[Release] Pokémon Essentials, version 19.1 - 22nd May 2021

Essentials v19.1 has now been released. It's full of bug fixes, text characters in the naming screen, gif support and a working Battle Factory. Download it today to get all this good stuff.

You do not need the v19 Hotfixes plugin. v19.1 contains all the fixes it provided and much more.


You may not have been expecting a new version of Essentials, only seven months after the previous one, but surprise! Not only is it being released so soon (compared to the gaps between previous releases), but it's a very important step forward.

Before we get into it, I should say that Essentials is now open source on GitHub, and this has directly helped others to contribute to the development of Essentials. I wouldn't have been able to do all this by myself. Everyone who has worked on Essentials with me is fantastic, and I want to give them a lot of thanks for it.

But anyway, what's so great about v19?

mkxp-z ftw omg

mkxp-z is a bundle of letters, but it's also a very big deal. It's an alternative to RGSS, and if you don't know what that means, it's a set of code that RPG Maker games can use to make themselves work. And not just work, but work better than they would if they were using RGSS. RGSS is, to use the technical term, way old now, and mkxp-z is much newer and faster and has more features. And it's now in Essentials.

The upshot of it is that Essentials should now work a lot better. For one, it's faster, but that's not the only benefit. Fonts can be used without having to be installed, there's a built-in way to remap the controls to whichever keys you want, you can access information on https websites (so Mystery Gift works again), there are better screen resizing options, custom loop points in music, and so on and so on. It's also possible now to create versions of a game that can run on Linux and Mac, so games are far more portable now.

Sounds exciting, no?

Scripts and values

There have been various code enhancements behind the scenes in addition to the above, and one of them is the addition of support for external scripts. These scripts will live in the new Plugins folder, which makes it much easier for you to add third party scripts to your game - just drag and drop the script files.

Another big change is that things like species, abilities and items are now going to be known by their internal names (:BULBASAUR, :INTIMIDATE, :POTION, etc.) rather than their ID numbers. This applies to storing them in variables such as Pokémon objects, as well as using them in the filenames for sprites and icons and cries. The meaningless numbers will be abolished completely in future. Lots of code has been changed because of this, and Pokémon/item graphics have been rearranged into different folders to make them easier to work with.

How about something that makes more sense? There are two new PBS files (regionaldexes.txt and ribbons.txt), and tm.txt has been merged into pokemon.txt/pokemonforms.txt. Also, encounters.txt has a new format which offers increased flexibility and even allows multiple sets of encounters per map to choose from, so you could make wild Pokémon get stronger as you earn more Gym Badges (for example).

Big and beautiful

You know how events occupy a single tile no matter how big their graphic is? Well, not any more! You can now specify the width and height (in tiles) of an event, and that event will sit in all of them. There are so many things you could do with this simple yet powerful feature, such as having huge boulders to push around, Snorlaxes blocking whole paths at once, condensing the contents of whole bookshelves into a single event, triggering a single Player Touch event that lies across the whole of a road, and so on. Why use many events when a single one works just as well?

Meanwhile, the overworld weather animations have been overhauled and now look much better than they used to.

And the rest

To be honest, a lot of what's in v19 is behind the scenes - code improvements and refactoring and restructuring. It ought to be very exciting to those who are interested in that kind of thing, but on paper it's not as flashy as a pile of new features would be.

Despite that, there are still a number of new things in v19 that everyone can appreciate, and of course there are always bug fixes. The fact that so much work has been put into the gears and levers behind the scenes probably makes makes it an even smarter idea to upgrade your game to it. It's an important milestone for many reasons (mkxp-z, code restructures, being the first result of the new open source development), and exciting times are ahead.

The full change log for this version is available on the wiki.

Enjoy!

Finally, to the latest ruby version! This one is a real upgrade right there!

Thank you Maruno, and everyone else at GitHub who helped!

Maruno said:

Pokémon Essentials, version 19
27th April 2021
Change log​

You may not have been expecting a new version of Essentials, only seven months after the previous one, but surprise! Not only is it being released so soon (compared to the gaps between previous releases), but it's a very important step forward.

Before we get into it, I should say that Essentials is now open source on GitHub, and this has directly helped others to contribute to the development of Essentials. I wouldn't have been able to do all this by myself. Everyone who has worked on Essentials with me is fantastic, and I want to give them a lot of thanks for it.

