Tales from the Alpha, vol 1 (Patreon)

alpha proceeds, and we pulled in a few more people for it today. currently there's about 12 people playing aside from the dev team. and... well, they've still barely started postgame. but soon!

in the meantime, some cats for your consideration:

Cosmetic Crash Cram School

tester alex of team rejuv took a trip down to the glamazonia salon for the haircuts,
and you do know how they do down there, fix you up real nice, little bit of spritz, little bit of snip, oh also they crashed his game

...why

like, that event hasn't changed
in years
so why is it crashing now ?

now to be honest, i don't exactly have that answer-- but there was a brief discussion in the dev server about reading crash messages, so i'll post that for the benefit of the non-coders in the room.

here's the actual error as we were handed it:

...and some explanation:

so i quickly looked into blorgus from scripts
and found out that blorgus does not exist, except in one place:

which makes sense. this is feebas's evolution method. and getting haircuts could have been a previously canon way to raise it.
...but don't we get milotic with prism scale and a link stone?

...yes! turns out, milotic has actually had two evolution methods in the code this entire time and i had no idea! 

the real issue here is that between central obsidia and both version of glamazonia, poke.beauty was only called on one of them because apparently the second glamazonia just got forgotten for years until recent script changes broke it.
i guess.

VR any% ledgeskip

god i really wish i could post a gif of this one but i absolutely cannot, it's inherently spoilers
so i'm just going to talk around this as best as i can
there's a room in victory road where a [thing] happens, and this [thing] can happen anywhere in the room and it happens regularly, and when it happens it knocks you backwards
also there are ledges in this room, you know, the kind you hop down

exposition over

so winter reported that if you specifically stand in front of a ledge that is facing downwards, and face the character upwards, and then wait for [thing] to happen
it will push you up the ledge.
she also said it does not work on ledges that 'face' upwards.

so to clarify why this is weird aside from the whole jumping-up-a-ledge thing, given the directional facings, [thing] should be pushing the player away from the ledge
but instead they clip onto it ???

issue is easily replicated. so first we test a few things. side ledges? glitch works.
up-facing ledge? i also replicate it not working there.
which is weird.
because all the ledges share the same code, and as you can see above, the same passability too.
and at this point i'm like
honestly ???
this is kind of cool
the entire time i was fixing this, i was actively considering just leaving it in as secret speedrun tech because i think this is actually super neat. and i'm still thinking about that a little bit. i have no idea how much or how little of victory road this trick would've allowed someone to skip... but i would've been willing to find out.
the problem is, if the upwards-ledges don't do it, it's inconsistent. so even if i decide this is hidden, but accepted behavior, it's still inconsistent and therefore a cat.

so why only the upwards ones?
my first theory was the correct one-- the assumption in the first place is wrong. the trick does still work with up-ledges, but the singular up-ledge in the room has something preventing it from working there.
specifically, it is mapped in such a way that the player cannot step backwards away from the ledge.

demonstration:

the glitch works on the right side of this two-tile wide ledge, allowing the player to hop downward up it
but it does not work on the left side.

this gives me a second clue to the issue.  
why does something that pushes the player upward cause them to move downward -and- not work if they can't move up?

i'll skip to the punchline now. the answer is because of how essentials coded in ledges. at every step of movement that the player takes, it asks if there's a ledge, and if so, it hops you over it.

this is handled by pbLedge here, in the base fundamental movement code:

of note, the command that moves the character backwards also just redirects to these same base movement functions.
and here is pbLedge itself:

this function asks exactly two things:
1- are we facing a ledge?
2- could we land on the other side of it (two spaces forward)?
if the answer to both of those questions is 'yes', it will jump you forward.

friends, do you see the problem here?
this command is called during every directional movement
and while it asks if you are facing the ledge, it just assumes you will move forward. at no point during this does it actually ask if you, the player, are moving towards the ledge.
therefore, any event movement command that doesn't change the player's facing, will trigger the ledge.

therein explains the weird movement. the player isn't clipping upwards onto the ledge, they are actually swiftly taking one step backwards, and hopping two forward because of the way movement commands were set up. and that's why it wouldn't work if the space behind them wasn't passable.
mystery solved.

i fixed this by adding a check for direction_fix to skip pbLedge, since stepping backwards turns that on innately. I don't know for sure that this won't break something else, but so far so good. 

you know what? heck u. *unPULSEs ur tangrowth*

so just before releasing alpha we did a rewrite of multiple forms to help it be compatible with the randomizer.  as any good rewrite, it is not without its cats. one of those cats is that Tangrowth 1 wasn't actually PULSEing.
I tried to fix it in time for our first patch, just after before our last post.
And, well, I couldn't.
The core of the issue is that since we rewrote Mega Evolution to make more sense, the very non-sensical way i shoe-horned PULSE evolution in stopped working.
this one isn't terribly interesting to talk about the fix for or anything, perry swooped in later to save me. but i wanted to get the patch up then, so i just made it work like other PULSEs and start in its morphed form.
unfortunately, i forgot to actually take the item that tells it to evolve off of it when i did that.
so it tried to evolve with the broken evolution,
and,
well...

(crim happened to make this meme as i was posting this)

no problem here, officer!

all right, that's it for the cats. have a list of more updates i've been putting off posting, and we'll call it a night until next time:

• kangaskhan has been moved up to route 1
• slightly expanded the dark room radius both with and without flash 
• placed the zoom lens which was somehow not a thing before 
• tweaked movement so as to not step in place when tapping the key in the direction you're already facing, thus annoying cass for centuries 
• riolu can now be obtained before blake, and doesn't require talking to the old guy at each step anymore
• added dream balls into the game
• on mirror field, special, single target, non-contact attacks no longer have a 50% chance to hit after missing. instead, they always hit targets with raised evasion.
• added placeholder animations recolored from other moves for all gen 8 moves, even though we don't use them. just so there's something besides tackle if someone hacks them in.
• reduce battle tower rounds from 7 to 5
• add BP gain for each cleared battle even if you lose a tower streak
• added a password to scale levels of opposing trainers up or down to a certain percentage. thanks vulpes!
• added EV Boosters, a consumable item which adds 252 EVs to a single stat
• added Glitter Balls, a special pokeball with increased odds vs shiny pokemon, or low odds vs normal pokemon but turns them shiny on catch
• added Remote PC, a new key item which can be used to access the PC from anywhere. Consumes one Cell Battery per use. (for clarity, this is a postgame item) 
• scooted mawilite and kangskhanite to be available earlier
• added a machine to tell you what roles your pokemon will be on chess arena
• added a password "earlyincu" to unlock the new incubator from game start ...well, not that it matters until you can use the daycare, but. it's there !
• added a password "stablweather" to guarantee a specific rotation of weather in a playthrough
• added several bulk passwords "easymode" (previous password changed to litemode) "hardmore" "qol" "speedrun" and by cass's curation, "goodtaste" to package multiple passwords together for convenience
• added patreon supporter names to the inscryptions on the steps in front of the grand hall, as they were always destined for
• added a minimap to the opal section of the WTC to show visually which areas have been cleaned and which have not
• added password "antidote" to prevent overworld poison damage
• added 'rename' option to the party menu, thus putting the name rater out of business for good. 
• added password "emptyivs" which 0's out all the IVs of all player-obtainable pokemon
• added password "stopitems" to prevent AI trainers from using items