andracass

oh my. so my answers are going to be complicated by the fact that we're rewriting the entire AI for e19. some of the things here aren't quite set in stone because of that. it'll still be similar to how it runs now, but i don't know that for sure since it, *coughs, doesn't work yet (moving this to the top) i'll say things like "generally" and "should" a lot because there's almost nothing that the AI is required to do, nor do we have 100% certainty of what it will do in a given situation. we feed it some information, it does some processing, it makes a decision. if it's a bad decision for the situation, we tweak the numbers a little. they are! each trainer class has a "skill" assigned to them. they generally break down into four categories: low, medium, high, and best. the way it's supposed to work: low skill trainers know about moves and status effects. they don't remember any of your moves. medium skill know about abilities and items. they remember the last move you used. high skill.... uh, knows about some more niche battle things? i'm actually not sure, and i've gone through the ai several times. they remember all the moves used by your current mon. best skill knows about field effects. they remember all the moves that all of your mons use. we dunno how much of this system will be retained for e19. i'm frankly not sure it's the most consistent to begin with. in general, trainer skill levels improve as you play the game. bosses are always at best skill. it looks like they are. yeah, aces are generally held for last. there are some cases when this is effectively mandatory for story reasons (pulse-magnezone). "generally" here means that the AI is situationally discouraged from sending out their ace unless it's essential to do so (which should happen in your example). dammit. so, uh, it kinda does! on accident. i thought we had fixed the issue with damage rolls miscalculating, but perhaps we didn't fix it entirely? higher skill levels should not have this issue. if they do in e19, it'll need to be fixed. so i alluded to this in the skill section, but yes- it remembers your moves based on skill level. it'll remember moves based on your mon's party index, so you can't fool it with duplicates. as for abilities..... setting up a system to guess what ability your mon has would be a lot of work. so the AI gets to just... know what it is. the justification for this is that you'll generally know what ability the mon has in a competitive setting and the skilled trainers will just know that. i'd say this is accurate in basically 95% of cases; some, like heliolisk, have multiple good abilities, so the AI technically shouldn't be sure. the AI should not be using moves that fail unless the information isn't accessible to them (for skill reasons, etc) i don't think it has a preference beyond that. technically it's only 42k!!!! but, yeah, either RMXP or gemini would be useful for viewing it. the code file is scripts.rxdata in the data folder. i do not recommend going through the AI code. on top of being stupid massive, it's not the most readable. we've cleaned it up a lot, and the e19 version looks like it'll stay under 10k lines. dream mentioned a scoring system; basically what happens is we have a lot of "checks" that the AI looks for, and each of those checks has a multiplier attached to it that changes the score. if you're asleep, you want to use sleep talk, so we boost the score for that. if your opponent is burned, you don't want to use sparkling aria on them, so we drop the score. the multipliers are subjective based on how positive/negative the effects are. there's a huge boost in the sleep talk situation, but in the sparkling aria one it's much smaller. deso uses our code. they'll also have the updated code when it's ready. i don't know what rejuv is doing these days. i've basically already said this, but yeah, the AI will cheat on this. it's for technical reasons, and the in-game justification holds up reasonably well, so fixing this would fall well under most of the other priorities for the game. the AI doesn't cheat on this. sucker punch basically comes down to a guessing game. it's one of a few parts of the AI code that actually uses RNG in its scoring. i'm definitely putting off other work for this, but i like talking about my code. someday there'll be a big devblog post about all the stupid shit we're putting in the e19 AI. until then, this'll have to do. also, for the record, i appreciate just having questions about the AI. there are a lot of people who just complain about it acting odd and don't try to understand why or anything.

i don't think there's a case that changing "swag jockey" is even worth considering. for one thing, we have a lot of changes planned and fern's title is absolutely inconsequential compared to... well, nearly all of them. for another, the fact that "swag" hasn't aged well makes it more appropriate, if anything. who the fuck calls themselves "swag jockey"???? in 2021?????? this kid does. he deserves every one of those question marks.

there are multiple phases of testing so that more severe bugs get caught early and don't have to be suffered through by subsequent phases

probably not. followers already run on a hope and a prayer, and we'd have to make follower graphics for 810 mons.

the sidequests are just a grab bag of shit we decided to make.

just the stats. no one's got time to update movesets............ yup better idea i'll make them more expensive but also re-usable it'll come in e19......................... like, this is the kind of thing that bums me out a bit too, but if i have to keep track of scripts in multiple versions and multiple games i think my brain will explode.

