Proto:Pokémon Diamond and Pearl/March-August 2006 Source Leak

This is a sub-page of Proto:Pokémon Diamond and Pearl.

This page or section details content from the July 2020 Nintendo Leak. Check the July 2020 Nintendo Leak category for more pages also sourced from this material.

This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes. Notes: To look at a WIP Improvement on this page, please look at User:PokeFan/Pokemon DP Prototypes Rewrite

This page sucks. If you could make it suck less, that would be awesome. Specifically: Extremely messy, very unfinished, misinformation; the whole wazoo

To do: Further documentation. Reconsider page structure: Differences should be tracked as normal within a build subpage (e.g. The builds section of this page) rather than one subpage for every conceivable area of comparison and every individual build. Considering how close the March 24th - April 14th builds are, and how close the June / July builds are, it's probably worth grouping them into the same page whilst pointing out the small differences between each of those builds. This will allow us to avoid excessive repetition. March 14th is arguably early enough to have its own page. In fact, do we even want to talk about builds at all when we're the ones deciding which builds to produce? Might it be more accurate to discuss individual file changes and the like? Or is it fair to talk about builds here as only a small quantity of working builds can be produced? If we didn't talk about builds it would arguably be harder to conceptualize each snapshot of development, as each aspect (sprites, sounds, gameplay etc.) would all be in separate pages. Having changes for a single build alongside each other is, I think, more helpful. Perhaps talking about major builds with CVS tags alongside individual file changes would allow for more comprehensive documentation? See this talk page for more discussion. There might be some inaccuracies in the header paragraph that are worth fixing.

On July 24, 2020, the complete source code for Pokémon Diamond and Pearl was leaked. The data corresponding to the version control system it used - CVS - was intact, to such an extent that a large number of file versions from commits from March 2006 onward are now available to us. The CVS repository, however, is not the complete repository used by GameFreak during the game's development. This is a most likely a localization repository, meaning it was meant to be used by localization teams to get a head start on translating the game ahead of its release. As such, while there are indeed quite a few commits and many unique assets and code exclusive to this leak, there are notable gaps in commits to the repository, with some aspects of early builds seen in pre-release material not being present here.

While no builds were present within the repository, a number of builds can be compiled from a handful of the commits. As such, the true extent to the revision history of the game cannot be captured by a small selection of builds, but they still provide key snapshots of development that can provide useful insights.

The English, Korean, and European debug ROMs were also compiled, along with a debug English demo ROM. They are otherwise completely the same as retail, so they are left undocumented.

Compiled Builds

Though the commits in the source data range from March onwards, much of the data within the commits seem to be from quite a bit earlier. Specifically, the .imd and .gmm files in each commit contain what is understood to be a more accurate means of dating the data than the commit dates themselves. With that in mind, the builds listed below - which were built from key milestones within the commits - are dated corresponding to the dates on these .imd and .gmm files, though many of them correspond to commit dates which are a bit later in development.

The builds have been grouped together to split development into three phases:

February 17th, 2006 build The earliest build that can be compiled from the source files.

March 17th - March 31st, 2006 builds Two closely related builds, apparently being quite a bit more complete than the previous build.

June 23rd - July 17th, 2006 builds The next group of compilable builds, nearing the game's completion.

Pokémon Super Contest Differences

To do: These are better off being a subpage or subheading of a June 30th / June-July builds page!

June 30th Super Contest Differences Differences in Super Contests for June 30th's build.

Music Differences

• A notable general change is that the in-game music had a dynamic crossfade from day to night, which isn't the case in the final game. This is present in all the builds from February 17th until March 31st. It seems to have been phased out in the following build, that being June 23rd.

Initial March 12 SDAT commit First known SDAT commit with 36 music SEQ slots. Suspected to have been compiled in February.

March 23rd SDAT commit Second SDAT commit with 46 music SEQ slots.

April 14th SDAT commit Fourth SDAT commit with 47 music SEQ slots.