Hecto

Not sure about the lab, but Agate Village does tend to tax my emulator a bit, too, maybe a few small slowdowns, and I have an Nvidia 970. The worst is when you do a purification ceremony at the village center. Other than that, though, it's fine. Could be a graphics setting? But it happens so rarely that I don't bother looking for possible solutions.

Not yet. It will be released when it's put on the very first post; right now it still says "Coming very soon..." But since there's no specific date, he's probably still hard at work on whatever new things he's adding. Also, as stated in the first post, save files are unlikely to be cross-compatible with newer versions due to things being moved around, and some parts of the save referring to other things, etc. Thankfully, since updates aren't that close together, you can finish your game in the current version and just start a new one in the next version when you feel the need to play again!

Wow, that's kinda cool that the caves are there, but The Under isn't. It's nice that you were looking into all that, though! I wish I had the know-how to help, but the lowest form of programming I ever worked in was assembly, and it sounds like you're a step deeper, into the hex. I wonder if it would be worth it to put that tidbit of info about the models for Pyrite Caves still being in the game on tcrf, since I don't see any mention of that on the site. What other things are still in the game, but never referenced or used/ dummied out? Are there models for the protagonists of Colosseum still in there, or even the antagonists, like the former mayor, etc.?

Regarding what you could put as a reward for basically "beating the game" aside from Orre Colosseum, maybe Robo groudon, Robo Kyogre, and a Mew that knows Shadow moves? Y'know, like that one battle in the 95+ area. I did NOT expect to see something like that up there! But it makes perfect sense. Also, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being copy-paste easy, and 10 being completely impossible, what are the chances of a mod (not necessarily yours, but mods to this game in general) importing the excluded areas back into the game, like the caves of Pyrite, The Under, and The Deep as postgame/optional content? Seeing as you broke Versus mode, I was wondering if there was more 'free data' to use now, or if that's simply too hard to do with the current tools available. I'm not sure about the mechanics of editing a file like this, only that it seems like you can't "add" more space to the 'disk,' either because that messes with memory calls, or because the original XD already filled the disk to the brim. Edit: Oh, also, just a minor question: Did you ever consider making the 100th battle theme instead be the song that plays in a Vs. Battle? Since it's kinda appropriate, considering the model used, etc. and it's not used anywhere else. Or was that scrubbed along with the rest of the Vs. Mode data?

To reiterate my personal opinion, I think your name changes for the less important NPCs are perfectly fine. I had a good chuckle at "Sailor Noah" and "Sailor Ark" up in Mt. Battle in particular, just off the top of my head. But you're right, the nostalgia for the "well known" names is a strong one, strange as they are. Chobin is a prime example of that--a reaction so strong that before anyone else, he got his name back. I didn't check previous pages to see what the name used to be, but Chobin is the meme of XD. An icon of our childhood with lips for eyes. Also, I'll throw my hat in for really liking the Mt. Battle changes. I don't remember... anything noteworthy at all regarding the original version aside from being a slog through easy, and then progressively tougher, trainers. Changing the theme every five trainers kept things fresh, especially when you battle it progressively rather than all at once at the end (Helpful to handle the difficulty curves. Did you have Mt. Battle in mind when increasing levels for later areas? The jump from the lap to Pyrite was the first real spike I noticed, and that's right when Mt. Battle became available.) The only problem I have with Mt. Battle is that the trainer dialogue hasn't changed, and sometimes refers to their old team. Same for the Colosseum fights. But that's small potatoes compared to the gameplay, but that's my bias toward prioritizing gameplay over story, especially for an engine/difficulty mod like this. And also, despite the Something tells me this is because of something internal, again, like there being no easy or 'worth it' way to replace the model in the overworld. Oh, right! A bug I forgot to mention! I don't know if the rewards for beating Mt. Battle is working.

Oh, oh! I can answer this one! It was mentioned earlier that this is a limitation of XD's internal engine. You might also notice that Discharge also only hits opposing pokemon, compared to how it normally works in the games. I don't know about the inner mechanics of XD, but I do notice a pattern: moves that do not cause status effects (Surf, Earthquake, Magnitude, Shadow Swim, etc.) hit allies and enemies, but moves that have a secondary effect (Muddy Water lowers accuracy, Bulldose lowers speed, Discharge causes paralysis) only hits opponents. I think the flag for "hits ally" is possibly mutually exclusive to the flag "secondary effect" or something, and you can't have both. Maybe they share the same variable and it can only be one or the other. Maybe. Just a guess.

If you need any more info, the Dolphin build is the stable 5.0 release, not a dev build. I also may have clicked out of the game and back into it while it was loading, maybe? I don't remember specifically, but I could have done it. I didn't have any AR codes enabled, as far as I know, and the only one I had installed was one for 999 Rare Candies in the PC item storage (early on I changed my strategy and everybody was too weak to implement it since I hadn't used them, so I gave them a few extra levels.) Aside from that, it was a clean version of the mod.