hi i don't mean to dump cold water on some of y'all but it's still gonna be a bit before release yet

that's basically the plan. the main story will be mostly wrapped up by the time you beat the game. postgame's going to be there to have fun. right now it's kind of like a bunch of mini-episodic segments strung together. it'll be a bunch of different sidequests.

this dev blog post has shown me that there are a lot of people who have come to equate "tedium" with "difficulty". i suspect those people will probably be proven wrong, but i suppose no one will really know until the game comes out... this feels like a stretch, though. did you know that the final tournament doesn't have a single mon with held items? it's true!

i'd be open to this. there are still the EV reset discs available after the city gets restored... uh oh.............................................................. so......................................................................................... we already have that............................................................................................................................................................................................ it's not remotely as early as i think you're hoping, but it is earlier! same. maybe i'll make a hard mode but it just causes more grinding pain. ev's only work if you have 8 of them, and you only gain 1/4 EXP... could bundle that with the 0IV mod........

we don't have that yet. it'll be an option in e19!

i... there... isn't? what? where does this come from? for one thing, i explicitly talk about how the difficulty is one of the main draws of the game anyway. it's one of my main draws to the game. god what do think we're doing, giving you cresselia before the first gym? more options do not inherently mean "easier". the idea that we're going to work on a game this long just to break it at the end is really something. a tiny handful of additional pokemon being available in early game is not the end of the world. please reconsider. can i stop you right there? i think i've heard that one before. it may come as a surprise, but we actually don't want that and have been working on the ai for the better part of a year now. might i suggest reporting bugs rather than bitching about them? i wanted it to be cut shorter, personally. if you want to do pickup grinding, that's your prerogative. you can also, in fact, still do that. i suspect that once e19 comes out, a lot of the "difficulty" complaints are going to disappear into dust, but this post will continue to exist as a reminder of the worst of them. yes! also yes. kinda still figuring all of that out, but main game will run up to level 100 and post game will run up to 150. probably. we'll tweak it if 150 is a problem. oh dear. so i dunno how to tell you this, but we've had multiple saves implemented for a little bit now... you should just be able to pull the most recent version and use them for the most part, wild encounters are going to be the same. the new mons will be added as events/trades. we won't be removing anyone! this'll just be bonus mon availability. have i missed something? is everyone secretly using delibird as a mainstay in their teams? i am so confused. why do people think this is going to change? just because it's not kricketune doesn't mean i'm giving you a broken-ass mon the moment you step out of opal. c'mon now.

pfffffft sure

this is a no for two reasons: 1. exp shares will be accessible more than once. you can buy them in the dept store too. 2. you're going to have an exp all now. i even mention people accidentally trading off their exp share as another benefit to the exp all. some people just don't read............ yes so that's actually not quite a for-sure thing. i think the workload for easy mode is different than the workload for hard mode. there also aren't mods that exist for it either. i'd say there's a small chance for it still.

Scripts.rxdata the scripts are made entirely out of jank, but i think this'll work.

snip snip Scripts.rxdata

they will be slightly different you'll probably want to start from the top again i think there's still a password for base hard mode, but it's permanent. so, technically, you can just forgo all the new improvements here. just don't use the exp all and stuff. sure, you can have a no. it's the first one! it's practically an honor. so i've made, like, 10+ quick mods for e18.4 and, as far as i know, none of them will work with e19. that does not mean that they won't work- i'll just need a reminder to remake them when we release.

i originally wanted them to give 64 EVs each battle. had to be convinced not to do that. see, i agree with you there, but man are people gonna have some regrettos in their spaghettos when postgame rolls around. at a level cap of 150, you'd have to fight 2.25x the number of mons to level up compared to level 100. if you enjoy tedium, then sure. the level cap isn't going away; game's still gonna be hard.

i like this. i'm not sure i know how to do it... but i like it.

nothing here should make the game easier, it'll just make it less of a pain in the ass. worst case is that people have less trouble with florinia, but, like, kricketune already exists. if anything we're just stealing dr. twobadge's spotlight.

so i have good news and bad news! good news is I think the accented names should work now. bad news is zmoves will require a little work on your end. so if this was a newer version of ruby (which will come in e19!!!) this wouldn't be a problem. but we don't live in that world. so we need workarounds. here, the workaround is: put the text you want to have displayed as the "realname". i don't really have a way to test this because i don't know spanish, but i think it'll work if you do this. if not, let me know. Scripts.rxdata

good point. yes.

c'mon, don't you want delibird???? oh gosh. i'm gonna give that a maybe. it'll take some playtesting to figure out what a "good" level is for them.