Tales from the Alpha vol. 2 -- Multitest edition! (Patreon)

finally stacked up enough cats for another post like this! actually, i've had enough for a few days now but it is difficult to find the time to post when i'm supposed to be watching everyone, and also fixing stuff on top of that! still, we've kept a solid pace of patching every 3-4 days all month, and i had some extra time before streams this morning so this seems like a good time to jump on it!

Rock 'em & Sock 'em

If you saw Cass's most recent dev blog post, you may have notice we showed off a new feature where opponents' VS cut ins still show even when in doubles, which was impossible in e18!

This is all thanks to The Magic of Perry ™ who made it work for us! But also, the sprites don't just line up cleanly by default. Crim also spent a lot of time going through and meticulously adjusting each sprites' position to make sure it aligned in as friendly a way as possible.
And there's a lot of sprites.
Sometimes it's impossible to make a combination work.
And sometimes... even when it is possible... there's just a really funny combination.

So, you know how you fight Fern and Blake together in the Fiore gauntlet?
....well....

turns out blake is getting his nose straight uppercutted in the QRTs
fern is sick of his shit and has had enough
bye bitch

(this has since been adjusted and fixed, and im not even sure if this happened in alpha, but it was too good to not at least post)
big shouts to crim and perry for their work on this feature!

The Lazarus Daycare Project 

one of the new passwords we've added is for a nuzlocke mode! The nuzlocke password makes it so that if a Pokemon faints, it cannot be healed by any means while the password is on. And one of our brave, brave multi-testers, Tiggy, decided to embark on a Nuzlocke for his test challenge.
Foolish.
But great for us because it means happened to catch and name this early:

I had no idea the daycare even healed. It's fixed now. But I think it does raise some severe questions about what the daycare couple are doing in their spare time. Perhaps they should've stayed in the warehouse...

Biodynamic Scripting

i want to open this bit by saying something like "lately, cass has been going through the scripts and cleaning up old and vestigal bits left in by essentials to optimize and tidy everything as much as possible" but i also feel like i may as well say "it sometimes snows in winter" and that would be about as surprising.

so anyway in her latest sweep through the code she found a few... interesting things that were left in there.

for instance, this code which detects if the... game's... battery is low?

now you might notice that the message is commented out. because probably a long time ago someone realized this was being made for PC and decided that message would only be obnoxious
but
uh
the game was still trying to update and check if the battery is low on every single step the player takes.
...

so this kind of makes sense, right? Essentials was started in the mid-2000's and has changed hands over time and was clearly originally written in a lower-level format with the apparent intention of maybe being ready to be forced onto a gameboy advance, so... sure, we can understand why this was in here. Even if it's silly.

But then there are some... other things?

...that is... code to calculate zodiac signs and moon phases.

what??

what?????????????????

why is t his here

why would this ever have needed to be here??!?

this is in the script PokemonTime,  this was clearly added for Essentials, but why would Essentials have needed moon phase and zodiac information!?!?!

i am a witch, this is my element but i do not understand !?!?!??!

anyway, it's gone now. cass killed it with prejudice for the sake of sanity and sanitation, it probably never meaningfully impacted the game but why? i just, i don't? why??????

You Spin Me Right Down Baby Right Down

so spinda, right?

spinda is definitely one of the pokemon of all time

and we've been releasing patches regularly to fix issues, especially around our major overhauls. i think i mentioned previously cass rewrote the way multipleforms work just before alpha to be more flexible and readable.

unfortunately, for us, spinda.

Spinda is a weird case of multiple forms because every instance of it is meant to be a unique form. Also, it's Spinda, so nobody thought to check it. Also, we added wild Spinda into Rhodochrine jungle.

...so what I'm saying is that there were just random game-breaking wild encounters in Rhodochrine. You just, find a Spinda and the Spinda bazookas your game and save file into the ground.

fortunately, it was pretty easy to fix that! so it got repaired in an early patch.

incidentally, we also rewrote and restructured the way sprites are handled! Instead of being in an inefficient pile of several thousand images, each pokemon now properly blits their graphics from a compiled image like a sensible program.

...and unfortunately for us once again, spinda.

