Category: Release

Almost two years have passed since the last release of EasyRPG Player. We wanted to release the new version for Christmas, but unfortunately we didn’t make it in time. But better late than never.

We’re glad to report that this time around, we got a lot of contributions from third-party developers. They are credited below next to the change they submitted. No credit usually means it was contributed by carsten1ns or Ghabry. We would also like to thank Carbonara aka Mimigris for doing the community support, opening issues and triaging bug reports. This saves us a lot of precious developer time.

Some noteworthy games that are now (almost) playable are Beloved Rapture (commercial game) and Ipomoea. Playable doesn’t mean there aren’t still a few bugs to be ironed out. While the demo of Beloved Rapture works, the full game still has a missing event command and issues with the combat system. We are working on it.

We’re excited to announce that the EasyRPG exclusive game Collective Unconscious was released. You can only play it online as it was game created for the Yume Nikki Online project which uses a modified version of the web player that adds multiplayer functionality by synchronizing the location of other Players. If you are not familiar with the Yume Nikki fandom: These are walking simulators in which you explore bizarre dream worlds.

They even found a bug a week ago: The frame counter is stored in the save file and it will overflow after about 1 year and 2 months of playtime. When the overflow happens some calculations become negative and the Player crashes. Some online users are very dedicated and caused this overflow. An urgent bugfix allows them to continue playing. (#3385)

To make the blog post a bit shorter we already announced the WiiU Homebrew and Flatpak support earlier.

We hope you enjoy reading the detailed release notes. The blog post is very long, but we are not the only ones who write extremely long release notes, Dolphin Emulator does the same. When you want to try the new release you can get it in the download section.

More assets for the OpenRTP project

The Runtime Package (RTP) is a collection of shared assets for RPG Maker games. They can only be used for games created with RPG Maker. We cannot distribute them. Therefore we are working on our own replacement assets. They are layout compatible with the existing RTP (this means they show the same concepts at the same location, making them a drop-in replacement).

All the assets of our OpenRTP replacement are under an open source license (CC-BY or CC0, depends on the asset). This means you can use them for any purpose you want but you must mention the original author.

Here the new facesets and characters (Authors and license is mentioned in the video).

Here a showcase of the new battle animations created by Victor Sena (link goes to X). These animations are not yet included in the OpenRTP but this will happen this April. As for the other assets the license is CC-BY.

As explained in the 0.8 blog post Jetrotal used generative AI during the concept phase years ago to create mock-ups for the faces of the characters. This AI art was not used for the final product and we are strictly against AI art assets inside of the OpenRTP project.

For the battle background graphics Sidewinder91 uses a different approach: Instead of a drawing tool the 3D graphic application Blender is used. (final result at the bottom right corner is licensed under CC0)

Regressions fixed

In version 0.8, we broke the Wait for Key Input command for RPG Maker 2003 games that used an older engine than the English release. We incorrectly identified this as a 2003 English release feature instead of a 2003 feature. This likely affected a significant number of games. We received a report for Answered Prayers: the character instantly got up when sitting down. (#3019)

Unfortunately, the Wii build of version 0.8 was completely broken. The problem was that we migrated to a new build system and the byte-order was incorrectly set. The Wii uses a PowerPC CPU that’s big endian (BE), which is different from most other systems that are little endian (LE). The RPG Maker data is also LE, so when reading on a BE system, you have to swap the order of the bytes. Otherwise, the data you read is garbage. (#3060, #3185)

Map & Interpreter

Loading a save now cancels active battle animations. Otherwise, they access old data and crash the engine. (#3255)

Every RPG Maker game has a map tree. This is where all the metadata about each map and how they are related to each other is stored. This is used for features like Inherit Music from parent map. There are a few ways the map tree can get corrupted:

• The map isn’t in the map tree at all
• The parent map doesn’t exist
• The map references itself (loop)

These cases are now handled by our code. This fixes crashes in Runic Cipher and in Japanese RPG Maker 2000 sample games such as Abyss. (#2756, #3013)

The Add Equipment event command didn’t check whether the item can be equipped by the actor. (#2902)

The game Ipomoea uses a resolution of 320×176, which is smaller than the default resolution of 320×240. This resolution doesn’t work with most built-in scenes, but we made some changes to the code of the message box and our settings scene to make them compatible with such a small resolution. (#3032) The video illustrates how it looked before (top) and after (bottom).

Versions before RPG Maker 2003 English release have a bug that prevents a changed tilemap from being loaded from a saved game. The Player is now bug compatible. (#3042)

Invoking Shake Screen with a duration of 0.0 seconds (this is equal to stopping a shake) restores now the camera correctly. (#3081)

The event command Control Variables returns now how many slots are empty when requesting how often item 0 is equipped. Setting the item to 0 isn’t possible through the normal editor and requires direct editing of the event command. We think this works in the official engine because empty slots have the value 0 and this value is counted. (#3085)

RPG Maker 2000/2003 has an annoying behaviour: When you set a variable to a new value it checks all the events on the map to see if they should run (or stop) now because their starting condition is met (or not). This can really impact performance, especially in event code that’s heavy on calculations. In newer versions of RPG Maker, they fixed this issue and only refresh the events when the current interpreter yields (so when doing 100 calculations you only pay for one refresh instead of 100 refreshes) but this behaviour is incompatible and breaks games. We implemented an optimization to get rid of most refreshes: We determine which events depend on which variables as a run condition and only refresh these events. This mostly helps our homebrew platforms because they are usually CPU bound. (#3194, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

Spritesheets work now in RPG Maker 2000 games when the RPG2k3Commands=1 feature is enabled (RPG Maker 2003 commands in 2000, set this in the [Patch]-section of EasyRPG.ini). (#3197, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

There was a glitch in the Tomb of Velleities in Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) that made it render some events incorrectly. It was caused by a key collision in our graphics cache (fetching the wrong assets). We’ve updated the caching algorithm to get rid of these collisions. (#3256)

The 2D platforming section of the 3D Underworld in Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) was unplayable because the screen was shaking too much. This map uses jump commands combined with a Vehicle teleport (this is referencing the hero through a modified Set Vehicle Position event command, which isn’t meant to be used this way). We couldn’t fix it properly and added a workaround instead, which resets the jumping flag when a Vehicle teleport targeting the hero is used. The game abuses this Vehicle teleport bug a lot – just read our older blog posts. (#3254)

In Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis, trying to access the Tournament Grounds from the Sphere crashed the Player. What happened is that the game opened a message box from a background interpreter (RPG_RT calls it a parallel process) and then triggered a teleport. When you teleport from a background interpreter, it’s not executed instantly. Instead, it’s delayed until the interpreter yields (suspends, e.g. because it waits for user input). In the case of A.I.L.A. this was another message box with choices. This message was shown after the teleport and referenced stale event data from the previous map. In RPG_RT, messages opened after a teleport are automatically closed, so this bug in the game wasn’t noticeable. (#3301)

The interpreter code was refactored to make it more maintainable. Duplicated functionality was merged and put in a dedicated class. This has no noticeable effect on the user, but it’ll allow performance improvements and new features later on. One planned new feature is local variables (newer RPG Maker calls them self switches/variables). This was a long-requested feature because always operating on global variables is error-prone. (#3233, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

When we first implemented our interpreter code, we were a bit lazy: the interpreter does not check whether the list of arguments provided for a command is large enough. The editor will only generate argument lists that are of valid size. We had a few cases over the years where we assumed wrong sizes, mostly when RPG Maker 2003 extended certain commands, but it usually worked fine. The problems started with the Maniac Patch Editor: Some of the commands it issues have too short command lists. RPG_RT does not care, because it interprets an out of bounds access as 0. But we read garbage data. To mitigate this once and for all, we have added sanity checks to all commands, and if the parameter list is too short, it is resized. This is a single runtime check per executed command, so the performance impact should be negligible if the command is the correct size. (#3314, #3343)

