PokéMorph (Discontinued)

[Dapper Gent]

What do you mean "save_as"?

[ValturNaa]

Where you right-click on the image and click on "save image as" in the menu. I use that a lot to get concept art.

[Dapper Gent]

I tried the invisible background trick but it didn't work. I'm thinking that it might be the program I'm using. It's Sketchbook Pro for the Galaxy Note 10.1.

[ValturNaa]

Ahh, a tablet program. I'm not sure how those work, never had an art tablet to play with. You might be able to import it into gimp or photoshop on your computer and get the results. I'm not big into either one, the best I can do there is erase the background.

[ValturNaa]

Okay, a few chat commands I've discovered by experimentation. \. provides a pause, and \! waits for keyboard feedback, while \1 through \9 provides a number of pauses in succession. The higher the number, the longer the pause in game. Typing numbers higher than 9 just results in printing the second number. \m provides middle alignment, \r right alignment. Both can be applied partway through dialogue, which looks bizarre if it occurs mid line. \n prints on a new line, or you can just push enter and write on a new line. I think those are all the ones I've discovered thus far that I know what they do, but Humbird uses others I haven't discovered a use for, such as \s0. Still much to learn ... for instance I have yet to figure out how he made one dialogue box appear at the top of the screen while the next appears at the bottom. This is a useful tool for separating two characters in dialogue and I will continue to search his editor to learn how it is done.
Also have not been able to figure out how to rename important characters.

Humbird also uses a method of separation of maps which I believe your (larger) maps would benefit from. Namely, he puts the town map in the base folder for each region and the building maps in separate folders inside that folder. This reduces item clutter in the editor menu and allows you to quickly find the town map. Houses with multiple parts may also be in a separate folder within the town buildings. I've started working on Pallet to create the intro scene we discussed, and I've moved the maps to fit his pattern (and adjusted the doors to match). It's just easier for me to navigate. I also amended the sprite paths for the characters in Oak's lab apparently you moved them and forgot to fix them in the editor, so they were invisible.

So, yeah, trying to reach a complete first scene. Lots to learn, but I'm learning fast with both your and Humbird's work to study. Hopefully in a day or three I'll be able to zip up the amended maps for your review.

[Dapper Gent]

You're picking this up a lot faster than I am, that's for sure. xP

[ValturNaa]

I also discovered that the chat commands are written at the bottom while you've selected the chat box. (facepalm) going to be reading the hints at the bottom a lot more now.

Copying Humbird0's scripts I've been able to get shopgirl Julia and Nurse Joy both working. Working on the inn now. Still trying to figure out why the trainers aren't showing moves in fights, but I was able to switch out for the correct trainer. Same function should be able to add pokemon to your team list or switch them out, if that's helpful. I put the function on Prof. Oak in my first scene, so it happens as soon as the player moves into the regular game. Still learning and experimenting, but it helps a lot when I put Humbird's game editor side by side with yours and match up the scripts. Doesn't always work ... he tends to use references to other objects a lot, and sometimes it isn't obvious what he's about. Took me till this morning to figure out he had an invisible sprite re-directing talk to a person behind a counter. Lots more to learn before we can make this game to Humbird's level but hopefully together we can unlock the mysteries of this terra incognita

Also still playing with tree layouts. At present my trees tend to overshadow the player in the wrong direction.

[ValturNaa]

Okay, I've written out the complete first scene and submitted it for approval and changes. Still a few bugs to iron out but I think we may expect an update soon.

To really finish it, though, I need a few more sprites. A disguised Damien and Angelica wearing some kind of hood or mask, an excited and/or surprised Bay, and an original Eevee (pre-virus). I need walking sprites and at least one sitting or lying down sprite to really make the scene come together.

[Dapper Gent]

I'm way ahead of you on that. :p I already sent the request to Geist. Minus the cloaked Angelica and Damien, but included sitting and laying poses for the main characters.

[geist]

And i already made a surprised bay (using chrono trigger as a reference) and pre-virus eevee (from mystery dungeon)

[ValturNaa]

Thanks geist. I'll implement these in the scene right away. Managed last night to make a complete switch from Ash to Bay for battles and even got his moves to show up, so I think I'll be able to get a finished form on the pallet events very soon. And I've already submitted my rough-draft scenes to lurker for the Viridian events to get things kicked off. Soon as we iron out the details I'll start building the Viridian scenes.