Spinda is a weird case of sprite handling because every instance of it is meant to be a unique form. Also, it's Spinda so nobody thought to check it. Also, there were still wild Spinda in Rhodochrine jungle...

...so what I'm saying is that several patches later, the random game-breaking encounters in Rhodochrine resurged with a vengance for an entirely unrelated reason.

It remembers being axed and it will not let us forget.

let us pray that our offerings may appease the merciless spinda gods
🙏 BLESS 🙏

The wild Rufflet used Softlocke! It's super effective!

sky drop.

like
not even gamefreak ever produced a cat-free iteration of this move before they (correctly) yeeted it from their game
do i even need to say anything else?

sky drop has already broken twice in alpha. The first was arguably not its fault-- we had to type it in for an exception and miscaptialized.
The second is most definitely its fault and this is a Sky Drop shaming post. 

So if you've been around the community long enough, or just played the game long enough, you might be aware of the softlocke which exists in e18-- You're on route 2, and the wild Rufflet appears and it has Sky Drop in its natural learn set, and then it sky drops you and dies to hail in mid-air so the sky drop never finishes and you are just stuck there forever. 

We fixed that.

We definitely fixed that, right?

I was very upset when one of the Multi-testers, Tony, suddenly got Softlocked by a Rufflet all over again because I know we fixed that

turns out it's a different issue. It's not dying mid-skydrop that locks it, but the Sky Drop missing in the first place. Because these goddamn Rufflet have Hustle. Why do they have Hustle. Why is this an interaction we have to accept breaking the game when no trainer in the whole game even uses Sky Drop anymore because it kept breaking things?!

reeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Let's just hope the Rufflet and Spinda don't team up...

The ally Pokemon used Judgment! It's super-effective!

this actually has nothing to do with the move judgment, just vibes. i'm just
okay so we rewrote sprite handling, right?
and it was great for like, 99% of cases
but for some reason we kept seeing random pokemon consistently load their front sprite instead of their backsprite
like this

I feel like, this is already funny, right, like

...but then there's Meowstic.
And something about this just
I just

Meowstic just spins around in the battle with the most judgmental look possible like "hey what the fuck are you doing" to the player

and I just

I just love it

(the reason for this cat turned out to be because the pokemon's form was somehow getting read as higher than a form number that actually exists, so it overwrote the handling to call the backsprite
but like
idk
i just care that meowstic)

Hey guys, did you know?

okay, I'm going to do my best to censor the most explicit parts of this, but I can't not post this for how funny it was.

So one of the QoL features Cass added was the ability to rename your Pokemon from the party menu at any time:

Now I need to introduce you to my friend Dana.
Dana is one of our multi-testers. He is a very typically-polite boy from the reaches of Canada, he has a very soft-spoken voice and doesn't interject or speak over others. For most of multi-testing, he has just kind of sat in a corner of the screen, quietly tending to his monograss playthrough, even when that means breeding an entire army of Roselia to get past Shelly, or filling up six boxes with Pumpkaboo because he really wanted a shiny and just couldn't get one. The rest of the group can be rowdy, shittalking, cursing each other out, tearing their hair out over fights, and Dana will just be there, quietly gardening in the corner. His vibes are very cute, innocent, maybe even sometimes naive.

But I warned people.
No, look here, I warned people well in advance--

So.
Dana was renaming some of his Pokemon,
and he happened to find a cat where, if you use the new rename feature above, the length limit is the normal 12 characters.
But if you copy and paste something into that box instead, it actually works, and gets around the name limit. 

It was like, oh that's kind of neat, but report that please.

And then we all go about our business for a few more.
There's like maybe seven or eight people in the call, four people or so streaming
I'm mainly focusing on some of the players who are further ahead...
And then I notice Dana type into his Eevee's rename box
"Hey guys"
I see his custom cursor click out of the window.
It clicks back in.
He suddenly pastes something--

"Eevee was renamed to..."

