Smogon's First "Create a Pokemon": Reflections, Opinions, and Closing

[GengarCrysis92]

Actually, we would probably wan tsome stories where it was immediatly shut down, or Nintendo will place it in Ubers.

[Cooper]

Originally Posted by Fat GengarCrysis92

Actually, we would probably wan tsome stories where it was immediatly shut down, or Nintendo will place it in Ubers.

Nintendo isn't responsible for tiers. That is up to the gaming communities. Note how some forums don't trust smogon's tier analyses? Nintendo basically gives us the game and leaves the rest up to us.

[GengarCrysis92]

Oh. Damn, I never knew that. So basically, we make it, they accpet and it is automatically OU? Then wedo some testing and find it to be Uber? Something along those lines?

Edit: I still believe some losses should be included so Nintendo doesn't reject it right away saying it is too good. Maybe some with it sweeping a whole team, taking no DMG other than Lo, and then some random Pokemon, A Water type preferably, comes along and OHKOs it.

[Cooper]

Originally Posted by Fat GengarCrysis92

Edit: I still believe some losses should be included so Nintendo doesn't reject it right away saying it is too good. Maybe some with it sweeping a whole team, taking no DMG other than Lo, and then some random Pokemon, A Water type preferably, comes along and OHKOs it.

Originally Posted by Fat Cooper

Note that you don't need to win the battle for it to be good; a good battle only needs to showcase Syclant in action.

[GengarCrysis92]

Lol. Sorry about that. I'm working on an animation, so I missed that.

[Time Mage]

Honestly, I wouldn't even bother sending a warstories at Nintendo. The competitive battling capability of a pokémon is the last of their concerns. I'd just send the design, typing, moves, weight, height, and possibly base stats. And I'd consider us lucky if they even bother to consider it.

[Viashino_wizard]

Thank you, Mr. Sunshine.

[Time Mage]

It's called being realistic.

[xcfrisco]

I wasnt around for the whole process, but I think giving Scylant Superpower makes him borked.

Other than that, cool pokemon/thread/idea.

[LickThePaint]

Originally Posted by Fat xcfrisco

I wasnt around for the whole process, but I think giving Scylant Superpower makes him borked.

Other than that, cool pokemon/thread/idea.

It's not that usefull TBH, I still use Brick Break over it... Otherwise the person can predict the Superpower and switch, or send out heatran/vile which can both KO it AND aren't hurt by it's stabs. And after using it out, I've realized it's almost impossible to get in, even with mountainire. Also, it's yet to do anything significant on my team... Or TO my team, for that matter.

[eric the espeon]

no-ones online anyone want a battle?

[Cathy**]

This is great work, Doug. Did you by chance make any general tools for adding new pokemon? I can completely understand if you didn't but if you did please send them in as a patch.

The metaserver is a bit iffy so I manually added your server to the list and it should show up from now on.

With regard to the recentness of the source, if you want the most recent stuff make sure you are using the CVS version. The source archives are basically for historical purposes and the CVS is always up to date.

Good luck with this experiment.

[DougJustDoug**]

Originally Posted by Fat ColinJF

This is great work, Doug. Did you by chance make any general tools for adding new pokemon? I can completely understand if you didn't but if you did please send them in as a patch.

The metaserver is a bit iffy so I manually added your server to the list and it should show up from now on.

With regard to the recentness of the source, if you want the most recent stuff make sure you are using the CVS version. The source archives are basically for historical purposes and the CVS is always up to date.

Good luck with this experiment.

Hey, thanks for dropping by! I've been singing your praises quite a bit around here. Thanks a TON for manually adding the server to the listing. I have been working for two days to figure out why the server listing would not update automatically.

As for the CVS version, that was a bone-headed mistake on my part. When I first attempted to look at the code, I was using Eclipse. I loaded from source archives at that time, because I was "just looking" to determine if this was a project I wanted to take on. Later after a lot of problems in Eclipse, I switched to NetBeans and never remembered to hook up to CVS. I've since remedied the problem and have CVS versions of everything. I've also got patch files for all my changes.

