Dramatic Shape Voxel Mod

Important

This is an unofficial Android-only Kanto Gear performance fork, based on Dramatic Shape Voxel Mod 1.7.0. We love the original mod: on PC, use the official project. This package exists because Android handhelds need additional frame-pacing work. It belongs to the tested Kanto Gear release set and is verified on an AYN Thor. Comparable Android handhelds are intended targets, but their performance and driver behavior still need community testing.

A mod for the Pokémon Gen 1 Recompilation Project.

The overworld as a voxelized 3D diorama, with the original project's first-person, third-person, staged-battle and VR features preserved.

Install on Android

Download DRAMATIC_SHAPE-1.7.0-android.1.zip from this repository's release page and import it through MODS > Import mod .zip. Remove the official Voxel Mod first if it is installed; both packages intentionally use the same mod ID. Confirm the experimental-mod warning and enable it. A fresh setup starts at VOXEL 35, BALANCED, T-SHIFT 3 and V-CURVE OFF; existing saved choices remain untouched.

This fork does not offer launcher updates. Install the matching Kanto Gear release set manually so an upstream package cannot replace its Android fixes.

Performance fork scope

This fork keeps the upstream renderer and adds cooperative terrain builds, camera-culling for spatial mesh chunks, split static/dynamic shadow updates, deferred mesh release and optional graphics presets. These changes primarily target stalls and frame pacing rather than promising a higher average FPS. The unrelated upstream Horde minigame is not activated in this Android build.

Known on the tested Thor: fancy water with V-CURVE can fall back to ordinary animated water tiles. This fork does not carry a separate workaround.

Controls

Every key is free-roam only. The headline VOXEL, T-SHIFT and 3D-BTL rows stay on the main OPTIONS menu; detailed controls live under MODS > DRAMATIC SHAPE > OPTIONS. With Modern UI installed, use the shorter MOD MENUS > VOXEL MOD route instead.

control	does
3, or the VOXEL options row	OFF → 15 → 35 → 50 → 75 → 1ST → 3RD → OFF (camera pitch)
SELECT (pad / touch)	the same step as 3 — for the machines with no number row
5, or the V-GRID mod-options row	OFF / ON — a one-pixel wireframe on every voxel
6, or the T-SHIFT options row	OFF → 1 → 2 → 3 → OFF (miniature blur)
7, or the V-CURVE mod-options row	OFF → 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 — bend the world over the horizon; 5 is a half sphere
8, or the 3D-BTL options row	2D-3D A / 2D-3D B / STADIUM A / STADIUM B / OFF — fight in 3D instead of on a white field. A stages it on the map, B on two discs against the sky; 2D-3D uses the game's own battle pics and STADIUM the Pokémon Stadium battle models
9, or the WATER mod-options row	FULL / SKY / OFF — waves and reflections on water. SKY gives the surface its pixel-tall wave columns and puts the sky, the sun, the moon and the cast in them; FULL adds a screen-space ray march that also reflects the shoreline, the trees and the buildings standing behind it
the BACK SPRITES mod-options row	OFF / ON — keep your own Pokémon on the battle menu, seen from behind in its classic slot, instead of standing it on the map; the foe is still out there
the AA mod-options row	OFF / 2X / 4X — smooth the stair-stepped edges of the 3D world by rendering the diorama larger than the window and folding it back down. The ladder is samples per display pixel: 2X is a canvas root-two wider and taller, 4X one exactly twice the size. Every edge in the projected picture softens with the silhouettes — the tileset's own texels are quads in a perspective view and cross the pixel grid at the same arbitrary angles — so the diorama reads smoother rather than sharper. The most expensive row in the mod, so it is OFF by default and FULL leaves it alone
the DAYTIME mod-options row	SYNC / DAY / NIGHT / DUSK / DAWN / CYCLE — what time it is outdoors, on the diorama and on the flat 2D world; held at SYNC while VOXEL is FULL

Free-roam cameras (1ST / 3RD)

The last two rungs of the VOXEL ladder are experimental, and they are the same camera: 1ST stands it in the player's own eyes, 3RD pulls it back onto a boom behind their shoulder. Both steer, and on both the grid walk is replaced by continuous camera-relative movement — push in any direction and you go there, at any angle, not just along the four compass lines. Collision, warps, ledges, encounters and scripts all still run through the engine's own machinery.

control	does
mouse	look (the cursor is captured; left click is A, right click is B)
right stick	look
a touch drag off the overlay's controls	look
left stick / touch d-pad / arrow keys	walk, relative to where the camera looks
wheel, Q / E, pinch, or a stick click	3RD only — let the boom out and pull it in (Q and left stick click out, E and right stick click in)

On an orbit rung the same wheel, Q/E and pinch drive the engine's own survey zoom. On 1ST they do nothing at all: the eye is in your head, and there is no distance to change.

