What is in this version?
Well, I don't want to give everything away just yet, but I can confirm some of the big-ticket features that I think everyone will get excited about, namely:- Gym matching!
- Robust support for various Pokemon attributes, including forms!
- Lots of backend improvements! (Okay, maybe that one's just exciting for me.)
What has taken so long?
Well, two things mainly. The first thing is Real Life. The second thing is that this version is a complete rewrite of basically everything in Meowth, and as development on this version has progressed there has been a bit of feature creep and reorganization. On the backend we are finally moving to a proper database which is already proving to be very helpful in development. Hopefully, once 3.0 has been released we should be able to develop new features more quickly.
What should we do to prepare for the new version?
There's one thing in particular that you can do to prepare your server to take advantage of the new capabilities of Meowth 3.0, and it has to do with our most-requested feature: gym matching! For us to be able to match gyms for your server, we need data! We will certainly have a way to add gyms one at a time to the database once we've released, but we also want to give you some time to prepare your data so that you can start using gym matching immediately. The easiest way to format the data would be as a spreadsheet with the ability to export to a CSV file. Here's an example showing the format I'd prefer. I can't guarantee support for other file formats at this point, so if you want to be proactive, following this format is what I'd recommend. I suggest making a copy of the following Google Sheet and removing the example gyms to get started.
As there are a lot of you and not many of me, please do your best to validate the data you gather: coordinates should be precise to at least four decimal places, names should be spelled correctly, and double check that the gym displays an "EX RAID GYM" tag before entering "TRUE" in your spreadsheet.
You may notice that there is also a sheet labeled "stops" - feel free to gather data on the Pokestops in your community as well. We hope to use a similar system for research tasks!
OK I gathered all this data, now what?
Holy crap that was fast. Okay. Well, hold onto it for now. You can email it to me if you really want, but I'm hoping to have an import command ready when the bot launches so that you can send Meowth the data yourself.Anything else?
Nope! Thanks for reading!