Nice to see you back! I'll admit that while it's a little unfortunate that Shadow Boom will remain, I'm glad that the pokemon that use it seem to have a higher catch rate (at least from my experience.) and it's pretty easy for a savvy player to guess which ones know it. Also, regarding the Exp. Share issue: After having played through all of the game and all of Mt. Battle, I don't think it's necessary to change it around. The Double Battle system makes it less cumbersome to switch pokemon around when some are getting too weak or too strong, so I wouldn't put changing that as a priority, or even something on the list of things to do in the first place. Also! Here's another glitch that I forgot to mention! It's a weird one, and it might be emulator specific. I fired up OBS and recorded it, but forgot to record sound. But the sound wasn't that important, since it was just the music and stuff playing. I broke Citadark Isle, in the elevator rooms! It happened immediately after the battle against the ambush trainer when you open the chest in the spiral. The first few seconds of a still frame is just me checking OBS and going back to the game. The fadeout at 3:10 is me resetting the game without turning it off, etc.

Boy, talk about a scare. I'm at Citadark Isle, just caught a Blissey, tried to save, and it said that the data was corrupted! I recall making some sort of mistake when saving versus using savestates (don't want to redo something if I accidentally KO a Shadow Pokemon on a turn, etc.) like the playtime was close to each other--something that I avoided--but finally slipped up. I decided to see if the save editor would do anything, but despite being able to edit so much, it seems that you couldn't edit playtime or... whatever else is kept on the save data as a whole. So I decided to just reduce the "number of times saved" counter (as if that'd somehow do something...) and reloaded it.... But oddly enough, it just loaded back into the time I had saved previously. Went back to a savestate that was further ahead, and it appeared that the playtime was actually ahead (38:06 -> 38:18) so I'm not sure what could have caused the corruption. Do we know exactly what they do to check for cheating/corruption in the game? Or is it playtime and I missed something? And if it's playtime, does it somehow check for the past two playtimes or something, and calls it corrupted on the third save, AFTER the conflicting times? But if that's the case, why is it that when I reloaded, it was back to before, and now I can save fine?

I don't mind Summer, but now that I think about it, Shadow Tsunami does sound cooler. If that happens to be too long for the attack text limit, maybe Shadow Flood? Also, I kinda have to agree with Shadow Boom. Either remove it, or make it so the AI doesn't ever choose it / doesn't choose it until x amount of turns or something. I had to resort to savestates just because that was almost always the first attack it wants to do. Alternatively, make Shadow Boom reduce the user's HP to 1/ cut it by a huge amount like 75 or 80% instead. Anything but a pure Explosion clone.

I agree with the above post when it comes to the names. I understand changing the names for the random trainers, because to be honest, the names were kinda weird in the originals. But there's something special about the main character names. Gonzap was such a cool name! And now it's... Black? And Dr. Kaminko is... Dr... Clark? I dunno, man. Maybe keep the names of the non-random trainers the same, regardless of the strangeness. Regarding the writing for Lovrina/Silvina, it was funny for me, but I can definitely see why it would be jarring. The same goes for the flavor text of the Music Disk in Phenac City. The "modernizing" text... I dunno. I don't think it fits, especially if it's making direct, real-world references. The only "modernizing" text change I can kinda agree with is changing Data ROM to SD Card (which, by the way, some text still refers to it as a ROM.)

From what I understand, changing models / textures that aren't already in the game is beyond the scope of this mod. Especially for a protagonist, who has many extra animations, let alone cutscenes. This mod's main attraction is the change in gameplay.

The game crashes and gives me a ton of memory errors when I go into Versus mode, but maybe that's because this game wasn't built to do versus mode? Not a big priority for me. I didn't experience the turn-2 lockup problem, though. Maybe you should use the most recent stable Dolphin build instead? That's what I'm using, and it's the only difference I can figure out between the two of us. Additionally, I came across this hack randomly after finding Paper Mario: Pro Mode. I thought to myself, "Wow! Mods for old Nintendo games are awesome!" Followed by, later on, "I wish Pokemon XD had current-gen physical-special split mechanics. It's the only thing keeping me from playing it again." And then this happens! What an awesome mod! How lucky of me to catch it with all the features already added--from what I understand from your posts, all you have now are minor bug fixes to work on? Very clever renaming Eagun. I mean, we were all thinking it, after all... EDIT: Also, I don't think I saw this anywhere in the changelog, but did you do anything to update the Exp Share item, or is that beyond the scope of the game's engine? It's definitely OP to make it behave as it does in current gens (Participating pokemon get full exp, all others get half) but what if the exp share was split evenly instead, or something similar? For example, if you turn the Share item "on," like a key item, or if you give it to any pokemon on the team, it simply distributes the experience evenly (1/4 to the two participating pokemon, 1/8 to the remaining four?) Now that I think about it, this sounds pretty complex if you want to keep the amount of experience gained overall the same for balancing...