Phoenixsong

You're welcome!

Now to get around to actually drawing stuff on a more consistent basis than "once every two months" or something.

Haha, yeah, that's the frustrating part. I wouldn't be so cheesed off if it were an actual science problem that was causing problems, but it's like, what did I spend today doing? (Not) installing software. Wooo... It's cool when you have everything tamed and can actually mess around with the data a bit, though. (Sorry, not really sure how much biology you actually know, so I thought I would clarify.)

Well, I hope to be able to be able to play with some of those bunnies eventually! I'm sure Riku would like to meet new friends. He loves friends!

Mmm, well, I hope you end up doing something more interesting, wherever that might be! And hopefully with the nice monies, too.

No, research isn't like most work... like, in a normal job you'd typically get an assignment, like "do this task using this tools," yeah? If you're doing research, you're given a more general problem to solve and how you do that is on you, to one extent or another. Nobody else in our lab is working on the same kind of thing I am, so there definitely isn't any established protocol, and I haven't found one online/know of anybody else around here that's working on it. "Figure it out for yourself" is pretty much how research works.

Haha, no, no molds. We work on protists, which are little single-celled swimmy guys.

Ah, that's too bad. Do you have work plans after the internship ends?

Recently I've been working on doing a multiple-whole-genome sequence alignment to try and identify conserved elements in the genome of the organism my lab works on... bases that are part of a conserved element evolve more slowly than those that aren't, because if they change they tend to screw something up. So, if you align a bunch of sequences together, you can identify conserved elements because they will align better (i.e. be less different) than the background. And if they're conserved, they probably have some kind of biological function, which is why we want to find them in the first place.

Unfortunately, while there is a handful of programs that will do the alignment part, and a smaller handful that have tools for the conservation analysis, I have yet to discover two that are both a) willing to talk to each other and b) willing to run on my computer. So today was pretty much me just raging at everything while I tried three different software packages, no one of which would install and/or compile correctly and then run as advertised after installation.

Science!

"A nickname for the fans of the webcomic Homestuck. Usually used in a humorous or lighthearted fashion?" I definitely don't recall that one... but one way or another, I'm relieved you didn't mean the food. Ick.

What's up with you? How's the job going? Doing that big Wordpress rewrite yet?

Well, I definitely hope time becomes a thing for you soon! In general, not just because you should join that RP. But also because of that. My character has a whale, it's awesome.

Oh, well, I'll have to thank her if I ever run into her again, then! But... you followed her for the hamsteaks? I don't... does that mean something I'm not aware of?

Hey Kratos, if you have any time left over after those other two RP's you're in, I found a pretty cool one I'm going to be starting up on soon and you should totally join and play, too.

Orrrr not, since I know you're really busy. Just letting you know.

"chaos muppet, chaos muppet"

Just wanted to compliment you on the Phoenixdex.

...not sure what I was thinking, but eh.

Okay-okay. If you find yourself with surprising free time and the desire to hang out, just let me know; it doesn't take long to get from here to there. You have my number. :) (...not that that's done a lot of good in the past. Damn phones. >_>)

Perhaps I'll just lurk about in New York anyway. I'd been meaning to check out The Strand as it was... always up for browsing Nintendo World, seeing if they have any good plushies... that kind of thing...

Fine! Maybe I will talk to that guy. He was the one claiming there would be updates, after all!

But wait, you're going to be in New York this weekend? As in... New York City? So like. Could I come and stalk you. When you're not busy doing wedding-related things. Or. You know I could just kind of

crash the wedding

would that be okay

It wasn't you who said it! It wasn't yoooooou! *shakes fist*

Come on, just give me an update here. Just give me a hint. What have you got left to do? What are you working on over there?

Aaaaa that's adorable. R/B, you're like a kid who really doesn't understand what's going on yet so you keep doing random inappropriate things and it's hilarious. And also like a game that was never seriously playtested at all. :P

Okay, but I'm seriously hoping that it's going to be time soon because my personal notepad is going to run out of space for stupid RP characters that are probably never going to appear anyway because I am the slowest panda about RPing. (Come on, it's been over two months already! I'm going mad with anticipation over here. Maaaad. Or at least madder. You know.)

Hmmm. Well, maybe they'll have officially supported add-ins by the time I get around to needing it, anyway. Problems are best solved by hoping it's taken care of by other people while you go off and do something else, right?

