Enhanced Heart Gold Hack. My first hack, would greatly appreciate any help.

[Ross11]

This is the basis of my idea. I want to make a hack of Heart Gold(maybe Soul Silver too) that enhances the original game without any drastic alterations to the original experience. The goals of the hack would be as follows in order of priority:

1. All pokemon in the national pokedex are available to catch. The key difference from many hacks which also fulfill this goal is that the edited locations with added pokemon will attempt to keep with what's known about the pokemon from the pokedex and from lore as much as possible. I will not add thing like almost every pokemon before first round Elite 4 or easily accessible pseudo-legendaries early in the game just for the sake of convenience or variety in early encounters. Every newly added pokemon to the base game should feel like it fits with its place in the world as much as possible. Legendary pokemon are only available through events. Exceedingly rare pokemon like Spiritomb may only be available through either trades or events.
2. Pokemon move sets should be updated as much as possible to newer game standards.
3. Trainers and gym leaders etc. should be updated to meet the above new changes.
   
4. Pokemon evolutions traditionally only available through trading mechanics should all be available through the use of their trade item in-game or a new item where there never was one used in the trade.
5. Increased difficulty. For any players who have ever played pokemon competitively, get into IV & nature breeding and EV training, use items effectively, are familiar with advanced battle tactics and familiar with metagame the pokemon games are generally a breeze and you may find you can sweep the Elite 4, Champion and Red with just one or two pokemon. This hack would seek to fix that and provide players with battles more worthy of advanced players. No more using simple rock/paper/scissors mechanics to get every victory. You will need to use good planning and tactics. All trainers, elite 4 etc. should still feel like their pokemon fit them thematically. e.g. no legendaries.
6. New challenges. Add in some new trainers to battle to give additional optional challenges to more experienced players. These battles will be difficult.
7. This hack should be somewhat modular. I got this idea from a 'Pokemon Emerald: Hoenn Dex edition' hack that I saw where many parts of the hack were optional and could be added on as you see fit. I think this is a great idea as not everyone has the same idea of a great pokemon game and this would allow users to alter their experience to suit their own desires. If possible I would like everything beyond the first two listed items to be an optional add-on.

This is a hack I would love to do and I think I could pull it off because I would be making this for myself more than anyone and I know there are enough tools around available that it shouldn't be too hard. My problem is that I don't know where to start. I know there are many DS hacking tools available but I don't know them all and which ones I would need to use to make this hack. If anyone could help point me in the right direction and tell me what would need to be done to make this hack possible I would greatly appreciate it. Heart Gold and White 2 are my favourite pokemon games and I would love to also execute this same idea on White 2 later if I can pull off this hack.

 

[Blazing Rud]

Looks really good project. I will surely support you in this. But i am a GBA hacker, so i will try my best if I can help you. As much i know there is not much research in DS hacking. Good luck for your project :)

 

[Ross11]

Okay, I've got a gist of the tools needed to hack Heart Gold now and a better idea of how to edit the ROM. 2 Things I would really like to do though I don't think are possible though.
Update the Pokedex to show new pokemon locations. This wouldn't be too bad as I could just add some documentation with the patch.
Edit trainers to the extent that I can change their pokemons nature, IVs and EVs. Was really hoping I could do this to add some challenge to the Elite 4 and others. There might be a way but I don't think anyone knows how.

 

[Buffel Saft]

It's always good see interest in hacking something other than Fire Red for a change. Finding any helpful info on gen 4 hacking can be pretty difficult, and a lot of the tools are unfinished. Even though I've only worked with Platinum, I can offer a few pointers on some of your goals:

• 1-6 are easily done with tools.
• Making your hack modular is very easy in the DS games; most of the changes you want to make are stored in separate files, so you can just swap them out to remove certain changes.
• I don't think anyone has really looked into editing Pokemon locations in the gen 4 dex; whatever GameFreak has done there seems to involve a lot of redundant code (don't see why they wouldn't just read it from the encounter table like gen 3).
• Trainers with EVs and natures has been done in HGSS by MeroMero in Mind Crystal; it's definitely possible, just difficult to do unless you have experience with assembly.