But anyway, what's so great about v19?

mkxp-z ftw omg

mkxp-z is a bundle of letters, but it's also a very big deal. It's an alternative to RGSS, and if you don't know what that means, it's a set of code that RPG Maker games can use to make themselves work. And not just work, but work better than they would if they were using RGSS. RGSS is, to use the technical term, way old now, and mkxp-z is much newer and faster and has more features. And it's now in Essentials.

The upshot of it is that Essentials should now work a lot better. For one, it's faster, but that's not the only benefit. Fonts can be used without having to be installed, there's a built-in way to remap the controls to whichever keys you want, you can access information on https websites (so Mystery Gift works again), there are better screen resizing options, custom loop points in music, and so on and so on. It's also possible now to create versions of a game that can run on Linux and Mac, so games are far more portable now.

Sounds exciting, no?

Scripts and values

There have been various code enhancements behind the scenes in addition to the above, and one of them is the addition of support for external scripts. These scripts will live in the new Plugins folder, which makes it much easier for you to add third party scripts to your game - just drag and drop the script files.

Another big change is that things like species, abilities and items are now going to be known by their internal names (:BULBASAUR, :INTIMIDATE, :POTION, etc.) rather than their ID numbers. This applies to storing them in variables such as Pokémon objects, as well as using them in the filenames for sprites and icons and cries. The meaningless numbers will be abolished completely in future. Lots of code has been changed because of this, and Pokémon/item graphics have been rearranged into different folders to make them easier to work with.

How about something that makes more sense? There are two new PBS files (regionaldexes.txt and ribbons.txt), and tm.txt has been merged into pokemon.txt/pokemonforms.txt. Also, encounters.txt has a new format which offers increased flexibility and even allows multiple sets of encounters per map to choose from, so you could make wild Pokémon get stronger as you earn more Gym Badges (for example).

Big and beautiful

You know how events occupy a single tile no matter how big their graphic is? Well, not any more! You can now specify the width and height (in tiles) of an event, and that event will sit in all of them. There are so many things you could do with this simple yet powerful feature, such as having huge boulders to push around, Snorlaxes blocking whole paths at once, condensing the contents of whole bookshelves into a single event, triggering a single Player Touch event that lies across the whole of a road, and so on. Why use many events when a single one works just as well?

Meanwhile, the overworld weather animations have been overhauled and now look much better than they used to.

And the rest

To be honest, a lot of what's in v19 is behind the scenes - code improvements and refactoring and restructuring. It ought to be very exciting to those who are interested in that kind of thing, but on paper it's not as flashy as a pile of new features would be.

Despite that, there are still a number of new things in v19 that everyone can appreciate, and of course there are always bug fixes. The fact that so much work has been put into the gears and levers behind the scenes probably makes makes it an even smarter idea to upgrade your game to it. It's an important milestone for many reasons (mkxp-z, code restructures, being the first result of the new open source development), and exciting times are ahead.

The full change log for this version is available on the wiki.

Enjoy!

Click to expand...

Great job Maruno,
So um where I can find link download for v19?

ardicoozer said:

Great job Maruno,
So um where I can find link download for v19?

Click to expand...

Relic Castle, Discord, Reddit, Google...pretty much everywhere but here.

Nice release! I particularly prefer longer time between releases, like 1.5 years.

Maruno said:

I should say that Essentials is now open source on GitHub, and this has directly helped others to contribute to the development of Essentials.

Click to expand...

Huge step!

When you took over Esssentials development (almost 10 years ago) I remember that you want Essentials to be a community project, but now, finally it is a truly collaborative project.

I Don't think It's Going To be Working On Android (joiplay) because it gives this error RPG Maker Plugin for JoiPlay

Script '016' line Deprecation: SyntaxError occured.

compile error 016:Deprecation:33: syntax error, unexpected ':',

expecting ')' ...e, aliased_method, removal_in: nil, class_method: false)

A

016:Deprecation:33: Can't assign to nil ...iased_method, removal_in: nil, class_method:

OK
and When I Edit the Game And Start Playing Using the rpgmaker It Says
Project creation failed.
Attachments
Screenshot_20210429-181045.png

I have created a plugin containing various bug fixes. You can find and download it here: https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/449597

This plugin will be updated periodically as more bugs are found and fixed, so it's worth keeping an eye on it.

Ranred said:

I Don't think It's Going To be Working On Android (joiplay) because it gives this error RPG Maker Plugin for JoiPlay

Script '016' line Deprecation: SyntaxError occured.

compile error 016:Deprecation:33: syntax error, unexpected ':'

Click to expand...

v19 uses Ruby 3 now. I'm guessing whatever JoiPlay is using runs on Ruby 1.8.1, which does not support keyword arguments.

