State of Topaz: November 15, 2008

Topaz has been going a little slow, but we're still moving. I realize how much of this slowness is my fault (putting Encounter Rates on hiatus and the forgetting that I need to convert lots of stuff still =P, being too lazy to do a couple of things for Fangking Omega and Trainer X, etc.), so I apologize for that. Even more importantly, I warmly (/exuberantly/jubilantly/ecstatically) welcome our newest member who is showing signs of being intelligent, active and enthusiastic: Pika-Freaka. Thanks for showing up, Pika-Freaka, and we hope that you'll continue to post and help out with the Topaz project. So, scoop (no particular order, as always):

In the past month since the last SoT, we've managed to get 24 Dex Entries done, and 5 other topics up (4 just now due to Pika-Freaka's final vote =P), mainly thanks to Kisa's huge contributions in both fodder and quality entries =D. This our lowest number of open topics since, Destado probably, which means that: 1. People have been voting (which is good) and 2. People have been posting less fodder in the general topic (which is bad). Of course, it's already been alluded to by many that not many of the Pokemon left scream "Make an entry for me!" anymore. For anyone new wanting to contribute, you can go here to check what still needs to be done, and here if your favourite pokemon doesn't have a link on that list.

Icons have once again reached a drought, hopefully Novoni will get some more time to do them. Anyone wanting to try their hand at them is welcome.

In items discussion, I have just closed new item ideas, there are 10 items (mainly ones we've just discussed) up for debate. I don't expect these 10 to take too much time to do, as 7 of them have been discussed to death and 3 of them are from "up for scrap".

Revamps have dropped even further in speed, to about 1 a week (so 4 since the last SoT). The latest one is Torkoal. Luckily, it being slow is alright, because we managed to revamp everything needed for the demo.

Encounter Rates (Changed from Wild Pokemon Lists) now have a new system of creation, requiring you to insert Pokemon into certain probability slots (it's like electron subshells and orbitals, but much cooler!) Read the OP first before trying to make any. I was actually mistaken in believing that each slot was just one poke at a particular level, you can actually assign level ranges to each slot, it's all explained in the OP. I still need to convert everything past Westlog Forest, so I'm going to do that as soon as possible. Also, please don't post any Surfing, Fishing, Rock Smash, Headbutt lists yet, those have some different mechanics and should probably be put into separate topics. On that note, do you guys want Headbutt trees? They're already programmed into the kit Fangking is using, and so the only potential drawback is that we'd have to make a "shaking tree" animation.

Sprite Battles, I realize that perhaps I'm at fault here for dragging it to get the results I want instead of the results people want (oh noez ImmunityBow is abusing his power), and so this has been a bit of a drag on my work on the demo and with OI. I guess I'll just use the original sprites for now, and then revamp Ohmure when I get the inspiration/time, and open them back up for debate. If it's worth anything, Mogel got a recolour, for those who didn't like it's colour scheme.

There's now an actual OP to the Little Corrections Topic, and people have asked me to tone down on the dex-entry-inspired changes, so I guess I will. If someone could do some double checking in the Complete Pokemon Forum to check for any errors, that'd be good.

If there's one thing I don't want to be doing alone, it's Trainer Line-Ups, yes Gym Leaders are more fun, but it's not difficult and I'd feel like I'm taking away the most easy opportunity to help out on this forum. We need people to do movesets for all those generic trainers' Pokemon, and it's not like it requires tons of skill or anything.

While it's not super-important, any contributions to Random NPC Lines are appreciated. It's always nice to have some more content we can use places.

Reliability has been slowly but steadily working on Back Sprites. Thanks to him for that.

For some of the more behind the scenes stuff:

MewLoverEX has been working on the scripts for the trainers and Therma in Therma's gym. They still need a little refining, but overall we believe them to be quite good.

The berries system is currently set to GSC-style (specific trees that regrow after a certain period of time), as the 3rd/4th gen berry-growing style (planting/watering) hasn't quite yet been figured out by Fangking. He's trying to figure out how to do them, but he says it's been difficult.

TV has been confirmed by Fangking to be not to difficult to do (I don't even know why I asked, it's actually easy enough to make trigger-based and time-based events in RMXP IIRC =P), so TV programmes could be something fun to do sometime in the near future.

An assortment of Event Dialogue has been pulled out by neon and is now in the Staff Forum, which hopefully will open up a little more soon...

And that's it.

Good night Calde-pleasepostpleasepleasepleaseitmotivatesotherstopos titmotivatesmetopostandvotesareespeciallyappreciat edkthkbai!

PS. I accidentally closed this tab, got a big scare, then Mozilla Firefox's awesome "open closed tab" feature saved it all for me. Whew.