Battle system

The rendering order (Z order) of enemy sprites wasn’t correctly calculated. (Reported for game 7th Stand User, #3026)

Closing a message box in the RPG Maker 2000 battle system using the decision key won’t incorrectly trigger actions like Fight or Auto Battle in the window that appears afterwards. (#2964)

Keys are now reset when switching between menu items. This prevents that key presses carry over and have unexpected effects. (#2996)

You can now move the cursor to select allies or enemies using the left and right keys. This is always enabled as it cannot break games. (#3052, contributed by Primekick aka TheDarkAxer)

When a state is added which prevents the usage of skills the usage of items that invoke skills was also prohibited. This is incorrect. Restrictions don’t apply to items. This fixes the battle against Alessi in The 7th Stand User where a state was applied in every turn of the battle. (#3057)

Due to a typo the initial escape change for RPG Maker 2000 was 64 – 100, not 0 – 100. (#3122)

The enemy AI figures out which battle action to use by first picking the one with the highest priority and then choosing a random action that has up to 10 points less. In our code, we set invalid actions to 0, so when the highest priority is 10 or less, invalid actions can be randomly chosen. We fixed this by deleting all invalid actions instead of lowering the priority. (#3146)

When scheduling actions we forgot to skip hidden enemies (but the action itself wasn’t executed). This meant that an enemy could appear mid-turn and attack right after, but only when the enemy speed was lower than the action that made the enemy appear. (#3158)

We added sanity checks to all battle interpreter events that access party members to prevent crashes when accessing the party out-of-bounds. (#3160)

The flash effect of pictures is now reset when a new picture is loaded in the same slot with inactive flash. Before this fix the old flash effect was stuck and corrupted the rendering. (#3376, contributed by lumiscosity)

Maniac Patch

Support for Maniac Patch continues. We’re a bit short on time and motivation, but the community wants it, so we’re happy to say that we’ve had lots of external contributions that have added new Maniac Patch features.

We almost support everything of the legacy version v210414 now. Only missing are: A and B autotiles for Rewrite Map, event command Change Picture ID, most of the command Set Game Option, background events running during battle and, for Battle Processing, the option that disables the flash effect before the battle starts. A and B are the internal names for the water tiles.

A new, valuable tool for implementing event commands is the Cold Spaghetti Analyser (CSA) by jetrotal. This website contains a dump of all event commands and how the TPC commands map to the event parameters. TPC is a templating language for Maniac Patch to generate event commands. The name CSA is a homage to the Hot Soup Processor (HSP), a programming language from Japan.

Let’s start with the biggest one. We support now Maniac String Variables! This was a huge external contribution by JorgeMaker and enewey aka Narcodis. We didn’t plan to implement string variables because it would’ve taken months to figure out the event command and implement everything. So big thanks again for this implementation. (#3051, #3140, #3141).

Thanks to the String Variables (and some other improvements) the demo of Beloved Rapture became playable as you can see in this before (top)/after (bottom) video.

Initially we wanted to write here that it’s not possible for us to be fully compatible because we use a different string encoding. The encoding determines how bytes are mapped to characters. We use UTF-8, which is a variant of Unicode and a modern encoding that can encode all characters used around the world. RPG_RT, including Maniac Patch, uses the legacy encoding for old Windows applications. E.g. in Western European countries this uses Windows-1252, which can encode 255 characters. It’s clear that 255 isn’t enough to encode Japanese, so in Japan they use Shift-JIS. A completely different encoding. We use heuristics to detect the encoding and then convert everything to UTF-8. This is fine because the game won’t notice it. But now with direct access to strings, it will, and we can’t rewrite our entire application and remove all the advantages of Unicode.

Assuming the game contains the string Ä. When asking for the bytes in Windows-1252 this character requires one byte. However, with UTF-8, it requires two bytes. We would already report an incorrect value here. The Japanese character あ requires two bytes in Shift-JIS and three bytes in UTF-8. While testing with あ, we made an interesting observation: RPG_RT reports a string length of 1. This means RPG_RT actually knows that Japanese uses multibyte characters and reports only one character here. Thanks to this implementation detail, we can actually (almost) perfectly emulate it just with UTF-8. Unicode has a concept of codepoints, which are single encoded characters. By counting the codepoints, we get the same result as RPG_RT, even though the encoding is completely different. This even works for features like insert or substring which require an index. There might be edge cases where our close enough approach doesn’t work, but we’re really happy we don’t have to rewrite half of our application. (#3298, #3305)

We relaxed two behaviours of the Control String Variable command: When opening a text file, Maniac Patch always adds .txt and .csv when looking for the file. This is inconvenient, so we also check if a file with the specified name exists and open it. Something similar happens when writing: It always appends .txt to the end. You can now add * to the end of the filename, and it will be taken as-is. When the filename contains a path, intermediate directories will be created automatically. (#3212)

Here a video demo where chat messages are used to store the game. The chat messages are read from a text file into string variables and then processed.

In addition to the string variables, we also fixed bugs in existing commands:

• Spritesheets with a horizontal or vertical flip effect now render correctly. (#2980)
• The origin setting works correctly when spritesheets are used. (#3053)
• When automatically calculating the size of string pictures, colour codes (\C[]) were included in the length of the string. They’re now filtered out before the size is calculated. (#2987)
• When using a custom resolution, the camera is now correctly centred when the number of visible tiles is odd. (#3006)
• When loading a game via event command Load the background music from the save game wasn’t played. (#3029)
• Due to a typo mouse scroll down was reported as mouse scroll up. (#3072)
• Event command Get Save Info applies now transparent colour to face graphics and initializes the picture with the correct default values. (this affected Beloved Rapture, #3272)
• Event command Show String Picture respects now the transparency setting for the system graphic. (#2961)
• When the map width or height for a custom resolution isn’t divisible by 16 (size of a tile) the map scrolled incorrectly (this affected Beloved Rapture, #3128)
• Maniac patch reuses the upper bits of the Wait setting from the Move Picture command for additional flags. We interpreted any value that is not 0 as Wait which broke games using newer versions of Maniac Patch. The other flags are now masked away (until we implement them) but at least the games are fixed. (#3372)
• Expressions (formulas) in variables (like (1 + V[2]) * 3) support assigning to variables in-place (e.g. with V1 += 2). Though when using the variable event command, the output variable is a dedicated option. Assuming the given expression and output variable V2. This would result in variable V1 being incremented by 2 and then giving V2 the same value. We are not fans of this feature, and it even causes side effects when used as a condition in a Conditional Branch. Beloved Rapture relied on this, so we had to implement it. But we still think it’s a bad idea and disable all the in-place assignments when EasyRPG Engine mode (EasyRPG=1 in the [Patch]-section of EasyRPG.ini) is enabled.

