Tool: Extended Pokedex (Fire Red)

[PlayerIDE]

I've been writing a program to accompany a ROM mod I'm making. Since I'm editing all the base stats, move sets and pokemon types, it'll be unfamiliar to someone who's played a lot of Pokemon before.




I had written a spreadsheet out for this, but I'd have to update it for every adjustment. This was unreasonable, so I wrote out a program that loads relevant data directly from the games ROM. It also reads the sprites of all the Pokemon and Items and displays them alongside.

I've included screenshots of each tab of the program. This is not an editing tool, it can't save any changes. It's only used as a playing guide, to quickly access stats and movelists of pokemon since the ordinary resources would be inaccurate.


I'm releasing it to anybody else who wants to place it alongside their releases. It opens up the Fire Red ROM data, takes approximately 30 seconds to load and convert all the sprites. It will only work on Fire Red ROM mods that haven't relocated any data tables, as it uses hardcoded offsets.

You can freely redistribute this program for any reason without requesting permission.

 

[NotMuchCreative]

A nice idea for a program. Pretty sure this hasn't been done before.
But there are some things that bother me:
-The title is misleading.
-The type chart is just a static image.
-The bold font hurts my eyes.
Also, i'm pretty sure no one uses original FR data anymore, so this would only work with old hacks. Still good though.

 

[PlayerIDE]

A nice idea for a program. Pretty sure this hasn't been done before.
Also, i'm pretty sure no one uses original FR data anymore, so this would only work with old hacks. Still good though.

Please elaborate. I've only been doing ROM mods for a couple weeks, hard to jump into a modding community this far in. I've heard of an expanded ROM as well as various disassemblies of the ROM image. If I were to make a pokemon mod in 2018, what should I be doing?

 

[DIAGO - OH]

Gaia ROM doesn't support.

 

[NotMuchCreative]

Please elaborate. I've only been doing ROM mods for a couple weeks, hard to jump into a modding community this far in. I've heard of an expanded ROM as well as various disassemblies of the ROM image.

Your tool is nice, but it only works few hacks, since it only uses original offsets.
Most hackers in this community repoint the original data, which makes your tool useless for them.
You can fix that by creating a .ini file, where it would be possible to change the offsets the tool looks for, which would make your tool compatible with many other hacks/mods.

If I were to make a pokemon mod in 2018, what should I be doing?

There isn't a formula. You could make everything from scratch, or just use a ROM base.
Anything that suits you.

 

[BluRose]

you could use so-called "dynamic offsets" (by g3t) by loading the data from a pointer to the pointer
if that makes sense
because people are a lot less likely to do extreme source changes like the ones that this entails

EDIT
to explain a very little bit better
when you repoint a table of data, you have to replace all the pointers to point to the new offset
so if you have your tool load the data from the pointer located at the offset your tool uses, then that would support a lot more hacks