StarsMmd

I have a question - are the nature/IVs assigned to shadow Pokémon still being severely limited by the Pokémon before it? What happens is, the Pokémon are generated in order, and for whatever reason, the unmodified game decides to check each PID for the non-shadow Pokémon, and reject it if it doesn't fit their assigned nature/gender, or is shiny. This limits the possible spreads on the next Pokémon severely - a single 50% gender ratio Pokémon before the shadow one will cut the available spreads from 2^32 to 1/50th of that (1/25 for matching nature, then 1/2 for 50/50 gender). Since even 2^32 possible IV/nature combinations don't yield every single possibility, the nature/gender lock of non-shadow Pokémon really hurts.

I imagine it would be easier to make the shadow Pokémon get generated first than to add a function that would modify the PID of the non-shadow Pokémon to fit their assigned nature/gender. Colosseum actually does the former for many Pokémon - notably the gen 2 legendary beasts are generated first, allowing for all 2^32 possibilities.

I've actually heard of this issue before but I haven't made any changes that would ameliorate the pid generation. I guess I'd have to rearrange the teams so that all the shadow pokemon are first. The AI doesn't necessarily send the pokemon out in the order that they are specified so it may still work out. That wouldn't be too hard to do programmatically. The alternative would be to make all trainer pokemon have a random nature, gender and ability each battle but that would create a lot of inconsistencies. I'll add it to the todo list

You tha man! Also umm.. eta on Battle Bingo? my battle bingo needs are wanting :bidoof:

I'm thinking of spending the day on it tomorrow. I have some ideas down on paper but nothing coded into the game yet. So once I have an idea of how long the process will take I will update you

Hey dude. Not sure if you saw this already, but found some guy on youtube playing your mod. Now watch as he gets nearly annihilated by Cuddles. mwahahaha. He's playing on basically your first version though. Thought you might appreciate the share.

 

I've made it past Phenac city myself. fancyhair had a really strong team too x.x

Also, curiosity gets the best of me so I have to ask. (Maybe put the reply as a spoiler) But what level can I expect the final fight to be? Is it still the same? Thanks so much for the opportunity to play this like this with this mod. And stuff.

Yeah, I've been following the series. I even managed to catch some of the live streams. Jet actually messaged me to let me know about the series and I try to follow as many playthroughs of XG as I can so I can see what needs improvement. Thanks though

I got to the part with phenac city and the music disc thing. You should have changed the sound file! heh. heh heh.

Yeah, that's a good idea actually. Will see what I can do

I noticed when training Murkrow, Hypnosis does not proc prankster, even though all the other status moves such as W-o-W, Roost, Swagger, etc all proc.

Whoops, my bad. Just fixed it for the next version. Thanks!

The fact that you gave Cuddles the Moonlight move displeases me .____. I got it down to like 1% hp like 6 times and Cuddles healed to half each time lol. But I guess it was my own fault for thinking a rash nature Jolteon with a helping hand hyper voice would do just as well in that fight then all the ones before it, haha. Really good rom hack though, it's much less annoying without every trainer having protect on their pokemon. Can confirm. I almost lost that fight and had to revive my jolteon, and its hyper voice saved my butt.

??? I wasnt sure if recovery moves would even be useful in double battles so that's pretty funny to hear.

So I fixed some bugs in the program and rewrote all the scripts to make them much faster, pretty much removing any waiting time. It's not that this is really good code now ( maybe it is, I wouldn't know), just a whole lot better than what I wrote before.

The only part that's not been tested by me or someone else is the insertion of soundeffects because I wouldn't know where to find them in the game.

Jar Download

Again, if there are any problems using it, especially when something doesn't work , just ask me about it.

Great, I'll check this out when I get home ?? thanks

Hey StarsMmd,

since our talk yesterday on Jetsplits Stream - I had some Idea's how Teams could looklike for Postgame Shadow's in Colosseum Orre.

Most of the following Team Comp's are either built around 1 Topic or go for straight up Fighting Power.

To make this Fights more tough it would be cool to script the item usage the way that it only allow's to throw balls - so healing is still banned.

I know alot of the Shadow's included in here have a current Spot but i got idea's to fix the missing Spot's - Just would need a List of the Fight's / Teams.

This Team's are only the one's that contain Shadow's by themself - if you wish I could bring up some redesign for the whole Rounds.

-> WARNING THIS POST MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS <-

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

Round 6

Round 7

 

Some cool ideas but I realised there are just too many issues with adding shadows to orre colosseum TT-TT

1. You can't use items, including pokeballs

2. Being forced to use 4 pokemon since they are chosen at random

3. Keeping track of whether the pokemon has been caught yet and scripting the game to use a different team if so

4. The levels in orre colosseum match the level of the player's strongest pokemon so the shadow pokemon's level would vary between different attempts

Back to the drawing board for me!