And we implemented new features:

• Event command Control Variables now support variable arguments when the operand is set to Random. (#2994)
• Conditional Branch now supports the Loaded this frame condition. (#3006)
• For event command Move Picture the delay can now be specified through a variable. (#3078)
• Conditional Branch supports now specifying of the condition as an expression (formula). (#3140)
• Conditional Branch supports now indirection (access via variable) for Item ID, Actor ID and Event ID (this affected Beloved Rapture, #3293
• The option to specify the picture limit in the new event command Set Game Option was stubbed to get rid of misleading warnings. We support an arbitrary amount of pictures, unlike RPG_RT, which uses a constant array that is resized by this command. So, this setting wasn’t relevant for us. (this affected Beloved Rapture, #3140)
• Event command Call Command is now supported. (#3140)
• Pictures can now have different width and height values for scaling. (#3180, contributed by ToolMan2k)
• Pan Screen supports now scrolling by individual pixels (#3245, #3249, both contributed by ToolMan2k)
• Call System Functions (an improved version of the original Open Save Menu that can call more scenes) is now implemented. (#3250, contributed by Jetrotal)
• Control Variables supports now the option Get Current Event ID (#3032)
• An almost complete implementation of Rewrite Map was added. The diagonals between A and B autotiles (water and deep water) are not calculated correctly but otherwise it works. (#3306, #3323, contributed by Primekick aka TheDarkAxer and enhanced by Jetrotal)
• GetGameInfo, which can be used to query certain game information, is almost fully implemented. Missing is the functionality to read framebuffer pixels and querying of the interpreter state. (#3309, #3330, contributed by ToolMan2k and Jetrotal)
• Erase Event, Set Move Route and Flash Event can now reference the arguments through variables (#3312, #3313, #3329, contributed by Jetrotal)
• Erase Event can now restore the erased event.  (#3313, contributed by Jetrotal)
• Providing the argument list inline for CallCommand is now supported (#3319, contributed by Jetrotal)

Developer MakoInfused contributed several new battle commands:

• Change Battle Command Ex to configure the visibility of certain party commands and whether the useless Row command is visible (#3290)
• Control ATB Gauge to control the current progress of the ATB (active time battle) gauge in RPG Maker 2003 battle systems (#3291)
• Get Battle Info to query battle related features like buffs. (#3294)
• Control Battle to hook (call events) when certain stuff like taking damage happens. (#3295)

As an EasyRPG extension you can now set the option Maniac=2 in the [Patch]-section of EasyRPG.ini to enable Maniac Patch without affecting the range assignable to variables. Some games use features like adding to a number and then checking if it’s exactly 9,999,999 (the largest number possible) but with the increased range of Maniac Patch variables these checks no longer work. This should help to avoid problems if you want to use Maniac Patch features in your game without having to re-check all the events for regressions. (#3209)

EasyRPG Extensions & New Commands

We started implementing our own commands. The easiest way to use them is a quickly hacked together plugin for the Maniac Patch Editor. Using them will become much better when our editor is ready wink wink. Most of these new commands were contributed by Jetrotal.

Enabling these commands requires EasyRPG=1 in the [Patch] section of EasyRPG.ini.

• A new path-finding command (2003) was added by ell1e that lets you calculate a path across the map even when there are obstacles on the way. (#3144, #3120, contributed by ell1e)
• With Trigger Event At you can simulate talking to a specific event (2002). This is sometimes a better version of Call Event because it checks the event run conditions. (#3183, contributed by MackValentine)
• Clone/Destroy Map Event (2056/2057) can copy and destroy events. With this you can define a template event and then duplicate it as many times as you need. This is already used by Collective Unconscious. (#3218)
• RPG Maker only provides Wait for Movement which should be renamed to Randomly soft lock the game. If there’s an event with a move route on the map that’s stuck, the whole game will hang. We added a better version Wait for Single Movement (2051) which does the same but only for a single event. It even has a timeout to prevent soft locks. (#3221)
• Set Interpreter Flag (2053) can toggle various patch behaviours. E.g. you can enable features of Maniac Patch and afterwards turn them off again. This is intended to be used for collaborative games. (#3123)
• Process JSON Code (2055) can interpret string variables as JSON and then do operations through JSON pointers on them. (#3215, #3341)

Here two videos: The first demonstrates Clone Map Event and the second the Path Finding command.

We made some improvements to our widescreen hack. Now, when the map is smaller than the resolution, it’s centred and anything out of bounds is overdrawn with black. This stops background graphics like panoramas from showing up in unexpected places. (#3030)

Normally, battlers turn around to face the unit they’re currently attacking, which isn’t ideal for certain games. We’ve added a game option to disable the automatic facing direction. (#3052, contributed by Primekick aka TheDarkAxer)

One feature inspired by RPG Maker VX are large charsets: When the filename is prefixed with a dollar sign ($) the size of the charset is specified by the picture dimensions. On looping maps they were unusable because they were culled (hidden) too early as shown in the video (left: before, right: after).

This was noticed while developing Collective Unconscious because they use this feature often and looping maps are typical in Yume Nikki-like games. Note that this is now an extension and requires EasyRPG Engine mode (EasyRPG=1 in the [Patch]-section of EasyRPG.ini). (#3149) The next video shows some species using this feature in the Surreal Zoo.

Loading of images with a colour depth larger than 8 bit is now disabled, except when a translation is loaded, EasyRPG Engine mode is enabled or Maniac Patch is enabled. We added this feature because it happened multiple times now that Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) shipped broken updates because some contributors only tested on EasyRPG. (#3209)

It’s not uncommon for games to modify the RPG_RT.exe. Some assets are particularly straightforward to replace since they’re embedded as PE resources. We’ve been supporting loading a custom ExFont (an icon font before emojis were cool) from the EXE for many years now. We’ve now added the option to load custom splash screens. The number of splash screens shown by RPG_RT varies depending on the version – you’ll see either one or three on startup. Some games use their own splash screens for instructions. By default, we’re now showing all custom splash screens at startup. We’re skipping the official (unaltered) splash screens and known splash screens from inofficial (bootleg) translations to reduce startup time. If you want to see them, you can read our previous blog post or configure it in the settings. You can also provide custom splash screens without editing the EXE. Just drop images inside the Logo directory. The filenames must be LogoN, where N goes from 1 to 99. (#623, #3096, #3152, #3344)

The video shows a small logo roulette that shows what is possible now.

Other Patches

RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 are full of patches. We support them by reimplementing the functionality (kinda like high level emulation in emulators works).

Since version 0.5, we’ve been able to support Ineluki’s MP3 patch, which added mp3 playback support to older versions of RPG Maker 2000/2003. It works by having text files with the extension .link.wav, but instead of being an mp3 file, it’s plain text that has the path to the mp3 file on the first line. For our new release we’ve improved the compatibility:

• Link files are now supported for sound effects. This was reported for Sternenkindsaga. We don’t know of any other game using this feature which is probably why we missed it when we first implemented the patch. (#2598)
• Les aventures d’un avatar 6 uses .link.wav files, but they are normal audio files. It seems the game originally used Ineluki’s MP3 patch and then removed it. There is no easy way for us to determine which patches a game uses. To solve this, a threshold was added: when the filename ends in .link.wav, it’s only considered a link file if the file size is less than 500 bytes. We analysed thousands of games to find a safe threshold. (#2609)
• The patch is now conditionally enabled: The file harmony.dll must exist. The file itself isn’t loaded, as this isn’t possible on other platforms than Windows.
• The functions SetMouseAsReturn and SetMouseWheelAsKeys which are only used by the games Vortex and Rutipa’s Quest 9 are now implemented. (#3362, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

With the Direct Menu Patch you can set, by default, variable 3326 to the number of the target scene and variable 3327 to the subpage (usually the party member) and opening the menu will then be redirected. There is currently no autodetection for games using this, but you can manually configure it by adding DirectMenu=3326 to the [Patch] section of EasyRPG.ini. (#3192, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

We’ve reimplemented the functionality of the DynRPG plugin DynText Plugin. The parser was already added in version 0.7. Note that we will never support the direct loading of DynRPG plugins. They’re Windows DLLs, which makes them not portable, and they require the memory layout of the original RPG_RT engine. Any support requires reimplementing the plugin. (#2369) The video shows a working DynRPG Text Plugin demo. The assets were replaced with OpenRTP assets to showcase them for you again :).

