The hot days and vacations make the Player advance more slowly and it is about time for another major release but too many awesome new features are still in the works so we decided to make another minor bugfix release instead but you can expect a new major release by the end of year :).
Games affected by bugfixes in this release are DRAGON FANTASY 2, Heaven and Hell: Episode 3 and Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき). Escape and reflect work now correctly in the battle system and the Android game browser learned how to sort the game list and supports pinning of games to the top. Read the rest of this article for more.
For package maintainers: No new liblcf release (use 0.6.2). We believe that we solved all your build issues (see developer notes). Thank you for sending us your patches!
Crash fixes
When entering the Tatami room in Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) the Player crashed because the Tilemap image was too small. (#2265)
Regressions fixed
When using Command Control Variables with a range of size 1 (start and end are the same) the command was not working properly. This was a regression introduced in 0.6.2 when fixing the Random number in range feature. (#2225, #2289)
Teleport targets were not properly overwritten, resulting in the list becoming longer and longer every time a target was changed. Not many games use this feature, a noticable on is DRAGON FANTASY 2 (#2234)
Event/Interpreter
Parallel events do not receive key inputs anymore when a message box is active. This caused the custom menu to appear when Escape was pressed while a message was shown in Heaven and Hell: Episode 3. (#2284)
The panorama was not redrawn in NIWATORIベンチマーク because this game used a hacked map of size 1×1 which is smaller than the minimal size of 20×15. (#2289)
Battle
When using healing magic RPG Maker 2000 only shows the difference between current and full HP but RPG Maker 2003 does not clamp the value – It always showed the entire healed amount. (#1680)
The escape algorithm matches now RPG Maker behaviour. (#2150)
The spell reflection feature of RPG Maker 2003 is now fully implemented. (#2251)
In the RPG Maker 2000 battle system the action of dead actors was not reset when pressing ESC to select the previous actor. This was not crashing but gave a Actor X has multiple battle actions warning. Dead actors are assigned a No Move pseudo action because of state recovery and event processing. (#2309)
Savegames
Spritesheets were incorrectly saved in the savefile when spritesheets were disabled. (#2226)
Android
The Android game browser received a small face-lift, sorts the list alphabetically and got a favorite feature. Your favorite games are shown first in the list. (#2257, #2258)
Web Player
The web player should be around 10%-20% faster now.
This was broken for a very long time but the fullscreen mode of our web player finally works again! (#1665)
When the web player is embedded on an external website (iframe) the keyinput input did not work properly. (#2307)
We replaced the text “Fullscreen” with a language neutral U+26F6 “SQUARE FOUR CORNERS” (⛶). (#2307)
Other
The Game Browser launches now games in Test Play / Debug mode when SHIFT (or the button mapped as SHIFT) is pressed. (#2239)
The macOS version is now distributed as an app bundle. From a user perspective this means that the Player has now our beautiful Player logo and you can double click it to launch games. (#2249)
When the popular patches DynRPG or Maniac Patch are found in the game directory the Player emits now a warning that the games are unsupported. (#2283)
The warning “Sound effect playback failed: No free channels available” is not shown to the user anymore. It was not very helpful (and very annoying when doing a fast forward). We know by now how RPG_RT implements sound effects but our audio system is not yet designed for it. (#2291)
When the first actor used a skill from the menu that only had “self” as a target it was possible to pick any actor as the target. (#2304)
The sand storm colors were slightly off. (#2315)
For Developers
The unit tests build now on macOS. (#2232)
Some constexpr code failed to compile on GCC < 7.2. (#2246)
CMake on macOS can now create app bundles. (#2249)
Our CMake buildsystem is now able to create a working Emscripten Player. Just point to the emscripten toolchain file or use emcmake and you will get a working web player. Unit tests that don’t touch the filesystem are also supported. (#2253)
The man target in the CMake buildsystem failed when doing out-of-tree builds. (#2272)
The circular dependency check between FreeType and Harfbuzz was not working anymore since CMake 3.18. (#2274)