Just a quick note though ... eevee's right and left are mixed up. I'll try to fix this in gimp, just a note for the future.

[ValturNaa]

By the way, lurker, I've found an easy fix for your background canvas appearing using gimp (totally free if you've never used it). And perhaps a similar technique will work with whatever program you are using.. Using the Fill tool, go to the color selector and use the mode with the printer icon. Set C, Y, M, and K all to 0. Then click in the background. It'll instantly erase the whole background. If there are unconnected background areas (such as the spaces between arms) you'll have to use the tool again in those spaces. I'm going to quickly correct all the work I have of yours.

Edit: Also have to set the fill tool to "color erase" mode, otherwise it just paints white over white. Totally forgot about that until I started looking at Angelican and Damien this morning.

And also, no detail seems to be lost if you reduce canvas size to 300x360, which is much cheaper on space. I cut the storage size of the Bay file by 90% just by shrinking it.

[geist]

Cloaked figure and special poses.

[ValturNaa]

Awesome. Worked these into at least one scene so far. I don't suppose I could also get the cloaked figure lying down and sitting up, when you have the time?

[Dapper Gent]

Just a brief update. Val, Geist and I are working to bring you all a great, unique and fun game. We're hoping to have an official release some time this month, maybe closer to May but we'll make sure there's enough for you all to play around with and enjoy. :]


Edit: On a side note, looking for someone to assist with the artwork. For consistency it must be done in the style of the other pokemorphs. The current list can be found on the third page, if you need the references.

[ValturNaa]

That's us, busy busy busy. I'm happy to say that I have most of the story worked out up to Bay's getting the pokedex and embarking on his ultimate quest, and most of the coding that will be used to tell that story completed, even if I have yet to write the story into the game. I hope to finish this portion by the end of the week and start looking beyond Viridian City on Sunday. It's been a long haul, but I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on handling Humbird's editor. Hopefully that means our progress will be smoother beyond this point.

[humbird0]

I have also figured out by comparing with Humbird's game how to make items disappear when picked up, and not get picked up again.

The sprite's "appearance flag" has to contain no spaces in order to be commanded in the variable menu. This also means the items need unique IDs (I have tested, and with the same ID both objects disappear simultaneously), which is probably why Humbird used !pallet_item_1 and similar for his flags. So, in order to fix the pokeballs and fan art objects in the playground map, I changed their appearance flags to !storage_item_1 and !storage_item_2. Change the last variable command to match this name, minus the !, and press the No Updates button to get Update Sprite Flags. Without all of these steps, the action doesn't work. This appears to make the object invisible plus removing its collision box, so using the set_visible command at the beginning as he does is purely cosmetic.

I actually came up with a neat trick in the previous version of my Pokemon game for handling item pickups without having to invent unique flag names for each one and keep track them. It's kind of advanced and a little mind-bending.
It totally works, but I don't use it often in my own game because I already had a list of all the items so far, and that list was useful for seeing how many items the player would get in any given area. So I've continued doing things manually. But the feature is still there.

Here's the idea behind it.

The theory:

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Suppose each item sprite's "auto" script generates a unique piece of text for that particular sprite? A piece of text that's guaranteed to be different from all other sprites, but will always be the same every time that particular sprite generates it?
Well... each sprite has a different name.



And you can access it by writing [this._name] like so:



Well, that's fine, but what about the other levels?
There might be a sprite with this name in another level.
Well, if you think about it, each level has a unique name too.



Okay, but how can a sprite access that??
Well, by typing [LEVEL.levelData.name] like so:



And if you combined these two pieces of text together, you'd get something like this:
levels\pallet\pallet_town.lvlitem_ball
Don't worry about what it means. It's just a jumble of letters, but what's important is that it's a unique jumble of letters that only this particular sprite, in this particular level would see when it looks at [LEVEL.levelData.name] and [this._name]

Now suppose you created a variable named... that.
Yes, I actually mean doing something like this:

Code: Select All Code

levels\pallet\pallet_town.lvlitem_ball = true

We're going to create a variable whose name is "levels\pallet\pallet_townlvlitem_ball"
This is actually possible. You can theoretically create variables with completely crazy characters in them. Even spaces! (I don't normally recommend it) But there is one thing you cannot put into a variable's name... periods.
(the level's file-path ends with .lvl)
So now we have to remove all periods from the text.
We can do that by using a helper function I built into the game.
The helper function is RAM_F.removeText

(By the way, if you try to use a textbox to display this text to see what it looks like, it won't display right because textboxes use \ for dialog commands like pauses and it'll look like letters are missing. Don't worry, they are still there even if the textbox refuses to show them)

Now granted, after doing this it would be a pain to have to actually type this text in. But we can generate this text and store it in a variable and then just use that variable.
This is where things get mind-bending.
We're going to use a variable to store the name... of another variable.
A name is just text after all.

