DramaticShapeVoxelMod/mod.card

-- Sharing metadata (25-community-and-ecosystem.md 3.2).  Read by tooling
-- and the manager detail pane; never by the loader's merge.
return {
  summary = "The overworld as a 3D diorama, and battles fought on it: real occlusion, tilt-shift, over-the-shoulder fights.",
  author = "DramaticShape",
  contact = "https://github.com/DramaticShape/DRAMATIC_SHAPE",
  tags = { "graphics", "3d", "voxel", "render-pipeline", "presentation",
           "battle" },
  differences = {
    changed = {
      "with VOXEL on, the overworld draws as 3D geometry instead of flat tiles",
      "occlusion comes from a depth buffer rather than a y-sort, so buildings really hide what is behind them",
      "with 3D-BTL on, a battle draws over the map's nearest clear ground instead of over a white field",
      "the battle's text box and menu are frosted glass over that ground rather than an opaque white slab, on the same panels the HUDs sit on",
      "the map's NPCs are culled for the length of a battle, so the wipe plays over an empty map",
      "a battle's letterbox voids go black rather than white, because the battle canvas is no longer white",
      "the engine's TILT and GBC FX rows are taken OFF the OPTIONS menu and held at off for as long as this mod is installed -- TILT is the flat fake of what this mode does for real, GBC FX is a full-screen pass over the top of it; uninstalling puts both rows back",
      "hotkeys 3 and 5 are taken over from those two, which have no key and no row while this is loaded",
      "SELECT in free roam steps the VOXEL ladder exactly as hotkey 3 does -- the button has no overworld job in Gen 1, and phones and pads have no number row; menus keep it untouched",
      "on the 1ST rung ONLY, the grid walk is replaced by free camera-relative movement: collision, warps, ledges, encounters and scripts still run through the engine's own machinery, and every other rung leaves movement untouched",
      "on the 1ST rung the mouse cursor is captured for free look; left click is A, right click is B, and any touch off the overlay's controls drags the view",
    },
    added = {
      "VOXEL options row and hotkey 3 (OFF / 15 / 35 / 50 / 75 degrees / 1ST, a first-person camera with free look and free movement)",
      "T-SHIFT options row and hotkey 6 (OFF / 1 / 2 / 3), the miniature blur",
      "V-GRID on hotkey 5 and V-CURVE on hotkey 7",
      "WATER on hotkey 9 (FULL / SKY / OFF, FULL by default): the water surface becomes a field of pixel-tall voxel columns rising and falling as waves, reflecting the sky, the sun, the moon and the cast standing beside it -- and, on FULL, the shoreline, trees and buildings behind it, by a screen-space ray march",
      "3D-BTL on hotkey 8 (ON / OFF, on by default), battles fought on the world map",
      "BACK SPRITES options row (OFF / ON, off by default), which keeps your own Pokemon on the battle menu in its classic slot while the foe stands out on the map",
      "VR options row (OFF / ON, off by default): PCVR through OpenXR on Windows -- the diorama as a head-tracked tabletop model presented at the rung's own angle and framing on the orbit rungs, life-size first person on 1ST, a staged battle snapping the headset (through a fade to black) into the flat game's own over-the-shoulder seat at life scale, a voxel Pokedex flush along the left controller in first person and in battles (menus, dialogs and the 2D battle screen on its screen; the diorama does without it), the sky and its sun and moon anchored in space, the floating panel wearing the GB frame near-square rather than the whole monitor-wide window, the window as mirror; needs a runtime (SteamVR/Oculus/WMR) and the mod on a real folder",
      "VR controllers (Touch/Index/WMR, rebindable in the runtime): left stick moves, A/B are A/B, either trigger is START, left stick click toggles first/third person; in 1ST the right stick snap-turns 45 degrees a flick; in the diorama the right stick zooms and a squeezed grip drags the table's height; no controller button leaves VR -- that is the VR row's job",
      "a day/night clock that reaches the flat 2D overworld as well as the diorama -- outdoor maps only, and only when the hour is not midday",
      "an over-the-shoulder battle camera on a slow parallax orbit, with a depth-of-field pass that holds both mons sharp",
      "a sky behind the diorama at the 75-degree rung, outdoor maps only, coloured by the active palette mode",
      "a hand-authored tile shape profile (data/voxel_heights.lua) a mod can extend",
    },
    known = {
      "needs shader and depth-canvas support; without them the rows still cycle but the world stays 2D and battles draw plainly",
      "water reflections additionally need a READABLE depth canvas; a driver without one draws the flat animated water this mode always drew",
      "WATER on FULL ray-marches the depth buffer per water pixel, so a map that is mostly sea costs real fill rate on a weak GPU -- SKY is the same look minus the ray march, and OFF is the flat water",
      "a screen-space reflection can only reflect what is in the frame: a tree just off the top edge is not in the water below it, and a ray that runs off the side fades into the sky rather than ending on a line",
      "a map with no 3x6 clearing falls back to a 1x4 one, and a map with neither draws the plain battle screen",
      "the arena is where the CAMERA goes -- nobody is moved, so a fight staged across the map is a shot of that ground, not a trip to it",
      "the battle backdrop renders at the GB's 160x144 to match the pics composited over it, so it is chunkier than the free-roam pass",
      "menus and cutscenes are unaffected -- outside a battle the mode only draws the free-roam overworld",
      "terrain meshes are cached per map, so the first frame after entering a large map costs a build",
      "1ST needs the 3D pass like every rung; without it the level still persists but the world stays 2D and the grid walk stays in charge",
      "in 1ST, scripted walks, ledge hops and spinner slides play out as the grid moves they are, with the camera riding along; free control resumes when they land",
      "rooms have no ceilings, so a first-person look over an interior wall shows the void the diorama always had behind it",
      "VR is Windows x64 only (the shipped loader and the Win32 GL binding): on any other platform -- mobile above all -- the VR row is absent from the OPTIONS menu and the manager's page both, and a stored vr=true carried over in a save is ignored. On Windows it renders the scene once per eye (heavy with WATER FULL or AA up); pad/keyboard/mouse keep working alongside the XR controllers. The loader DLL is found wherever the mod was put -- the dev tree, an installed release's save directory, or an imported archive, from which it is copied once into the save directory so the FFI has a real disk path",
      "VR on and off are both the VR row's job (options menu or manager); no controller button does either",
      "the Pokedex needs a TRACKED left controller; without one there is no device in hand and the floating panel carries the UI as before",
      "while the VR row is ON, 3D-BTL is held ON and BACK SPRITES held OFF (the headset's battle staging assumes both), and both rows leave the OPTIONS menu until VR goes off -- their stored values come back with them",
      "while a headset is live the battle HUDs keep their classic in-frame slots instead of snapping to the window's edges, on the flat mirror too -- both VR screens crop to the GB frame, and a block at the window's edge would be cropped away with it",
      "VR swapchains prefer plain RGBA8; a runtime that only offers sRGB shows slightly lifted colours",
    },
  },
  credits = {
    { who = "pret/pokered", for_ = "the tile and sprite data the geometry is derived from" },
    { who = "The Khronos Group", for_ = "the OpenXR loader shipped unmodified in assets/vr (Apache-2.0; full license text alongside the DLL)" },
  },
  compat = { engine = ">=0.1.37 <2.0.0", modApi = 2 },
}