Jambo51's Homebrew Pokémon Engine

[Gamer2020]

Originally Posted by Banjora Marxvile

He said items...

I can imagine that the engine could be adapted for this purpose,I know Jambo is a stickler for detail so you'll most likely get any new evolution items for sure. Not sure about the rest atm.

I meant that there is just data for the Pokemon as far as I can tell.

[Jambo51]

Sorry guys, I've been really busy with University coursework and my honours project so development on this has taken a major back seat.

I plan to add Gen 4 and 5 items where they are necessary. EG, new evolution items, the EV training items are already in, but not game specific stuff, you'll have to add that yourself.

The Kalos Pokémon are partially implemented in the engine too, but some are missing base stats and sprites. Mega Evolution is NOT in the game, and I have no intention of adding it either.

I could do with some help, however, in porting over the move effects and making battle scripts for the engine. Given the sheer number of moves, doing each of them by hand will be an excruciating process!

If anyone's interested in helping me with those, speak to me on RHM or reply to me in this thread and we can discuss what needs to be done.

I've built a lot of framework for the battle engine now, and fundamentally it is quite complete. There's a lot of stuff missing though. There's no bag support (primarily because I've not coded the bag in any way) and there's also no party screen (same reason as above).

[Jambo51]

Sorry for the double post, but I just wanted to say that I've done some work on the Pokédex over the last couple of days. Only enough to have the weight based functions work though. But, for a bit of fun, I put in code to convert the metric values stored in ROM to imperial values for display. This is a setting that can be chosen by the player, so they can see the values in metric m and kg or imperial lbs and ft and inches.

[Slawter]

I've just read this thread, and I'm very eager to see what will come of this.

Now I'm not a programmer in the slightest so if anything I say is inanely obvious I apologise.

In terms of suggestions, the ability for as much easy customisation as possible, along with the ability to expand things without much trouble would be greatly appreciated. (Things such as battleground expansion, overworlds, palettes, extended pokédex, more that just either a male or female to play as, more bag slots etc)

In terms of features, potentially some of the more modern feature such as swarm battles, other than that I am unaware of the newer features as I've not played the recent games.

I posted an idea for ridable pokémon using an overworld with two palettes on pokecommunity to which you gave me an explanation as to why it is unfeasible to implement it in a hack (page 16 & 20, quick research and development). Would your engine be able to support something like this?

[Jambo51]

Originally Posted by Slawter

In terms of suggestions, the ability for as much easy customisation as possible, along with the ability to expand things without much trouble would be greatly appreciated. (Things such as battleground expansion, overworlds, palettes, extended pokédex, more that just either a male or female to play as, more bag slots etc)

Engine is open source and can be directly modified at source level to add new Pokémon etc.

Originally Posted by Slawter

In terms of features, potentially some of the more modern feature such as swarm battles, other than that I am unaware of the newer features as I've not played the recent games.

Not even close to enough screen space to deal with swarm battles. Same applies to triple battles. Technically, by moving objects around, it may be possible to have a single object on screen at any given time and handle the logic for it, but it would be exceptionally difficult to do.

Originally Posted by Slawter

I posted an idea for ridable pokémon using an overworld with two palettes on pokecommunity to which you gave me an explanation as to why it is unfeasible to implement it in a hack (page 16 & 20, quick research and development). Would your engine be able to support something like this?

Link to the actual comment, if possible? I don't have time right now to search through pages and pages of posts to find the one you want. By the sounds of it, this would also be very very hard, but theoretically possible.

[Slawter]

Here's the comments.

Originally Posted by slawter666

Now this has probably posted before but I couldn't find it and it seems like a fun feature: Riding pokémon like in the upcoming games.

