DramaticShapeVoxelMod/README.md

Dramatic Shape Voxel Mod

A mod for the Pokémon Gen 1 Recompilation Project.

The overworld as a 3D diorama. Terrain is extruded into real geometry, occlusion comes from a depth buffer rather than a y-sort, characters stand as leaning sprite slabs, a shadow map throws real cast shadows across whatever they land on, and an optional tilt-shift pass sells the miniature-model look.

And battles fought on that world rather than on a white field. When something picks a fight the map's NPCs are culled, the engine's own wipe plays over the empty map, and the battle draws over the nearest patch of clear ground — shot over the shoulder, the player's mon low and left and the enemy high and right, with a slow parallax drift behind them and a depth-of-field pass that keeps both of them sharp.

Purely presentational. Nothing here reaches collision, movement, triggers or scripts — it changes what the world looks like and nothing about what it is. The battle arena is where the camera goes, not where anybody goes: no cell, facing, flag or warp is written, so the player is standing exactly where the fight found them when it ends.

Controls

Every key is free-roam only, and each one is also a row on the OPTIONS menu.

control	does
3, or the VOXEL options row	OFF → 15 → 35 → 50 → 75 → OFF (camera pitch)
5, or the V-GRID options row	OFF / ON — a one-pixel wireframe on every voxel
6, or the T-SHIFT options row	OFF → 1 → 2 → 3 → OFF (miniature blur)
7, or the V-CURVE options row	OFF → 1 → 2 → 3 — bend the world over the horizon
8, or the 3D-BTL options row	ON / OFF — fight on the map instead of on a white field

3D-BTL is on by default and is independent of VOXEL: battles draw on the world whether or not the free-roam camera is pitched over.

While a battle can be staged on the map — 3D-BTL on, or VOXEL on FULL, which owns that row — the engine's BATTLE LAYOUT row is set to OG and taken off the OPTIONS menu. The staged shot is composed in the Game Boy's own 160x144 frame: the arena camera is solved to put a cell under each of the two pics' feet, and WIDE re-lays that screen out on a 304x144 surface, which moves every anchor it is solved against. Switching 3D-BTL off hands the row straight back with WIDE selectable again.

Leaving a battle fades rather than cuts while VOXEL is on: the battle screen fades to black, closes behind it, and the map fades up out of it. The engine wipes into a fight and cut straight out of one, which is a big jump between the arena's placed camera and the walking diorama. It applies to every battle while the mode is on — including one that found no arena and drew on the flat battle screen — and not at all while the mode is off. The timing is a voxel_battle_exit transitions record, so a data pack can retune it.

The two HP boxes snap to the window's own edges while a battle is staged — the foe's to the left, yours to the right — instead of huddling in the middle of the frame with map showing either side of them. Same tiles, same size, same rows, on the same frosted glass; only the pair's position changes. On a window shaped like the GB screen there is nowhere to snap to and nothing moves.

Where a battle is staged

The mod looks for the nearest clearing shaped like this, where every x is a cell the player could walk onto — the two mons three cells apart down the middle, with a one-cell apron so the camera looks across floor rather than into a wall:

x x x
x O x     O   the enemy's mon
x x x
x x x
x P x     P   your mon
x x x

Indoors, in a corridor or in a cave there is often no room for that, so the search relaxes to the same three-cell gap with the apron given up:

O
x
x
P

If neither will fit — and on a map with no open ground at all, or on a machine with no depth-buffer support — the battle draws exactly the way it always did. Water counts as open ground while you are surfing and not otherwise, and warp tiles never count, so a fight is never framed in a doorway.

Two of those keys are taken off the engine: 3 was TILT and 5 was GBC FX. Neither is reachable by key while this mod is enabled, and both are still on the OPTIONS menu. Pressing 3 also switches both off — they fight the diorama, and it is the way back from having left one on.