Yeah, it's rather unfortunate. Since nobody shares their code, you end up with dozens of aborted starts and then everybody afterwards is obligated to start over from scratch (or, of course, use the starter kit :P).

From what I can gather, Nugget Bridge was started by some people in the VGC scene who were displeased with the communities available for doubles at the time (Smogon and Skarmbliss, essentially), in particular because they thought they weren't very welcoming to new players. It's been around since July-ish I think.

Oh, is that why the AI in the old games would often do things like light screen over and over? I just thought it was mostly random again, but if it's doing that because the move would be super-effective if it actually did damage, that would be pretty funny. As for stairs, no, I hadn't planned for them to have any major role. Am I forgetting an in-joke about that, other than the obvious Homestuck reference?

Okay, yeah, fair enough. I enjoy some Challenge Cup pretty much whenever, and prefer to playing other people to Tower AI, but I mean some people get really competitive with pretendy made-up mons too! CAP and all that.

I do like how you dodged my SOON??? there, though. :P

Nah, there are third-party Showdown servers running (Nugget Bridge has one, por ejemplo), though it looks like you may be right about the media all coming off of Showdown's own servers; I don't see it hanging out anywhere obvious, at the least, and apparently logins all run through their own server, so yeah, maybe those are all kept behind closed doors yet. Custom pokémon should be easy to add, though, I think... it looks as though there are already some in there? I don't know that there's a server actually using the CAP-mon yet, but they're right there in the code... Good point about the media, though, I don't know what would happen if you tried loading a pokémon without whatever stuff the Showdown site might currently be keeping to itself. Bah.

Eh, I'm just judging by all the "look guys I'm making a Pokémon game framework in Python/Java/C++" threads that pop up on Pokécommunity, which show like hey I already have the map editor done. And look, you can walk around and interact with NPC's! But then somebody comes into the thread and is all like, do you have a battle system, and they're like well no I'll do battles later. Someone else already did the battles! And probably better than you could on your own! (Why nobody has tried to make an open-source pokémon engine also baffles me, though I guess a lot of people are used to game programming alone or in very tiny teams using proprietary stuff like RPGMaker). Look at me talking about what other people should go and do again, why don't they ever listen to my infinite wisdom and lack of personal effort.

I don't think making an acceptable pokémon AI would be all that hard... most trainers pick their moves nearly at random, and even at E4 levels in more recent games things don't go much beyond "which attack does the most damage to the current pokémon OR heal if in the red." Battle Tower's a bit better but not by a ton. Though, for what it's worth, I'm hoping to play with Technical Machine a bit in the future... I'd like to try and put it in a learning framework, so that rather than starting out knowing how to play well, it becomes better over time as it battles more against the player, which would hopefully allow for a much more challenging AI for people who want that kind of thing, while not being too daunting for people who kind of suck at the game, because then it would be learning based on a terrible teacher, so to speak. It would work perfectly with the plot of the FR/LG ROM hack I would like to make that would be, essentially, an AU to my fanfic--you don't even know the grandiose plans I have cooking for this thing, it is in fact ridiculous.

Oh, and you don't think there might be more than five people interested in battling with some random person's weird fakemon, or at least a particular subset of them, in the near future? As in, soon? SOON, right?? >|

Well, is the physical/special split still not a thing? That seems like it should have been dead easy to implement... but then again, altering the timing flags for things like sandstorm damage seems fairly trivial as well. Hmm. It's curious to think about, since I don't actually know anything about RPGMaker, and sometimes working with a framework like that makes things you would expect to be easy very difficult.

And yeah, that seems like a poor way to run a project, though I can understand the sentiment. People with more enthusiasm than competence can do a fair amount of damage if they aren't handled with care... kind of surprised that nobody's come up and done a nicer framework in the meantime, what with RPGMaker XP being as Ye Olde as it is already, but a pokémon-style game really is a ridiculous amount of work if you decide you want to realistically simulate the more recent games. Actually, I'm surprised people haven't tried using stuff like Pokémon Online as a base for fangames, since the battle system programming is one of the more onerous parts to implement, and for the most part the sims have that pretty locked down. Though I guess Showdown is actually closed source? Booo. Oops, no, they're totally on Github and everything. Gomen, Showdown team.

So I guess the question then is... Phoenixdex Showdown server Y/Y?

Blah blah Opinions on matters that have little to do with me.

