hi by the way supervised testing ended 5 days ago (Patreon)

i'm really good at this whole posting thing

also this whole functioning thing

help

okay it's kind of been a time, so we finished on the morning of the 23rd and i had another moment where i had to go get emotional about being done and then just died

leftover after that has been a bunch of cats, as well as various things that just needed to be added or implemented. and we're still working on all those. i also just took a couple days to sort out a bunch of personal stuff that had stacked up, some of which i'd been neglecting for years.
like that map.
haha. 

(that's gonna be next post* btw, i will be posting it don't worry! we're just waiting for a thing or two)
*sequential order is a social construct but spiritually it is next post

anyway tl;dr this week is many lifedo, many catcatch, many flop on floor
it happens

let's talk about the testing!

ikaru clocked in finishing at about 58 hours of postgame. temper expectations accordingly because that also included some time dealing with cats, and a lot of ramming face first into fights which as i've already mentioned have since been nerfed. i wouldn't be surprised if we lose a good third of average postgame playtimes to easier fights, but it seems like the better way to go. also i'm making that amount up, i don't actually know anything.

...so, i'm prone to anxiety and stressing too much about details, especially when it comes to development, and i feel like i've kind of bungled up some parts of the testing so far a bit with old and outdated habits... 

prime example, cass made this super cool typo-fixing tool which has now been tested and confirmed plenty functional to help ease burden of all the little things! it just scans every map and finds+replaces.
fucking wonderful.  
and for the first half of this month, i've still been in the habit of just loading up RMXP, finding the map, finding the event, and fixing each typo manually... even though i knew the typo fixer worked.
i was wasting a lot of my own time ??
I felt a little uncomfortable with the tool at first, and cass had to have a Talk with me about what the hell i was doing and i frankly had no justification for my crimes. it was a little bit jarring now wondering what the hell i was thinking two weeks ago-- bulk solving typos is fantastic.
i have been questioning my rationality lately. old habits die hard, sure? but, c'mon ame, get with the program, it's 2022 or so we're all led to believe. let us do things in more efficient ways already. 

another example of past stresses kind of creating more problems-- at some point we've done some batch sound work to update the files to play nice with the newer engine. that's involved batch work all side, scripts, engine and the files themselves.
and then later, crim noticed that the rock climb sound wasn't working on a certain maps.
...or on some certain maps.
......or on any map at all, actually.
i replicate.
i check the events. the sound command to play PRSFX- Rock Climb is definitely still there.
i panik. 

to me it seemed like there was a clear cause, or a set of several things, nebulous though they were. we've had audio trouble on and off, so it made sense something changed, and now some sounds broke. we didn't know what, and we would have to dig through all the script files, compare old sound files, hope we can somehow unravel and that a myriad of sounds besides rock climb didn't die permanently and that if they did we could somehow find them all to replace them and even if we did find them, it would probably be tedious as all hell to replace them all.
i went to sleep that night with fear in my heart and a resolution to Simply Not Perceive the problem until the morning when i would be prepared to spend my day dealing with it.

of course, in the morning, i realized... PRSFX- Rock Climb doesn't exist. it got renamed to PRSFX- Rock Climb1.
everything is fine.

a sense of embarrassment for undue worry.

this is not an isolated example.
shortly after the Great Script Merge, crim reported an issue where the player was clipping through some of the railings on stairs... uh you know these guys?

right so the player wasn't totally behind them all the time, just behind them most of the time
so crim reported this and i'm like,
what
this has definitely always worked before though, right? maybe it was always this way?
and then later cass reported it, and i'm like,
did something in the script merge subtly change the way that tile priority is handled that's now broken this?
do we now have to fix this for every stairs in the game and also god knows what else ????

so, thinking i was being intelligent, i'm like okay, i'm not going to immediately consign myself to manually fixing all the stairs one by one and then later realizing it was a script change that caused it.
this actually happened with our screen tints-- every tint in the game got darker due to the screen merge, and by the time we noticed and confirmed it, i had already manually lightened most of them so there was no point in reverting the scripts.
so this time, i thought, i'll just identify this as a script issue from the beginning, and pass it on for someone who knows how to deal with that to deal with

scene 2, enter perry, dressed in the robes of someone who has been just doing his best to keep everything together all month.
perry says, he can't replicate the issue? 

and i then realize
cass and crim reported the same area
it's definitely not every rail in the game
it's specifically the railnet where i screenshotted above
and the priority is working perfectly as intended, it just somehow got accidentally changed.

and i lied to everyone's faces about it because i thought it was some big sweeping systemic issue.

i fix the priority to match the other maps.
i test.
it works.

...i get a crash message as i'm testing.

sorry for posting your team being half dead crim
i also post a screen showing i have every badge in the game, including saphira's.

