Now it's time for the other kind of overhaul.
So what's new?
A Whole New World
- Those dingy old example maps needed a bit of a touch-up, but I went quite a number of steps further. Say hello to the Essen Region! 72 maps(!) filled with all kinds of goodies, including several features I invented specially for them (including an elevator, cracking ice, Apricorn conversion/fossil reviving, a much-improved bridges system, and so on). I've also codified via examples a number of other features you may not have known how to do properly, such as battling your rival, pushing boulders down holes, changing a Pokémon's form, using particle effects, and so on. This is the first time I've done any mapping, but I think it's gone all right.
- The new example maps demanded new tilesets in order to look their best. So I made some. I ripped them all from FRLG (plus a few from RSE like the really long grass and berry patches), put them all together, polished them up and called them tilesets. I did the same for the charsets, notably the Cut trees/Rock Smash boulders which are now animated. While I was doing that, it seemed only fair to also use FRLG trainer types only - move over, Roxanne, I'm gonna Brock your world! All tilesets are fully defined, so all you need to do is get drawing.
- Ever wanted to not show something on the Town Map until you've been there? A secret island or some such? Well, now you can! You can now paste pictures onto the Town Map depending on whether particular Global Switches are on. In other Town Map news, you can now easily define which region's map to look at, and whether the map is a wall map. A wall map is one found hanging on the wall (no kidding) in places like Poké Centres. Those extra pictures I just mentioned can either always or never be shown on a wall map, in case you want that feature (e.g. if you're colouring in visited towns as you go, a wall map should always colour them all in).
- Yep, they work now. If you give a Shadow Pokémon multiple Shadow moves, it will have them all from the start. They also relearn moves properly now, can no longer be affected by things like Rare Candy, Move Tutors and breeding, and battles carry on normally if you snag one. Be warned, though: if an enemy trainer uses a Shadow Pokémon, it's going to know all its moves (Shadow plus regular ones). A semi-related new feature is that, if you define a move with 0 PP, it behaves as an infinite-use move.
- I can't see any other big things that warrant their own paragraph, so I'll bundle a bunch of things into this one. Roaming Pokémon actually literally honestly work this time. Pokémon now have their B2W2 movesets, and all Gen 4 & 5 Move Tutor moves now appear in tm.txt. You can now show the player how many coins they have as easily as you can their money. A number of script sections have been tidied up, including a change in the order of end-of-round effects in battle. pbChooseItemFromList is a useful method I don't want to be overlooked. When you put an item in a Bag's pocket, the message now contains that pocket's icon. Triple Triad got a big improvement.
And yes, many other little things and bug fixes as usual. There was one bug I only discovered because of my work on my TCG project - it doesn't ever appear in Essentials itself. Check out the change log on the wiki for full details of what's happened this time.
Enjoy!
