considered to suggest before, actually. The reason I never did was that I figured devamping the icons would be too much work to be worth it shortterm.

(So basically, yeah I'd find it cool :p)

As for that icon in particular, I think it would perhaps look nicer if the "arrow" were stat-dependant (like in later generations) while the other color available would go to a brown color for the bottle otherwise, similar to vanilla icons.

EDIT: As for prism stuff, I don't see why *not* to incorporate internal improvements (like the improved compression stuff to add space) if feasible. Allthough, as stated earlier, I still feel that you should ask beforehand due to the circumstances of the source release.

 

[Master Terrador]

I already have individual icons for each Pokémon. I do plan to color them by species instead of all red; however, an attempt to copy Prism's code directly failed, so I may end up designing my own.

Prism has an entire separate audio engine for playing its new cries, and I don't want to copy signature features like that. (Same goes for the compressed text engine, printing variable-width text, trainer appearance customization, the calendar, and so on.) If I manage to use the existing cry system to better approximate the official cries, that's something I can add in a later update without breaking saves.

There are a few smaller features of TPP Anniversary Crystal and/or Prism that I'd like to have: playing the "low HP" beep for just a few seconds, a sparkle animation for successful captures, a Surfing icon that has the player's head instead of always Lapras. But most of those are just because we both want to copy the new official games, which do all of those things. It might be easier to implement some of those myself than to adapt existing code.

(I thought Polished Crystal would be the first GSC hack with official abilities, thanks to FIQ's help, but then the TPP Prism playthrough disproved that. So congratulations to Koolboyman and company. It'll be interesting to compare our separate implementations. I think the Prism devs did more refactoring of the original pokecrystal code than FIQ and I have, at least in some parts.)

(Oh yeah, apparently there's a Haunted Mansion in Prism? Total coincidence, I'm adding one in Polished Crystal 3.0 based on an old idea by Mateo. :P I hope they don't end up too similar.)

Neat thing about the icons, if your pokemon is shiny the icon matches, thought that was a nice touch the official games should of done years ago.

Your hack may not of been the first to implement abilities, but it'll be the first to have both abilities and natures! And unless you add some weird dream tripout scene in this mansion I doubt it'll end up too similar.

>Bag
I like it, another neat touch.

 

[WorldsBoss]

Quick question: I'm trying to adapt RSE's boat to GSC, given that tiles are 8x8 and the "white" hue on the blue tiles cycles white→sky blue→dark blue due to the water animation. Does this look acceptable?

Or this:

Also, happy new year! :)

Personally, I prefer the first one. The second one looks like the boats are sailing past rather than being attached to the dock, but both look nice all the same.

What do y'all think about this Bag concept? Does the item picture take up too much space?

This is really cool! The icon is definitely too big though. It could do with being about 2/3 - 1/2 the size it is in that screenshot.

Happy new year to you too :D

 

[Rangi]

Abilities overworld effects you could choose to only implement a few useful ones if you wished to like flame body and compound eyes.

Yeah, both of those will be implemented.

I like the bag concept! But maybe a tad smaller? It looks larger than the bag now which i find personally weird but it's still okay and a really neat concept .

This is really cool! The icon is definitely too big though. It could do with being about 2/3 - 1/2 the size it is in that screenshot.

It has been something I've considered to suggest before, actually. The reason I never did was that I figured devamping the icons would be too much work to be worth it shortterm.

I could resize them to 16x16, but it's more work and some of them would lose considerable detail. Then again, maybe it's worth it.

 

[FIQ]

I prefer the large icons, they also fit neatly without strange alignments. I still think the colors look a bit off though, but maybe you tried and disliked what I suggested.

 

[Rangi]

I prefer the large icons, they also fit neatly without strange alignments. I still think the colors look a bit off though, but maybe you tried and disliked what I suggested.

Actually you're right, the brown bottles look better.

I was also thinking of trimming the icon border to make it look smaller, but that just looks weird.

Another possibility: use the same kind of border as the Bag image.

Edit: And the Bag could be larger (but does it look distorted?):

 

[Rangi]

The boat and port looks kinda out of place for me. Because the harbour is so brightly coloured but the port and ship is all grey except the bluish part which i understand is due to colour limitations?

Right. 8x8 square tiles don't work so well with curved objects. I tried this:

But the corners look a bit off.

 

[Keetongu856]

The larger bag looks great! It doenst look distorted to me. I prefer it because it looks more like a back pack than a handbag now :p

Loving the ship colours! For the pier and the bench the colours are quite similiar so it looks camouflaged maybe change the pier to brown like woodish? Thats just my opinion.

 

[WorldsBoss]

Edit: And the Bag could be larger (but does it look distorted?):

This looks way better. I like the fact that it doesn't lose the pink background anymore, which made it look kinda weird previously.

The bag looks fine to me. The only time you even realise it's stretched is when you directly compare against the other one, but even then it looks decent. Is it possible to lower the item image just a smidge so it's nearer to the bottom? Not so much that it loses the pink background again, but just a little so we can see how that looks?

 

[FIQ]

It's worthwhile to compare it with the boy bag too, just pointing that out.

 

[Rangi]

This looks way better. I like the fact that it doesn't lose the pink background anymore, which made it look kinda weird previously.

The bag looks fine to me. The only time you even realise it's stretched is when you directly compare against the other one, but even then it looks decent. Is it possible to lower the item image just a smidge so it's nearer to the bottom? Not so much that it loses the pink background again, but just a little so we can see how that looks?

I could manage this:

But the item icon has to be aligned on tiles, so nothing halfway.

 

[Rangi]

It's worthwhile to compare it with the boy bag too, just pointing that out.

The boy's bag is boxier and resizes even more naturally:

Edit: And the girl's bag has enough space now that I don't need to pretend the main pocket's opening is actually a second pocket:

 

[FGF111]

There are separate DVs for HP, Atk, Def, Spd, SpA, and SpD, but they go from 0 to 15, not 0 to 31. Still, there's also a personality value to determine things like gender and shininess, so those aren't related to DVs any more.

That's a really nice change. the fact that everything was previously linked to DVs made editing DV values and natures fairly time consuming. :)