Animation: Shadow Pokemon

Section 1.F

Shadow Overlay Patterns

By default, Essentials supports Shadow Pokemon introduced in Pokemon Colosseum. You can add your own custom sprites for these Shadow forms so that they look different when encountered. However, if you intend to include lots of different species as Shadow Pokemon in your game, creating or finding sprites for each and every Shadow form can add up to become quite a lot of extra work.

To simplify this, this plugin introduces a method of automatically applying an overlay on top of Pokemon sprites if they are in Shadow form. This allows you to have any species in Shadow form to appear different when viewed, without having to manually add new sprites for each Shadow form. Here's an example of what this looks like when applied:

Shadow Lugia with the overlay applied.

To accomplish this, this plugin includes a graphic file named shadow_pattern, which is located in the folder Graphics/Plugins/Deluxe Battle Kit. This image is what's used as the pattern which Shadow Pokemon sprites are overlayed with. You can edit or change this image if you wish to customize how your Shadow Pokemon sprites look.

However, if you already have existing Shadow form sprites for a particular species, then this generic overlay effect will not apply to those sprites. This can allow you to have specific unique Shadow forms for certain species, while maintaining a more generic effect for others.

If you wish to disable this feature and apply the generic overlay to all Shadow forms regardless if they're already using an existing Shadow form sprite or not, then you may do so by opening the plugin Settings and setting DONT_OVERLAY_EXISTING_SHADOW_SPRITES to false.

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Animated Overlay Patterns

The overlay displayed on Shadow Pokemon is a pattern than can actually move around in a loop, creating an animation of sorts. By default, this overlay will scroll upwards, creating a smoky effect.

Shadow Tyranitar with an animated pattern.

To edit how this pattern moves, you simply have to open the plugin Settings and find the setting SHADOW_PATTERN_MOVEMENT. You will see that this is set to an array containing two symbols.

The first element in this array corresponds to how the overlay animates along the X-axis. The second element in this array corresponds to how the overlay animates along the Y-axis. By combining different settings for each axis, you can control how the pattern moves.

If you'd prefer that the pattern is a still image that doesn't animate, then you would just set this as [:none, :none] to prevent any movement on either axis.

X-Axis

Symbol	Animation Effect
:none	The overlay will not move along this axis.
:left	The overlay will move to the left in a loop.
:right	The overlay will move to the right in a loop.
:erratic	The overlay will "jitter" erratically left and right.

Y-Axis

Symbol	Animation Effect
:none	The overlay will not move along this axis.
:up	The overlay will move up in a loop.
:down	The overlay will move down in a loop.
:erratic	The overlay will "jitter" erratically up and down.