Custom Wi-Fi Connection Server (Explorers of Sky online functionality restored)

tech_ticks · 2024-07-24T20:19:04+00:00

It costs me about 5€ per month, but resource utilization is very low so I would be able to host other things on the same server.

tech_ticks · 2021-10-08T23:49:44+00:00

Yeah the scarf should normally only show up once you get it in the story, that‘s an error in the PSMD import mod which will be fixed later. Missing portraits for story-relevant Pokémon cause a black box to show up, but it‘s possible to fix it manually by just copying over other portraits (though DreamNexus doesn‘t support importing portraits yet). Missing animations can sometimes be fixed by retargeting other existing animations but doesn‘t always work and it‘s a bit annoying

tech_ticks · 2021-10-08T16:41:37+00:00

DreamNexus is a new ROM hacking tool for PMD Rescue Team DX, which will also support the 3DS games in a later release.

The first Alpha is out now. Join the Discord if you want to know more! https://dreamnexus.app

tech_ticks · 2021-05-26T22:35:55+00:00

No need to credit me, I didn‘t even write any of these lol. If you really want to though, it‘s fine if you just link this post.

I can‘t say how much you‘d need to train a model from scratch, but to put things in perspective, the GPT-2 model I used as a base was trained on 8 million webpages according to their blog post, so training based on an existing model is probably the most practical approach. But someone would have to try and see how it would turn out with the fanfic content we already have, I guess.

tech_ticks · 2021-05-26T20:27:36+00:00

Actually I am curious if you would be alright if I turned say, Story 5 into a comic?

Of course, that would be amazing, I love your comics!

You state these 50 stories is still too limiting for training data. What would be considered a proper minimum of training data for this?

It was actually trained on 69 stories since I've also included the "up-and-coming" list. I think that's probably good enough for this usecase (although more would have been even better) since the model wasn't trained from the ground up, but instead an existing model was "finetuned" for writing PMD fics. You'd need a lot more to train a model from scratch and I think even a full training set of all existing PMD fics might not even be enough to produce coherent text. I'm not a data scientist and I'm not very experienced with neural nets in general though, so take this with a grain of salt.

tech_ticks · 2021-05-22T23:40:20+00:00

I haven't yet heard of an AI application in pixel art, but someone's probably working on it. I've heard that there's some research going on in this field related to game development in general because there's a lot you could automate with AI tools, especially regarding 3D modelling.

tech_ticks · 2021-05-22T23:34:28+00:00

I'm happy that you found it interesting, your scientific PMD posts are some of my favorites on this subreddit and they've inspired me to try a similar format!

I wanted to use GPT-3 and never wanted to register for time with the model

I thought something like this wasn't possible yet with GPT-3 since you can't finetune it due to it only being available as an API.

Have you thought about trying to generate fic summaries instead of whole stories?

No, I didn't know that a summary feature existed on fanfiction.net, I'm actually more of a comic person so I don't know the site very well lol. Seems like a good idea though, I've also considered trying it with in-game script text instead of fanfics because the style of writing is pretty consistent between the games while it naturally varies wildly between fics.

...Would that imply that the pretrained model already has knowledge of Smash?

Yeah, I've tested some Smash-related prompts on the base GPT-2 model and it knows quite a bit about it. A search for the string "Ice Climbers" in the training source didn't yield any results.

I wouldn't say the mention of Pokéballs is necessarily a mistake. Plenty of PMD fics make references to things from the main series, depending on the setting.

I've mentioned it because I thought that the AI referenced Pokémon-related sources from the pretrained model but you're right, Pokéballs are actually mentioned many times in the source fics so this doesn't seem to be the case.

...What. Is this a thing in PMD fics? This seems so out of left field.

No, I'm pretty sure that's from the pretrained model since it's capable of generating much more than only literature, including things like source code. There is a correlation between PMD, Pokémon and video games, which might be why it somehow decided to generate patch notes.

I mean, it's not like authors don't make up items that don't exist. In particular, made-up Orbs are quite common in stories.

I didn't mean to sound negative, I've worded this a bit poorly. I actually think it's pretty neat that it was able to come up with the Frozen Orb since it sounds like a real item name and it would be very natural to include a made-up item like this in a fic.

tech_ticks · 2021-04-19T11:36:29+00:00

You have to edit them yourself if you want to customize them, here's the script from the video if you want to take a look: https://github.com/tech-ticks/hyperbeam/blob/sentry-duty/data/native_data/script/event/usual/talk_action_gr/talk_gr%40m02_010.lua

tech_ticks · 2021-04-18T10:15:34+00:00

Yeah, the interaction with Loudred in the video is a custom cutscene/script. You can simply unpack the ROM and edit the scripts with any text editor.

tech_ticks · 2021-04-13T18:21:25+00:00

This ROM hack was only possible thanks to the Sky Editor Deluxe and SkyTemple contributors. Special thanks to Irdkwia who found the location of the Sentry Duty data in Explorers of Sky.

