stadium Stadium nicknames and color changes

[Fëanen]

I think most fans who've played Stadium know that nicknamed Pokemon can have different colors. But why? How? After a lot of time and effort, I've worked it out - well, mostly! Since PKHeX was critical to my success, this seems like an appropriate place to share my results. 

My research was thorough and I made sure to explain things in a lot of detail, so the full write-up is in a Google Doc here. But if that's TL;DR (I get it, life is short and the internet is full of content) here's a summary:

The ASCII values of a Pokemon's OT name and nickname are added together, along with the values for the two bytes of its TID. The last byte of the result in hex is what I call it's name value (NV). This is converted into a hue adjustment based on a Pokemon's specifically programmed hue range - an NV of 0 is its minimum hue, and FF is its maximum. It'd take a hacker (I'm not - can't program my way out of a paper bag) to get the exact formula, but I've worked out an approximation that gives results that are at least super-close. Like, closer than the human eye can probably distinguish. I put my formulas into this spreadsheet which can be downloaded or copied to your own Google Drive to find the hue of your own nicknamed Pokemon, but to make use of it you'll need to read at least some of the document.

I've also worked out how Smeargle's DVs effects its colors and why shiny Pokemon can look so different in Stadium 2. It turns out almost all shiny textures are modified using the HSL (hue, saturation and lightness) colorspace, just like the nickname palettes (which only use hue). I wrote down each Pokemon's hue range for nicknames and the HSL values for its shiny in Stadium 2 here. I got these using jrra's patch to re-enable the debug menu in Stadium 2, which has all this info and more.

Finally, I've taken screencaps of every Pokemon's minimum and maximum colors, plus some in-between if there's a big range. For fun, I also took a handful of art, sprites and models and altered them using GIMP's HSL editor to create Stadium-style nickname colors and shinies. My gallery of screencaps and modified art can be found here.

I'm open to comments, questions, and any other feedback. Hopefully some of you will find this interesting, and if you like what I've done, I welcome you to pass it on to anybody else who might like it! I'm also totally cool with my research and pics being freely distributed and used to edit stuff like Wikis so long as credit is given when possible.

Edited January 11, 2020 by Fëanen

[Sizer25]

I don't understand your formula for the smeargle colours. I'm trying to use PikaSav to make 3 smeargles, each of the different colours with match tail and back colours, but I have no idea how to do the math based on what you wrote. Can you provide an easier equation, or an explanation of how to convert the numbers? Or can you tell me what DVs the smeargles should have to get the colours I want?

Fantastic work btw, I think you did a great job!

[Silvalfo]

god, i spent most of my childhood trying to make sense out of this, and there's FINALLY good documentation on it, that indeed works!

(these are nicknames in the Stadium Editor, in which the Trainer name and ID are TRAINER and 000000, respectively.

now on to have fun with red mewtwos and yellow primeapes

[MaxRepell]

@Fëanen

Thank you so much for this valuable document and for the amount of work you have put into it.

I was losing my head trying to find the right nickname for Pikatchu to get rid of that ugly green fur and now, 20 years later, I have my orange fur Pikatchu.

Now I'm struggling to get the first variation of Snorlax from the file you uploaded with all the different colours. Looks like you need an NV of 1 or 2 to get that variation.

Edited April 16, 2021 by MaxRepell