Okay! I put the database and media files up here; it's still a 30MB file, so it'll take a minute to download. The database is just a flat sqlite file (sooo... I hope you don't mind using a sqlite backend) and is in the upper-level directory, though it's going to want to go in the data directory (I had to symlink mine to pokedex/pokedex/data to get it to work) in the end. The images are all organized into subfolders according to where they appear in the default heirarchy, so you should just be able to just copy the contents of each folder into the corresponding one in the official distribution. Good luck getting everything up and running... let me know how it goes.

Ah, that's too bad. Have they moved it to fifth-gen mechanics yet? Or is that not even something they're interested in?

Have to go back and try to figure out which particular one you're talking about.

Sure, no problem. Well, little problem. I'm not actually sure how to get all of these files to you, because even when zipped, the result is kind of huge. So I'm thinking it might be simplest for you to just download and install the veekun 'dex yourself, as per the instructions on the site, and once you have it working I'll just pass you the correct database file and media, and when you drop those into the right folder everything should work as advertised. Alternatively, I could try leaving out the media directory and give you *everything else,* since that's what takes up most of the space and it's easy enough to get off git. What do you think of that?

Ah, I see--that makes sense. That'd be cool, I'd enjoy playing around with a new version. It's nice to see that someone's actually updating and maintaining Essentials nowadays, too.

It looked like it was on the older side in terms of the art style, so must not be the one you're thinking of. Now you've got me curious, though; I'll have to

Hmm, perhaps you were looking at the Pyramid docs rather than the Pylons docs? As far as the database thing goes, I'm pretty sure that means for a MySQL/Postgres sort of db--I'm just using a sqlite file, which works well enough for the most part. Another possibility would be removing the non-Phoenixdex canonmon info, and/or tables that aren't going to be relevant (Pokéathlon stats and Conquest info, anyone?), which would greatly reduce the number of rows.

But anyway. Sorry, feels like I kind of made this thing and now I'm all "you must use it, which means you have to do all these things and make all these decisions and stuff." Why give a gift when you can give an obligation? But seriously, if you'd really just rather have a copy to use for yourself, I won't mind.

Hmm, still thinking about an interactive-story kind of fangame, perhaps? I actually recently saw a web site that has it set up so that if you receive an error page, in addition to your usual 404 or whatever it's also the launching point of a little interactive story you can play. It was really neat; wish I could find it again.

Nah, no fanfic... though I did recently run across a partial draft of a Golden Sun one I was trying to write for you a couple years ago.

Damn, you get all the crazy plagiarists! So lucky.

Well, I was only looking to dump the images so I could mass-resize/rename/etc them, but maybe now I'll try going a little deeper, eh? But yeah I think I've actually seen most of them. There was one I rather liked that I know I haven't seen before, but I can't remember the name and my desktop is all the way over theeere life is hard. So I guess you can imagine that I approve of whichever one you like.

2.4 should be fine, actually, at least for Pylons; I haven't actually looked at the dependencies for the spline stuff itself. Although it did just occur to me that it could be tricky to get things integrated with your other applications. An alternative option might be to stick it on Heroku or something; I think it would be able to hang out there for free, and you could just point a subdomain at it if you liked.

Well, I don't know! Maybe those reasons are reasons I'm familiar with and you just don't know about it yet! (I hope we're actually talking about the same thing, that would sound wildly creepy otherwise.)

...unless it's something like you were thinking you needed the data in an easily-mungible format so you could use it for a fangame or something, which actually I was considering would be pretty easy to do at this point since most of the stuff is in there (although you neglected to come up with base EXP values/egg hatch counters/growth rate assignments/EVs for everything how could you be so shoddy), in which case no, that wasn't what I was thinking of, and also *rolls around the floor frothing at the mouth in anticipation*

Out of curiosity, what did you actually think I was working on?

Hah, wow, glassified plagiarism? That sounds entertaining.

But they're such pretty spoilers! Don't leave them in your images directory if you don't want someone to accidentally wget them all!

Hmm, what host are you using? If it has any kind of support at all for Python (possibly has to be 2.6 or better) and you can use the command line at all, you should be able to get it running just fine. But also what is this witchery, a host that supports Rails and not Python, son I am disappoint. >|

Well, the reason I thought of it in the first place was because I thought you and/or other people might be finding it useful in the near future for reasons. It might be coming in much handy for me in the near future. I hope.