Template talk:Enemy stats

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Revision as of 16:25, July 19, 2019 by Espyo (talk | contribs)
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I think total enemy counts should be added as a column for enemy stats. I'm apprehensive to implement this, as I believe some of the enemy counts for areas and caves are inaccurate. For example, the page for the Wistful Wild doesn't list Ravenous Whiskerpillars in it's enemy count list, despite the area having the aforementioned enemies. Could this be due to an error with the read values from the internal game files being wrong (namely TekiInfo sections)? The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ladishchap • (talk) • (contribs)

Well, most counts on the wiki are wrong or incomplete. Even cave sublevels have a warning about how they're being read wrong. Progress is being made to rectify that. That said, for Pikmin 2, the numbers will never be correct, since the random sublevel generation can generate a variable number of some enemies. And even then, all games have side modes, and enemies that respawn in story mode. Finally, counting everything just for a final stat might not be that interesting. If somebody really wants to do that, and count everything properly with the help of the game's files, there might be a spot somewhere on the wiki for it. Otherwise, I don't think so. — {EspyoT} 17:16, July 18, 2019 (EDT)
I think such a statistic should definitely count enemies that respawn only once and could either exclude side mode enemy counts or have two numbers; one plain for the normal areas and caves and another in parentheses that adds the side mode counts, with appropriate footnotes explaining at the table's bottom. With respect to caves, as I understand, the enemy counts and spawns for caves are constant, while the physical areas are randomly generated. Am I understanding this wrong, because that's what the cave generation pages seem to suggest? Obviously I don't think implementing this is a good idea unless the sublevel game files can be accurately read and verified. But if they could, I think this would be a very good and interesting data implementation. My inspiration for this idea is from the Doom wiki, where each enemy has stats such as health, damage, and movement speed just like the pikmin wiki in data tables, but also lists the total amount found in each game based on difficulty. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: https://gyazo.com/42c42d5746ba9ffc0cf621008c60b9cc For Doom enemies, the counts exclude enemies spawned by or revived by other enemies, for example. Do you know of any forums/discussion pages where people are trying to better understand the sublevel files? Thanks for the reply, cheers. Ladishchap (talk) 14:24, July 19, 2019 (EDT)Ladishchap
I pretty much agree with the details of the plan. Right now, the sublevel files are more or less well understood; there are just some minor details that need to be figured out. I'm even currently writing a script that will, hopefully, dump perfect information about every sublevel, straight from the game files. While some sublevels say that, for instance, 5 Red Bulborbs will spawn, other sublevels can say 2 Red Bulborbs + 3 Orange Bulborbs + 4 more enemies picked at random, with a 30% chance of any randomly picked enemy being a Red Bulborb, and 70% Orange. That's mostly what the fluctuations boil down to. That said, there are even other subtle problems, like sublevels that are physically generated in a way that can't accommodate the enemies the game wants, but those can probably be ignored for the most part... More research is needed, I guess. Doom Wiki's count makes a bit more sense, so players can get a feel of how different enemies increase in number in different game modes, but for Pikmin, I think it just makes for a neat stat. Maybe a way to compare between games, but that's about it. I think one plan to get this to work would be to wait for the script to be done, and all numbers to be properly dumped on the wiki, and then get data from the overworld area files carefully in a similar fashion. But even then, that's just for Pikmin 2... Anyway, right now, Pikcord and Hocotate Hacker (Discord servers) have users that know bits and pieces, but the best place to find all known info about the sublevels is in the Pikmin Technical Knowledge Base. — {EspyoT} 17:24, July 19, 2019 (EDT)