Maximum number of trainers in Pokeemerald

Bidoof said:

Hi all,

does anyone know whether there is a hard-coded limit for the number of trainers one can include in Pokeemerald? I've been adding new trainers and trainer parties without problems to a total number of 864 (#define TRAINERS_COUNT 864) compared to 855 in default Emerald. However, I can't seem to make any new trainer battle work after hitting this magic number. Upon interaction, the NPCs say their default message as if the battle was already complete although it never happened. I've been trying to understand the gTrainers structure but nothing seems to hint that it should have a limit in size (as far as I understand). As for compilation, make runs without warnings or other issues.

If anyone has a better understanding of this issue, I would be very grateful for your insights!

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Buffel Saft said:

Hey, there's no set limit anywhere, but each normal trainer needs a flag in the save file to work.

If the trainers are acting like they've already been battled, you probably need more trainer flags. All the flags are defined in include/constants/flags.h. Plenty of them are unused, so you could shuffle them around a bit to make the block of trainer flags bigger, or add a second block of them and figure out how to get the game to access them.

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Buffel Saft said:

Hey, there's no set limit anywhere, but each normal trainer needs a flag in the save file to work.

If the trainers are acting like they've already been battled, you probably need more trainer flags. All the flags are defined in include/constants/flags.h. Plenty of them are unused, so you could shuffle them around a bit to make the block of trainer flags bigger, or add a second block of them and figure out how to get the game to access them.

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Bidoof said:

Hi again,
I tried increasing TRAINERS_FLAG_NO from 0x356 to 0x3E8 (dec 1000), but it messed up some things. I started a new game just to be sure, and the sprites for Birch's intro Pokémon and starters in the bag selection screen were shiny. Also, after receiving the starter, the Pokémon menu was still not accessible, so I guess that increasing the flags allocated to trainers interferes with the system flags. I don't know why because SYSTEM_FLAGS is defined relative to the offset of trainer flag start and the number of trainer flags. Would you think that this could be related to the sizes of different memory sections?

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Buffel Saft said:

I don't know why that would be happening; I've only ever seen that caused by changing the shiny rate. It's possible there's more to adding new flags than just defining new ones, but I haven't tried to do that yet so I can't say for sure.

You could try removing some unused flags and renumbering all the following ones to make room for more trainer flags, but that's a lot of work and very tedious.

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Bidoof said:

Thanks for your insight. I will probably shuffle the unused flags and see if I can use some of them for trainers. Fortunately I can lessen the workload with Python. Again, thank you so much for your help!

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