It did not. pending() short-circuited on available(), and available() was
true for any checkout carrying assets/stadium -- so when REV went to 3 for
the shiny variants, such a machine was never pending, was never asked to
rebuild, and quietly went on serving the old set. ready() was false, so
readPack skipped the save-dir cache and read the shipped normal-only packs:
every shiny Pokemon drawn in its ordinary colours, with nothing on screen
saying why. A driver run sitting at "idle 0/151" for twelve thousand frames
is what surfaced it.
pending() is now keyed on ready(), not available(). A checkout with a ROM
spends one loading screen rebuilding a set it had files for; after that it is
current and never pending again. That was the cost the old short-circuit was
avoiding, and it is worth paying once to make a rev bump mean something.
The other half is the players who imported a ROM through the picker rather
than dropping it in baseroms/. beginFrom builds from the bytes and never
keeps them, so on a rev bump there is no ROM to rebuild from -- and with
available() keyed on ready(), the STADIUM rungs would have vanished off the
options row entirely. usable() now separates "these packs are readable" from
"these packs are current": format and count, deliberately not rev. Stale
packs keep the mode working and keep the rungs offered; only the recolour
waits for a rebuild. Losing the shinies until then is a blemish, losing the
mode is not.
readPack orders the two accordingly: a current cache always wins, a stale one
wins only when there is no shipped set to prefer instead -- so a cache from
an extractor rev we have since fixed cannot shadow good files, while a player
whose only copy IS that cache still gets Pokemon on the field.
Verified by rolling the marker back to rev 2 and launching: ready=false,
usable=true, available=true, pending=true, and the build runs unprompted.
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