Approved Visible Poké Ball information

[Mijzelffan]

Is there any chance pokeballs could be implemented on showdown in some way? I noticed between playing vgc on showdown and on battle spot there's a slight difference in information available to players, and that's that on cartridge you can see what pokeball the sent out pokemon are in. It's not allowed in vgc atm but if your opponent sends out a greninja for instance then on cartridge you can rule out either ash-greninja (always in pokeball) or happy hour protean greninja (always in cherish ball) depending on the pokeball for instance, whereas on showdown you're left guessing. I've studied a few battle spot videos and in XYORAS only the lead pokemon had a clear shot of their pokeballs whereas it was impossible to tell for any pokemon sent out after the first turn. But in sun and moon it's possible for a watchful eye to see a pokemon's pokeball every time it's sent in, and even those who don't know every pokeball can generally tell a cherish ball apart. Therefore it seems to me it's neccesary to have this on showdown in some way as well if it wants to emulate the game's experience as well as it can.

 

[pre]

There is an issue open for this which includes some discussion and its relatively straightforward, but its likely not been worked on too aggressively due to it being a relatively low value feature requiring an outsized amount of work (eg. animations to display the ball/displaying the balls in team preview/modifying the team builder to allow selecting the ball etc). This is a planned feature, and maybe the Preact client rewrite will make some progress towards implementing this (eg. the new teambuilder design seems like it will be more straightforward to add support for specifying balls, though looking at it now, the formatting used for importing/exporting sets will need to be extended with a 'Pokeball: <Pokeball>' field, as support currently only exists on the packed format, not the export format).

 

[Zarel]

This is planned for the Preact rewrite, yes. All the hard work for support is in; the only hard part is finishing the Preact rewrite. :p

 

[Marty]

Finally found where I put those Ball animations I made from the Black and White sprite sheets all those years ago. Just a neat little aesthetic thing to supplement the main Ball display instead of always having the standard Poké Ball on entry.

Bonus: A quick and dirty Gen 5 style Beast Ball!