And THAT... is how you can make a variable named levels\pallet\pallet_town.lvlitem_ball and store the value true inside of it.
[this.variableName] also works in IF commands.

If we can create different variables for each item sprite, we can use IF commands to detect when those variables are already true and remove the sprite.
So instead of using appearance flags, I have an "auto" script that detects a variable and immediately removes the item if that variable is true. Why is this useful? Because it's possible to generate a unique variable-name based on the level path and the item sprite's name.

If you kept the _common.lvl level file in your pokemon game, you should see a sprite named "item_ball" in there which optionally uses this trick. (It also does a bunch of other things)

Here's an example of this technique in action:
How to automatically generate a unique variable for each item and use it like a flag:

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Create a variable named this.autoFlag
Before this sprite does anything else, it'll run this "auto" script first.
And it'll still remember this variable when the player talks to it later.
(I'm only going to talk about the parts that you actually need. You can ignore all that other stuff I added)
You notice how the variable's name starts with "this". That part makes it so that the variable only exists inside of this one particular sprite, and nowhere else in the game.
(When you exit this map, this sprite is erased, along with all variables inside of it)
I set that variable's value to be the file-path for the current level. It's a string of text that's different for each level. It usually looks something like levels\pallet\pallet_town.lvl
Now this.autoFlag contains that text.



Notice how the "operation" is set to a + sign?
That causes the value in the bottom box to get appended to a variable's existing text.
(or adds numbers together if the variable currently contains a number, and the value you're adding is also a number)
I'm tacking-on the name of this particular sprite onto the end of this.autoFlag so that it contains something like this:
levels\pallet\pallet_town.lvlmyPotionBall



Then I use a helper function to strip out all periods from that text so it looks like this:
levels\pallet\pallet_townlvlmyPotionBall
This will be necessary because we're actually going to create a variable using this crazy name, and variable names can't contain periods. (But they can contain just about any other weird characters when we create it the way we're about to)





This part is in the "talk" script.
When you talk to this item, use [this.autoFlag] as the variable name for a new variable and set it to "true"
When you put a [] around a variable name, the game will use the value of that variable instead of the actual text you've typed. So the new variable's name is going to be levels\pallet\pallet_townlvlmyPotionBall
And since it doesn't start with the word "this." the variable will exist along-side all of the other in-game variables. So it'll continue to exist after you leave this map, and it'll exist when you return to this map.





Now back inside of the "auto" script, we want to detect whether the variable named levels\pallet\pallet_townlvlmyPotionBall is already true.



If it's true, then remove this sprite.
When you use a "swf" command to remove a sprite it won't respawn if other sprites in this level change a variable and tell the game to "Update Sprite Flags"
The game will completely forget this sprite exists until you re-enter this map.

[ValturNaa]

Wow, deep. I've started getting into the [this.name]var declarations, but never into the level name. To be honest, up to quite recently the item ball scripts have been completely over my head but I've learned what I could from them. The common room has been an incredible coding resource for me. I'm going to try out this full naming convention technique for our local gym trainers. For items I prefer using your item ball and rock item in the common room .

A brief update for everyone, the code for the first chapter is basically written but we're having some troubles with finding time to playtest it and prep it for release. Hopefully Lurker will be able to find the time soon.

[Dapper Gent]

I'm aiming for next week for our official release day. I'll be running through the playtest tomorrow night. Afterwards I'll be spending my free time trying to pump out a few more sets of pictures. I have had no luck in trying to find another artist.

Thanks for the information, Humbird0!

[bubba91]

I'm aiming for next week for our official release day. I'll be running through the playtest tomorrow night. Afterwards I'll be spending my free time trying to pump out a few more sets of pictures. I have had no luck in trying to find another artist.

Thanks for the information, Humbird0!

Remember you can contact me for any scene you want. I'm open to that.

I just don't want to redo the ingame battles artwork.