On 3RD the boom shortens against whatever is behind you, so backing into a wall walks the camera in to your shoulders rather than through it — squeeze it all the way in and the view is 1ST until you step clear. The character turns to face where they are walking, and every sprite in the world — yours, the NPCs', the figures drawn into the furniture — turns to face the camera and shows the frame it would look like from where the camera actually stands, so walking behind someone shows you their back.

The battle camera

A fight staged on the map (3D-BTL, on by default) is shot with a solved over-the-shoulder rig — and you can steer it.

control	does
right stick, a touch drag, or the mouse	swing the shot around the arena (→) and raise the seat (↑)
wheel, Q / E, pinch, or a stick click	the lens (Q / left stick click out, E / right stick click in)

Both axes stop where the composition does. Left stops at the shot the rig was solved for — there is nothing to the left of it. Right ends side-on: the eye square to the arena's axis, both Pokémon at the same distance instead of one behind the other. Down stops at the rig's own low stance; up is 45° above it. The lens opens as you swing or climb, by exactly the amount the two Pokémon spread apart, so they stay framed at every angle. Move animations follow the pair's position and its separation, so a beam still lands on the Pokémon it was aimed at.

Where you leave the camera is where the next battle opens.

BACK SPRITES locks it. That setting pins your own Pokémon to the GB's slot on the menu while the foe stands out on the map, and no angle holds a composition that is half frame and half world — so with it on, the shot holds the one the rig was solved for.

STADIUM battles

The 3D-BTL row has five rungs, which are two choices — what is standing there, and where:

rung	the fight
2D-3D A	staged on the map, with the Game Boy's own pics stood up on their tiles
2D-3D B	those same pics on two discs against the sky, with no map drawn
STADIUM A	staged on the map, with the Pokémon Stadium battle models
STADIUM B	those models on the discs
OFF	the engine's own battle screen

A is the map — real ground, in that place's own weather and light. B is the carried stage, which works everywhere, including the caves and shop floors that have nowhere to put a fight. Only the STADIUM rungs need a ROM; 2D-3D B is generated in Lua and uses the game's own art.

Skinned and animated, playing the animation the move being used actually calls for — the Stadium ROM's own per-species move table, so DIG really does put Diglett into the ground. Fainting plays the faint and holds there, a send-out grows the Pokémon out of the ball as it opens and plays the entrance, and between all of that the standby loop runs. Eyes blink and go dizzy; Charmander's tail flame and Weezing's gas are drawn over the body.

Taking damage plays nothing, because the set has no damage reaction in it — the slot that looked like one is each species' default attack, which is why being hit used to look like swinging. The engine's own screen flash, pic blink and HP drain are what say "that hurt".

148 of the 151 have models. Exeggutor, Tangela and Magmar come out of the ROM with corrupt standby loops and stand as their Game Boy battle sprites instead, on their own tile, in the same arena — the same per-Pokémon fallback a substitute doll and the pre-send-out trainer pic already take.

B is for the maps that cannot host a fight. Half of Kanto's interiors are furniture, a cave floor can be nothing but corridors, and a map where neither Pokémon can be seen from a low camera is declined outright — which drops you back to the flat battle screen. B carries its stage, so it works everywhere and looks the same every time. It is abstracted from the ground, not from the world: the sky behind the discs is the hour's own, and a fight in a cave is under that cave's void and its own flat light.

Getting the models

They are not in this mod, and they cannot be — they are Pokémon Stadium's data. What ships is the reader; you supply the cartridge, exactly as this engine already asks you to supply the Game Boy ROM it is a recompilation of.

You must supply a Pokémon Stadium (US) 1.0 ROM. Not Stadium 2, not another region, not a later revision. Every offset in the reader was measured against that one cartridge, and nothing else is promised: a different file is either refused outright or builds models that are subtly wrong. The mod checks, and says so — on the console, and on the loading screen itself if it built from something unexpected.

The reference dump is md5 ed1378bc12115f71209a77844965ba50, 32 MB. The mod does not tell you where to get one, and none ships with it.

1. Open OPTIONS and press the STADIUM ROM row. It opens your system's file picker; choose your Pokémon Stadium (US) 1.0 ROM. .z64, .n64 and .v64 all work — the byte order is detected, and the wrong file is refused with a reason rather than half-built.
2. The 151 models are built on a loading screen that says so and shows a progress bar, in about ten seconds. The row then reads READY.