...now compare that to your corn, and see if you can spot an issue.
the others did.

you know what this post is? this is the game development equivalent of -- you know those pet-shaming posts? like-- like this?

that's me

that's this post

i looked my mum in the eye while i peed on her hoodie

...so that's where i've been at the last couple weeks.  just living in fear of everything being broken due to larger systemic changes that will need to be repaired by people who better at scripts than i am.

i'd like to take this opportunity to give a shoutout to both of those people, cass and perry, for patching everything up while i drown in the shallow end of a pool.
also, appreciation for vulpes who has also been dipping her proverbial toes in, i guess the aforementioned metaphorical pool (??) and helping out with scripting and cats as well!
also also a second shout out to crim who has basically done the bulk of the actual cat-catching, at least all the little things and then some, while i've been busy guzzling chlorine

...this metaphor got weird. anyway, really appreciating everyone still. 

okay, so now that we've finished talking about the ghost of testing past, let's talk about the ghost of testing future-- alpha testing

we're not starting yet.

...look, i know i just wrote this entire post around the premise of shaming myself to overreacting to larger systemic changes causing problems . . . .  but this time, i really really swear . . . . there are some larger systemic changes causing problems . . . . that we need to deal with first !!!

like the field effect system! cass has been at its throat for months. if not years. it wasn't feasible to gut it and restructure it before The Merge but now that that's done, she has taken the opportunity to slice it up, flay it into shape, and make sure it regrets the day it was ever born. 

you might be wondering, what's wrong with the current implementation of the field effect system?
and if you are wondering that, that tells me two things-- you don't have programming experience, and/or you haven't looked at the current scripts.

if you don't have much programming experience, allow me to summarize the problem in a succinct and understandable way for you:

it sucks

if you do have programming experience, then i think all i need to say is that the current field effect implementation is managed solely by a handful of loosely-affiliated global variables that have been tossed around wherever my inexperienced-ass from however many years ago felt thought maybe they needed be.  
"global variables" being the key operator there.
actually, the only operators really. 

so that's not quite finished yet and there's not really a point in testing until it is. the same is true for a couple other things. and that's on top of the handful of things i still gotta finish up and add in. 

it'll be worth it in the long run, however short that may be. this is helping out rejuv and deso now too, and thanks to cass and perry we also have battles automated for our everyone-fights-everyone thing which is gathering trainer data a la marcello's post and scanning for crashes on every single field. it's rocky right now, but i'm still hopeful that thanks to all of our system improvements, this can be one of the smoothest testing cycles yet.
(someone be sure to feed those words back to me in a few weeks)

here's a fun quirk from auto-battle testing:

so the way these are set up, each window is assigned to a certain field and loops through each trainer to fight every other trainer in the game. we speed this process up by cutting out all visual feedback-- animations, menus, messages, gone. it is just a black screen with two AIs punching each other and we know it will tell us who fought, who won, and if it crashes. we gotta check on the windows every now and then to make sure they haven't crashed or stalled, and we fix it as appropriate

but

recently, cass checked on our black box battles to find
it wasn't a black box

it just

asks her to pick one (1) pokemon and proceeds happily !
the AI is supposed to be doing this !!!!

but this happened twice! with sigmund!

..actually it happened a lot more after that !

cass took a good guess and got it on the first try-- this happened because of an incorrect call specifically when a pokemon dies to pursuit when trying to use u-turn or volt switch. we just saw it with sigmund the most because... well... rotom and a-raichu are right there, you know? 

still, it threw us. 

so this has been our world, and it's likely going to continue to be our world for a while. i am hopeful that we can start alpha testing with the new month. a refresher on how that's going to go:

we decided to shift the multi-testing into the middle of alpha because we're prioritizng getting in the dev teams for rejuv and deso first (as we're sharing code anyway), and some other folks to help manage the ever-flowing tide of cats that is sure to come. then there's multi-testing itself, the tail end of the alpha group, and then beta hits for you. we'll take this slow, because there's no point in testing it we aren't going to be able to keep up with issues.

as always, thank you all so much for your patience, and for helping make this finally happen <33

-------------------------------

side notes, i said i'd do it three weeks ago but i finally did-- get all of the patron credits in game. so that is officially cut off for new patrons. if you're a patron as of the time of this posting, you're in.

you can find your name in three places-- the game's readme as usual, the ending credits... and also 

on these steps!

i've been sitting on this since e16! I thought it would be very cute for everyone who helped rebuild reborn city to have like inscribed their names into the stone as a way of making their mark as a community, and who better for names to have inscribed there than you all! thank you all for helping to bring reborn city to restoration <3

by the way, it came up on the server earlier and i don't think i've done a poll like this for years-- where are you all from these days?! i'm curious as to the distribution of folxxxx around here. 

these designations are going to be completely arbitrary i'm so sorry i only have so many poll options i'm doing my best -----