OK, so sadly I was not able to “lock in” again on pkmn work – the end of the year involves a lot of work demands and holidays that steal focus. Other than wrestling a bit with WASM on the demo for the engine, most of the pkmn progress this month was on a revamp of the @pkmn/protocol package.
The State of the Union covers some of the issue – the Pokémon Showdown client actually works with an “upgraded” version of the protocol that smoothes over issues with the current or legacy versions of the protocol to present a clean version for ease of use, however, there are use cases (e.g., performance or verification) where the raw version of the protocol may be desirable. The new version of the package will have separate Protocol, Protocol.Upgraded, and Protocol.Legacy types (as opposed to the current Protocol type which is a mishmash of all three) and the types will be tightened up based on the actual verification tests. This protocol work is important for solidifying the pkmn engine’s own protocol as well as helping unblock work on the baseline agents aspect of the pkmn.ai leaderboard project.
I’m not sure what a realistic goal is for Decemeber – most of the month is going to be scrambling to meet deadlines at work and then spending time with family and friends. It would be nice if perhaps on a flight I manage to finish off one of the draft posts I’ve been wanting to publish, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to ship anything big before the end of the year. Such is life, there’s always next year!
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