The ROM itself is not kept — it is read, built from, and forgotten, so the cartridge does not sit in your save directory alongside the models it produced. Press the row again any time to import a different one.

There is no picker on Android, or on a Linux install with neither zenity nor kdialog. Those keep the original route, which still works everywhere:

• Put the US 1.0 ROM in a baseroms/ folder beside the game — straight in it, not in a subfolder — and start the game.
• In a packaged build (and on Android) baseroms/ goes in the save directory; the mod logs the exact path on startup when it cannot find one. On Android that is the app's external-files folder, reachable over USB or any file manager without root.

Either way, the two STADIUM rungs appear on the 3D-BTL row when it's done.

The built models live in the save directory, not in the mod folder, and are rebuilt automatically if the format changes or the ROM does. Until they exist the STADIUM rungs are simply not on the row — skipped rather than shown and refused, because a setting you can select that then does nothing is worse than one that is not there.

This works on mobile. The extraction is pure Lua — no FFI, no native helper, no second process — so it runs anywhere LÖVE does. It peaks at about 68 MB of Lua heap (32 MB of that the cartridge itself) with a working set that does not grow across the run, and tests/stadium_budget_test.lua fails if either stops being true. On Android the save directory is the app's external-files folder, so baseroms/ there is reachable over USB or a file manager without root; the build is slower than a desktop's ~7 s but runs one species a frame behind the progress bar either way.

Developers can pre-build them with tools/stadium_pack.py, which reads the same ROM through model_extract/pipeline. That path is also the oracle: tests/stadium_extract_test.lua runs it and the in-game Lua extractor over the same cartridge and requires all 151 packed files to come out byte for byte identical.

VR

The VR options row (OFF / STANDARD / DIORAMA / DIORAMA-MR, off by default) drives a PCVR headset through OpenXR on Windows — SteamVR, Oculus or WMR.

STANDARD follows the VOXEL ladder. Both free-roam rungs put the headset in the player's head: a boom that seats its wearer three cells behind their own body is a reliable way to make people ill, so 3RD in VR is 1ST in VR. The rung still changes the walk and the sprites the same way.

DIORAMA

DIORAMA is one presentation instead of a ladder: the world is always a model on the table, and the model is a thing in the room.

• A viewport. Everything outside an invisible box centred on the view is not drawn — a square slab of Kanto sitting in the air rather than a map running off to a horizon, cut with a hard edge, because a flat world is a thing with sides and the sides are what say so. The sky behind is the same one the flat screen has.
• V-CURVE changes its shape. With the bend on the world is not flat any more, and a square cut through a little globe is a lie about what is being looked at — so the box becomes a ball whose rim is a gradient dissolving into the sky. One click of the left stick throws the row and swaps between the two readings of the same model.
• A staged fight ignores both and cuts a vertical pillar about the arena, always with the dissolved rim, which lifts the fight out of the map as a floating disc.
• The grips take hold of it: one hand carries the model anywhere in the room, both hands turn it and open the viewport out to whatever you spread your hands to.
• The left stick's click throws V-CURVE to its top rung and back, rather than stepping views — there is no 2D diorama and no first-person one, so the ladder is held on an orbit rung while the mode runs.

DIORAMA-MR is the same mode with the background keyed pure green, for a mixed-reality capture that composites the model into your own room.

VR controls

Suggested onto Touch, Index and WMR controllers (rebindable in the runtime's own binding UI); pad, keyboard and mouse all keep working alongside.

control	does
left stick	move — grid-walks the diorama, free-walks 1ST
A / B (X / Y on the left hand)	A / B
either trigger	START
left stick click	STANDARD — step the VOXEL angle ladder (same as the "3" key); DIORAMA — throw V-CURVE to its top rung and back
right stick up / down	tabletop — zoom the model
right stick left / right	1ST only — snap-turn 45°, or turn smoothly with SMOOTH TURN on
one grip squeezed	STANDARD — drag the table's height; DIORAMA — carry the model wherever that hand goes
both grips squeezed	DIORAMA only — turn the model with your hands, and open or close the viewport by spreading them
head	1ST and battles — look; FreeMove walks where you look
left hand	1ST and battles — the Pokédex: menus, dialogs and the 2D battle screen on its screen

This fork is not distributed or supported as a PC replacement. Its Android release ZIP omits the upstream Windows OpenXR runtime. PC and PCVR users should use the official Dramatic Shape release, where those platforms are developed and documented.

