Armed on the occupant-change edge, which happens while the screen is still
mid-wipe -- so the burst spent its whole three-quarter-second life underneath
it. The instrumentation is what settled it: armed=1, quads=450, which is
45 frames times 10 stars, exactly LIFE. It was never missing. It was drawing
where nobody could see it.
Two gates, because the first one was still wrong. Holding the clock until the
scene DREW the side does not help: the battle renders under the wipe for
about a second before the wipe is gone. The burst now waits until the battle
is the top of the stack -- the wipe popped, somebody watching -- and only
then starts. Armed and released are separate moments now, which is what they
always were.
Also, a shiny no longer discolours a PERSON. Both sides can be holding a
trainer pic rather than a Pokemon (the foe's portrait before the send-out,
the player's own back until "Go!"), and the tint was going straight through
it. Shininess is a fact about a Pokemon, not its owner. sideTexture asks the
same two questions it already used to label the finished texture.
And the capture drivers build the party BEFORE pinning the odds. Pokemon.new
is where shininess is decided, so setting odds to 1 first made the player's
own Pikachu shiny too -- which tinted the player's side, which during the
intro is the trainer sprite. That is what "the player trainer sprite seems
discolored" was.
Lineup is now Charizard, Electrode, Vaporeon, Dratini.
Verified by strip: the burst lands in the frames right after the wipe clears,
and the trainer back sprite is its own colour again.
Flat numbers cannot work here and both previous attempts proved it in
opposite directions. The first ring was 7 world units across, which is inside
anything bigger than a Rattata -- and additive drawing keeps the depth test,
so all sixty quads a frame were rejected and nobody saw them. Correcting by
eye gave a ring 24 across starting 20 units up, which is taller than the
tallest Pokemon in the game: it hung in the sky above a Ponyta with nothing
underneath it.
A mon on the map is 5 to 18 world pixels tall (StadiumMon REF_HEIGHT 14). One
ring cannot fit a Diglett and a Gyarados, so every distance is now a fraction
of the mon: Stadium pushes each side's worldHeight and worldRadius into
ShinyFx every frame -- worldRadius exists precisely so "a caller can size
something to its footprint" -- and the burst is measured off those.
Two more things the pictures showed. The ring is an ELLIPSE with its axes
measured separately: flattened enough to read as a ring from the battle's low
seat, a single radius reaches only a third of the body's height, so the top
and bottom stars sit on the Pokemon. And it OPENS from clear of the body
rather than from a point -- springing out of nothing means every star spends
the first frames stacked at the centre, which is the middle of the mon and
looks exactly like the sparkles being stuck inside it.
Shot against Ponyta and Gyarados, an order of magnitude apart in size: the
ring hugs each silhouette from outside and no star lands on either body.
Gen 1 has no shininess of its own, but it has the four DVs Gen 2 reads to
decide it -- and the engine already ships that reading (Stats.isShiny, its
own comment calling it "the RBY virtual shiny", allowlisted for mods
precisely so an indicator mod can call it). Nothing new is stored on a
Pokemon and nothing migrates: every save already contains the answer, and
this starts drawing it. Random DVs land on the pattern 1 in 8192, which is
the classic rate and the default the odds dial ships at.
Deriving rather than storing is what makes it survive a save, a box, a
trade and an evolution with no second copy of the truth to drift. mon.shiny
is a cache written from the DVs, never read as the source.
The roll goes in Pokemon.new -- every wild, gift, starter and traded mon is
built there, and it is before the battle bakes its sprite, which
battle.started is already too late for. It draws from the mod's own random
stream so installing this does not shift the sequence damage rolls and
encounter slots come out of. Trainers stay ordinary by themselves: the
engine pins their DVs, as the real games do.
The models are genuinely recoloured, as part of the extraction. Each
species is decoded once, packed as usual, then recoloured and packed again
as NNNs.dsm. The colours are Stadium's own HSL slide (hue in degrees,
saturation and lightness on a -8..+8 scale at 12.5% a step); five species
carry an explicit colour table instead, because Stadium gives them a real
alternate texture that no single slide reproduces -- Jigglypuff's body must
stay pink while its irises rotate to green.
Extraction is the right moment because StadiumFx's generated frames are
still marked there and the packer drops the marker: it is the last point a
flame is distinguishable from a hide. A shiny Charizard has a shiny hide
and an ordinary fire. The normal packs are written BEFORE the recolour, so
they come out byte-identical and stadium_extract_test still diffs all 151
against the Python oracle unchanged -- no format change, no DSM4, no second
implementation to keep in step. REV goes to 3 so an existing cache rebuilds.
Flat art is tinted instead, because the engine bakes a species palette into
a cache with no notion of which individual is drawn. The tint comes from
that species' own slide rather than a generic gold. A multiply can only
darken, so species whose shiny is lighter read quieter there than on the
model; the status page's star is the mode-proof mark.
Tests: 58 assertions in tests/shiny_test.lua, including the colour
transform against 640 real colour pairs lifted from the verified texture
set, the DV model, the read side, and the end-to-end through the engine's
own constructor. stadium_extract_test gains --mod (worktrees have neither
the ROM nor the packs, both gitignored) and now also checks that every
shiny pack is the same length as its twin and actually differs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
DramaticShape