A stub for Destiny Patch, another popular but complex patch for RPG_RT, was implemented. As it’s a stub it has currently no useful functionality, but this will improve over time. (#3131, contributed by drxgb)

Audio

The Player no longer crashing when you close it while a MIDI file is playing through the Fluidsynth backend. Fluidsynth is a library that lets you play MIDI through SoundFonts (files that contain samples of musical instruments). The issue was that some audio components, including the MIDI background thread, were global variables and not instance variables of the Audio interface. This meant that the MIDI thread kept running after the Audio interface was deleted, accessing freed memory (use-after-free). This also fixes that the playback of MIDI music continued in RetroArch after closing a game and then crashing when starting a new game. (#3015, #3035, #3079)

When a game uses a custom soundfont it’s now unloaded when the game ends. Before the first custom soundfont was used for all games started afterwards. (#2916)

Desktop operating systems like Windows, Linux and macOS have a software MIDI mapper that emulate a MIDI device. We support the MIDI mapper because it makes MIDI files on Windows sound exactly like in RPG_RT with zero additional configuration (on other system it requires more work because the soundfont Windows uses is copyrighted). The problem of the MIDI mapper is that it’s a shared instance. When a song ends, the software sending the MIDI events (this is us) is responsible for resetting the MIDI mapper to a sane default. Otherwise, the next song sounds incorrect (e.g., because the previous song altered the instrument mapping). We already did this in the same fashion as Harmony, the audio library used by RPG_RT, but we missed a single MIDI event: the pitch bend of the MIDI channels wasn’t reset. After fixing this the MIDI tracks in Toilet in Wonderland play correctly. (#2910)

You can listen to the issue here: It contains excerpts of four tracks: Two from Toilet in Wonderland as they are supposed to sound and twice Opening1 from the RTP. The second version of Opening1 is the broken one. The other tracks were silent in the old version of the player.

The MIDI tempo wasn’t reset when a new song started. As a result, it was played too fast (MIDI events sent too fast) until the first tempo command. We only found this out by chance, as most songs send a tempo event manually at the beginning. (#3090)

The software MIDI implementation in macOS isn’t quite as fault-tolerant as it’s in Windows. While playing Unterwegs in Duesterburg on macOS we noticed that our application crashes while sending MIDI events. It turns out that some MIDI files contain invalid MIDI events with numbers outside the specification. Windows ignores them, but on macOS this crashes. We even managed to reproduce this in VLC on macOS. To fix the crashes, MIDI events are now sanitized before sending them to the MIDI device. (#3148)

Sometimes, when the Player paused due to focus lost (clicking outside the game window), music played through the MIDI mapper didn’t continue. There was a race condition where the MIDI volume events were sometimes sent in the wrong order. (#3186)

Here’s finally one that affects Fluidsynth and not the operating system’s MIDI mapper. For performance reasons, we’re reusing a single Fluidsynth instance. We’ve noticed that in some cases Fluidsynth has cached a few milliseconds of old samples. This is usually intentional, as it allows cross-fading between two songs, but in one case it caused problems: When a music ended and the next music isn’t played immediately after. Then the old music was played for a very brief moment which is obviously incorrect. We couldn’t find an API to clear the internal sample buffer. Instead, we manually exhaust the buffer by reading from it and then ignoring the read samples. (#3135)

If there wasn’t any background music (BGM) playing, the sound effects had a kind of echo. We made a mistake when we were calculating the array size, which meant that only a quarter of the audio buffer was zeroed. The mistake had been there for years, but it almost never occurred because almost every game plays background music, and that always fills the entire buffer and hides the bug. (#2919)

When playing WAV files via the dr_wav library the values returned by Get Midi Ticks were incorrect. The name of the function is a bit misleading: When a MIDI is played it returns the current MIDI tick and in all other cases the playback location in seconds. In the case of dr_wav, we didn’t reset the amount of decoded samples, so the second counter always increments and never resets to 0. (#3059)

The heuristic to determine whether a file is a MP3 audio file was improved to reduce the false positive rate. Before even corrupted files were read as MP3 and this either crashed or played noise. (#3364)

Settings

The settings scene received a plethora of new features:

We support various MIDI backends: Fluidsynth (already mentioned earlier), WildMidi (an alternative to Fluidsynth), Native (via the Midi mapper provided by the operating system, if available) and FmMidi (emulates a Yamaha YM2608 FM synthesizer – we bundle this one). Normally, the Player will try to use the MIDI backends in the mentioned order and FmMidi as a backup when nothing else works. For example, Fluidsynth won’t work when no soundfont was provided. On Windows, it was impossible to listen to FmMidi because the Native Midi device usually works. Now, with the new config settings you can disable certain MIDI backends. (#3117, #3168)

For Fluidsynth we implemented browsing for soundfonts. No need to configure environment variables anymore. Just select the soundfont from the settings and the Player will use your soundfont by default. The soundfonts must be in the soundfont directory of the config folder. On our desktop systems, we added an option that opens that folder in your file browser. For emscripten (web player) you can upload a soundfont to use it. This isn’t a real upload, it just makes the file available in the browser’s sandbox.

You can even change the sound font mid-game. The next time a new MIDI file is played, the new soundfont is used. We originally planned to allow changing the sound font while a MIDI is playing, but this resets the channel and instrument configuration. Our idea to fix this is to remember all control commands sent by the MIDI file and then replay all of them when a new sound font is loaded. This might come in a later version of the Player.

A similar option was added for fonts: Games can have two different fonts, depending on what is configured for the system graphic, and you can choose now which two fonts you want and which font size to use. Using custom fonts can break games when the font metrics are different. Some games bundle fonts, in this case this setting will be ignored.

Help windows, these are the windows that show a single line of text with a description, scroll now the text when it does not fit on the screen. (#3168)

The settings scene crashed when command line argument --no-audio was used. A similar issue broke the build when compiled with -DPLAYER_AUDIO_BACKEND=OFF. (#3116)

Whether the Player pauses the game when the window looses the focus can now be configured in the settings. (#2925)

The background music (BGM) volume in the settings now also changes the volume of MIDI devices. With MIDI, unlike in other formats, samples are not written to a playback buffer, but MIDI events (e.g. note on) are sent to the MIDI device. If the global BGM volume is changed, the player now sends volume events to the MIDI device. (#3083)

The help texts in the advanced input settings are now correct UwU. (#3104, contributed by MikuChan03🎶)

The fast-forward multiplier is now configurable. The default stays at x3 and x10 speedup. You can now make them supew dupew fast (up to x100). (#3105, contributed by MikuChan03🎶)

When the working directory contains a config.ini the Player will load the settings from this file instead of using the global settings directory. (#3248)

A setting was added to set the scaling factor for screenshots. 320×240 is a bit small these days. (#3125)

Fonts

We removed the Thai and Hebrew glyphs from the bundled ttyp0 bitmap font. Our bitmap font code is pretty simple and can only handle basic scripts. We consider a script basic when you can just lay out all the glyphs next to each other in left-to-right (LTR) order without any further logic. These two require FreeType (a font parsing library) and Harfbuzz (text shaping library). Thai is already supported when you use a custom font.

Hebrew is not supported, because it’s a right-to-left (RTL) language. We don’t support RTL currently, but support is under development. (#2999)

Here a small sneak-peak for the right-to-left rendering feature showing Hebrew and Arabic (under development, not part of 0.8.1):

For large text the background gradient of the system colour is now correctly blitted. (#3168)

Due to an incorrect size calculation the damage popup in RPG Maker 2003 battles wasn’t shown when a custom font was used. (#3031)

The rendering of external fonts was improved: (#2953, #3179)

• When the font has embedded Bitmap glyphs at the correct size they are preferred
• The spacing between the glyphs is now correct (before they were too close to each other)
• The algorithm to determine the baseline (an imaginary line for positioning glyphs on the y-axis) was improved
• The algorithm for calculating the font size (mapping points [pt] to pixels [px]) was improved and has now font metrics that are very close to the metrics Wine (reimplementation of the Windows API for Linux) uses. We noticed that the metrics in RPG_RT different depending on whether Maniac Patch runs on Windows or through Wine. This concludes that not even Wine is able to perfectly render fonts like Windows does. When you use EasyRPG Player the metrics are pretty much the same as Wine, even when you’re running it on Windows. We’ve no clue what Windows is doing differently here, and it was easier to analyse the algorithm that Wine uses.

