Emerald hack: Pokemon Emerald's Eight v1.5: Now with full dex and Physical/Special split!

[PageEmp]

When you claimed that all trade evos are now friendship evos, that includes anyone who evolves by trading while holding an item, correct?

 

[AstroBreak]

Is there a list of locations for everything somewhere? Thanks!

Not for now, sorry, since it would take a good chunk of time, so i just compiled legendaries/starter locations on the download's readme.txt. Locations for seen mons can be checked on the pokedex tho!

When you claimed that all trade evos are now friendship evos, that includes anyone who evolves by trading while holding an item, correct?

Yes that is correct. Only 'exception' is clamperl who now has a day/night friendship evolution like eevee's. All the others no longer require an item at all.

 

[DarkDragonMeister]

I gotta be honest I wish the trade evolutions were level and item evolutions instead of friendship based. Is friendship at least easier to raise in the game?

Also where can I find Squirtle and Cyndaquil?

 

[Mr. Dudley the looker]

Are there gonna be any more updates to this, or have you finally fulfilled your creative vision? If 1.5 is the end of the line, then I must say that this is a really cool idea and I hope future hacks decide to do more with this. Also, you're awesome :)

 

[AstroBreak]

Are there gonna be any more updates to this, or have you finally fulfilled your creative vision? If 1.5 is the end of the line, then I must say that this is a really cool idea and I hope future hacks decide to do more with this. Also, you're awesome :)

Yes it is, as I see it the hack is complete as of the last version! Initially i just wanted to try and learn the decomp project and see if it was possible at all to implement a party expansion. I ended up adding a bunch of other little things so the experience would not be so similar to base emerald and to make it a bit fresher, but i'm satisfied with how it finally turned out. Thank you playing! I must say the good reception made me very happy :)

 

[Opallegro]

Is there any way to use the original music for the gym battles? I think that song is kinda... awful, in this soundfont. Everything else is really cool, I just find myself straight up muting the game during gym battles

 

[Nuclearstomp]

So far the hack is really cool. The only thing I would change is increasing the # of pokemon that regular trainers have in general. I've made it up to before the may fight under cycling road and all trainers (besides this really weird bug catcher at the start) have had their vanilla mon #s. I know giving EVERY trainer extra mons might be asking for a bit much but at least some of them would be nice.

I do like the upgraded gym teams, though maybe

Spoiler:

Rock Slide Swords Dance Aron is a tad much for the first gym.

I feel like this idea would be even cooler in newer gens due to increased mon variety so here's hoping in the future it becomes possible.

 

[Queen Neptunia]

As I'm at the Elite 4 right now. Figured I'd post my thoughts now.

This is kinda insane. fully 8 Team members is gonna be huge for future Rom hacks and I can't wait to see it expanded upon. However the hack itself, Team gimmick aside is admittingly very bare. With no moveset updates or modern moves. It is a little harder to enjoy the gimmick. not to mention all of the Non Gym/E4 members are the exact same as vanilla. I understand why the hack is the way it is, This is just the start and I can't wait.

Also, due to how Shops are updated as you get Badges. The evolution stones are removed from the Petalburg shop after beating a certain amount of gyms.

 

[floodryan123]

Agree with the above comment. I'd love to see this hack with unique moves and radical changes to the Pokémon like altered emerald, but its up to you. I like the gimmick and would like to see more added to the game to make it stand out!

 

[MeowCatMeow]

Really loving the hack. It's basically my dream hack. I've beaten the e4 already and am mostly done with the pokedex but I can't get all the legendaries. When you added the event items to the player's PC did you remember to enable the flags that let you use them? I don't remember exactly, but I know there's some mumbo jumbo you have to do after giving the player access to those items in order to make them work. If you did I think I broke it and I'll prolly have to gameshark my way to the events. I really do love the hack though! I've been spending a long time just running through trainers with a bunch of different teams. I'm tempted to go a mono bug team next and just see how far I can get in the game. The exp share makes it so I can mix and match my party without having to grind new members up.

 

[Forrester]

Do you have any plans to make Trainer Docs for nuzlocking, or did you build this more around a casual playthrough?

 

[SabataLunar]

I see that the 8 Pokémon party code is open source, but are there any plans to make the full hack open-source?

 

[AstroBreak]

I see that the 8 Pokémon party code is open source, but are there any plans to make the full hack open-source?

I've actually been thinking about open sourcing the full thing too. The community would be able to add & tweak trainer teams that way, as well as contributing to the hack in general. I guess there'd be some small problems that come with this however, mainly due to the base code being already an almost one year old fork of pokeemerald by now, plus having to manage contributions, if there were any at all. TLDR I'm still thinking about it as i'm a bit burned out

 

[YalooTheGuru]

Hello everybody! After lurking for some time on these forums and playing lots of great hacks, here i present to you my first hack (and post!):

Pokemon Emerald's Eight.​

Introduction:
My initial idea, and the one that ultimately led to me starting this project, was to create a hack that featured a party size other than the classic 6 members that's been included in all main series games to this day. There's seemingly a lack of hacks (or none at all that i've knowledge of) that have attempted to implement this, and when i first i looked into it, there didn't seem to exist any major limitation preventing it from being done, but there was definitely not a lot of info regarding different party sizes.

And so, this is a bit of an experiment-hack that consists of the base Pokemon Emerald experience, such that all of the mainline mandatory battles are playable, but with a party size of 8 pokemon not only on the player's side, but on enemy trainer parties as well. Along with this, i've added some QoL features that seemed like a must, as well as expanded all initial gym leader's teams to feature a full 8 member party, together with elite 4 and champion's.

