Negrek

Hrm. How low-commitment is low-commitment, exactly?

Not yet, no. There's not much to see aside from those changes at the moment, granted.

That should be most of the changes, yeah, although in the end I think there are a few things that got changed on the official wiki that I may not have edited into those threads, and I'm not sure I remember exactly which they were. :| I think I did add most of them there, though, so I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to fix the few discrepancies that crop up later. Hm.

Right now it's a set of files on my own server; putting it on ZB itself with its limited page-creating tools would've been an unnecessary headache. There isn't a database as such, partially due to laziness but mostly due to the mismatched set of tools I ended up cannibalizing. There are actually a few files with different information in them that it's pulling from in a rather embarrassingly inelegant manner, but it works. :/ My intent is to one day clean it up and actually integrate everything properly so it's only looking up one unified set of information instead of several, but tbh I just got frustrated and wanted something that worked so I could get it out of the way and focus on the rest of the preparations. Granted without a trainer generator that takes matching up moves to pokémon it doesn't need anything more complex at the moment, but eventually it'd be nice.

Also, if you mean you're using the same veekun-style database as you showed it to me... that's actually not entirely correct, unfortunately. The available moves/items, the TM lists and several of the levelsets aren't the same as on the standard Phoenixdex. There'd need to be some changes made, assuming you haven't taken most of that into account already,

Wild pokémon generally shouldn't have special moves at all except as noted in special situations (for example it's possible to find pokémon with egg moves in the Submarine Safari), and most of those special situations would outright state what the extra moves are anyway. Generally speaking wilds just use anything from their levelset at that level or below except for relearners. Early on trainers shouldn't have anything special either, but once people have maybe 3-4 badges under their belt they'd be more and more likely to see opponents with an egg move or two, a TM, maybe some held items, so on, and more likely still when they have more badges. As you'd expect, basically. (What would you be coding this in, btw? The current set of tools is all JS, so it'd need to be that if I were to stick it in there directly, but if you wanted to do something downloadable/set up something else in Python or whatever then we could probably work that out.)

Nah, that's not me. I figure I'll be less tempted to play while I don't have the time for it if my lurking remains accountless for now. :P Took long enough for those carvanha to show up, by the way.

Be patient. >| Mod apps will go up when they go up. (Which would probably be sooner if some people would at least give a yes/no to the important question I posted aaaaaaa stop all being busy with school)

The limited use of 5-6 (no matter how long the player's team) is mostly an artifact of the "battles take too long" issue. Players with only one pokémon should generally have opponents with three or fewer, but unless the opponent's one pokémon just about walls the one they're using they should probably be facing at least two. Strategy-wise the idea is for trainer attacks to be chosen at least kind of strategically without being perpetually unfair or stalling, so it's not too likely they'll be randomized, no. I imagine most trained pokémon that know fake out will be using it on turn one, for example, whereas ideally a wild wouldn't necessarily (although try telling that to OI's mods >>;... hm. Come to think of it I might want to discourage that for trainers, too. At least fake out is mercifully rare for now since most things in NL that learn it only get it via egg.).

Okay... where are you talking about?

I'm afraid that the actual set of tools is classified for now, sorry. You can see it as soon as you're accepted as a mod~

You can if you want to, though it's not immediately necessary since just picking things that seem balanced works well enough (and mods are allowed to give the occasional trainer that's not "random" anyway). Honestly the only guidelines are to keep things roughly equi-evo and equi-level, try to avoid teams that are too long or too short (1 or 5-6) without appropriate balance, keep the pokémon in-region and try to avoid unown, fossils, pseudolegends, starters, the dinobots, makima and the pokémon that evolve via Logos stone or in the ruins (but not their prevos; cherubi/cherrim are okay, cerisol is generally not). Beyond that teams can really be whatever. *shrug*

OI's trainers are generally easy (barring the ever-present RNG hate that makes it not seem that way), yeah, though I think that's largely due to the use of straight-up game mechanics in a play-by-post format. Not sure if I'd consider AI trainers from the games the same difficulty or easier, but either way you can get through even tough ones with just a few button presses as opposed to waiting days to beat a single guy. Making the trainers relatively easy compensates for that a little. There are also the requirements, and I think maybe that gives people the mentality that they need to be able to get through trainers quickly so as to keep moving toward that goal. Turquoise generally doesn't use requirements like that, at least, so if someone did feel like having a longer, more strategic battle then they have that option and don't necessarily feel like they have to rush. The battle mechanics are largely identical, though (kinda wish we were doing something else but ehhh gonna have to try and work that out later), so since they'll be equally not fun to spend days and days and days on the difficulty should keep that in mind. IDK, maybe we will want to tweak how easy or difficult trainers are down the line, though we'll also need to mess with the experience payout if that's the case.

(I think what OI does is assign each star rarity to a percentage, like maybe 0 stars is 50% and 5 is 1% with whatever else in between. The mod rolls for a rarity and then rolls an even chance for any pokémon within that star bracket. Which, of course, presents the aforementioned hiccup when the list of pokémon for any given star rating gets longish.

Some of the star images work, some of them don't; depends on which forum you're looking at. Quite a few are using an old source URL and haven't been updated yet.)

@edit: uhhh... no? Not sure what you're talking about.