In general the documentation of FreeType and Harfbuzz is lacking, and the coding involved a lot of trial and error to get the font rendering work correctly.

Engine detection

In version 0.8 we made some improvements to the engine detection by parsing RPG_RT.exe. The information collected is from the resource section: The number of startup splash screens and the version information. Unfortunately, we didn’t notice that very old versions of RPG Maker 2003 (1.2 and older) were missing the version information. We assumed that a missing version information must be RPG Maker 2000. This caused a regression by incorrectly detecting the engine used by Yume Nikki (ゆめにっき) version 0.04 (the oldest public version) and Ahriman’s Prophecy. To correctly detect this version of the engine, we added a new metric to our heuristic: the size of the CODE segment. By obtaining this size we can make a really accurate detection as shown in this article on Makerpendium. Since we already have to search the resource segment to extract the ExFont (an icon font before emojis were cool), adding this was quite easy. (#2990, #3095)

This fixed the detection problem for the original and slightly modified versions of RPG_RT.exe. But what about Maniac Patch? To detect the presence of this patch we relied on the existence of accord.dll. Unfortunately, newer versions don’t need this file, and games have started to omit it. While fixing the previous problem, we looked for a way to detect the different versions of Maniac Patch. What they have in common is that the version is 1.1.2.1. Very early versions of Maniac Patch are assembler patches for RPG Maker 2003. The first available version we found adds a GEEP segment to the EXE and later versions have no GEEP segment but a larger than normal CHERRY segment. This is our current detection heuristic for older versions of Maniac Patch. (#2992, #3000)

Recent versions of Maniac Patch are based on reverse-compiled source code of RPG_RT and lack most of the typical segments (e.g. no splash screen resource), making the detection easy to do. The only hurdle was that they use a 64-bit executable now and we had to add parsing support for the 64-bit EXE format. Fortunately the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit EXE are only minor. (#3317)

A common bug report we receive is “Why does game XYZ not work/show?”. The most common reason is that the game was not made in RPG Maker 2000 or 2003. Many users do not know the difference between the different versions of RPG Maker. We now detect common RPG Maker engines and show a warning if the game is not supported. In addition, as a side effect of this feature, the player now highlights game directories that contain supported games. This feature is enabled for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android. For homebrew ports, detection will only occur when the specific game folder is opened. File IO performance is poor on most homebrew ports, and scanning all games would significantly delay the startup. (#3198, contributed by Primekick aka TheDarkAxer)

Improved archive support

The zipped version of Steamed Hams is now loadable. The archive contained multiple entries of the same files. We assume that files were appended to the archive and in this case old references are not removed. We now discard all file entries except the last one. (#3094)

As already mentioned in the WiiU blog post, games inside LZH archives are now supported. LZH is a popular format for RPG Maker 2000/2003 games because the editor can create game bundles using this format. That means you’ll find lots of games distributed in this format. (#3033) While implementing this, we noticed that loading LZH archives took minutes on our homebrew platforms. The problem was the ZIP detection: We first check if it is a ZIP archive and then check for LZH. ZIP archives can be located at the end of the file. This is how self-extracting archives work: They are executable files with a ZIP appended the end. To detect ZIP archives, we read the last 64k bytes backwards. Reading backwards is unbuffered and slow. Instead, we now read the last 64k bytes in one read and scan backwards in memory. This is much faster and reduces loading times to a few seconds.

The encoding detection for ZIP archives was improved. Now, only the filenames are sent to the encoding detection process, rather than the full path. The full path was usually ASCII, confusing the detection algorithm (was biased and usually detected Windows-1252). (#3281)

If a directory has a file that ends in .easyrpg and that file is a game (doesn’t matter if it’s a directory or an archive), the Player will automatically run it. This was requested to make it easier to distribute games when bundling the Player (standalone mode). (#3133)

Language / Internationalization

The language selector was moved to a dedicated scene (before it was part of the title scene) and can be invoked from a game by using event command Open Save menu with a scene ID of 207. Maniac Patch already added calling of various scenes through this event so this was a suitable location. (#2945,  contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

When a game is configured to skip the normal title screen common events were not translated. When the translation changes these events are now reloaded ensuring that the translated texts are shown. (#3048)

When parsing of .po translation files fails the error message contains now the name of the problematic file. (#3059)

In version 0.8 we added a deprecation warning that the Languages directory must be renamed to Language. We’ve since removed the warning and support for the Languages directory. (#3023)

Setting the encoding manually to Traditional Chinese (950) in the RPG_RT.ini didn’t use the Traditional Chinese keyboard in the name input scene. (#3084)

A new key GameTitle was added to Meta.ini to allow translating of the game title shown in the title bar. (#3097, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

The Player will not abort on startup anymore when --language is used when no Language directory exists. (#3213, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

If the game has no savegames and no language directory, the player will now ask for the game language before starting. This is mainly for games that skip the title screen, such as Braingirl, where it was not possible to change the language without using the command line. If you do not like this behaviour, you can disable it in the settings. A language selector has also been added to the settings, allowing you to change the language during the game, although this is a little unreliable and will be improved later. (#3348, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel).

Android

More fun with the Storage Access Framework (SAF) (#2985)

We’ve received a lot of negative reviews on the Play Store complaining about the poor performance of the new version of the app is and that we shall revert to the old version. We expected this to happen, and we have known for years how unconstructive many reviews on the Play Store reviews can be. So we don’t take it personally, and we’ve been able to improve the ratings by offering a video tutorial explaining the initial setup. Readers of our blog know that it’s Google’s fault for enforcing their unusable, slow SAF API but of course the users on Google Play blame the developers because they don’t know any better.

Anyway, we found ways to make the SAF experience slightly less bad by completely getting rid of this useless DocumentFile wrapper class provided by Android, which we already ranted about in the 0.8 blog post. The problem is that DocumentFile caches a lot of file metadata that we don’t need. By using the underlying API (which is DocumentsContract.buildChildDocumentsUriUsingTree) we can reduce the query to just the metadata we need.

Though even this DocumentsContract query takes at least 100 ms to complete (still 10 times faster than DocumentFile). So, we tried to reduce the number of calls to SAF. One of the speedup tricks we found: SAF has an interesting behaviour when a non-existent file is opened for reading: Instead of failing it returns a valid file descriptor but the descriptor points to the root of the tree (the EasyRPG directory). Checking to see if the file exists first is slow, so instead we try to read from the descriptor, and if the read fails (because you cannot read from a directory this way), we assume the file is missing.

This trick makes the situation better, but the performance is still bad. Thanks, Google :(.

Working around Samsung touch issues

Every time Android is discussed it’s required to talk about Samsung: They have the largest share of the Android market, but their system has so many modifications that some Android features simply do not work as expected.

In the 0.8 blog post, we discussed a strange multitouch issue that only affected some Samsung devices. We were able to gain access to a Samsung device and finally investigate the bug. It took a couple of hours to reproduce, and we believe the cause of the bug is a power saving feature that makes it only noticeable when the battery is low enough. For performance/battery saving reasons, Samsung dynamically reduces the resolution of the rendering context (via Game Booster). In order to make this invisible to the application, all metrics, such as touch coordinates, are faked. However, this feature has one oversight: If the app contains multiple views, in our case a view is a single touch button, then the reported coordinates are wrong when more than one finger touches the screen (multi-touch).

Here is a video demonstrating the issue: The thin lines are the real finger touches reported by an Android debug feature. The locations of our touch buttons are what the app receives. As you can see, the coordinates are wrong when two fingers touch the screen.