I'm not too well versed with programming but my idea is as follows:

My idea would be to have a bit for each pokémon that determines whether it is "ridable" or not. On the menu where you can view the pokémon's stats, held item etc there would be a check for this bit and if it is the value that means its ridable a ride option would appear, if not it wouldn't. Once selected the appropriate overworld would be loaded determined by something unique to each pokemon (id number?) and all would be great. Obviously going through this step everytime you want to ride a pokémon would be tedious so this feature could replace the bike. The last pokemon you rode could be stored somehow so when you press select the game would look to see if that pokémon was in your party and if not it would just load the regular bike sprite.

There would need to be a lot of custom overworlds made but the HGSS pokemon overworlds could be used for now.

As I said previously I'm not familiar with coding so various details could be wrong/far more complicated than I made out.

Something similar could be done with surf I guess.

Has anyone considered/attempted this before? I do think it would make a very interesting feature.

Originally Posted by slawter666

Is it possible for an overworld to use two palettes? I've been thinking about the idea of hacking the bike routine for ridable pokemon (Page 16 of this thread) and the pokemon and hero would need seperate palettes for the sprite to look good.

Originally Posted by Jambo51

Without significant hacking of the game, no. The GBA is technically able to support such a sprite, but you would need to have intimate knowledge of the OAM system and how the palettes can be used in such a manner.

Basically, no, you can't do it.

Originally Posted by slawter666

What classifies as an OAM-palette? Because if it's just overworlds it would be easy enough to make it so each map only has a maximum of 14 overworlds with different palettes (leaving one for the player and one for the bike-pokemon).

EDIT: A workaround could be when the bike is selected create an overworld of the pokemon on the same spot that mimics the players movements. From the players point of view this would be exactly the same as if it is one object.

Originally Posted by Jambo51

You're not getting it, sadly. While it IS possible to do, and in fact should be fairly simple from a coding standpoint, it's not something that can feasibly achieved as a hack to an existing game.

The GBA renders objects on a per object basis. Meaning that data for one object can be interpreted differently to another. You could feasibly store the bike sprite as an 8bpp image and then tell the GBA (using the OAM data) to interpret it as such, while leaving all other images in their native 4bpp format and having no ill effects.

The trick to this is that doing so as a hack is a lot harder than you would initially think, especially as you'd have to do it as a hook into the existing sprite object code for the bike.

I wasn't ever saying it wasn't physically possible, simply trying to get it across to you that it's not really feasible as a hack within the Game Freak developed system, since that system relies on the sprites being in 4bpp format.

[Jambo51]

Ah yes, I remember now. Thanks for that. Well, yes, this is something I'd ideally like to achieve with my engine since it gives that extra flexibility to the end users. I may not directly implement the system you want, but I'll do my best to make sure that it can be implemented fairly easily.

[Slawter]

Perfect. That's exactly what I was looking for, the ability for as much customisation as possible.

Has there been any progress on this recently?

EDIT: How will the tiling system work for mapping, will it work exactly the same as gen III games, or will there be slight variations?

[Black Charizard]

First of all great project!
It would be great to have no limitations when creating a game in the GameFreak style
In what language is the engine coded if I may ask? C? C++? Or?

[Jambo51]

Originally Posted by Slawter

Has there been any progress on this recently?

Sadly no. I've not long finished university and I've been concentrating on writing my CV and developing my game instead of this. The fact that text rendering has broken too isn't helping.

Originally Posted by Slawter

EDIT: How will the tiling system work for mapping, will it work exactly the same as gen III games, or will there be slight variations?

It's similar, but not identical. Obviously, hardware limitations dictate just how much you can actually do with the tile system. The tiles themselves are all but identical, albeit I render them in a slightly different way.

However, tile animations are very different and significantly easier to add than the vanilla gen 3 games. If you've ever used Lu-Ho's tile animation hack, it's very similar to that in this engine.

Originally Posted by Black Charizard

First of all great project!
It would be great to have no limitations when creating a game in the GameFreak style
In what language is the engine coded if I may ask? C? C++? Or?

It's written in C, although I am now starting to consider redoing it in C++ from scratch. C, while powerful, has a large number of issues for a project like this which I am having trouble getting around.