Supervised Testing, Day 1 (Patreon)

We got finished yesterday, and so we got started, with supervised testing! For anyone who missed my previous rundown of it, supervised testing is basically me watching someone (his name's Ikaru, maybe you heard o' the guy) play through the entire episode and looking for any errors or things that need to be improved. Sometimes that's like, oh, that's a crash message, but other times it's just like, okay that transition feels a little too fast, I'll slow that down.

So we were doing that for about 7 hours yesterday. And he's only done sidequest stuff so far. Today we'll get through the main story. 

We kind of had a rocky start... The last supervised test we did (and we've done these pretty much since... Episode 2? E1 was supervised over my girlfriend at the time since she was living with me and I could actually point over her shoulder and such...) was back when Skype was still-- well, relevant at all. Luckily Discord told me I got Video Calling as they rolled it out to 10% of users, so I was like, no sweat, we can screenshare since I've got it.

Got into a call, aaaaaaaaaand there's no screenshare option. I'm feeling pretty lied to by Discord. It's just not there despite telling me I had it ;~;
So we managed to get someone else who we knew had it into a group chat, ("daaaaaaaaaaaaaan dan dand na dna na dna dna dna pls help ;~;") so we could start a video call, and then he left Ikaru and I all alone there.

Unfortunately Ikaru's internet was having an unfortunate case of being absolute garbage. So. We had to drop that call too. After a bit of flailing and mutually deciding that going back to Skype was something nobody wanted, he decided to just do an unlisted stream and I'd follow along, delay and all. 

Compared to 40-80s delay, I really missed just pointing over someone's shoulder... He'd be going along and suddenly I hear him say "Oops!!" in the call, which is the noise he makes when something has Gone Wrong, and let me tell you-- the 40+s between him saying that and me seeing whatever the bug was on the stream is like the living personification of anxiety. 90% of the time it's just a tile error, him walking where he Should Not Walk, and I sigh in relief. then there are the times that break the game. more on that later, I suppose.

So I have a list of things to test that I've been keeping all episode. It's pretty much just a list of all the events that have been added/changed in this development cycle. I'm looking at the list and the first thing on it is the redone Zorua event. And I'm sitting there staring at it like,

i have no clue where this event is.

I made it. I definitely put it into the game. Probably. But it was so long ago I have completely forgotten where to go for it. "...Good luck, Ikaru!"

So I'm sitting there wracking my defective brain, and Inuki's hanging out with us too... You know, Inuki is like the Rem to Ikaru's Ram, so that's only natural. And he tells Ikaru to go test something at the top of Pyrous Mountain while they're waiting for me to get my cognitive shit together. And I'm like yeah sure why not, go for it. 

Record scratch. "I bet you're wondering how I got into this situation." Flash back. Remember the end of yesterday's post? 

unrelated PS @ Aie thanks for making that report about the pyrous absol because i totally forgot one was supposed to be there at all and i might have never noticed again 

i just threw this in at the end because i had noted down to mention it to Aie, but I didn't expect it to become Chekov's smoking gun. To clarify the above, you know there's that Absol that appears before Bad Things happen? you know the one. right so I had added an event for it to appear to Pyrous as well, but it wasn't activating at all cuz I'm a putz and copy pasted a previous event without properly adjusting it, and then like I said I forgot it was even there so who knows how long it's been buried there. I fixed it. ...Kind of. 

So Ikaru, the lad, the legend, wanders up onto Pyrous Mountain with his post-E16 save file, and steps out onto the peak..... and there's that Absol. And it cries and hops away like Absols are wont to do, and he's just like "uh oh." because he thinks that it's going to muck up the entire story variable for the episode. And I'm like "oh yeah, nah, it'll probably be fine, it's probably just that singular event, I don't think it affects the story variable"

well haha

he goes up a little further and ghost victoria is talking to him.

"o-okay, that's weird, but it .. might.. be okay?"

he goes up further, and, sure enough, the Entire Crew is chilling on the peak, Cain Cal Victoria Taka Solaris-- the gang's all here! and the entire cutscene starts to play again. so FML. it probably wouldn't affect a new save file, but I definitely have to fix it for older ones.

.........but that's not the best part.

the best part is... in the middle of this huge dramatic scene, kiki's getting cut down, medicham is getting roaster... Victoria's pokemon.... y'all know it's an incineroar now, right? bye emboar. we 7th gen boiizzzzz. but it's sent out to fight chatot, only, in the middle of this dramatic scene it's... just....

ohh check me out! i'm dancin'! i'm dancin'!

and that's the story of how, within 15 minutes of starting testing, i was on the floor both crying and laughing and gasping for air. 

then again inuki generally has that effect anyway.

i eventually remembered where zorua was. after testing like five other things on the list. it was very difficult. sitting there like, "if i were me-- and i very often am-- where would i have put it??" but i'm proud i eventually remembered. thank you. this is the stuff character development is made of.

the rest of testing was pretty straightforward. as far as significant bugs, we were pretty surprised that partner trainers seemed to not be taking any action at all... and by that i mean not surprised at all because we just rewrote AI and that kind of thing was bound to happen... we were surprised when we accidentally figured out (by crashing the game when i entered Draco Plate as 'Dragon Plate'.....) that the reason they weren't taking any action was because of some debug logging process we were going to use to gauge AI in the first place. so that's like. you go to the hospital and the doctor draws blood but you forgot to mention you're anemic and pass out. not that i've done that or anything.

there was one case where a transition wasn't lighting up despite clearly having been instructed by the code to light up... so our boy was just fumbling around in total blackscreen for a while... That was a mess to undo. As for fixing it, I changed the order of the commands to an order that should not work and it worked. so. what do I know tbh. 14 years with this program and it still finds new and exciting ways to just fuck me up. 

the big bug find though-- and I'm pretty interested in if you guys have noticed or can replicate this in E16 as well-- is that wild Pokemon aren't getting their full level up moves. Like now that most wild pokemon are level 65+ it's pretty apparent. There's mandibuzz, right, and mandibuzz gets tailwind at level 37 and a bunch of moves after that. These wild Mandibuzz have no business still knowing Tailwind at level 77. But it's like they just stop learning moves at some point. Meanwhile other Pokemon like Aggron have all their moves properly. 

We're still trying to figure this one out, so if you have any info to contribute from E16 and Pokemon you caught at a high level in there, I'd really like to know. 

More exciting adventures continue today!