The wrong offset is always the same, so we can fix this. We cannot hardcode this workaround for all Samsung devices because it does not happen on all of them. Instead, we have found a way to detect it: When the multitouch bug occurs, the touch begin event reports a coordinate that is outside the object being touched (which is impossible). If this happens once, we add a displacement to all touches. It seems to work. We implemented this bugfix a year ago and have not had a single bug report since. (#2830, #2915, #3016)

Further Android improvements

The frontend now uses the native FileFinder implementation of the Player instead of custom Java code. This increases compatibility when scanning ZIP archives, and we were able to easily add support for LZH archives. As a further improvement, subdirectories and archives can now contain multiple games. For performance reasons we currently limit this to a maximum of 3 games before stopping the search.

In addition, the correct title graphic for the game is now displayed. If there is only one file in the title folder, it is selected, otherwise the game database (RPG_RT.ldb) is parsed to get the filename.

We now display the real game title (obtained from the RPG_RT.ini file) instead of the directory name. If you don’t like this, you can revert to the old behaviour, and you can even give each game a custom name in the preferences. For the game title we must guess the encoding. We noticed that the encoding detection is unreliable for the title because it is too short but we found a sketchy workaround: Concatenating the title string multiple times to itself gives better detection results ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. All these features make the first startup a bit slower, but only the first one, because all the data obtained during the scan is cached. In case you dislike this feature you can switch back to the old (use directory name) behaviour. (#3316)

The settings were extended: You can check now whether RTP 2000 and 2003 were detected. (#1845) and the font configuration is integrated. To help you choose the right settings, the app displays a preview that’s rendered using Player’s native text renderer, so it’s pixel-perfect to what you’ll see in-game.

The fast-forward button was removed from the default layout. You can still add it manually using the Input Layout Editor.

While a game is running, the options Toggle FPS and Reset game are now shown in the drawer. (#3230)

All assets in the game browser were replaced with vector graphics. This improves the quality of these icons on high resolution devices. (#3258)

An option was added to display the A and B buttons as Z and X instead.  A and B are the buttons used by gamepads and Z and X are used by keyboards. (#3311)

Orientation changes of the device are not always sent depending on the Android version due to various bugs in the operating system. This broke the positioning of the SDL window when we updated the layout. We use now a hack provided by SDL (they read the orientation through a sensor) to properly support this across all devices. (#3356)

Other weird Android issues we cannot fix

According to the crash logs, some devices crash with a timeout when creating our folders. We think that the Storage Access Framework (SAF) implementation is broken on these devices just hangs 🙄. The stack trace:

This Binder call may be taking too long, causing the main thread to wait, and triggering the ANR. Learn more

  at android.os.BinderProxy.transact (BinderProxy.java:584)
  at android.content.ContentProviderProxy.call (ContentProviderNative.java:730)
  at android.content.ContentResolver.call (ContentResolver.java:2450)
  at android.provider.DocumentsContract.createDocument (DocumentsContract.java:1380)
  at androidx.documentfile.provider.TreeDocumentFile.createFile (TreeDocumentFile.java:53)
  at androidx.documentfile.provider.TreeDocumentFile.createFile (TreeDocumentFile.java:45)
  at org.easyrpg.player.Helper.createEasyRPGFolders (Helper.java:118)

On Samsung devices (it’s Samsung, after all) it’s possible to disable the built-in Files app. When this app is disabled, the SAF file selector is broken because it requires the Files app. Yes, you really can accidentally disable an essential system feature. 🤦

The same thing happens with Android TV: Here Google simply forgot to include a SAF-compliant file browser, making our app unusable on all devices running Android TV. 💩

Two weeks ago we were informed that the metrics of the app are broken on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13PRO. When you look at the screenshot you can see that settings (Pantalla) are not drawing inside the window (below the green “Configuration”) but start at the very top of the screen. Last week we were able to reproduce this in an emulator. Turns out this is a new feature since Android 15 (SDK35): Edge-to-Edge. With SDK35, the app itself is responsible for calculating the margins. According to Google, this makes the app more immersive, but we only get a headache from this feature. We have reverted to SDK34 until we find time to fix this mess. Our Android code is so old that Google’s suggested solutions do not work for us. (#3373)

Emscripten (Web Player)

When embedding the EasyRPG Player canvas into a website, e.g. via <iframe>, grabbing the focus (and keyboard) now works correctly without any hacks. When embedded by other means, the keyboard focus of the whole website won’t be stolen anymore. (#3195)

Accessing your saved games is tricky in our web player. All guides use the JavaScript console. As a new feature, you can now press Shift in the save/load scene to upload and download saved games. (#1025) In addition, to make it easier to add your saved games, you can now press Shift on the title screen to open the load scene even if you have no save game. (#3195)

If an asset download fails, the Player will now retry the download multiple times. (#3004)

The Maniac Patch commands Load and Get Save Info now work in the Web Player. The Load function opened a deleted map which didn’t crash because there is no memory protection when reading inside the memory buffer and Get Save Info didn’t fetch the Face graphics. Control Global Save has received some bugfixes and now saves the global save file to the browser storage. (#3270, #3271)

Sometimes it can happen that the WebGL rendering context is lost. Then the canvas is no longer updated and everything since the last save is lost. The Player will now try to restore the context by recreating the SDL2 window. Did you try turning it off and on again?. (#3282)

The game OFF crashed when entering the Big Elsen room but only in the web player. This was a strange interaction between async suspend (for fetching the panorama on this map) combined with the way the interpreter works during the map transition. What happened was that the panorama was changed by a map event during the transition and this indirectly continued the interpreter, resulting in an endless recursion. The endless recursion is now prevented by checking if the panorama is already being downloaded. (#3058)

When a translation is changed, the list of requests, which keeps track of which files have already been downloaded, is cleared to ensure that you can receive the translated assets. Unfortunately, this includes deleting requests that were in flight, resulting in a use-after-free. (#3165)

The touch buttons now send event.code to the Player instead of the deprecated event.keyCode. This allows the input to be keyboard layout independent as on other platforms. This is most noticeable on French (AZERTY) keyboards. Walking with ZQSD (WSAD on US keyboards) now works. (#3023)

The further emscripten changes were related to the infrastructure and are not noticeable by normal users: (#2722, #2862)

Code running in a web browser is required to yield back to the browser, otherwise the tab will be reported as stuck and the browser will terminate it. This is incompatible with the usual approach of most desktop games which use an endless update loop that terminates when the game is closed. The simplest way to make this still work is to use Asynchify, which converts all calls up to this endless loop into an intermediate language that can be suspended. This was our approach for years, but when we implemented savegame uploads, we found that this broke asynchronous calls into the Player because the Player never fully suspended. So we had to rewrite our code in such a way that it suspends without using Asynchify. Fortunately we already used this approach in the early days our web player, so we knew what to do.

We have moved the Player into a module (via MODULARIZE). The advantage is that this gives more control over the configuration. Previously, the Player launched when the website was opened, making it difficult to pass options. Now it launches when the module is instantiated. The file system module FS has also become part of this module. (#3243). For users this makes no difference.

This module allows us to expose an API to the web browser. The main motivation was to make it easier to call into the Player from JavaScript. This change helped the Yume Nikki Online project a lot in simplifying their callback code.

Windows

This release requires Windows 7 or newer. After the 0.8 release, we updated our build infrastructure from Visual Studio 2019 to Visual Studio 2022. The new version no longer supports Windows Vista.