Essentials v19.1 has now been released. It's full of bug fixes, text characters in the naming screen, gif support and a working Battle Factory. Download it today to get all this good stuff.

You do not need the v19 Hotfixes plugin. v19.1 contains all the fixes it provided and much more.

You removed the multiple font support on a minor version? So, if someone wants multiples fonts, this person would stick on V19 or even v18.2?

Oh nice, were on v19.1 now I had no idea, how do you guys do it, but I think I'll read the changelog and give it a whirl, and let you know what I think. Speaking of anybody here remember the Ultimate Pokemon Centre hosted by Peter O, I think it was, that was how I found about it, shame that sites no longer around, i actually loved looking at the in depth mechanics info and trainer lists.

I'm wondering about two oddities in V19 I've come across. I wouldn't exactly call them glitches, so I'm posting here instead of in the glitch thread. The first is that when I rename my project, the title seems to no longer supports the accent marked e seen in Pokémon, replacing the character with a question mark inside a black diamond character instead. This was not an issue in V18 and earlier. This seems problematic to me, as it looks rather unofficial to name a project using Pokemon instead of Pokémon.

Second is that in debug menus I can no longer use the page up and page down buttons to quickly scroll through long lists. This was possible in V18 and earlier, but seems to no longer work. This makes it very hard to scroll through some of the debug menus, which have hundreds of items on the list, such as Pokémon or move lists.

It might be worth noting this is all on V19, not 19.1, as I haven't gotten around to updating to 19.1 yet.

Bguy7 said:

I'm wondering about two oddities in V19 I've come across. I wouldn't exactly call them glitches, so I'm posting here instead of in the glitch thread. The first is that when I rename my project, the title seems to no longer supports the accent marked e seen in Pokémon, replacing the character with a question mark inside a black diamond character instead. This was not an issue in V18 and earlier. This seems problematic to me, as it looks rather unofficial to name a project using Pokemon instead of Pokémon.

Second is that in debug menus I can no longer use the page up and page down buttons to quickly scroll through long lists. This was possible in V18 and earlier, but seems to no longer work. This makes it very hard to scroll through some of the debug menus, which have hundreds of items on the list, such as Pokémon or move lists.

It might be worth noting this is all on V19, not 19.1, as I haven't gotten around to updating to 19.1 yet.

Click to expand...

Page Up and Page Down have been remapped to A and S by defualt. You can re-map your controls with F1.

Good to know. That's a life saver. Thanks.

Hey, Maruno, can you elaborate on the new format of trainer events? I want to update the Essentials Docs Wiki, but do not know exactly what is changed. The example trainers do not elaborate on what each argument means, either. I believe that the 4th argument is the version of the trainer, but the 2nd and 3rd are 'nil' in every example, which does not explain much. I am not willing to dig through the code to find the answer, either. Thanks.

Edit: Dug through the code, and I still have questions... What are valid values for the 'endSpeech=' argument in 'pbTrainerBattle()'? Is it a bool, or a string? If it's a string, is it the same as the one in the 'trainers.txt' PBS file? I'm a little lost. I'm upgrading a game made in Essentials v15 to v19.1, and need to change over 1000 trainers' events.

Edit 2: Never mind. Looking further at the code, it appears that this argument is filled on the fly as the script is triggered, and is the same as 'LoseText' after all. Basically, it should be left as 'nil' if every trainer in 'trainers.txt' already has 'LoseText'. However, having this is redundand, and is probably left in in order to make upgrading from v19 to v19.1 require less edits. I assume that this will be changed in v19.2? As I said, it's redundant.

Edited the above message.

Edit: Edited again.

Is the default Day Care lady in Lerucean town still causing crashes for anyone besides me?

SuperSpyroDragon64 said:

Is the default Day Care lady in Lerucean town still causing crashes for anyone besides me?

Click to expand...

Someone found the answer to this issue in your thread. The problem is an error with the Gen 8 Project, not vanilla Essentials. You must be using the Gen 8 Project and forgot that it wasnt an unmodified Essentials.

But all I have in the Plugins folder is Move_tutor and v19.1 hotfixes. I didn't install gen 8 project... I think.

SuperSpyroDragon64 said:

But all I have in the Plugins folder is Move_tutor and v19.1 hotfixes. I didn't install gen 8 project... I think.

Click to expand...

Gen 8 Project isnt a plugin. Its a completely revamped version of Essentials itself.