News

You may remember that Essentials exists. It hasn't had a new release in nearly three years now, so you'd be forgiven for forgetting that it exists. But exist it does, and now there's a whole new version!

So what's in it?

Battle system overhaul

This whole thing started when I decided to rearrange how using a move in battle works, from "each target is attacked separately" to "the move hits all targets at once". I grossly underestimated the workload involved in this, and then things spiraled out of control and v18 became a whole battle system overhaul. Lots and lots of things have been rewritten and improved, and I can't possibly describe them all in this post.

The most notable feature is that triple battles are now supported. In fact, all battle sizes are supported, including 1v2, 3v1 and so on. (Anything above 3v3 will require you to add some extra things yourself, but the underlying code will work for those as well.)

The other most notable feature is that the effects of Gen 7 moves/items/abilities have been added. Gen 8 effects have been omitted for now, because I didn't want to add two Gens' worth of content at once. Essentials now comes with two sets of PBS files: one for Gen 5 and one for Gen 7, now with fewer mistakes and better formatting.

Battle visuals

There are move animations and common animations, and then there are "system" animations. The latter are things like "throw a Poké Ball" or "Pokémon faints" or "make the whole battle screen fade in from black at the start...

Hi everyone!

This is a progress report for the next version of Pokémon Essentials, which will be version 18. Before I begin, no, I'm not announcing my retirement or anything like that. This really is just a progress report.

The next version of Pokémon Essentials, v18, is intended to be focussed on the battle system. More specifically, the battle system code is being tidied up and rearranged to make it better and easier to work with, and with some new features which this post will talk about.

So what's happening?

1. Tidying up and rearranging

The battle system is currently crammed into just a few long script sections, which makes them tough to navigate. Chunks of code are often in unreasonable places, or at least could be relocated to somewhere better (e.g. duplicated code that can be consolidated). Some battle mechanics don't work quite right, such as the timing for throwing a Poké Ball. Some mechanics I just want to make work differently, such as making a move hit all targets at once rather than one after the other (this is the original reason I wanted to focus on the battle system this time, actually, and making this change took much longer than I expected).

To this end, I've been moving and improving a whole lot of code. I've been renaming and repurposing methods and variables, with the result being that virtually every third party script that affects battles will be incompatible with v18 without rewrites. I know, I know, but that's how it goes.

2. Triple battles and so on

Although I think triple battles won't look good (the screen's too small to reasonably show six Pokémon in battle with their data boxes at once), I decided to improve the code to support triple battles. Actually, I generalised the code completely, meaning not only are single/double/triple battles possible now, but so are 1v2, 3v1, 2v3 and any other permutation of "number of Pokémon on each side of battle". It's entirely possible to have a battle where you use one...

There was a longer gap between v16.2 and v17 than there was between v1 and v10.

A Quality Update

• Essentials v17 was focussed (vaguely, more or less) on making quality of life improvements. Things that make the game easier to play, or look nicer, or easier to develop. This includes the new Ready Menu, which is a much improved version of registering an item that can register multiple items at once and show moves you can use in the field; the option to choose whether you want to input text via cursor or direct typing; various improvements to Debug options; the addition of the "pokemonforms.txt" PBS file; and support for AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards, not to mention moving the F5 key all the way down to the more easily accessible F. There are plenty of other changes I've made that would fit under this heading, but I'll let you read through the change log and find them for yourself!

Yes, But What Does It LOOK Like?

• Some long-standing visual quirks have finally been resolved. You can no longer jiggle in and out of a running pose when you're not supposed to (I know, it's a shame), grass rustling no longer happens above your head, and water reflections no longer appear over land. Fishing is much improved too, with several audio and visual cues that tell you when you've hooked a Pokémon. The shading of the world throughout the day is more pleasant to look at. Oh, and the Pokédex looks a whole lot nicer now, as do various other bits of GUI. Some Pokémon storage box wallpapers are unlockable (and locked by default), so maybe you won't see those.

Tell Me More

• Fine. Input::A (the Z key to you and me, or W for AZERTY keyboards or Y for QWERTZ keyboards) has...