Finger touch input is now working on other devices besides the Microsoft Surface. When we first implemented this feature, the finger IDs we saw were always in the range of 0 to 4. But we noticed something different on an ASUS laptop: the IDs kept getting higher with each touch. We improved our finger tracking algorithm to fix it. (#3207)

Windows 11 has an annoying window rounding behaviour by default that results in a few pixels at the bottom being lost. Ironically right after we implemented this, we read in a blog post of Dolphin Emulator that they had the same idea. In conclusion, we’re not the only one hating it. (#3207)

Consoles (Homebrew) and libretro

EasyRPG Player for WiiU is out. Read the linked blog post for details. (#1348, #3167, WiiU Fixes #3234)

There have been lots of changes for the Wii version: We’ve migrated it to SDL2. SDL is an abstraction layer for video, audio, input and more. Since the beginning the Wii version ran on SDL1, which is an ancient, deprecated version of SDL. Switching to SDL2 gives us some advantages: The rendering resolution is higher (not just blurry 320×240), which makes a big difference in image quality and lets you use features like custom resolutions. We measured the performance and the SDL2 version is up to 5 FPS slower when V-Sync is disabled. With V-Sync enabled it’s significantly slower. We decided to keep it off because we couldn’t find any flickering or tearing issues. We think the slightly worse performance is acceptable, given all the other enhancements. (#3236). The Wii uses now a custom audio backend based on AESND which should give a slightly better performance when playing audio. (#3181). The app no longer crashes when running from USB while no SD card is inserted. (#3054)

We have received reports that the log file corrupts the filesystem, especially on the Wii. The filesystem drivers on the homebrew platforms are not very reliable, and if our player crashes, the filesystem can get corrupted. We have decided to disable logging by default on all our homebrew ports. Logging can be enabled/disabled in the settings. (#2838)

Screenshots taken on Wii and WiiU do not have incorrect colous anymore. (#3125)

Fixes and improvements for the 3DS: Loading saves no longer crashes. We are not sure how this was fixed. (#2988). Transitions are no longer rendered in blue. (#2981). The 3DS version now uses the native error dialogue to report fatal errors, and ports using SDL2 (e.g. our desktop platforms) show a message box. (#2875) Furthermore a battery indicator is now displayed and stretching of the top-screen is supported. (#3202)

On the Switch, the app no longer hangs when resuming from sleep mode. (#2957)

The startup path passed to libretro is now made canonical as our file system code expects this. A canonical path is a path without .. and . components. E.g. the canonical version of dir/./dir2/../dir3 is dir/dir3. (#3059)

libretro cores for iOS and tvOS are now provided. A native EasyRPG Player app will come someday, porting the core just took less time because libretro already has a working frontend on Apple devices thanks to RetroArch. (#3365)

Everything else

The game The Sacred Tears: TRUE uses an encrypted map tree to prevent altering of the game in the RPG Maker editor. Obviously this also breaks running it in our Player. The encryption consists of incrementing all byte values by one (also known as a Caesar cipher). As this encryption is trivial, we’ve implemented a decryption to make the game work. (#3269)

Changes to the debug scene:

• The scene can now be opened while a message is active. Note that messages are not stored in the save file. Loading the save will resume execution immediately after the message box command. This is usually safe, except if the message box contains choices or a number input. This is a debugging feature, so use it with care.
  (#3014)
• Opening of the menu scene can be blocked by the game. We had an undocumented override (hold shift, then press cancel five times) to still get into the menu. This override was removed and instead an Open Menu option added to our debug scene. (#3020)
• While in battle, map events can now be triggered from the debug scene. The option is still disabled during a battle test because no map is loaded. (#3028)
• A new setting was added to override the hero’s movement speed. (#3074)
• You can now analyse the call stacks of the interpreters (#3219, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)
• A new view for looking at the content of string variables was added (Maniac Patch only, #3219, contributed by florianessl aka Käsekumpel)

Bitmaps that had an effect applied were never deleted because we always kept an active reference to them, wasting a lot of memory. Effects are modifications to a picture such as x/y flip or a colour change. (#3163)

The warning message shown when learning invalid skills was changed to a debug message. Skills can become invalid when they are removed from the database after assigning them to an actor. RPG_RT ignores such invalid skills (and the editor does not show them!), making it impossible for the game creator to notice. This was reported for multiple games, including Uneven Dream (凹凸夢) and LanVodis. (#2977)

More invalid database data: The warning messages shown when the game database references invalid items or party members were changed to a debug message. One way to get invalid party references is removing actors from the database after they were added as initial party members. RPG_RT again ignores such invalid data. This was reported for the game Adventures of Meatball Dog. (#3008)

Since the first release of EasyRPG Player we create a log file easyrpg_log.txt in the working directory. When the Player is started in a game directory, the logfile is created in that directory. This means that if you use our player in many games, you will have accumulated hundreds of log files. We noticed that this was slowly becoming a problem: game archives were starting to contain our logfile because the author forgot to delete it. To mitigate this problem, we now create a single logfile. On Windows it is located in AppData/Local/EasyRPG_Player.log and on Unix systems in $XDG_STATE_HOME/EasyRPG_Player.log (~/.local/state by default). On other platforms we put it in the config directory. (#2838)

The size limits for some assets were increased to reduce spamming the log file with false positives. (#3260)

A graphical user interface was added to lmu2png to make exporting maps more user-friendly. (Tools #89) Currently the builds we provide only support the GUI on Windows.

For Developers / Maintainers / Building

Always upgrade liblcf before upgrading the Player. Both need to be on the same version.

As a reminder: liblcf is our library for parsing RPG Maker files.

tl;dr for busy maintainers :)

• C++17 required
• autotools will be removed soon, migrate to CMake
• CMake: zlib uses now the find package because the config file is broken
• CMake (liblcf): in-source builds are now prohibited
• SDL3 is now supported but SDL2 is still the default. To enable it use -DPLAYER_TARGET_PLATFORM=SDL3.
• fmt >= 10 is supported
• lhasa is a new, recommended dependency (for playing games inside LZH archives, a popular archive format among RPG Maker games)
• dr_wav prefers now the system library instead of the vendored copy (via #if __has_include)
• rang was removed
• Vendored picojson was removed and replaced with nlohmann_json and is a new, recommended dependency on all systems, not just emscripten (used by the new JSON event command).
• liblcf: Vendored inih was removed (we still use some example code based on it) and requires now the system library
• liblcf: Vendored string-view-lite removed and migrated to C++17 std::string_view.
• liblcf: Support for iconv was removed, use ICU instead (ICU is the default since 7 years, nothing changes here)
• liblcf: Expat (XML) uses now the legacy EXPAT find package when the config file is missing.

Detailed

Building liblcf and Player now requires a C++17 compatible compiler. For liblcf this is actually enforced by a dependency: ICU (the Unicode library we use) requires C++17 as of version 75. (#2190, liblcf #458)

Building with autotools is deprecated and will be removed right after this release. The archaic m4 language used by autotools became more and more of a maintenance burden, and our autotools build system lacks many features compared to our CMake build system. If you are a package maintainer, please migrate to CMake.

We support now SDL3.  SDL3 is the latest version and brings enhancements such as a better graphics API proper scaling on high-DPI displays. Our support for SDL3 is very basic (same as SDL2) and is fairly recent so we decided to stay on SDL2 by default for now. To enable it use -DPLAYER_TARGET_PLATFORM=SDL3. (#2865)

CMake: zlib now uses find package because the config file is broken if not both shared and static version of zlib are installed. (#3318)

The Player compiles now when using fmtlib 10 or newer. (#3002)

Loading games inside LZH archives, a popular format for RPG Maker 2000/2003 games because the editor can create it, is now supported and requires lhasa, a new, recommended dependency. (#3033)

Dr_wav (header-only library to play WAV audio files) uses now the system library, when available, instead of our vendored version. (#2986)

The vendored version of rang (library for coloured output in the terminal) was removed. We now use the functionality of fmtlib. This breaks the terminal output on Windows versions prior to Windows 10 but considering this is only a debugging feature this is acceptable. (#3181)

The vendored copy of picojson (JSON library) was replaced with nlohmann_json. The JSON library is now used everywhere, not just for emscripten, making it a new, recommended dependency for the Player. For emscripten it’s used to parse index.json to figure out which files exist and for the other platforms a new event command was added to access and manipulate JSON files. (#3228)

When compiling a libretro core for Android some components depending on SDL2 were not disabled which broke the build. (#2983)

The CMake build system has a new setting -DPLAYER_BUILD_LIBLCF_BRANCH to build a custom branch when using -DPLAYER_BUILD_LIBLCF=ON. (#3017)

The Player now builds when resampling is disabled (neither speexdsp nor libsamplerate available). (#3251)

CMake now correctly detects the endianess (big or little endian) when crosscompiling. (liblcf #464, #3060)

A callback API was added to make it easier for external code to hook into our code without causing merge conflicts every time our code is updated. (#3224)

The header string-view-lite was removed and replaced with std::string_view which is a new feature in C++17. (#3360, liblcf #495)

liblcf

As a reminder, liblcf is our library for parsing RPG Maker files.

