Fairy Fox

Updates · · pokered-save-editor-2update

Pokered Save Editor 2: rebuilding the Market screen, plus screenshots and releases

The shop screen — long the buggiest in the app — gets a full rework, and the project gains automated screenshots and a release pipeline.

The Pokémart / Game Corner screen in Pokered Save Editor 2 had long been the most half-finished, fragile part of the app. This day was a long, iterative rebuild of it, plus two pieces of project infrastructure.

The Market rework

The screen became a clean two-pane layout: a shopping list on the left and a cart that reads like a store receipt on the right, itemised with a running total. Buying and selling were unified into a single cart per currency, summing into one net total, and the mode controls moved out of the footer into segmented header strips.

The standout fix was the money/coins exchange. A coin is worth ₽20 — confirmed in the game’s own data (gameCorner.json "price": 20) — but the conversion was inverted:

A coin is worth ₽20.

  old:  coins = rate × money      → ~20 coins per ₽1   (inverted — wrong direction)
  new:  money = rate × coins      → ₽20 per coin        (correct)

So the data was right and the C++ math was wrong. It was reworked into a clear converter — money on one side, coins on the other, live deltas above each. To check this kind of thing against an authority, the documented Pokémon Red disassembly (pret/pokered) was cloned in as a read-only reference. The rework also surfaced another use-after-free, traced with a debugger to shop entries being read from cross-instance static registries after they’d been freed; the fix sweeps only the current model’s live entries.

An automated screenshot pipeline

A headless tool now boots the real UI and captures PNGs of every screen and several states — and it only ever reads the save in memory, so it can’t touch save data. Getting it to render correctly offscreen took working through several quirks (missing fonts, blank grabs, dropped visual effects), ending on a real but hidden GPU window:

# render through a real GPU window, parked off-screen, so effects actually draw
PSE_SHOT_SIZE=750x480   # capture at the app's real window size

A release pipeline

A GitHub Actions workflow now builds and publishes a GitHub Release, gated so it only fires when the version was actually bumped:

Artifact Platform
Installer (.exe, Inno Setup) Windows
Portable (.zip) Windows
AppImage Linux
Portable (.tar.gz) Linux
Doxygen HTML docs (.zip) —
UI screenshots (.zip) —

The first release, v0.7.2-alpha, went out with all six artifacts after the usual first-run shakeout (a windeployqt flag unsupported on the llvm-mingw toolchain, an Inno Setup path quirk, and a Linux binary-location difference). Screenshots and docs are also served from GitHub Pages, so they stay current without bloating the repo.

References

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