sim

@pkmn/sim

An automatically generated extraction of just the simulator portion of smogon/pokemon-showdown.

The package aims to meet the following requirements:

• stay as close to sim/ from smogon/pokemon-showdown as possible
• be usable as a typed and verisoned module that exports a @pkmn/dex-types-compatible data layer
• be usable in the browser environment

To that end, any divergence from the canonical Pokémon Showdown sim/ directory can be explained as desirable to meet one of more of these requirements.

If you do not need typed and versioned module or do not require the ability to run a the full blown simulator and/or validator code in the browser, you will probably be better off vendoring the smogon/pokemon-showdown in your project.

If you simply want access to the Pokémon Showdown's data layer but do not care about any of the logic required to implement the game mechanics and battle system, please see @pkmn/data (or @pkmn/dex).

Installation

$ npm install @pkmn/sim

Usage

import {Dex, BattleStreams, RandomPlayerAI, Teams} from '@pkmn/sim';
import {TeamGenerators} from '@pkmn/randoms';

Teams.setGeneratorFactory(TeamGenerators);

const streams = BattleStreams.getPlayerStreams(new BattleStreams.BattleStream());
const spec = {formatid: 'gen7customgame'};

const p1spec = {name: 'Bot 1', team: Teams.pack(Teams.generate('gen7randombattle'))};
const p2spec = {name: 'Bot 2', team: Teams.pack(Teams.generate('gen7randombattle'))};

const p1 = new RandomPlayerAI(streams.p1);
const p2 = new RandomPlayerAI(streams.p2);

void p1.start();
void p2.start();

void (async () => {
  for await (const chunk of streams.omniscient) {
    console.log(chunk);
  }
})();

void streams.omniscient.write(`>start ${JSON.stringify(spec)}
>player p1 ${JSON.stringify(p1spec)}
>player p2 ${JSON.stringify(p2spec)}`);

Please see Pokémon Showdown's existing documentation, in particular the PROTOCOL.md and SIM-PROTOCOL.md files (DEX.md, FORMES.md, TEAMS.md, SIMULATOR.md, NONSTANDARD.md, and the long-open PR attempting to document the simulator's inner workings are also helpful).

Browser

The recommended way of using @pkmn/sim in a web browser is to configure your bundler (Webpack, Rollup, Parcel, etc) to minimize it and package it with the rest of your application.

Changes

Pokémon Showdown's sim/ directory has been modified in the following ways:

• import and export statements have been added as needed to allow consumers to use this package with TypeScript without type errors. Internally, Pokémon Showdown uses global type definitions which are not accessible to third-party developers and the code will not type check when used externally without these additions. Pokémon Showdown's internal type setup is also fairly convoluted - because of global definitions there is quite a bit of merging going on and with explicit import and export statements the TypeScript compiler better able to detect type errors. index.ts files have been added to each of the generations in data/.
• only Gens 1 - 9 are supported, no other mods. Generation 9 as the base mod is supported as with Pokémon Showdown, but after that only the canconical genN mods are supported (no Stadium, Let's Go, or pet mods). However, the @pkmn/mods package provides the information required for additional formats, and support for Other Metagames can be achieved with the modified Dex#mod method. The Dex#mod and Dex.forGen methods will throw if an unsupported mod/gen is requested. A Dex#modid method has also been added which returns the current mod applied to the Dex.
• random battles are not supported by the @pkmn/sim package. All team generation logic and data has been removed from the package and are instead to be provided by the @pkmn/randoms package which exports a generator factory that can be configured using the Teams#setGeneratorFactory method. Unless a team generator factory has been set Teams#getGenerator and Teams#generate will throw.
• all generations and all of their data are automatically loaded. With Pokémon Showdown, data is loaded lazily, and often requires you run includeX methods to ensure you are getting consistent state. These functions still exist and can be called, but are now wholly unnecessary. Lazily loading older generations would still be desirable (and this package still lazily constructs the data objects), but lazy loading only works on web with asynchronous APIs which Pokémon Showdown does not support. Dex#includeMods is a no-op.
• Teams methods delegate to @pkmn/sets. In Pokémon Showdown this logic is copied between the client and server, but in @pkmn has been extracted into a module. However, the Teams methods have slightly divergent behavior to Pokémon Showdown's Teams because of this, most notably around defaults and parsing past genrations (eg. Pokémon Showdown will simply leave evs absent when not present whereas @pkmn/sets will default to 0 or 252 depending on the generation, but since the Teams API does not support a generation evs will always default to 0). Using @pkmn/sets directly and with the generation provided is the recommended approach to avoid any inconsistencies.
• dataDir and dataSearch have been removed.
• in order to be @pkmn/dex-types compatible, the asynchronous learnsets API has been added (though unlike like with @pkmn/dex, the learnsets data is loaded at startup, not asynchronously), and Dex.data.Species and Dex.data.Types 'aliases' have been added for what Pokémon Showdown calls Pokedex and TypeChart respectively. However, it is important to note that the types in @pkmn/sim do not match the stricter @pkmn/dex-types directly, you must simply cast the @pkmn/sim Dex and trust that it will work.
• DexConditions has been modified to behave like the client (and @pkmn/dex). If an effect is prefixed with a type (e.g. 'move: ...') then the type will be used to determine which API to search. The two differences with Pokémon Showdown's simulator is that the input is more lenient (the simulator expects 'move:<ID>', where the client allows for 'move: <Name>') and the returned object's ID is actually a legal ID (the simulator returns 'move:<ID>' as ID).

Formats

Pokémon Showdown expects server owners to modify config/formats.ts in order to configure the formats their simulator supports. @pkmn/sim does not ship the same config/formats.ts as the upstream smogon/pokemon-showdown repository - @pkmn/sim bundles stable, popular formats that require no mods, looking to cut down on bundle size and churn. However, users may extend the default formats by providing their own:

import {Dex} from '@pkmn/sim';
import {Formats} from 'myformats.ts';

Dex.formats.extend(Formats);

You can copy Pokémon Showdown's formats verbatim by simply fetching the latest formats and saving the file locally.

$ curl -o myformats.ts https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smogon/pokemon-showdown/master/config/formats.ts

Note that not all of Pokémon Showdown's formats are expected to work out of the box, you may need to mod the Dex with additional data (including any Rulesets). Furthrmore, formats are Dex-specific, if you mod a Dex you must instead call extend on that dex.formats. Similarly, that dex then must be passed to whichever object (eg. Battle, BattleStream, TeamValidator, etc) needs access to the format. Dex#mod will automatically call extend if the data provided to it includes a Formats list.

License

Substantial amounts of the code in this package have been either derived or generated from portions of Pokémon Showdown code which are distributed under the MIT License.