Category: EasyRPG

Quirks in RPG Maker: RTP and the translation hell

Welcome to our new series “Quirks in RPG Maker”. Here you will read about interesting issues we discovered while developing liblcf and EasyRPG Player.

RTP: “RunTime Package”

Almost all RPG Maker versions for PC bundles a shared game assets package, containing graphics, sounds and music. RTP packages are installed separately and they are downloadable for free from authorized distributor websites. The main motivation for this was intended to have a common asset library (graphics, music, sounds) shared between games to save some disk space in early distribution days (floppy disks, dial-up modems). Modern RPG Maker versions still use this shared way to provide game assets like a shared application library.

RPG Maker 2000 (and 2003) was published in Japan only. All RPG Maker 2000/3 RTP file names are in Japanese. This is OK, nowadays we can read Japanese and other languages across the web without issues. However, things were different around 15 years ago. RPG Maker 2000/2003 installers only work in Japanese Windows (or configured as Japanese), even today they are tricky to install. Though the license didn’t allow to modify the application, there have been unofficial translations of the product, requiring translating all file names to be able to install on non-Japanese Windows.

The problem: Non-unicode applications

Some years ago, there were lots of language specific character encodings around. Operating systems needed to map character symbols for different languages. E.g. Windows used the codepage 1252 for Latin script (western), 1251 for Cyrillic script (Russia, eastern Europe) an dozens more. These encodings shared same byte identification for specific characters, so documents needed to include some encoding identification to be read in systems with different languages and doing a conversion to be read.

Due to early years limitations, Unicode was created to have an universal character encoding for all symbols from all languages. This was awesome, but:
Year 2000. The year of the release of RPG Maker 2000. Popular Windows version that year: Windows 98. Unicode support: no.

Unicode was introduced in Windows NT, but the first user oriented Desktop version with Unicode support (based on Windows NT) was released later: Windows XP (2001).

Being RPG Maker 2000/2003 a non-unicode application supposed lots of problems as usual due to the character encoding legacy. Specific encoding quirks will be extended for the next “Quirks in RPG Maker” article.

RTP translations

Apart of the worldwide repercussion and facts about releasing program translations not needed to mention, the focus on the RTP translation deserves its own space.

The first popular RPG Maker 2000 RTP translation was made by Don Miguel. He translated all 465 filenames, some bugs and inconsistencies but nothing serious… well, he removed 3 files and added 38.

EasyRPG Player has a translation table feature. This allows to play games depending on Japanese filenames with an installed unofficial English RTP translation and vice-versa. If a game uses one of these 38 files added by Don Miguel and the system has the original Japanese RTP, weird things will happen. To prevent missing files, assets have been mapped in the table pointing to other files, but this is not the best solution.

Around 2002, RPG Maker 2003 was announced, after some advice about how bad are translations for the business. Don Miguel said he ceased translating RPG Maker. New, now major problems again.

Multiple RPG Maker 2003 RTP translations

After the RPG Maker 2000 translation release, RPG Maker became very popular around the world. With the RPG Maker 2003 announcement and RTP release, a couple of translators published different RTP translations, even before RPG Maker 2003 translation releases. This race of independent translators became a major mess. Then appeared multiple games depending on RTP assets but incompatible between RTPs. As a result, missing file errors appeared when trying to run them and became a pretty common issue.

EasyRPG Player needed to deal with it, by adding a multiple RTP translation table. Currently we have one translation for RPG Maker 2000 RTP and 3 translations for RPG Maker 2003 RTP. Now it is capable to solve this issue, as a value-added feature.

You can check the EasyRPG wiki for more technical details about RTP and some additional features like 2000 to 2003 migration and shared assets between versions, not mentioned here, but may be mentioned for other articles.

EasyRPG Player on GCW Zero

Shin-NiL updated the GCW Zero version to 0.2.1. You can find them in our download section. If you are having issues or want to say thanks, take a look at the on-going discussion.

As an additional service to the community we are providing now automatic builds for GCW Zero via our Jenkins build service (and of course in the download section under “Continious builds”). Together with the Wii this is the second community maintained port officially distributed via our Website.

You are a developer and want to maintain a port for another system? Feel free to contact us!

Installation

RTP

  • Install the RTP files on your computer
  • RPG2K games: Copy the RTP files, not the RTP folder iteself, to /media/data/local/share/easyrpg/rtp2k
  • RPG2K3 games: Copy the RTP files, not the RTP folder itself, to /media/data/local/share/easyrpg/rtp2k3

Games

  • Copy the desired game to your device (this folder name must not contain blank spaces)
  • Run EasyRPG then navigate into the game folder and select the RPG_RT file to play

Video

EasyRPG Player 0.2.1 “Carol”

The last month was filled with lots of activity on the Player development side. Therefore we decided to publish the first bugfix release. The compatibility should have significantly increased compared to 0.2.

What is new for users?

