Silver hack: Pokémon Dark Energy - Beta 5 Released

Thank You ! But I believe I found an answer while checking the numberous pages of this forum ;)

Nice too here this is coming out later this year.

Oh, man. I remember playing this one many years back. Happy to see this is back!

One of the most enjoyable hacks I've played. I cannot wait to see the next update!

Hi miksy91 im a pokemon fan girl and a pokemon dark energy fan too .. I played your rom since 2015 and it's super cool unlike the others. Please , I encourage you to fully finish your rom becoz i really love the story. Hope you read this .. Tnx and im looking forward to this rom :) more power and creative ideas for the rom . 😍

I have played this myself years ago, however, I am excited for the final release to come out. I will resume playing it then...although it'll be from scratch..

Are there pokemon from later gens

So far up to this beta only gen 1 & 2 pokemon
@Miksy91 I keep forgetting to ask you this question. Have you changed the encounter ratio for shiny pokemon? When I first played dark energy back in 2015, I caught shiny pidgey, nidoran male, nidoran female, squirtle, charmander, mareep, and a few others that I forget in 1st play through. The 1st three of my shinies I ran into trying to get pikachu in the 1st area
(Sorry if this is spoilers for people)

Hello! Just started playing dark energy and i love it so far! When i got the eevee i realised i got a shiny one! Then later a shiny squirtle, and now im trying to reset for a charmander. I enjoy the change of pace from the generic story to the way this game plays out so far. Will it be finished?

Thanks for the replies guys! :)
Not going to answer everyone in person, but I did click "Like" button for your comments as a note that I have seen them, and it was nice hearing positive feedback :) Though it's not like constructive criticism wouldn't be bad either.

PokemonJournalist said:

Are there pokemon from later gens

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Kilzzll also replied to you below, but in case you didn't notice, there are no pokemon from the later generations. At least, I haven't added any yet. I might add some later, but considering the nature of this hack is quite different from your normal pokemon adventure where you aim for becoming a pokemon champion and possibly filling out pokedex, I just don't see a need in changing the pokemon that are obtainable.

Kilzzll said:

@Miksy91 I keep forgetting to ask you this question. Have you changed the encounter ratio for shiny pokemon? When I first played dark energy back in 2015, I caught shiny pidgey, nidoran male, nidoran female, squirtle, charmander, mareep, and a few others that I forget in 1st play through. The 1st three of my shinies I ran into trying to get pikachu in the 1st area
(Sorry if this is spoilers for people)

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Yeah, I have basically altered the ratio for shiny pokemon. In G/S/C, whether a pokemon is shiny or not is determined by its IV values in a such way that only pokemon with very specific IV values are shiny. In Dark Energy however, there are plenty of different kinds of IV value combinations that make the pokemon shiny. I don't remember for sure, but I think shinyness ratio is either around 0.4%, or 1% in beta 4.1.

This probably sounds a bit weird, but in G/S/C, they actually didn't have an attribute for a pokemon which would say whether the pokemon is shiny or not. They rather made the game implicitly infer the "shinyness attribute" of the pokemon based on the IV values it has.

Metalona said:

Hello! Just started playing dark energy and i love it so far! When i got the eevee i realised i got a shiny one! Then later a shiny squirtle, and now im trying to reset for a charmander. I enjoy the change of pace from the generic story to the way this game plays out so far. Will it be finished?

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Thanks :)
You got lucky with Eevee, but the Squirtle was actually shiny by default. I have also written a hint about that in the FAQ.

As of now, I have no plans of quitting to work on this hack. So yeah - I'd say the hack will be finished one day. What comes to getting everything done for beta 5 this year, I'll have to unfortunately say that it's quite unlikely that will happen.

I have come up with some new ideas alongside the original story and gameplay progression I had in mind, and that will slow down the development of the hack in terms of getting beta 5 ready. In case you want to know more, check the contents under the following spoiler tags.

I have however been thinking that I might as well release beta 5 with less content that I had originally planned. The original plan was for beta 5 to cover whole East-Suden, but getting it done this year is something that I don't think will happen. I could however release that as beta 6 next year if I end up splitting the content I had originally planned for beta 5 in two releases. But we'll see..

Also not totally sure about this either, but I might upload a video in Youtube showing some of the content I have implemented for Rocky Village. At that point in the game, the storyline starts to take over from your everyday town to town traveling and gym leader battling. There are a few cutscenes that take place in this village, and I have planned them out (cutscenes "scripted" in Notepad :laugh-squinted:), but not fully implemented in the game yet. Other than that, the village is already finished.

I uploaded a video showing a certain cutscene in a place called Rocky Village. I will also link this video clip in the main post as well because out of the three videos I have there, two are already outdated. I think I'll rather show up-to-date content instead.

But yeah, here's the video clip. It shows a short cutscene in Rocky Village pub/inn featuring a familiar face the player has run into earlier in the game.

Nice clip! Thats a good idea to split up 5 if its content heavy into 2 betas. Unless you'd rather wait until next year to hit us with a heavy 5. How many more betas will there be before games finish?

Kilzzll said:

Nice clip! Thats a good idea to split up 5 if its content heavy into 2 betas. Unless you'd rather wait until next year to hit us with a heavy 5. How many more betas will there be before games finish?

