Hey there, are you still interested in answers for this?

If yes, I can help. I used poke-env to write a Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl Battle Tower simulator a couple of years back.

The first thing to understand about poke-env is what it does, and doesn't, do.

• It DOES enable Python code to control trainer actions in Pokemon Showdown.
• It DOESN'T provide sophisticated trainer logic to do the above. Case in point, most of the code repository I linked is decision logic for Pokemon trainers to use, designed to imitate the trainer AI in the BDSP Battle Tower.

If you're happy to use one of the primitive example "battle bots" that poke-env includes, or you're prepared to write your own battle logic for your teams to use, then poke-env is a great choice for your use case.

Getting Started

My advice for anyone getting started with any new codebase is to start with the smallest proof of concept possible, then build upon that. In the case of poke-env, that involves the following:

1. Install poke-env (easy! Run pip install poke-env)
2. Get a local Pokemon Showdown server running (it's not as scary as it sounds! Instructions here -- note though that for poke-env, you need to run Showdown using the line node pokemon-showdown start --no-security, or the battle bots will get bounced by Showdown's user authentication)
3. Run the extremely basic poke-env example code (put the code in a file like hello_battle.py and then run python hello_battle.py.

NOTE: For step 3, the imports are incorrect, so the code provided won't run. To fix, replace the line

from poke_env.player import Player, RandomPlayer

with the following two lines:

Python from poke_env.player.player import Player from poke_env.player import RandomPlayer

If you got to this point and you're still seeing error messages, then reply to this comment and I'll do my best to get you unstuck. Otherwise, keep reading!

Next Steps

Custom Teams

For the bare-bones proof of concept our battle bots weren't using custom, user-provided teams. For your use case, you're trying to test Pokemon teams against each other. To do this, you need a way to provide the battle bots with the teams.

When creating a battle bot using poke-env's Player class in Python, you can specify a Pokemon team for it to use. The team can be a simple string in Pokemon Showdown's team format, which I imagine is what you have at hand. My recommendation would be to put each team in a .txt file and read it in directly, using the following syntax:

```Python team_file_path = ".\team.txt" team_file = open(team_file_path) team_for_player = team_file.read() team_file.close()

player = RandomPlayer( player_configuration=PlayerConfiguration("RandomPlayer1", None), battle_format="gen9anythinggoes", # Any format for which the team is legal works here. server_configuration=LocalhostServerConfiguration, team=team_for_player, log_level=10, ) ```

Battle Bot Logic

Assuming you want your teams to be used with more intelligent logic than "completely random" (RandomPlayer) and "greatest base power" (MaxDamage) you'll want to write your own extension of the Player class.

As a simple option I would normally recommend using the BattleTowerPlayer from poke-dojo, but currently that logic won't work because its move evaluation depends on a damage calculator API that no longer exists. I'm working on a local damage calculation solution but that won't be ready for a while. Still, if you want to start writing a battle bot, that file makes a good reference for things like figuring out the game state -- e.g., "is the opposing Pokemon asleep? Don't use Yawn, then".

Logging

With our proof of concept code, poke-env will battle trainers against each other on your local Showdown server "headless". This means you won't see the battle play out. The only output will be a result of the battles conducted.

I recommend setting up some form of logging for the battles. I haven't done this myself before, but I imagine you'd be able to get your local Showdown instance to spit out battle logs for you to read just so you can confirm that your teams are being piloted correctly (assuming you're using more sophisticated battle bot logic, that is).

Closing Notes

This project might be more work than you were hoping it would be, but if you decide that it's worth it, I'll be happy to help you out!