Update - Couldn't find any ups patcher other than the two mentioned, so I used Unipatcher on my Android phone. Only enough it worked! Thanks again for attempting to help out. Now let me go enjoy this amazing hack!

Great! Glad you got it to work in the end. Enjoy

Alrighty, I'll see what I can find. Thanks and keep up the great work!

Thanks, let me know how it goes!

Hello, and thank you for the quick response. To answer your question it is the ISO that it can't seem to find.

Someone else had a similar problem on a different forum. They said they fixed the problem by using the same files on a different computer. They couldn't get it to work on 32 bit windows 7 but got it to work on 64 bit windows 7 apparently.

You can also try a different UPS patcher other than tsukuyomi or NUPS and see what happens.

Hi I am having a problem regarding patching the game. I am using NUPS as stated but when I try to patch i get "error opening file" message. Think anyone can help?

Does it mention which of the files it can't open? Is it the ISO or the patch?

Oh boy, seems like it's even more work than I first anticipated lol. No wonder why Colosseum shinies are so notoriously hard to find. I could have sworn shadow pokemon retain shininess when purified if they already were shiny, but I trust what you are saying is true. It's going to be a lot of work regardless, but I will probably end up trying to get them anyway. Thanks for the replies again!

Yeah it's a lot of hard work but it would be pretty impressive if you pulled it off. Good luck!

When you first encounter the shadow pokemon it's shininess is determined using the opponent's trainer ID. After purification the shininess is recalculated using the player's trainer ID. This means that even if it's shiny when you catch it, there's only 1/8192 chance of it still being shiny after purification. If it wasn't shiny when you caught it, also has the 1/8192 chance of being shiny after purification. So if you want it shiny after purification you won't know until you purify it. If you're aiming to reset the game until they're shiny, you'd have to get all the way to purification before resetting. If you only care about them being shiny while they're shadow pokemon then it doesn't matter.

Maybe you could use a save editor to change your TID just before you purify it and choose a TID that will keep the shininess. I doubt anyone would judge you for that after all the effort of resetting for it.

The PID of the pokemon is set the first time it is used in battle so you would have to reset without saving. I think if you manage to lose to him before he sends out the metagross then it might possibly work. I don't know if it's set when the battle starts or when it is sent out but more likely when the battle starts so I doubt it would work but you can test what happens if you lose before the shadow pokemon comes out on another trainer to see.

Hello everyone, I know it's probably going to take a while to get a response to this most likely but I wanted to ask a question. Is getting a shiny Nascour's Metagross or Evice's Tyranitar possible? I'm fairly certain all of the shadow pokemon can be found shiny under rare circumstances (excluding the Japanese E-reader events since they have fixed values I think), but I have to make sure first before I play through English Colosseum again and start spending a whole load of time trying to get either of these lol

I'm pretty sure they can be shiny. Of course it's really difficult with it being 1/8193 chance and the shiny glitch in colosseum complicates things further

So uh. I started with a shiny beldum, is that intended? Cause that was neat.

Yup, it's a copy of the oras shiny beldum event. It was actually meant to be shiny in previous versions but I made a slight error. It's now always shiny

I'll see if I can find something, I don't really see a reason for that info to be outside the file, but maybe there's some kind of table in a different file that has loading data like the number of textures for every Pokemon for some reason .

Yeah that would be a pretty crappy design choice and quite problematic for us. It's unlikely they did anything that weird though so I'm hoping something convenient turns up.

There are also some models that contain RGBA8 textures, but I'll just have to adjust the amount of bytes read per pixel.

I also (probably) confirmed ( not that it was hard, I was just lazy ) that the first pointer doesn't always poin to the first texture pointer, so the information on what the pointers in the main table point to is probably stored elsewhere (maybe even still in the file).

That complicates things a little. The exact pointer has to be somewhere since the game knows how to handle it. Maybe there's a pointer to the pointer. In the ones where we know the first pointer points to the texture we can see if there's a pointer to that offset (factoring in the header).

Well, thanks for reading such a long post! Yes... Citedark has a huge number of shadows, and it takes time to purify them, so it is hard to use them. But well, this is Pokémon , the way it is designed means only a few Pokémon are available early on, I like it, for having almost everything available early it is better to play a GBA hack with tall grass, caves and Wild Pokémon everywhere. But the philosophy of is different. Catching strong shadow Pokémon is cool and you can always make Mt. Battle quite challenging for those that want to use them (by the way in your game I went to Mt. Battle to purify the brothers shadows and when I saw lv 25 I immediately got out of there!) I have beaten probably 5 or 6 times and I never had a problem building a team I liked. Here is the same! In your game I only know of 12 Pokémon and I am already thinking about playing it again after beating it to do it with a different team! (If it is an updated version even better! xP). I think Eevee as a starter helps to do this as well.

I think my list is a bit too long, I tried to cover almost everything and I ended up making trainer after trainer have shadows... Curious I took similar decisions because I didn't open your list, I didn't want to have spoilers for my gameplay of XG!