As for tools -- yes I created a class that will add new pokemon to the species.db and movesets.db It works a lot like the applyServerPatch methods on ModData. The big difference is that it assumes a new Species is being added. It won't add exclusive items to pokemon, only because we haven't done that yet. But it handles everything else. Since we plan on making several new pokes, I made the tool very generic. Just about anybody could add new pokemon with it. Just tell me where to send it, and I'll be happy to share it.

I also created a little utility to add the new pokemon sprites into the preferences.userRoot, since the client normally gets those from the server. Fortunately, the SpriteLoader looks in the local directory first. So, by pre-loading the cache, we can actually get a look at our new pokemon without requiring the sprites to be on the server. That tool isn't very generic, but easily could be.

If you ever want some help fixing bugs on your bug list, I'll be happy to chip in. Now that I've spent the time getting familiar with the guts of the code, I might as well put it to good use for the community as a whole. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to take me up on the offer. It looks like you have been shouldering a lot of the coding burden yourself. I'm personally amazed at how much functionality you've put your simulator. The fact that you've made all your code open-source is an even greater accomplishment. And thanks for the well-wishes.

[Slice n Dice]

Oh boy, I hope nintendo likes Syclant. This could make a splash for the next metagame.

[KoA]

We are proving that fan pokes can go beyond that of Luvdisc. :(

[Sunday]

/feels inspired

I'm going to make the "Smogon's First 'Create-a-Pokemon": Syclant Testing Week' thread now. If anyone has any final objections to me doing this raise their voices now...

[Cathy**]

Originally Posted by Fat DougJustDoug

Hey, thanks for dropping by! I've been singing your praises quite a bit around here. Thanks a TON for manually adding the server to the listing. I have been working for two days to figure out why the server listing would not update automatically.

As for the CVS version, that was a bone-headed mistake on my part. When I first attempted to look at the code, I was using Eclipse. I loaded from source archives at that time, because I was "just looking" to determine if this was a project I wanted to take on. Later after a lot of problems in Eclipse, I switched to NetBeans and never remembered to hook up to CVS. I've since remedied the problem and have CVS versions of everything. I've also got patch files for all my changes.

As for tools -- yes I created a class that will add new pokemon to the species.db and movesets.db It works a lot like the applyServerPatch methods on ModData. The big difference is that it assumes a new Species is being added. It won't add exclusive items to pokemon, only because we haven't done that yet. But it handles everything else. Since we plan on making several new pokes, I made the tool very generic. Just about anybody could add new pokemon with it. Just tell me where to send it, and I'll be happy to share it.

I also created a little utility to add the new pokemon sprites into the preferences.userRoot, since the client normally gets those from the server. Fortunately, the SpriteLoader looks in the local directory first. So, by pre-loading the cache, we can actually get a look at our new pokemon without requiring the sprites to be on the server. That tool isn't very generic, but easily could be.

If you ever want some help fixing bugs on your bug list, I'll be happy to chip in. Now that I've spent the time getting familiar with the guts of the code, I might as well put it to good use for the community as a whole. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to take me up on the offer. It looks like you have been shouldering a lot of the coding burden yourself. I'm personally amazed at how much functionality you've put your simulator. The fact that you've made all your code open-source is an even greater accomplishment. And thanks for the well-wishes.

I'm glad to hear you made some general tools, because I know that some other people are also interested in adding new pokemon, and it would be a good thing to have in the repository. We have a patch tracker that allows you to post files here. It is a bit elusive since it is currently inactive. If you fix any bugs, you can also post patches there and they will be incorporated into the main source tree. (You have to reply to your own post to attach a file, which is a bit counterintuitive.)

