sprites/README.md

Pokémon Sprites

The Smogon / Pokémon Showdown! sprite repository.

Installation

This project depends on

• ImageMagick >= 7
• gifsicle
• AdvPng (optional)
• OptiPNG (optional)
• pngquant (optional)
• pnpm
• node.js >= 24
• cwebp

Windows

Windows binaries of these dependencies can be found on the download pages of the sites listed above.

Linux

$ sudo apt install nodejs imagemagick gifsicle advancecomp optipng pngquant webp
$ sudo npm install -g pnpm

You may have to build imagemagick from source to get version 7.

$ sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libltdl-dev libperl-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev
$ wget https://imagemagick.org/download/ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ tar xf ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ cd ImageMagick-*
$ ./configure --with-modules --enable-shared --with-perl
$ sudo make -j install
$ sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib

macOS

Using brew on a macOS:

$ brew install imagemagick gifsicle advancecomp optipng pngquant webp

Building and deploying

Install dependencies once with pnpm install.

Each deploy is a root *.build.ts module: it declares its build rules (shared sets are plain functions in rules/; declaring an identical rule twice is a no-op returning the existing artifacts, so any number of deploys can call the same set) and a finish function that maps the built artifacts to their published names. Build outputs are content-addressed: rules declare nominal output filenames but the store names every object by the hash of its bytes (under .build/cas/), so incrementality keys on content, same-byte renames rebuild nothing, and hash-stamped publishing reuses the build's digests. All state lives in .build/.

$ pnpm build                                     # build every deploy's rules, GC stale state
$ pnpm deploy                                    # every deploy in deploy.json5
$ node tools/deploy/index.ts deploy assets       # one named deploy
$ node tools/deploy/index.ts build ps.build.ts   # build one deploy's rules
$ node tools/deploy/index.ts run smogon.build.ts -o deploy/smogon
$ node tools/deploy/index.ts inspect src/minisprites/items/i1.png -o /tmp/out

run materializes a deploy to a directory (--link hardlinks, --tar writes a tar file) without uploading anything. inspect builds every rule that consumes the given source paths (and their transitive consumers) and copies the outputs out under readable names for eyeballing.

Useful flags: -j <n> parallelism, -n dry run, -v verbose, --fail-fast stop after the first failure.

Deploying

deploy reads deploy.json5 at the repo root (not tracked by git). It maps deploy names to a buildFile and a list of (subset, cmd) entries: after building and finishing the buildFile, each entry's globs select a subset of the finish outputs, which are tarred and piped to the entry's command on stdin. Every glob must match something, and every output must be covered by some entry.

{
    assets: {
        buildFile: "assets.build.ts",
        deploy: [
            {subset: ["**"], cmd: "ssh smogon smogonctl assets upload sprites"},
        ],
    },
}

Configuration

Build settings are configurable in build.config (not tracked by git).

• DEFAULT_OPTIPNG: Command line to pass to optipng.
• DEFAULT_ADVPNG: Command line to pass to advpng.
• DEFAULT_PNGQUANT: Command line to pass to pngquant.

There are src-specific versions of these settings:

• TRAINERS_<PROGRAM>: Compression options for trainers/ only.
• DEX_<PROGRAM>: Compression options for dex/ only.
• MODELS_<PROGRAM>: Compression options for models/ only.
• SPRITESHEET_<PROGRAM>: Compression options for spritesheets only.
• MINISPRITE_<PROGRAM>: Compression options for minisprites/ only.

For example, these settings reflect the compression settings for the files chaos uploaded in src/:

DEFAULT_OPTIPNG=-o7
DEFAULT_ADVPNG=-z4 -i5000

Gotchas

• The build tool only tracks the inputs a rule declares. If a build tool reads files that aren't on its command line (e.g. it does a readdir()), declare them with the rule's deps: so changes are detected.
• Rule identity is content-only by default: renaming a source without changing its bytes rebuilds nothing. If a tool bakes input names into its output bytes (the spritesheet builders do), the rule must set nameSensitive: true or renames will leave its output silently stale.
• Rules must be declared when a deploy module is imported (top level), not inside finish — the build runs before finish does.

License

All code in this repository is licensed under the MIT License.

The sprites themselves are property of Nintendo / Game Freak / The Pokémon Company, though Black & White sprites for Pokémon from later generations were created by artists in the community. The license for these community-created sprites is still being determined and may change in the future, but in the meantime please talk to use first before using them.

The PMD sprites are from SpriteCollab. The exact list of contributors can be found in spritecollab_credit_names.txt of this repository.