Well, that's it! They say your tutorials are amazing, so who knows, maybe this list with its broken Steelix (poor guy! Even with 255 base defense, it cannot take Flamethrowers or Hydro Pumps!) can be something else other than a bunch of text and ideas!

Yeah, I could tell from the way you wrote your explanations that you haven't seen my list and you mentioned you hadn't gone very far in the game so it's really cool to see we had similar ideas in places. I hope there will be hack tools soon to make it easy for everyone to do. I'd be sure to play yours if it is ever produced

while i realise its been a few weeks since since anyone has replied, i figured i'd make a request anyway. I dont suppose you'd be able to randomize one for me? Pretty much the same as the top one on the main page where trainers pokemon are randomized. moves randomized, and trade evolutions set for level 40 etc. the only thing i really want, is for the starters to remain as Espeon and Umbreon. (well mostly just Espeon, dont really care about the other one). As i use windows, its kinda hard for me to use the randomizer to be that specific haha.

Sorry for the late response! I'll see what I can do

Well, after a week working on the list, I can finally post it here. It's tough making a list, I like so many Pokémon that I end up putting them so the list is very long, 127 Pokémon actually... I was a bit crazy, especially in the last 2 dungeons of the game.

Well, this was long. Now I can play your game! I left it after purifying the 6 brothers Shadows... Time to play again! By the way I am Mochorro in the other forum .

This was a lot of fun to read through. It's clear you put a lot of time into it! We actually made a lot of similar decisions with things like pokespots and bonsly. It's interesting that you put both larvitar and tyranitar in. I had them both at the same points in the game in previous versions for the exact same reasons you did but it was probably the most complained about thing by players so I changed it in the end.

The huge number of shadow pokemon on citadark isle is pretty troublesome though. I'm actually aiming to reduce the number in the next update of XG. Also I feel like a lot of the pokemon in the early game are quite underwhelming, especially a few of the admins' shadow pokemon. A lot of really popular pokemon are left until citadark by which point it's often too late to use them and with XG's really poor postgame they don't get much screen time. On the bright side it does mean that there's more of an incentive to try out new things which is fun too!

A lot of really cool ideas! I hope you enjoy XG

Your steelix stats look really broken btw !

Another thing, the stuff the first pointer in the main pointerlist points to looks very different in the overworld files.

*EDIT: I'm pretty sure the first pointer in the overworld files doesn't point to texture pointers.

*EDIT: Also reading the texture pointers of the Battle model files might be more complicated than I thought it would be...

SO I'll have to find a way to reliably read and stop after I read all the texture pointers (finding them is not so hard because they're all in the main pointer table, there might be irregularly many pointers between the texture pointer pointers though( I'm not sure)) and find out where the texture pointers are in the overworld files.

But I can't think of aything for the stop point right now, so I'll take a break till tomorrow, maybe you can think of something, this is what I tried : Link

Looks like you've put a lot of work in. I'll take another look and see if anything stands out.

I could compare the png files the libarary gave you to the ones the other program creates if you send me one.

I could also probably directly write them in the format you have if they're different.

*EDIT: Apparantly java supports png to bmp and bmp to png natively which will probably save me a lot of trouble.

Cool, I'll send some examples when I get home. ??

The library gave me 32 bit rgba with 8bits per channel. I'm not sure if that's how png stores the data or if the library converted it to that format. I divided the values to get the required format which was 5 bits per rgb and 1 bit alpha channel.

If you know how to reduce palette sizes of exisiting Palette based files it could work, I'd just need code to convert to and from png. maybe I can think of a way for the CMPR files but your code for conversion of png to palette based could be useful even if it is Mac only, I could probably still rewrite it into java.

I'll upload my source code on github later. I used an iOS library to convert the png to the raw pixels as a bitmap. I started with an empty palette and for each pixel, if it's colour was in the palette I would use that as the index. If it was a new colour then I just add that colour to the palette. When the palette was full I would stop adding colours and give an error message. I don't know too much about the png format but if you can at least find a method of converting it to a bitmap then the rest is really straightforward.

For it to work I'd have to put all in one format (probably png) and that wouldn't solve any of the present problems like Palette size limitations. It would also mean I'd have to save location of the files, thier type and other needed data seperately. I don't really see how that simplifies anything.

Yeah I thought as much. If it was all in the same format it could have been feasible. I guess the best course of action is to have something that takes a model file, locates the textures, extracts them as pngs and then has the option to replace the textures if the new texture has a palette that fits. Using the same palette size as the original isn't too difficult usually.

So if you already have that, waht should the program be able to do? I haven't written anything yet because it's been a bit unclear what you want it to do.

It would be useful to have a program that can extract the textures from models and to replace them directly in the model files with an edited png. I was wondering how feasible it would be to just dump one large image from the models that contains all the textures in one. It could be easier to extract and reimport that way.