For a couple of months now there's been an issue with the Favorite Pokémon Picker for some users using Chrome on Android devices - the images would just fail to load, leaving a rather useless grid of gray circles in place of the Pokémon to pick from. After some major headaches reproducing this, I finally discovered that it was about a recent Chrome feature, which for all that the page says about how "if the developer doesn't include the ‘loading’ attribute, then the resources will be eagerly loaded as they always have been" was actually being activated on the page, despite the images being already visible, and refusing to load them.

I've now fixed it by explicitly telling the browser to eagerly load these images, but this is quite frankly just a bug in Chrome and I am pretty annoyed to have had to deal with this.

Note that thanks to caching, the updated script may not load for you immediately; you can clear your cache or wait for it to expire.

For those of you wondering when the picker's going to get the eighth-generation Pokémon: I will get to that as soon as there exists a consistent set of images of every Pokémon (other than party sprites, which are a bit too small to usefully show what the Pokémon looks like at all). We don't yet have Sugimori or dream art for the Galar Pokémon, while rips from Sword and Shield can't include every Pokémon because not every Pokémon is programmed into the game.

As far as I can tell, the most feasible routes to obtaining vaguely consistent images for the picker are: a) we wait for full official art reveals for the Galar Pokémon, and then remove from the picker those Pokémon forms that don't have official artwork; or b) people more knowledgeable about 3D rendering than me rip all the models and textures from Sword and Shield, add Gen VII models for the unobtainables, and then actually create small renders of every Pokémon in an idle pose, suitable for use in the picker (and probably other applications). Option B is very attractive if it's at all feasible. If you or somebody you know knows about this stuff, please do contact me.

Speaking of Sword and Shield, my in-game experimentation indicates that prior to the level restriction on capturing being lifted entirely near the end of the game, the capture algorithm is modified to significantly reduce the chance of capture if the wild Pokémon is a higher level than your active Pokémon - from a guaranteed capture to as little as 20-30%. Looking at the actual code will be needed to tell exactly how that change works, but otherwise the algorithm looks probably fairly similar to Gen VII.

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The Favorite Pokémon Picker finally has that progress bar now! I'm not entirely happy with the technical hack I ended up doing to get this working, and I'm probably going to squint at it some more later, but at least it seems to be behaving, just about.

As always, let me know if you find any bugs.

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What's it now, I forget?
Nah, I'm kidding, don't fret.
Happy seventeenth, dear website!
I'm not done with you yet.

Today, my Pokémon website is seventeen years old! That's the age that I was when I started Morphic. Luckily, my website cannot write edgy fanfiction.

For the occasion, I have goddamn finally finished the updated twelfth movie review. Now all my proper movie reviews have screenshots and are a bit better written! I'll do the special reviews as well, hopefully in less time because they're a bit newer, and then finally we can move on to some all-new movie reviews.

I was also going to put up this nice little progress bar feature for the Favorite Pokémon Picker, but unfortunately this innocuous-sounding feature is about ten thousand times harder to implement than I was blissfully imagining when I started working on it, owing to the fact that the picker's information state currently doesn't actually know how many Pokémon were in this round to start with. I thought I had something down that worked okay but no, it's buggy in some weird way and I have yet to figure it out or decide if this is even the way I want to do this feature or if I want to do it in this form at all or just flip tables and do some other form of progress indicator that does not need this information. Sometimes programming is eternal torment. I'm working on it, I swear.

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