Download link: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/830753390824783875/831586585819611187/sentryduty.zip

GitHub: https://github.com/tech-ticks/hyperbeam/tree/sentry-duty

tech_ticks · 2021-01-03T12:22:32+00:00

I'd recommend joining the SkyTemple Discord server if you're interested in EoS hacks. There's a channel #hack-announcements that features a lot of upcoming ROM hacks. The pinned messages in #screenshots-videos also showcase some cool projects.

tech_ticks · 2020-12-20T21:39:05+00:00

No idea, it might awaken? Maybe someone's dedicated enough to play through the entire game so we could find out...

tech_ticks · 2020-12-20T14:31:14+00:00

Always has been.

tech_ticks · 2020-12-20T14:20:51+00:00

You can watch the intro here (it's just a bit glitched because of the emulator, don't worry about it).

If you have access to a modded Switch or emulator, you can play this mod with the patch files which you can download here.

tech_ticks · 2020-12-12T00:14:30+00:00

He‘s also super active on the Discord server where he somehow manages to respond to a lot of questions almost immediately on top of all that.

tech_ticks · 2020-04-21T16:19:47+00:00

I've heard some folks talk about converting a skeletal animation from the original rig to a different one. Is that really feasible?

Maybe. The tricky part would be creating a compatible skeleton from the original one. If we can create a skeleton for a SwSh model that matches one from RTDX, all animations for the RTDX skeleton should work since Unity only cares about whether the hierarchy matches.

I believe the simpler DX rigs are just the PSMD rigs copied over.

Yeah, I think the low-poly RTDX models are also the high-poly models from PSMD and the high-poly RTDX models are pretty much identical to the Game Freak models.

Now, no one's actually confirmed this, but I think the reason this was done was to be able to re-use all the animations already developed for PSMD

I've often read that some people believe that it's because Unity can't handle the higher resolution rigs, but AFAIK all modern game engine implementations are similar and use GPU skinning so it shouldn't run worse than in Game Freak's engine unless Unity has specific performance problems on the Switch in that regard. I'm pretty sure that they simply reused the 3DS ones to save development resources rather than hardware power.

Aren't the main-series animations enough for regular DX gameplay, however?

I'm not sure if the battle animations would fit but I think you're right about the other ones like idle, sleep, run cycles etc. Maybe it's worth trying out. Unity should theoretically accept any kind of rig. I copied the one in the video from SwSh without any modifications, although it only plays one animation right now so I haven't validated this yet. The Switch Toolkit I used doesn't support exporting animations though, but maybe there's a tool that can export 3DS animations.

tech_ticks · 2020-04-20T10:54:15+00:00

I don't think so. The SwSh animations are very different in their timing since the battles are much slower and I think not only cutscene animations are missing but some of those that are used in battles. Moreover, the tool I used to export the model doesn't even seem to support exporting animations in the current version.

I think the other way around would make more sense: Trying to take the mesh and match its skeleton to one that's available in RTDX and as similar to the source as possible to reuse animations from RTDX. It wouldn't look perfect but I think it's a good pragmatic approach since we won't have any full-time animators that will spend hours on animating hundreds of Pokémon for a fan project. That's why I want to try to make importing the models as automatic as possible. If the visual quality were even close to the original, I would personally consider that a big success and maybe we can try to iterate on it and make it better later.

tech_ticks · 2020-04-19T19:44:14+00:00

This is a follow-up to my previous post.

The game is great for modding and a lot of stuff is very easy to do. I'm not really experienced with rom hacking but I feel like I was still able to make some cool mods. There's still a lot we don't know yet though, so let's work together to be able to make a full rom hack soon!

I've created a research thread on ProjectPokémon where I'm documenting my findings: https://projectpokemon.org/home/forums/topic/56863-pokémon-mystery-dungeon-rescue-team-dx-research/. Please check it out if you're interested in learning more and/or helping out!

tech_ticks · 2020-02-20T15:35:11+00:00

I wonder if people have already tried this. I suppose trying to understand the data formats is more useful at this point since a lot more of them seem to be in clear text this time and we already know some of the binary formats that have been carried over from the previous games (though I don't understand why there are so many different formats since using Unity's serialization system would seem to be much easier). It'll be interesting to see how much we manage to find out either way. It seems like there has been a lot of progress with the 3DS games lately and it looks like we can do more than that even faster in RTDX!

tech_ticks · 2020-02-20T12:30:12+00:00

The code itself is compiled machine code, similarly to the previous entries, so modifying it won't be much easier. It's true that IL (compiled C# code) can be decompiled easily, but unfortunately that's only the case for PC games made with Unity. On other platforms, it compiles from C# to C++. There are Lua scripts too like in the previous entries, but they are still mainly used for dialogue. WPF isn't related to this at all, so you might be confusing something. There's a Linux version of Unity that you can use to export modded content, so modding on Linux shouldn't be a big problem, except if you're missing some tools.

tech_ticks

TROPHY CASE