Tales from Alpha, vol. 3 (Patreon)

 i said i was going to make this post tonight and by golly i am making this post tonight. who cares if it's almost 5 am im doing this :flayndetermined:

i'm also not doing half of this right now, there's like four other things i need to talk about, i think that's just going to become a tomorrow post and we hope that tomorrow actually happens tomorrow

for tonight, cats. we're still going through multi-testing, some of these are a little old, a little silly, and as i started writing this post we just watched a wailord in the battle pavillion full confidence just Dive into a murkwater field, killing itself instantly. it wasn't a trainer class that we expect the AI to care about fields on (so no cat) but it sure was funny and feels very in the spirit to kick this post off.

Salt in the Wound

so one of our favorite stupid additions to e19..... is Bindra.
now i'm not going to tell you that much about Bindra because i believe he is best experienced blind
but it is probably not out of pocket for me to confirm that he is a clown and parodies the grinding trainer indra. i'll also say he isn't in the circus, nor route 2 itself.

only

there was a small issue with him

because i forgot how to brain when i wrote him

when you lose to Bindra, he says this:

...only, because of the way, uh, losing works in this game
(and, for the record, it has always worked this way)
the player scampers off to a pokemon center ... before any of these commands would play.

it's an easy tidy to just make loss forgiven so the dialogue will play naturally, but it was very funny to look over at Dana's screen just after he wiped and see him sitting in the PC room of the agate circus... and see all that "Too bad, so sad!!" lmao loser dialogue
with Bindra's voice clearly taunting him from now like a mile away

Professor Bindra's words echoed in your head..........

Spinda Strikes Back

what are the fucking odds, right.

how could we have another crash with spinda.

we already fixed its form.

we already fixed its sprites.

what could possibly be left.

fucking haunted hollow spinda egg

one crashes the game the other just has a portal to the void

this pokemon is fucking cursed i want out bye

I finished reviving your fossil! As I thought, it was... Ivysaur?!!

so im sitting there minding my business, just watching testing, barbeque sauce on my titties, you know how it goes,
and then i tab into a channel and see AyTales just casually drop

...on another note, I just received an ivysaur when I gave the guy a helix fossil in spinel town

so Azery jumps on and tests this right away, and he's not getting any issues. however, the two of them talking back and forth do find the issue pretty quickly--

in our recent field effect update (psst)  we restructured the field system to detach it from janky global variables for the sake of efficiency and good practice. (psst ame) also, you might remember that puzzle up in teknite ridge where you have to change the weather to wind in order to hop across some rocks (psst ame hey--) and previously that was done by saving the weather at the end of the battle to a global variable which an event on that map would then check to see if
(psst ame hey-- yeah, hi, sorry to interrupt, quick question: why are talking about the field effect system and the tailwind puzzle???? i thought this cat was about fossils

great question, imaginary voice! so the thing is, don't want to be making new global variables willy mcnilly but actually a global variable is still the quickest way to add information to pass from [the ending battle] back to [the rest of the game]. also the internal game variables built into RMXP are all global variables, and they're free, so there's no reason not to just use those.

and also, Essentials reserves a handful of variables here-- like this, see? 

so it's been 10 years, right, and i just kind of assumed those variables were all used somewhere in the scripts for most of that time. but also, we've now torn up the scripts over the past few years and can do things like global search them all and see that, actually, none of those variables are used anywhere in the scripts!

so, we plucked a few of those out and used them for field effect data.

your fossil became an ivysaur.

because global searching the scripts for variables doesn't tell us diddly squiddly about when some random-ass essentials-default event uses them and didn't label the variable.
we set the weather to save for the tailwind event to variable 9.
the fossil checker uses variable 9.
you get the fossil based on the weather outside.
stormy is weather id 2.
ivysaur is weather id 2.
if it rains you get bulbasaur. sand is venusaur, snow is charmander, sun is charmeleon, and wind is charizard.
motherfucker.

we untangle the variables, set them all straight, label them properly this time, baddabing badaboom, we're set.

tick 

tock

tick

tock

tick 

tock

next patch: 

so i didnt even know this text was in the game. 

but it is. it plays it if, for some reason, the game fails to revive your fossil. for instance, if the dev tried to update all the calls in the event to a new game variable because she thought that would be easier than updating the weather side calls (and was wrong), and somehow missed a spot.

just. as a funny, offhand example....

...turns out the daycare was the same way.
daycare lady just crashed your game if you ever changed field effects

lol.

Congratulations! Your Torchic evolved into a cat!

i dont remember what the cause of this one was

something to do with sprites i think? 

i dont know how we fixed it

but cmon

you start an evolution

and then you get a crash

and then the pokemon that was evolving?

it's still there.

twice even.

battle ends?

still there.

he's just there.

he's just c hillin.

he's jsut a littol guy...........

and he lives there now. and scrolls with your screen. and does not go away. ever.

Clangorous Soulyeet

to top it off, here's another one that I can't entirely explain what the issue was-- we were seeing some jank with Clangorous Soulblaze, right? But then when Vulpes took a look, the very act of opening and closing the animation editor itself alone just fixed it... and then it broke each time we compiled the game after that. 

we eventually fixed this by adding a line in to go through some decompression process for animations again, that's new but it was working for a while, for all moves except this and Heat Wave for some ungodly reason, anyway even after fixing it we don't really know why it happened

but i mean

cmon

look at this

you'll notice that the other shuckle did not come back.

he's gone now.

he's dead.

i have no explanations.

that's going to be it for crazy cats for now, and that is probably going to be it for alpha stories. expect another post tomorrow* with some more details updates and developments.