Into Inner Internal (Patreon)

so the gap between supervised and internal, let alone finishing and internal, has been a lot longer than i ever wanted it to be
which i probably say every time but
you know
blame AI and all that
that said AI is now significantly smarter
let's talk about the last few changes that have been made to it before the next test cycle:

• AI now knows when to send in imposter ditto
• now properly considers refrigerate (etc)'s type changes for STAB and field boosts, failed to before
• now knows to prefer moves that can thaw it when frozen (restored from pre-AI rework and improved)
• newly avoids using moves that thaw an opponent on them
• handles non-ghost curse set up better, including at max stages; overvalued it after the speed bug
• now considers rest better when weighed against killing moves and other circumstances
• fixed a bug (probably speed bug related) with avalanche and similar moves making them hardly ever used
• tweaked how much it cares about stat drops from close combat and similar moves; more likely to use them
• now hesitates to use offensive set up moves against speed boost pokemon
• fixed a bug causing the AI to think there was an invisible normal type second enemy in single battles, an overvalue fighting attacks when switching in
• switch in calculations now properly consider 4x weaknesses and resistances instead of just SE/NVE
• AI now considers accuracy when looking at prospective moves to switch in for
• weighted speed calculations for switchins better, after speed bug fix, values offensive threats more when outspeeding
• prefers to hold sweepers off until a little bit later; values them less in general
• fixed a bug where AI thought that toxic spikes were always applied for the purposes of switching in poison and flying types; tweaked scores to also include steel types and grounded absorbtion
• fixed similar bug for scoring roar and dragon tail, etc, assuming opponents always had toxic spikes up
• gale wings no longer cares about spikes when deciding to switch in
• tweaked likelihood of speed boost pokemon using protect
• scaled likelihood of potion usage down with HP to 50%, less likely to use at higher hps; fixed a bug with the previous implementation of this that made it not work anyway
• now accounts for high-damage priority moves better when deciding to use potions
• and finally-- you may have seen me complain about it on the server already, but if you don't think i'll complain about it again here now then you clearly don't know me yet:
  fixed a bug that resulted in the AI deliberately sending in pokemon with poor type match ups
  also ran screaming into the hills
  was never seen again

so there's that.

• i'll take this opportunity to get some other things i've had on my changes list off it and into the world.
  some of them are not recent changes and i don't know if i've actually mentioned them somewhere before. so if they sound familiar, try assuming you're clairvoyant instead of assuming i already talked about them:
• PULSE pokemon now use held items and start the battle transformed
• PULSE Muk and PULSE Avalugg have received significant buffs
• The fishing animation has been properly restored to the world after being broken for,, probably ever?
• Several Pokemon have new shiny sprites following server discussions, including zapdos suicune, fused reshiram, ralts lines, darkrai, articuno and probably some others i forgot
• Fixed the bug with status attacks improperly interacting with absorption abilities. Again. We hope.
• Fixed a bug where wonderguard didn't properly account for aerilate (etc) abilites
• Fixed a bug where player's hidden powers only were not properly set to the static 60 base power. we tried to make this change at the time but it apparently just didn't work. sorry.

and finally, some animations for you all. These are fresh and hot off tonight's press as we prepped it all for Internal.

Our first one comes from Vulpes, for Aurora Veil:

And the rest will be from Smeargle. First up, Plasma Fists:

Next, Photon Geyser:

And finally...
the big boi.....
that so many people have been asking about for years...

there's a few reasons earthquack didn't get done sooner. The first reason is because the background shift in the animation editor actually used to just be fucking broken so it would create a seam no matter what you did if you even thought about using it
so a while ago we had to have marcello fix that
then after that one or two folks took a crack at the move, and by took a crack at it, i mean put a crack in it, but it turned out that having a crack in earthquake was really less quakey and more fissurey, so that version of the move became fissure instead.
and then there were just a couple revisions before it got to this finished point
but hey
it made it eventually
as will we
probably

so yeah internal's up for the mid-episode testing and it doesn't have to have any kind of a set end date. we finally finished writing and setting up all the stuff for the party today so we can get back to actually Doing The Things now thanks ~
also
hope to see you there tomorrow!!! you know, there!!!! 

kthnxbye