11-4-23 Update - Expanded Done and PAR

Blame the Snorlax Doll for this update being a day late.  This update is a massive update, and I'll break it down into sections, but the tl;dr is every card from the start of Gen 5 to Paradox Rift is now done.

- Expanded coverage is done -

This is a big one, as it was a major goal I've had for a while, and it's now done.  Every single card that Expanded covers is now in the PDT, including the Gen 9 promos I somehow missed.  I know I estimated this part being done a few weeks ago, but I really only expected about 30 cards to really need any extra work, but it turns out I missed a 0.  I had forgotten just how many unique effects Gen 6 cards had, like the Venomoth that forces you opponent to flip a coin for every trainer they use, and the effect is canceled if it's a tails, or Protection Cube that prevents self damage, or the Burning Energy that re-attaches itself to a pokemon if it was discarded from an attack it used.  So by the time I was done with all that, it was only a few more days until Paradox Rift came out, so I figured I'd just update once that was done.  For context, Gen 5 and 6 have a bit over 3000 cards, and I got them all done in just under 2 months.  The hard focusing on expanded certainly paid off, when most of the sets I was doing before was about 1 set every 2 weeks, or roughly 170 cards every 2 weeks, which means I would have been at this point by the middle of next year, if not longer.

- Parser Updates -

I've updated the Parser a bit because I was rather annoyed at how inconsistent some phrasings were.  For example, one branch was "discard, X, opponent, hand, random" while another was "choose, X, random, opponent, hand, ...".  The wording is different, but the outcome was the same.  Another example was "return, this, hand, everything/only" for one branch but another was "return, this, everything/only, hand", the exact same output but different wording for no good reason.  Other spots of inconsistency were some places having "deal" or "take" with others being "deals" or "takes".  So I've updated many branches for better consistency.  What this means is if you've made any custom cards, there's a small chance they're broken and will need to be remade.  I really hate having to do this, but it was bothering me too much to leave.  I made all the Gen 5 and 6 cards in a few week period of time, and after having many of these being backwards or inconsistent is what prompted me to do this again.  I had re-written the parser almost from the ground up back in March knowing that I was going to release this soon, so I wanted to have everything corrected before then so future updates wouldn't require remaking your custom cards every few updates, it just turns out I missed some spots.  So I can guarantee with a 98.765% promise that this won't happen again.

- General Clean Up -

I forget if this was in the last update or not, but I've done some clean up to the interface, mainly with the Board. There's labels above the player's deck, discard, lost zone, and prizes, since I know that my setup is different than PCGLive.  There's a button to the left to toggle them on and off.  The Reset and Return buttons were also moved to the middle left of the board.  The 4th button there is the Show Effects button, which needs a little explanation.  It'll show all the effects currently present, but not in a super user friendly format.  Most should be pretty obvious what they are, but the formatting might be confusing, so I'd suggest looking at the card that caused the effect if you're unsure.  I do need to figure out something better for this rather than just displaying the effects that the PDT processes, but that's a later project.  It's also split into Player effects, then each individual pokemon's effects, Temp, Ability, Tool, Stadium, Energy.  I really wanted to have some way to show these without needing any of my debugging tools active.

- Future Plans -

As it stands, the PDT is coming along nicely.  However, I'm going into a 'Maintenance Mode' of sorts, as I'm turning most of my attention back to the Youtube channel I've completely ignored.  I'll still be keeping up with new sets, but it may be a while before any more big updates happen.  I just couldn't do both video editing and set creation at the same time, it was too much stuff for too little time.  Like I said above, I hard focused getting all the expanded cards done so that this goal would be done now, rather than almost a year from now, and part of that was because of the video editing.  As for future PDT content, the next update should be the AI update.  I plan on getting the AI to a mostly functional state, then updating with that option present.  I say 'mostly', since I plan on the AI being capable of handling any card you give it, but I'd rather have one that can play with most of the usual cards and not every niche card possible too.  Then there's the Intelligence portion of the AI, and that'll be even longer away, but that one can be a more gradual updating process.  Another big update I have planned is the Vanity Update, where I'll actually bother getting all the alternate arts into the game.  I was more concerned about getting all the cards in first, as now it's just 20 hours of copy-pasting the completed cards.  I'm probably also going to handle them slightly differently than normal, mainly so if you don't care for the alternate arts, you don't need to download another 1.5 GB of images, which is another reason I held off on doing them before, but with the image split I did last time, it'll be easier for that.

So thanks for reading all this, and for checking this game out.