New user, first impressions and a legality error

[JustHere4Coffee]

After using Showdown and Discord bots to make a few new critters, but wanting to explore further than using batch commands will allow, I have this week made the jump into using PKHeX to directly meddle with the files. So far I've found it pretty good, but I have one particular niggle with the interface and I just found a legality error in 22.3.01 and 22.3.18 (I found it just before the new release dropped and have confirmed it is still in the new version).

With regard to the interface:

The first best piece of advice I see anyone give, and have been giving to others, is use the Encounter Database; however, now I've used it myself, I can understand why some people have forgone this option on their first attempts. It's great to see everything possible pop up, but there's no obvious way to make use of that info once it appears. it would make much more sense to use a double-click on the one they're interested in to transfer it to the editing window, rather than right-click and View. There's no hint that this accomplishes anything, the window you're looking at remains completely unchanged and when I was trying to figure it out I just assumed it was an unfinished feature of some kind until I looked at my second tutorial and (due to being a video) it fortunately included that step.

Legality error:

In SwSh, Pikachu can learn Surf from TR04. I haven't exhaustively tested every possible Pikachu from the Encounter database, but those I have tried which originated in SwSh have al considered an illegal move.

Keep up the fantastic work, tools like this deserve to flourish!

[Kaphotics]

8 minutes ago, JustHere4Coffee said:

In SwSh, Pikachu can learn Surf from TR04. I haven't exhaustively tested every possible Pikachu from the Encounter database, but those I have tried which originated in SwSh have al considered an illegal move.

When learning a TR move, there is a flag set in the Technical Records list. Not having the flag = TR was never used, thus illegal. Working as intended.

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Slot viewing in the encounter database is the same as viewing slots from boxes. You can either right click for the context-menu, or you can use the same modifier keys as the box slots (control will view).

[JustHere4Coffee]

I shall preface this that none of this is meant to be in any way accusatory or harshly worded or over critical, just stating what I can and cannot do when trying to interact with the program. Tone is always hard to convey, I could pepper this with smileys but they'd feel out of place.

Thanks for the explanation about how to apply TR moves. Perhaps then the error should be "TR not selected" rather than "illegal move"? I can understand not wanting the app to automatically toggle that state when you add/remove the move, as that may not be an intended consequence. I'd installed ALM, but it's not as A as I'd expected; that also helped fix it and I shall know how and when to trigger in future edits.

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I don't have any pokémon in boxes, I'm not using a dumped file from a Switch, so I have no idea what options might be available from left or right clicking on anything in those areas. I had no idea what modifier keys may exist for interacting with them, as I could see no examples in the app to show me. (I have now found that list, will return to that lower down) As the context menu in the Encounter database consists solely of View, the same applies - no idea what if any modifier keys may be expected to perform any given task, nor any idea what those tasks might be. But if I did have saved Switch data, I would be able to see a change if I right-clicked and picked View, as the slot data wouldn't be obscured by the menu I was using, whereas I had no feedback that doing this in the Encounter database made anything happen.

I natively use a Mac, which is why I have taken a while to get around to using PKHeX directly. On a Mac ctrl-click is interpreted as right-clicking, and there's no easy way to disable this; there's not really a hard way to either, Mac software is designed to avoid having to do so. Through the set-up I'm using (Mac controlling a Windows PC running PKHeX), ctrl-click accomplishes nothing at all - it doesn't emulate a right-click, and it doesn't select a slot for viewing as I believe you're suggesting. I see there's quite a few ctrl+click options, all of these are also unavailable. Obviously I'm an edge case and I recognise that, aside from guaranteeing Xor1 shiny selection I don't think there's anything that I can't access in another way though, which is great and shows the amount of thought that has been put into this interface.

Regarding the shortcut list, having it as a sub-menu in the About section means you can't keep the list open for reference when using the app. My short-term memory is absolutely terrible thanks to ADHD, I will eventually remember things after multiple repetitions but without being able to have something to refer to my chances of learning these drop considerably. Could it possibly be set so we can keep it open, like the encounter list? Perhaps also wordwrap could be enabled or the size of the windows expanded, as the text flows outside the current area.

(I am very glad this board caches entered messages. This took a while to get down and I almost lost it.) 

[Kaphotics]

1 hour ago, JustHere4Coffee said:

Perhaps then the error should be "TR not selected" rather than "illegal move"? I can understand not wanting the app to automatically toggle that state when you add/remove the move, as that may not be an intended consequence.

The logic that is currently implemented in the moveset validator does not check for what the user did wrong, it only checks for what is allowed with the current values. Adding in extra logic to guide the person who made a mistake takes more developer time (& CPU time too). The main goal of the legality checker is to check if things are legal, not to indicate every corrective action (as one size does usually not fit all).

 

1 hour ago, JustHere4Coffee said:

Regarding the shortcut list, having it as a sub-menu in the About section means you can't keep the list open for reference when using the app.

You can select all text in the textbox and copy it to an external notepad editor, or you can check the shortcuts.txt via the source code on GitHub.

 

1 hour ago, JustHere4Coffee said:

I natively use a Mac

This is a Windows Forms application; these kind of apps are for Windows systems but can be run with Wine/etc on Linux and Mac. Certain experiences are not tailored to be multi-platform where right clicking does not exist. Using a virtual machine may help. Not sure how worth it is to make hotkeys/shortcuts configurable, since that would require changing a lot of things around

[Atrius97]

4 hours ago, Kaphotics said:

The logic that is currently implemented in the moveset validator does not check for what the user did wrong...
The main goal of the legality checker is to check if things are legal, not to indicate every corrective action (as one size does usually not fit all).

As an example, an illegal move may be possible to correct by leveling up the Pokémon, changing the form, adding it as a Relearn/Egg Move, by checking the TR/Moveshop flag for it, etc.
Without context of the user's intentions, there's no logic that could point out one specific option and direct the user to do it, and listing "any and all potential fixes" would be a nightmare.