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I don't think it's that content heavy that it must be splitted. There have howeber been lots of improvements to the contents of the game already accessable in beta 4.1. I was thinking already during summer 2016 to possibly release a new "Beta 4 plus" with only a little more gameplay content, but with many improvements to the current gameplay that I had done by then.

Video from that summer:

Beta 5 will naturally cover all those improvements to the gameplay, but most likely also some more. I can't recall any other improvements by heart though. And for those who haven't been following the progress updates that much, beta 5 will naturally cover also more storyline related content, and you can progress further in the game than in beta 4.1.

But yeah.. I'll think about it! Might be a good idea to split the content though because there really isn't anything there to be lost by doing so.

To answer your question there, I'm not totally sure. But considering beta 5 or 6 (depending on whether the East-Suden will be split in two releases) will cover most maps, and storyline related events, I'd say that the final release would follow that one. That has also been my release plan for DE a long time now.

If you need a beta tester i'll be more than happy to help :) I have plenty of time on my hands now. Just send me a private message If you want. I can't wait to try out the new events for beta 5 to be honest :D

Kilzzll said:

If you need a beta tester i'll be more than happy to help :) I have plenty of time on my hands now. Just send me a private message If you want. I can't wait to try out the new events for beta 5 to be honest :D

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Cool :) Have you been beta testing other hacks before though? I guess it wouldn't hurt if I sent you a "pre-beta 5" version of the hack sometime before the public release even if you didn't have experience with beta testing in general, but at the same time, it would help me out more if you were trying to break the game (without ram modifications) while doing the testing. That way, I could also make the best out of it.

Also yeah.. :D

Beta 5 of Pokemon Dark Energy is going to be available in public in the near future!
It's been over a four years since the last public release, but I can finally say that the next one is coming really soon (most likely, by the end of the year).

For beta 5.0, you can expect a more balanced, and interesting gameplay with the part of the game that is currently accessible in beta 4.1. And there is naturally also more gameplay, and storyline related content after the point where beta 4.1 ended. There will however be most likely at least one more beta even after this one until I could consider Dark Energy being finally complete. What that practically means that the game won't end in beta 5, and many plot twists are yet to come in the further releases.

After beta 5 is released though, I should be done with most gameplay related improvements which I'll ever end up making the to early parts of the hack. Thus progression with the development of the story and gameplay progression should also be faster from now on (while until this point, I have done lots of smaller or bigger improvements to the beta 4.1 content of the game).

What is the difference between the battle modes between normal and active?

Paige said:

What is the difference between the battle modes between normal and active?

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Now that I think about it, the possibility of being able to change the battle mode isn't really much of a "feature" at all. And what I meant by the "Battle Modes" in the first post was about being able to change the "Battle Style" that is normally either Shift or Set.

The "Normal" battle mode stands for the Shift style where you can switch your pokemon before your opponent is going to send out another pokemon. "Active" mode on the other hand doesn't allow you to do this, and is actually just a minor tweak over the Set battle style.

I initially implemented this "feature" as one my first asm hacks way back in 2011 when I actually didn't know of the existence of the built-in "Set" battle style (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrGRU1FiawM). The hack changed the Shift battle mode to work similarly to the Set mode so that switching, before your opponent would send out a new pokemon, would be prevented. There was however some extra text displayed, and the outcome feels more natural than the Set battle style I think.

But yeah.. that's pretty much what "Active" battle mode is in Dark Energy as well. Here instead of touching the "Shift" style (= Normal), it brings a minor improvement to the original "Set" battle style. And now that I really started to think about this more, I'm not quite sure, why I even added that solution to the Dark Energy. I did that sometime between 2011 and 2013 most likely, but I can't remember my reasoning behind implementing that. Perhaps I didn't even have one..

But good thing you asked about it! I don't think that's something that should even be listed as one of the features about the hack, so I'll remove it from the thread here, and also from my website. I'm also pretty sure the hack refers to the change to the battle modes in the beginning as well, so I might also remove that reference as it's not really needed.

I am really surprised to see this hack being continued on a silver base cause of the crystal disassembly available.

Inner Rhymes said:

I am really surprised to see this hack being continued on a silver base cause of the crystal disassembly available.

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I have to say that I could spend some time planning and estimating, how long it would take me to port all the stuff over on a pokecrystal fork. But my intuition is that it would be an extremely time-consuming task, and if I was to import everything over to pokecrystal, it would probably take me around a year to do so. Thus I don't really consider that being an option.

At the same time, there are not that many things that I would really need from pokecrystal. Sure, the pokecrystal hackers have developed many, neat enhancements to the gameplay that could I could port over to my hack too (of some I have figured out ways to implement on my own editing the rom file). And editing pokecrystal would also make certain things easier to implement.

Yet the "issue" I'm having is so normal in software development in general. Software projects are usually done with techs that used to be among the best options available at that point of time. Back in 2011 when I started working on Dark Energy, pokecrystal wasn't so widely encouraged option out there. Thus it's more than natural I will finish Dark Energy based on a rom file rather than pokecrystal. Changing to the new platform (pokecrystal) would give its benefits, yet the change would probably require months, and months and months of work, and it wouldn't make sense to go through such process.

Finally back on! Had lots do do this fall. But now I'm back to having free time :) I've tested a couple hacks for my friends irl, and have found bugs in different hacks on here. I did an alpha test on one here, but can't remember the name as it's been several years lol. Happy holidays btw :)