One solution I was planning for sprites was to allow the server to specify a list of sprite repositories and send them to the client when logging on. Then the client would go through the list before defaulting to the sprites on shoddybattle.com. This might be a bit inconvenient if you aren't running a web server but it's certainly better than the current design (with just one hardcoded sprite repository). Setting up the server to send sprite files seems a bit like reinventing the web server.

Thanks for all your praise, and bearzly and I would certainly appreciate additional help with bugs - thanks for offering.

[eric the espeon]

Colin would it be possible for you to add syclant to the normal server? you can ban it from ladder maches if you want, but it would help us test this thing faster.

[nattyb]

That would be pretty cool but wouldn't it eliminate the need for Doug's server?

[eric the espeon]

mostly... but it could still be there.

[Cooper]

Originally Posted by Fat nattyb

That would be pretty cool but wouldn't it eliminate the need for Doug's server?

Doug's server could be there to act as a meeting ground for those of us involved in the actual creation of Syclant.

[eric the espeon]

Originally Posted by Fat Cooper

Doug's server could be there to act as a meeting ground for those of us involved in the actual creation of Syclant.

yes... and those who want to test their teams against it. also it will help with the testing of the ghost/fight poke we are makeing next.

[Judicator]

Not a metagame question, but why exactly does it learn all of the fangs except for its own type?

Competitively, this is Weavile and Infernape rolled into one, given some great support moves and given an ability that patches up a massive weakness which is the only thing stopping it from going any further down in the tiers then high OU.

Weavile and Syclant...

...have similar typing
...are able to outrun most of the metagame
...make great revenge killers
...have a similar attack stat
...have a similar movepool

Infernape and Syclant...

...have similar stats
...can easily pull off physical, special and mixed sets
...can be hard to counter because of this
...have large movepools full of both sides of the damage spectrum

So essentially, Doug has put together a physical sweeper, a special sweeper, a speed demon, a supporter, a wall killer and something immune to SR which would have a 4x weak to it. It is as if he thought of an unused type combination that he liked, decided that it would be really strong and made sure the easy way to bring it down was completely negated.



...but I love it.

[tennisace]

[quote=Judicator;995075]
So essentially, Doug has put together a physical sweeper, a special sweeper, a speed demon, a supporter, a wall killer and something immune to SR which would have a 4x weak to it. It is as if he thought of an unused type combination that he liked, decided that it would be really strong and made sure the easy way to bring it down was completely negated.
quote]

Wrong. The community made Syclant through a series of polls that decided what it should be like. Doug programmed it into a server so that we could test it and play around with it. As for stealth rock being the only easy way to bring it down, your wrong. For one, if a strong sweeper can survive one of it's attacks, it's quite easy to OHKO. As an example, a Porygon-Z with 4 hp/252 attack and speed can survive an unboosted Blizzard and OHKO with Tri-Attack. Also, Mountaineer protects it fron Stealth Rock and Rock attacks on the switch, after that, it's a dead bug. Please, if your going to comment, do some research first.

[Fenikkusu]

Originally Posted by Fat tennisace0227

Wrong. The community made Syclant through a series of polls that decided what it should be like. Doug programmed it into a server so that we could test it and play around with it. As for stealth rock being the only easy way to bring it down, your wrong. For one, if a strong sweeper can survive one of it's attacks, it's quite easy to OHKO. As an example, a Porygon-Z with 4 hp/252 attack and speed can survive an unboosted Blizzard and OHKO with Tri-Attack. Also, Mountaineer protects it fron Stealth Rock and Rock attacks on the switch, after that, it's a dead bug. Please, if your going to comment, do some research first.

Um, your pory-z is switching into a blizzard? or just randomly facing your buggy as a lead/revenge kill?
cause 4hp Pory-Z takes...

unboosted
252/neutral :73.08% - 86.22%
252/positive :80.45% - 94.55%


@life orb
252/neutral 95.19% - 111.86% not quite a guaranteed OHKO
252/positive 104.49% - 122.76% guaranteed ohko

I won't bother for specs calcs as life orb clearly indicates that it's going to ohko there.