Pretty much all the mechanical stuff (some of which, like damage, is yoinked directly from game mechanics atm, some of which is not but honestly isn't that interesting) is taken care of in the set of handy-dandy mod tools I stole and borrowed from various people spent most of last year putting together because the slows. 'Bout all you've mentioned I don't have anything specific in there for is trainer generation, which is currently meant to be handled by the very scientific "idk make something up"; I was going to put together some pokémon generation tools that could be used for that eventually, maybe start from something similar to the metronome generator and add options from there, but if you're already going to do that then that saves me some trouble. :P Other than that, though, there are already at least some basic utils for damage/battle calculation, wild pokémon generation, experience, stats and also Butterfree's catch rate calculator for good measure.

The % rarity will be publicly visible on opening, mind, so that's nothing mod-specific aside from the tools mods have to make actually choosing the wilds a little easier. Have you seen how OI has those lists of wilds with stars (or, er, broken images that are supposed to be stars) visible in each location? Kind of like that, only with reasonable percentages instead of the cumbersome way they handle it that somehow manages to make common pokémon harder to find than rare ones in some places.

u first

...although actually much of it at this point is waiting for a response from the other admins for something. :(

well stop >( or at least tell me what it is!

what are you doing

Hahahaha that is amazing. Thanks for that.

And no, I didn't know Mewkitty was back! I should read that comic. (And all the billion other comics I mean to read.)

Eh, in a nutshell we got shipped off to Middle of Nowhere Island, Maine, first in a plane but then in a twelve-person van with fifteen people + tons of food/equipment/belongings shoehorned into it, in autumn to spend a week learning about the fascinating marine ecosystem there. This translated to getting up in the rain at 5:45 am and sticking our hands into freezing tidepools to harass crabs and snails for science, then sitting for lengthy lectures about chitin later in the day interspersed with harassing lobsters they bought mostly for eating but not before we stressed them out for science. (I don't eat seafood anyway, especially not lobster, so I didn't even get any of that.) There were six girls from my class on the trip all crammed into a four person tent, half the time they wanted boys from another school also on the trip in the tent with them, and then idek what happened but somehow something the girls said and something some of the guys might have said ended up making all five girls that had to share said cramped tent with me really pissed off at each other. I had to listen to them either arguing or whining about how they needed to avoid each other until I finally got fed up and somehow convinced them to fucking talk to each other about it and get over it and stop making me even more miserable by extension.

The scenery was very pretty and they took us on a little shopping trip somewhere sane in Maine at the end of it, and the flight back was nice because I ended up with a whole row to myself to stretch out in, but yeaaaaah most of the excursion was being cold and handling annoyed animals and catfighting and kvetching and gross seafood.

In lighter news, surely you should have realized by now that my sole purpose when RPing with other people is to annoy the everloving Christ out of their characters. Granted that particular bunny came with an idea for a related but less obnoxious character as well... but where's the fun in playing that one first? :D

(Honestly? Barely any, as I have very little head for any sort of science in spite of it being interesting. But I went on the Senior Trip from Hell during the same block I learned what a protist was, so random bits and pieces of that month or so of lessons tend to stick in the mind. In general you are free to assume that everything you say about your work fascinates me but flies riiiight over my head.)

Oh, Riku might very well like the bunnies. Dunno how Pam would feel about the one I'd probably focus on first, though. Hopefully worse than she felt given her initial impression of Hannibal, if I'm doin' my job correctly.

Hopefully!

Hm. That's got to be frustrating sometimes, although then again sometimes I'm feeling masochistic and derive some sick pleasure from having to plumb the internet's guts for weird software or answers to problems only to discover that it never actually works, so eh, maybe I could actually live with that part of the research stuff. (Also I know what protists are. :p Mostly. Kind of. I've heard the name somewhere. Probably.)

Ngl. In spite of myself I spent a little time reading over some of those PMO threads and it has given me character bunnies. Curse yoooou.

The possibility of them taking me on full-time was floated briefly but hasn't been mentioned again recently; I'm getting ready to apply to something else so we'll have to see what happens, because while the other thing is a little more up my alley work-wise the company I'm interning at seems like a cool place to work. So we'll see!

Oh, computers. That's unfortunate. But surely as far as things that will interface with each other they should've... given you some kind of information about that? You're not having to hunt for all these on your own, are you? :/

Also, what organism? Still a mold or whatever you mentioned when we talked about that summer thing, or a different mold, or something else entirely?

Unfortunately we haven't moved forward with that much, at least not wrt whatever I'll be doing. I keep meaning to ask the person I'm working under but I either get distracted or it takes forever to find some images and then she goes home because she leaves before I do. :/ Hopefully I'll get to do something at least a little more interesting before the intership ends next month!

What about you? What've you been up to?

I am reasonably certain you have used that term yourself once or twice, albeit maybe ages ago. Think a minute, it'll come to you. :p

Ah... funnily enough, I've seen that before and it's totally in my "check this RP out later when time is a thing" bookmarks folder. :p So hopefully I will eventually be able to give it some sort of closer look, at least!

EDIT from stalking: the person who "knows who they are" is Twitch, who I followed for the hamsteaks but whose blog is like 75% bords at this point. :p

i never read any before! the whole... genre? thing? always confused me o___o but this is drawn so well and the story seems to be going somewhere really interesting and GOD their skill is just amazing!! those druddigon *u*