There are few things I wish I'd known before starting on a Platinum hack, hopefully at least some of them are useful to you:

• Don't use any part of PPRE except its Pokemon, trainer and script editors; the rest of it is buggy or inferior to other programs.
• Don't use SDSME's wild Pokemon editor, it doesn't write data to the NARC properly and will corrupt parts of it.
• SDSME's script editor doesn't save properly (mashing the save button will work sometimes)
• When adding new events, bear in mind that the centre of the coordinate system is in the middle of the map, rather than at the bottom left.
• SDSME's trainer editor is the best around IMO, but it doesn't let you set abilities or ball capsules; this can be done with a hex editor.

 

[Ross11]

There are few things I wish I'd known before starting on a Platinum hack, hopefully at least some of them are useful to you:

• Don't use any part of PPRE except its Pokemon, trainer and script editors; the rest of it is buggy or inferior to other programs.
• Don't use SDSME's wild Pokemon editor, it doesn't write data to the NARC properly and will corrupt parts of it.
• SDSME's script editor doesn't save properly (mashing the save button will work sometimes)
• When adding new events, bear in mind that the centre of the coordinate system is in the middle of the map, rather than at the bottom left.
• SDSME's trainer editor is the best around IMO, but it doesn't let you set abilities or ball capsules; this can be done with a hex editor.

Thanks a lot! I have actually started some work on this hack already. I have been using PRRE to edit wild pokemon encounters but I apparently shouldn't be using it for that? So far I have finished adding all Soul Silver exclusive wild encounter pokemon. I have finished them all except Ledyba and Ledian which will take a while due to their numerous locations so I'll have to take care rebalancing encounter rates. I have already noticed one problem with PRRE in the fact that I can't seem to access or edit Route 48 using it which contains Vulpix in Soul Silver so I wasn't able to add it there.

 

[Ross11]

There are quite a few pokemon I have identified as what I'm going to call pseudo-unobtainable. These are pokemon which are obtainable in the base game but require some kind of special condition to obtain which usually involves waiting a long time or having to clear so much of the game to get them that by that stage they are no longer useful. There include all Safari Zone pokemon where you have to wait 10 or more days for them to appear, Swarm exclusive pokemon which are time & luck based, Radio pokemon with the Hoenn and Sinnoh sound whom are only obtainable one day out of the whole week and even then are still inconvenient because the radio has to be turned back on after every wild encounter and then finally Hoenn starter gift pokemon and Steven's trade Beldum which aren't obtainable until after beating Red.

I haven't yet decided what to do with these pokemon. All starters would kind of fit in this category since you can't obtain all 3. So far I think the best solution to these pokemon would be to remove the waiting mechanic for Safari Zone pokemon, add toggleable key items that permanently plays the Hoenn and Sinnoh sounds and adding Swarm exclusive pokemon to the wild encounters. This would be the least intrusive solution and avoid the problem of trying to find a place to fit in some pokemon where they don't really fit anywhere. e.g. Cacturne from Safari Zone when there are no deserts outside the Safari Zone. All starters would be obtainable through gift including the unobtainable Sinnoh starters and the Hoenn starters would be available at a much earlier point in the game.

All pokemon outside of this category would be added to wild encounters including Pokewalker exclusive pokemon. I'd like to hear people's feedback on these points. Do you think these are good or bad ideas or is there better solutions? Also, there may be some other pokemon which fit into the category of pseudo-unobtainable which I failed to identify, if you can think of any that I have failed to mention please notify me.

 

[Buffel Saft]

Thanks a lot! I have actually started some work on this hack already. I have been using PRRE to edit wild pokemon encounters but I apparently shouldn't be using it for that? So far I have finished adding all Soul Silver exclusive wild encounter pokemon. I have finished them all except Ledyba and Ledian which will take a while due to their numerous locations so I'll have to take care rebalancing encounter rates. I have already noticed one problem with PRRE in the fact that I can't seem to access or edit Route 48 using it which contains Vulpix in Soul Silver so I wasn't able to add it there.

PPRE's wild editor itself is fine, but it has a tendency to mess up the scripts on the maps it edits. It only happens sometimes, and most of the time it's easy to fix; it's just annoying. You could use WPEDS 1.1.0.0 as an alternative, but it has a few encounter slots labelled incorrectly and also has a pretty poor layout.

...

Sounds good to me, it makes sense to keep the rare Pokemon rare. I'd say Feebas definitely falls into the pseudo-unobtainable category, but you could probably get away with putting it in the wild somewhere.