Pokemon Battle Revolution Save File Dolphin

[Francisca Noggles]

Itook my save file, copied it into PKHeX, added the mons I wanted, saved and exported the save to the same area. I removed any illegal mons and everything. The TID and SID are all right as well, no weird markings or anything, and are on the correct .pk format. What am I missing? I thought that was basically it? Is there a better way to do this? It does this no matter if I do all 493 mons or even just one.

hi there, made an account to reply to this since ironically enough I was looking into battle revolution save editing last night! for some reason your save was the only one I could get to open in pkhex, so I'm really grateful for that

anyhow, what I ended up doing was going into the block data (found under the SAV tab) and changing the BoxesUnlocked value from 0 to -1. once that was done, I was able to make custom passes with everything in the save file!

for convenience's sake, I've attached my own save file with the change (as well as a bunch of legendary metronome spammers lmao) so you should be able to just drop it in and play. I did change the trainer name, but you can revert it easily by editing the CurrentOT field.

As I write this, it's exactly 10 years since the first launch of Twitch Plays Pokemon. The stream has been running for over a decade now! As part of the team behind it, in 2016, I built this piece of animated generative art:

You can see this in the background of Twitch Plays Pokemon during most of the year, when the stream pits its chat against itself in competitive matches of Pokemon Battle Revolution. In this article, I'll explain how I made this background, why I made it, and some context around what Twitch Plays Pokemon has done since 2014.

The year was 2015. Twitch Plays Pokemon had successfully completed not just one, but five games of Pokemon by harnessing the power of the internet. Thousands of people had all dedicated their time and effort to (mostly) working as hard as possible to becoming a Pokemon master.

Eventually, the stream began to experiment with other forms of chat-controlled interaction. Pokemon Stadium, a game for the N64, was the first pokemon game to see pokemon battle it out in full 3D for the first time. Twitch Plays Pokemon created a chat-controlled version: two teams of 3 pokemon would be displayed, and users could choose to bet virtual money on whatever team they wanted (denoted, of course, in the official Pokemon currency of pokedollars). Then, the AI-controlled players would battle each other with random moves, and the winner would get their bet back.

Pokemon Stadium was a lot of fun to play, but it only included the 251 Pokemon from the first two generations of games. Slowly, people began to wonder if it was possible to play the next Stadium-type game in the Pokemon series: Pokemon Battle Revolution. PBR, as we called it, not only included the updated battle mechanics introduced in generations III and IV, but also a grand total of 493 Pokemon (and not to mention some amazing of music). Playing it was sure to be fun!

But because the Wii was a much more advanced console than the N64, there were many problems that stood in the way of making Pokemon Battle Revolution into something the chat could play. The stream overlay, for example, needed to be able to read the game's RAM in order to detect whether a 'mon had fainted or not (in order to allow users to vote which pokemon to send out next), and no RAM-editing functionality existed in Wii emulators. Selecting all pokemon meant it needed a save file with all pokemon ready-to-choose - but PBR's save file format wasn't known. Emulating Wii games was also processor-heavy, and the existing TPP computer hardware wasn't quite up to it.

Streamer publicly stated that if someone was willing to make a system to play Pokemon Battle Revolution, he'd be willing to use it. From there, it was only a matter of time. Eventually, a team of fans, including one by the name of EliteAinax17, assembled under the name of Project Revolution to create just that. After several months, EliteAinax began streaming test matches on a newly-created Twitch account named ProjectRevoTPP (which he later adopted for personal use), and once the software was judged stable enough, the game was handed over to Streamer. On December 1st, 2014, Pokemon Battle Revolution made its Twitch Plays Pokemon debut. PBR still continues to be played today in between mainstream pokemon games.

I first joined the stream as an one-person music team, adding new entries to the list of playable songs. I eventually wrote the code that handles playing music and selecting songs, optimized the advanced AI built for Anniversary Crystal romhack from 30 seconds down to fast enough that we could afford to add another layer to the search tree, helped contribute to the stream interface, made the music selection go haywire for april fools' day, and managed to use a tool from economics in a technical setting to help simplify code.