One of the more exciting features is the automatic encoding detection. This basicly means that you don’t have to set the encoding manually (via Encoding option in RPG_RT.ini) for games that are not from your region. In our tests we couldn’t find any games where the detection fails, but the manual setting is still supported. This also resolves a problem with the wave dash (~) in japanese games which was mapped to the wrong unicode character. (#258)

Lots of movement related issues were resolved:

  • Pictures locked to a map position are supported now (#44)
  • Events face the hero now when triggered. Movement mode “spinning” added and movement with fixed orientation (#253)
  • Fix passability between events of the same layer (#259)
  • Fix HaltAllMovement with repeating move routes (#259)
  • Improve jumping, allow to jump on the same tile (#259)
  • Always block player movements when a window message is shown (#259)
  • Don’t cancel forced move routes when a new page is set up (#259)

Fixes for the event interpreter:

  • Events on the upper layer (above hero) with “On Touch” trigger execute now (#264)
  • Fix rendering for tiles when replace tile command is used. The game Tetrix 3 uses this feature in a quite clever way: It uses two tiles for a bridge that are looking the same but have different attributes (“circle” and “star” flag). When the player walks over the bridge the circle tile is used and when driving by boat under the bridge the star tile is used (#142)
  • Fix incorrect termination of parallel processes (#255)
  • Fix passability of upper layer characters over the hero (#265)
  • Fix counters (tiles with “counter” flag) (#274)
  • The Tone command was sometimes displaying wrong colors (#265)

Improvements to Image handling:

  • Some BMP images contained invalid header data and failed loading (#248)
  • The image type is now determined by reading the header. Image files with incorrect extensions (e.g. BMP files that are actually PNG) load now (#163)
  • The Player loads a dummy image (checkerboard) now when an image is not found instead of terminating (#32)
  • When a picture was loaded twice, one time with transparency flag and the second without, the second picture was transparent, too. (#86)
  • If a graphic didn’t have a file assigned the Player falls back to sane defaults now (#139)
Checkerboard for missing graphic
Checkerboard for missing graphic

Improvements to Audio handling:

  • The type of audio files is now detected by reading the header. This allows e.g. playing of “MOD” files with WAV extension (RPG_RT got this feature via the Audieremony patch) (#74)
  • Fade in support (except on Windows due to a platform bug) (#62)
  • Increase channel limit from 8 to 32 to prevent “no free channels available” warnings. (#247)

Our Font got full Cyrillic and Latin Extended A to cover all Central and Eastern European languages (#245)

Russian game
Russian game (look at the beatiful parallax mapping!)
Polish game
Polish game

Messages:

  • The “gradient” color from System graphic was misaligned for wide chars and symbols. (#145)
  • Because of the way Japanese and Korean are encoded they use Yen (¥) and Won (₩) symbols instead of backslash (\) for message commands. These command triggers are now supported (#259)
  • Show faces on the right side and choice input was broken due to a regression introduced in 0.2 (#246)
  • In TestPlay mode messages can be fast-forwarded by pressing the Shift key (#196)

Skills that change switches were implemented. (#274)

Allow creation of Monsters without graphics (#125)

The Menu scene got some bugfixes:

  • Cursor position in Save/load menu fixed (#265)
  • Using null/empty items, skills or equipment doesn’t crash anymore (#254)

Map and Battle transitions are supported now and the default transition speed was adjusted.

The Title scene window position was fixed, the opening animation speed adjusted and HideTitle command is supported now (#49)

Our FileFinder supports files in subdirectories now (this isn’t officially supported by the RPG Maker editor but somehow works in RPG_RT). Yen and Won are supported as folder seperators now (same issue as for message commands) (#259)

Handling of the RTP was improved:

  • A warning is now displayed when there is no RTP found and RPG_RT.ini doesn’t contain FullPackageFlag=1. (#247)
  • More RTP 2003 translations supported. (#244, #283, #291)
  • Fix WINE registry UTF-16 parsing (#238) and add fallback support (#250)

The Android port was updated. Get it from the Play Store or get the APK from our download section.

  • Support for Xperia Play buttons (#232)
  • The select region menu (long press on item) got an autodetect option and contains more regions/languages now (#291)
  • INI writer corrupted the INI file when [EasyRPG] was the last line (#291)
  • MIDI playback tempo is now correct. A patch for SDL2_mixer (The audio lib we use) was backported to fix this (#291)
  • The OSD buttons were hard to see and are now less transparent (#291)
  • Timidity now ships directly in the apk. MIDI playback works now without any additional user interactions. (#291)
  • Added (highly experimental) standalone mode. This allows distributing of RPG Maker 2000/2003 games inside a single .apk. We will give more details about this in a later blogpost because there are still some issues we have to resolve. (#291)

The Wii port had outdated libraries and wasn’t completly working anymore. User carstene1ns was so kind to update them for us.

The on screen console supports linebreaks now (#256).

The command line interface got a new argument –start-party option to overwrite starting party members and the Player was crashing for arguments requiring values when no value was passed (#259).

The Linux distribution Mageia provides now a RPMs for the Player (maintained by Akien). Note that there are also AUR packages for Arch Linux since a longer time (maintained by carstene1ns).

What is new for developers?

The Player got an experimental double resolution mode. (#249)

Our jenkins system supports now building of pull requests. This allows faster reviewing of new code contributons if they work correctly on our major platforms.

We were mentioned in the Press

The japanese website Gigazine posted a very detailed tutorial about correctly configuring our Android port. The related tweet was retwetted more then 300 times. Thanks for this great article!

Our project got a page in the magazine “Advanced RPG Maker: Issue 3” on rpgmaker.net.

Somebody mentioned us on Hackernews which resulted in a small discussion.

Shoutouts to that japanese person who recommends our Android Player over Neko RPGXP and Choco R2k Player (another RPG2k/2k3 interpreter) because it doesn’t want internet permission and is not from a korean developer.