Licenses

All upstream authorship stays with DramaticShape and the original contributors; this unofficial fork does not imply their endorsement. The source repository retains one upstream third-party binary for parity with the original project; the Android release ZIP does not include it:

• assets/vr/openxr_loader.dll — the Khronos OpenXR loader (version 1.0.10.2, x64, unmodified), © The Khronos Group Inc., licensed under the Apache License 2.0. The full license text ships alongside the DLL at assets/vr/LICENSE-openxr_loader.txt, as the license requires; keep the two files together if you redistribute this mod. Source: KhronosGroup/OpenXR-SDK.

Everything else in this mod is original to it, except that the voxel geometry and shape profiles are derived from the tile and sprite data of the original game, as documented by the pret/pokered disassembly. No ROM data, artwork or audio is included; the mod reads the assets the host game already has.

Everything the battle screen draws as a box — the two HUD blocks, the text box and the menus over it — sits on frosted glass rather than on the white field it used to have behind it: the world underneath, blurred and laid back down translucent, with the ink flipping white where the ground it lands on is dark. Nothing the engine draws inside a box moves; only the paper is gone.

Graphics tuning

The graphics rows under MODS > DRAMATIC SHAPE > OPTIONS leave the original renderer untouched until you choose a different rung. They remain available while VOXEL is FULL:

row	controls
V-PRESET	ORIGINAL / QUALITY / BALANCED / FAST / BATTERY / CUSTOM
V-RES	internal 3D resolution: 100 / 83 / 75 / 67 / 50 percent
V-SHADOW	original adaptive shadow map, fixed 1024 / 768 / 512, or OFF
V-SRATE	maximum real-shadow refresh rate: LIVE / 60 / 30 / 20 / 15
V-SOFT	four-tap soft shadow edges or a one-tap hard edge
V-BUILD	NORMAL / SMOOTH / MIN terrain-streaming time per frame

The measured 1080p starting points keep the scene native whenever shadows are enabled. QUALITY uses 512 soft shadows with 60 Hz character updates; BALANCED uses the same image quality at 30 Hz. Both retain T-SHIFT 3. FAST keeps native geometry and 30 Hz shadows but switches the soft filter and T-SHIFT off. BATTERY renders at 75%, disables real shadow maps and uses the lightweight character decals. Every row remains independently adjustable; changing one marks the aggregate preset as CUSTOM.

The first visit to an uncached map may briefly show the original Gen 1 Kanto Town Map while the current terrain, connected-map bodies and shadow chunks are prepared. The destination uses the ROM-extracted location coordinates and blinks under the original cursor; stale asset builds retain the lightweight BUILDING KANTO fallback. Gameplay and input pause behind this cover, and the builder uses the time as a loading budget. T-SHIFT is temporarily bypassed for the cover so its pixel art stays sharp, without changing the saved setting. The outer letterbox uses the same pure black as Gen1Recomp's 4:3 menus; cached revisits and ordinary crossings remain seamless.

Visible terrain, tall grass and flowers are camera-culled in spatial chunks. The culler uses the live camera matrix rather than a fixed screen rectangle, so every gameplay zoom, window aspect and battle camera receives the same exact-fidelity optimization. A conservative edge guard and whole-mesh fallback keep geometry from popping at the screen boundary or on limited drivers.

Acknowledgements — pret/pokestadium

The STADIUM battle models are read out of the player's own Pokémon Stadium (US) 1.0 cartridge by original code in lib/ and model_extract/. That code exists because of pret/pokestadium, the community decompilation of that game, which is the reference this mod's reader was written against. Specifically, it is where the following came from:

• the bone matrix chain, and the fact that scale is kept out of it and applied only at draw time (func_800143C0) — the single most important thing to get right in the whole rig, and not guessable from the data
• the rotation basis and its row-vector Rx·Ry·Rz order (func_8000F730, src/F420.c)
• the animation player's frame counter and loop-start behaviour (func_80016FBC), and the texture-animation sampler that clamps past the end of its stream rather than wrapping (func_80017540) — which is the difference between a Pokémon blinking and twitching
• the battle system's per-species animation context slots and the routines that select them (func_8432B0A4, func_8430506C, func_84305A74)
• the move-id constants the per-species move table is keyed by

No code, data or asset from that project is included in or redistributed by this mod, and none is needed to build or run it. What was taken is an understanding of the file formats, re-expressed in this mod's own Lua and Python. If you want to reuse anything from the decompilation itself, get it from upstream and follow that project's own terms.

No Pokémon Stadium ROM data ships here either. The models are built on the player's own machine, from a cartridge they supply, into their own save directory — see Getting the models.