Features:

• Party size of up to 8 members on both player and enemy parties.
• New 4/4 party manu layout.
• Gen 6+ Exp. Share.
• Custom gym leader, elite 4 and champion 8-member teams.
• Reusable TM's.
• Indoors running.
• New music on gym leader battles.
• Starter Tyrogue along with the usual starter of choice.
  
  New as of v1.5:​
• Full 386 pokemon catchable.
• Physical/Special split added.
• Tuned down a bit the Exp. Share. This results in a slower level curve and alleviates overpowering the full party.
• Trade evolutions are now all friendship evolutions.
• Event items are obtainable from player PC upon starting a new game.
• Expanded item pocket to hold up to 50 items.
• Forgettable HM's.
• Evolution stones sold on Petalburg pokemart, heart scales sold on Fallarbor pokemart.
• Buffed Cut && Rock Smash. Rock Smash now also lowers defense every time.

Screenshots:








Known issues & bugs:

• Slight graphical glitches on party menu.
• Battle Frontier and postgame are largely untested so probably broken somewhere, due to them being out of the scope of this project.
• Some emulators might produce freezes at the beggining, or cause a black screen when starting champion Wallace's battle. Retroarch mgba core seems to mostly run the game just fine.
• You tell me :)

Thank you to:

• Everyone working on the decompilation project! I'm sure this would not have been possible to do with binary hacking, and the decompilation project is an amazing work of reverse engineering.
• My friend Airen for playtesting the hack.
• u/SilverPrince94 for suggestions on expanded enemy trainer party members.
• Blurose for their implementation of the gen 6 Exp. Share, and Lunos for their port of said implementation.
• Romhacking Hideout members for their PSS battle engine implementation.
• Jordan Davenport for creating the MIDI that i used on the gym leader theme.
• All users that encouraged me to finish the initial version of the hack!

Download:
Please patch using Lunar IPS.

Changelog v1.5:​

• Small buff to Flannery && Winona teams as they seemed too easy compared to other gym leaders.
• Fixed Hall of Fame freezing the game after beating league.
• Fixed bug preventing 7th/8th pokemon from being switched in on double battles on occasion.
• Fixed bug incorrectly selecting party members on forced switch in (Roar, etc.)
• Fixed bug preventing pokedex data from being recorded correctly.

Release v1.5​

Initial release v1.0:​

Release v1.0​

Additionally, the code for the party expansion implementation featured in this hack is available on this repository.

 

[FluffyGarbodor]

Question: Are you going to post a list of encounter tables for v1.5?

 

[tehponycorn]

Just finished a harcore nuzlocke of the hack and I had a great time with it! Just some feedback:

I wish there were more fights where the opponent had 8 Pokemon. The rival fights, the Archie and Maxie fights, and the Steven fight should all have 8 Pokemon in addition to the Gym Leaders, Elite Four, and Champion. The 8v8 fights were super fun, and there should be way more of them.

I also would've liked to have seen movesets updated to fit with the Physical/Special split, as the Gen 3 movesets don't account for that and because of that a lot of Pokemon's movesets are awkward (for instance, Charizard's only notable special moves are all fire type, and it doesn't have a single physical fire type move). I also personally felt the encounter tables veered a bit towards vanilla as compared to what's advertised, but that may have just been bad encounter luck on my part.

The Petalburg Mart having Stones is also glitched as stated above. Perhaps moving the stone shop to the Slateport outside market area would be better?

Overall this is a great mod, but maybe a bit too close to vanilla Emerald in my opinion. Definitely looking forward to any updates!

 

[AlmightyK]

I am having some issues with using the Pokemon Part Expansion code in my own Decomp. Specifically, during a battle with two separate trainers the party load out is bugged. The second trainer will start with a blank pokemon, then after that turn send out their pokemon, the other trainer also send out the second trainers other pokemon after theirs are defeated. This is likely because I have missed some code somewhere to determine where the party starts and ends but I am not sure where.

 

[AstroBreak]

I am having some issues with using the Pokemon Part Expansion code in my own Decomp. Specifically, during a battle with two separate trainers the party load out is bugged. The second trainer will start with a blank pokemon, then after that turn send out their pokemon, the other trainer also send out the second trainers other pokemon after theirs are defeated. This is likely because I have missed some code somewhere to determine where the party starts and ends but I am not sure where.

I've been unable to reproduce this with the base code from my linked repository. I've tried both normal double battles as well as separate trainers (such as the ones on route 116 on emerald, when two trainers look at the player at the same time), so it may be something on your end. Be sure to check all the changes on each commit to see if you missed something! It could also be that my repository is not up to date with current decomp changes, so maybe something in the code structure could have changed in this time that breaks double battles.

 

[grzes2pl]

Does not work with existing emerald saves, there is no character, no pokemons and no pokedex. When starting the new game it works fine. Really cool hack, finaly I can have team of 6 and 2 tm slaves.

Will trading between this romhack and fire red work? Or this romhack and standard emerald?
Also, will it work on other emerald romhacks or just standard emerald rom?

 

[Absolumont]

Hey, bug reporting! I just fought with Steven against Maxie and Tabitha in the Mossdeep Space Center. At one Point, Steven swapped to one of my Pokemon and gained control of it? I might've just missed his Metang getting Roared (though both of the Camerupt were out, so AI could've just gone "oh, this Pokemon has Surf!" without thinking about who owned it.), but I don't think Steven can normally gain control of one of the player's pokemon that way. (correct me if I'm wrong on that, though.)
It just freaked me out because I was playing a Nuzlocke and had to waste turns healing Steven's bad move choices.