Sometime after the release of PBR, Streamer began to float the idea of remaking the interface. In addition to lots of balancing changes, and a complete code rewrite, Streamer suggested in the private developer chatroom that it would be nice to have some sort of background to replace the static black; perhaps something based on Pokemon Battle Revolution's own menu background but incorporating user avatars. I decided to give it a try.

I began by breaking down what I liked about it, to figure out how it worked (and to see it without the pesky text boxes in the way). Dolphin offered a handy free-camera feature, so I loaded up Battle Revolution on my own and attempted to observe what the game's programmers had done. The circles, as it turned out, are in fact not 2D circles, but hemispheres curved away from the camera (perhaps to achieve the 'shiny' look through reflection calculations?). While they appear to drift from the bottom left to the top right, this movement is not as complicated as it looks: from what I could tell, the circles were moving around the surface of a cylinder, and it seemed the camera was tilted. Culling seemed to happen in groups: two side-by-side circles would disappear at the same time once they got outside the camera, and reappear barely offscreen to the left.

I began by creating the orbiting circles. I knew from the beginning that I'd do this in webGL and Three.js, so it was simple enough to make an object to represent one circle, and create enough of them in a cylindrical pattern. I had some convenient pokeball textures lying around from a different project, so I used them to texture each circle:

Then, to match PBR's diagonal slant, I rotated and repositioned the camera until the circles looked like they were arranged diagonally. Doing that was simple enough: I pasted in some keyboard-and-mouse controls so I could interactively move the camera with my keyboard and mouse, flew around the scene until I found a good camera orientation, then logged the camera settings so I could just set them directly at the start of my code.

Behind all the circles, PBR's background has a pretty gradient that appears to be refracting light in a variety of weird, triangular ways. It shimmers over time, too, making for a scintillating display that I'm actually rather disappointed is hidden behind text boxes all the time. How could I get similarly nice gradients that could blend together colors nicely in webGL?

However, vertex colors don't come without caveats. As you can see in the above animation, vertex colors do not necessarily have to agree when they meet at a vertex. In fact, the name "vertex" colors is a bit of a misnomer: Because GPUs are designed to operate on triangles, not vertices, one actually must specify one color per "vertex in a triangle". Want your favorite vertex to avoid those ugly lines and show up as only one color? Specify that color once per triangle, and make sure all the colors for that vertex are consistent on every triangle. Normally mesh editing tools will automatically take care of this alignment for you, so you don't need to worry about ugly banding - and normally you'd be texturing a mesh, so you wouldn't even need vertex colors in the first place.

For my first attempt at creating a gradient background, I decided that the best way I could think of was to make a giant cube, then color the corners of that cube different colors by manually entering vertex colors into the triangles that made up the cube. Not the best idea, in retrospect.

Behind those circles, the background isn't just a static gradient. There's a hexagon of colors shimmering in a regular pattern. Each hexagon is made of many triangles, and over time colors would slowly flow out of the center of one triangle to the inside of its neighbors. I wanted to try and replicate that color changing in my design.

Next, I needed to make vertex colors change over time. That meant making a formula that dictated a vertex's color for a given input value, and if I wanted to do that for many vertex colors all at once, I'd probably need to start thinking about shaders.

As opposed to most programs which run on a computer's CPU, shaders are programs designed to run many times in parallel using a GPU. In my case, using webGL to render graphics, there are two types of shaders: vertex shaders, which run a formula once per vertex to compute colors or change vertex positions, and fragment shaders, which run once per pixel to decide how to color that pixel. The vertex shader can pass values to the fragment shader, including vertex colors, but those vertex colors will be blended: a point halfway between a green vertex and blue vertex will automatically get a vertex color of 0.5*green + 0.5*blue. Fragment shaders do that blending automatically!

To get some pulsing, I wrote a function which interpolated between two different colors, made it repeat by having the interpolation factor move back and forth in a sine-wave pattern, and then used the blue color as a signal for some vertices to be slightly ahead of other vertices. I'd need to pass in a number representing the current time, but that was simple enough using shader uniforms. Here was my first attempt at coding this via shaders:

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