it's an entire fucking copypasta.
I cannot post this entire copypasta.
Please be advised it is very explicit.
I am going to censor a couple parts of it, scroll past these screenshots if you're not comfortable with filling in the blanks,
But I can't not show the the few snippets of it I managed to screenshot through everyone in the call suddenly collectively dying of laughter as it became increasingly clear that not only did the game allow Eevee to be renamed to this, but it handles it like a champ and scrolls through every single line of the copy pasta in every instance of the Pokemon being named in a battle.
Like "Eevee used Tackle!"?
Or "Trainer sent out Eevee"?
no, it clicks through every single line of this--

thanks dana.

this is the most unholy thing in existence.
Now, instead of posting the full copypasta, I incidentally found this very wholesome version of it instead and I agree with this whole-heartedly, so I'm going to post this for some soul-cleansing:

Hey guys, did you know that in terms of human companionship, Flareon is objectively the most huggable Pokemon? While their maximum temperature is likely too much for most, they are capable of controlling it, so they can set themselves to the perfect temperature for you. Along with that, they have a lot of fluff, making them undeniably incredibly soft to touch. But that's not all, they have a very respectable special defense stat of 110, which means that they are likely very calm and resistant to emotional damage. Because of this, if you have a bad day, you can vent to it while hugging it, and it won't mind. It can make itself even more endearing with moves like Charm and Baby Doll Eyes, ensuring that you never have a prolonged bout of depression ever again.

this is healing. i've thought this many times. this is why we have heartfire, our plush flareon.
everyone please appreciate flareon.

Lin's true identity is... a rock climb event!?!?

In a recent post, I mentioned that we added in a QoL improvement so if you rock climb twice in the same map it doesn't ask you for confirmation or show the animation or anything, you just nyoom. 

So fun facts about the Rock Climb: Essentials doesn't have a native Rock Climb implementation. Rock Climb was always an event-side implementation (that I stole with permission from Insurgence and made improvement). Being event-side and poorly planned means, chiefly, that every instance of it is disjointed from every other instance, and editing them all is a huge pain in the ass because we had to manually find and edit every single case of Rock Climb in the entire game.
We had to do that multiple times, even, around E18 in particular.

Enter Cass. Cass thinks us having to go edit every event in the game manually is stupid and impractical and she's right. Also, she's the most powerful Earthbender in the world, so she just wrote a script that found, processed, and modernized-into-scriptside every Rock Climb event in the game while preserving their other properties. Honestly incredible, honestly life saving. 

It does this, first, by getting a list of every Event named "RockClimb" in the game, and then checking the contents of those to see which of them are real events as opposed to just graphical, and analyzing the pattern of event commands to determine what parts of that event to yeet into efficient script processing and what parts to preserve so that moving the player across them actually works.

This worked like a charm in 99% of cases. There were like, one or two fringe bits like Hardy's Gym where there's a bunch of bonkers processing going on within the Rock Climb event, and those were super easy to just replace manually. The script was amazing and saved us a ton of time and manual heartache. 

Only,
For some reason,
That I still fundamentally cannot fathom,
It processed the climactic fight with Lin as a Rock Climb event.

Posty was one of our first testers since he is involved with Deos, and he already completed E19 once. So, as he was going back through e19 after a full replay on a later patch, already knowing what should happen at that point, he was very surprised when he stepped into the map to fight Lin, and was greeted with this:

...and then a crash.

The automated rock climb script somehow processed that entire giant event into one (1) script command and deleted most of the entire sequence.
(Thanks to git-fork, it was trivial to recover, this is a non-issue)
There is no reason for this. Her event was not named Rock Climb. There is no hint of Rock Climb anywhere on that map. It just... baffles the mind.
just... hillarious.

But you know what would be funnier than Lin being processed as a Rock Climb event on one off instance?

What if
Lin was processed as a Rock Climb event
twice?

Now, I'm not confirming anything here, but hypothetically speaking,
There could be a second fight against Lin somewhere in the postgame.
And wouldn't it just be hillarious if, for reasons unbeknownst to mankind, that fight also got eaten and processed as a Rock Climb event?

i don't understand.
I truly don't.
But I do love it.

---

that's all for today! As of last night, we've brought in another group of testers, focusing mainly on those making prominent mods and guides in the community to give them a head start on playing and subsequent updates! The forum community staff will be our next and last group for Alpha, and then you all are up for Beta!

Thank you all so much for your support in patience as we hammer out the final cats and polish <3