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.
Water is a surface rather than a texture lying in a hole. It is a field of one-pixel-wide voxel columns, each standing a whole number of pixels tall and rising and falling as waves — found by walking the view ray through them in the shader, so a crest hides what is behind it and shows you its lit side, with no extra geometry anywhere.
And it reflects. The sky it stands under, in the same bands, the same dither and off the same clock, so the lake and the sky above it meet at the waterline with no seam. The sun or moon hanging in it, at the size the painted disc is drawn, craters and all. Whoever is standing beside it — walkers, NPCs, the two Pokémon in a staged battle. And on FULL, a screen-space ray march adds the rest of what is on screen: the shoreline, the trees behind it, the buildings across the bay. How much of it shows is Fresnel, so the top rung is a mirror and a looking-straight-down rung is a pond, off the same water.
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.
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 |
9, or the WATER options row |
FULL / SKY / OFF — waves and reflections on water. SKY gives the surface its pixel-tall wave columns and puts the sky, the sun, the moon and the cast in them; FULL adds a screen-space ray march that also reflects the shoreline, the trees and the buildings standing behind it |
| the BACK SPRITES options row | OFF / ON — keep your own Pokémon on the battle menu, seen from behind in its classic slot, instead of standing it on the map; the foe is still out there. Only on the menu while 3D-BTL is on, because it decides nothing without it |
| the DAYTIME options row | SYNC / DAY / NIGHT / DUSK / DAWN / CYCLE — what time it is outdoors, on the diorama and on the flat 2D world; held at SYNC (and off the menu) while VOXEL is FULL |
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.
Two of the engine's own rows are taken away while this mod is installed: TILT, which is the flat fake of what this mode does for real, and GBC FX, a full-screen present pass over the top of the diorama. Both are held at off rather than merely hidden — a row that is not there cannot switch off a value an older save arrived with. Uninstall and both come back, at whatever they were last set to.
Everything the battle screen draws as a box — the two HUD blocks, the text box and the menus over it — sits on frosted glass rather than on the white field it used to have behind it: the world underneath, blurred and laid back down translucent, with the ink flipping white where the ground it lands on is dark. Nothing the engine draws inside a box moves; only the paper is gone.