Mail Time: Pokemon Coding and DRM

[Shamus Young]

Mail Time: Pokemon Coding and DRM

How can there be four billion different variations of Spinda? Has Shamus ever reconsidered his stance on DRM, especially now that's he's nearing releasing a game of his own?

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[hentropy]

I just want people to know it exists.

Such a selfish attitude! Artists shouldn't feel entitled to participate in the whole "promotion" thing. Everyone knows the best and most uncompromising art is found in people's basement after they die.

 

[CaitSeith]

no other species of Pokemon has varying stripes / spots / feathers / whatever.

I don't know how the pattern for Spinda is rendered (the 32 layers theory is the very likely); but it certainly isn't the only one with varied patterns (it's only the one with the most numerous ones). Some depend of the sex (like Pyreroar and Unfezant), some depend of the season (like Deerling and Sawsbuck), some depend on where they were catched, Unown has 28 completly different shapes (depending on the same variable used for Spinda), etc... And lastly, every single Pokemon has an alternate color pattern called "shiny", which usually is ridicously rare to find and catch (except for the Red Gyrados in Pokemon Gold/Silver).

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

To add onto the idea of Pokemon as a cultural force, I played it the first generation once, a very long time ago, and yet I entirely understood CaitSeith's post. What a world we live in.

On a side note, the tab description for the article just says, "Mailbag Placeholder", so someone might want to correct that.

 

[Theminimanx]

In any case, I wonder if a no-spots Spinda is possible, in-game.

As a matter of fact, it is!

EDIT: As it turns out, Shamus was also right about this:

Is there a Spinda somewhere in the possibility space that technically has spots, but they never show up because they occur outside of the silhouette of the sprite?

From Bulbapedia:

[HEADING=2]Spinda's spots[/HEADING]
00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Spinda has four spots: two on its face, and one on each of its ears. Each byte in the personality value represents the coordinates of one of these spots. The x-coordinate is the lower four bits of the byte and the y-coordinate is the higher four bits of the byte. These coordinates determine the position of the top-left corner of the corresponding spot.
While this would appear to mean that Spinda's spots have as many possible variations as there are personality values (4,294,967,296), some coordinates will place a spot off of Spinda's body or such that one wholly overlaps another. Therefore, in practice, the number of observed variations is fewer.

 

[The Eupho Guy_v1legacy]

Wow, Good Robot looks very interesting. It's on my wishlist now and I'm looking forward to giving it a go next year once it comes out. Any idea on price?

 

[Bad Player]

no other species of Pokemon has varying stripes / spots / feathers / whatever.

I don't know how the pattern for Spinda is rendered (the 32 layers theory is the very likely); but it certainly isn't the only one with varied patterns (it's only the one with the most numerous ones). Some depend of the sex (like Pyreroar and Unfezant), some depend of the season (like Deerling and Sawsbuck), some depend on where they were catched, Unown has 28 completly different shapes (depending on the same variable used for Spinda), etc... And lastly, every single Pokemon has an alternate color pattern called "shiny", which usually is ridicously rare to find and catch (except for the Red Gyrados in Pokemon Gold/Silver).

The difference is that those are all distinct sprites/models that were individually created and put into the game. They didn't manually create over 4 billion Spinda sprites.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

This is the first I've heard of Good Robot, but it looks like my kinda game! Can't wait to try it.