Messages from the liblcf library can now be redirected instead of just appearing on the terminal. This allows us to log parsing problems and skipped (unknown) chunks to our normal log file when running a game through EasyRPG Player. (liblcf #416)

Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft bundles the Unicode library ICU. We now support building liblcf against this system library. The disadvantage is that you need Windows 10, otherwise you will not be able to run applications that depend on it. We asked around in chat and decided to build a custom version of ICU anyway. This way you get support down to Windows 7. (liblcf #427)

New chunks have been added to support new EasyRPG and Maniac features:

• EasyRPG extension: For battler facing direction (liblcf #463)
• Maniac Patch: For separate Width/Height parameters when scaling pictures (liblcf #473)
• EasyRPG extension: To store state when an event command yields and is called again after (used by Wait for Single Movement on repeated calls, liblcf #478)
• Maniac Patch: For separate (X/Y) camera pan speeds (liblcf #482), for various message settings (not implemented yet), for new terms related to battles and for giving names to string variables (liblcf #499)
• The default trigger type for common events was changed to call (liblcf #484)

In addition to ICU, we supported iconv. This code was unmaintained, and we decided to remove it. As a bonus you can now build liblcf without ICU, but then only Windows-1252 encoding is supported. (liblcf #465, #471)

The tool lcf2xml now uses the system encoding by default, and you can override it with --encoding. (liblcf #468)

The vendored copy of inih (a library for accessing INI files) was removed, and building now requires the system library. We still distribute parts of the C++ interface of this library, as we have modified it to suit our needs. (liblcf #479)

liblcf now builds with RTTI (runtime type information) disabled. This is used on our homebrew platforms to reduce library size. (liblcf #483)

One of the things liblcf is designed to do is read and write RPG Maker files in a bit-perfect way. This basically means that if you read a file with liblcf and don’t make any changes, the output file should be exactly the same. Apart from files that have corruption issues, this was the case before version 0.8. However, in version 0.8, we accidentally broke this feature because we always wrote certain EasyRPG chunks in the files. These are now omitted by default, which restores the bit-perfect read/write behaviour. (liblcf #485)

The library inih can be disabled to make building liblcf easier. However, when you do this EasyRPG Player will not compile. (liblcf #490)

On some sytems the libexpat package (used to parse XML files) does not provide a CMake config file. The config file generated by liblcf correctly handles now the case that a legacy find package is used by Expat. (liblcf #496)

After more than one year we are finally reporting back with a new release. This was a special year for all of us. Though it was not only the pandemic holding the release back. Instead the main issue was: Many of the new features / enhancements were under development for months and have been gradually integrated in our main code base. Therefore, the Player was quite unstable at times and making a new release was simply not feasible. We are only a small team of developers, so it was easier to wait until everything complicated was finished and then we could test and eliminate the last bugs. Now all bugs are removed (hopefully) and we can release.

Guess you want to know what is new? The major enhancements are:

• The RPG_RT patch Ineluki’s Key Patch is now supported
• Many of you asked us for Maniac Patch support. This is another major patch released a few years ago. While we do not plan to support the entire patch we decided to implement selected features.
• MIDI playback was significantly improved and games that use MIDI Ticks for timing work perfectly now
• The movement system (Move routes) was completely rewritten. This solved most of the remaining bugs in our map interpreter.
• The RPG Maker 2003 battle system is now almost feature complete and we verified that all algorithms behave properly
• All file operations go now through a Virtual Filesystem (VFS) layer. This gives us much more flexibility, e.g. it is now possible to launch games that are inside of ZIP archives.
• We invented a new way to translate games. See this article for more information.

One feature that did not make the cut for 0.7 is a settings scene and input remapping for game controllers. The code for the configuration dialog and for managing the config file is still missing. Expect this feature in 0.7.1.

If you ignore unofficial RPG_RT patches one can say that our work is finished by 99%. The major missing features are some item animations in battle, the dungeon generator and movie playback (and the last one is unlikely because all games use different video codecs, making this a mess). Well, … and of course the never-ending amount of edge-cases we missed. :)

Why Codename Sword? Because item animations in the RPG Maker 2003 battle system was one of the longest standing issues and nobody wanted to implement them. But a fearless new developer joined and implemented them for us.

Sorry to the developers if one of your contributions is not mentioned here. In this release were 160 issues closed and 260 pull requests merged, making it very hard to mention everything.

Crash fixes

The Player crashed when an enemy killed themselves due to a reflected spell in battle. (#2394)

Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) sometimes uses an Instant Scroll feature by using a patched Pan Screen event command with a very high speed number. This crashed on certain Android devices due to a divide by 0. The Yume2kki developers really love abusing undefined RPG_RT behaviours. We already fixed so many of them over the last years…

Regressions fixed

When using a Speicherstein item (saves the game) in Vampires Dawn 2 an endless loop of save dialogs occurred, because the save count was not updated anymore. (#2450)

When using a healing spell in Vampires Dawn 2, it was impossible to tell which actor is currently targeted. (#2479)

Audio glitches happened when a sound effect was playing without an active background music. (#2427, #2501)

When the state Death is configured as Ends after Battle, the state was removed but the HP were not increased to 1 anymore. Resulting in an instant game over still. (#2521)

Patch support

RPG_RT is infamously known for the huge amount of custom patches applied to it in order to get custom functionality.

EasyRPG Player cannot support all of them because many are game specific or launch other programs on Windows but we add support for the most common ones such as the Pic Pointer Patch.

Ineluki’s Key Patch

In 0.7 we added support for a popular patch in the German community: Ineluki’s Key Patch: This patch is a replacement for Harmony.dll (the sound engine used by RPG Maker 2000/2003) that allows running scripts by “playing” music and reading the return values through the GetMidiTicks function. The major additions are full keyboard and mouse support. (#1181)

Harvest Moon – A new Life and likely other games invoke a program called LS.dat through Ineluki’s Key Patch. This program puts a script in the Sound directory that contains the current save count. The games use this in custom title scene to decide whether load shall be displayed. This functionality is now emulated. (#1367)

Games that use the mouse like Jumping cubes are playable now but for new games better use the mouse functionality of Maniac Patch because it has a better integration through event commands.

DynRPG

Even more complex than Inelukis Patch is a plugin system by Cherry called DynRPG. DynRPG provides a C++ API for accessing and modifying RPG_RT behavior.  This is highly RPG_RT specific and we will never be able to support this properly, but we added a parser for DynRPG commands. This means we can now reimplement the most popular plugins and integrate them directly in the Player but as of now the parser is useless for users, except for better error reporting that the game will likely not run properly. (#2282) Currently planned for a later release of Player are DynTextPlugin and DynPEC.

Maniac Patch

In August 2018 a user called BingShan from the Japanese community released the first version of Maniac Patch. This is the first major patch for the official English RPG Maker 2003 release and it extended certain event commands and added new commands. The patch was extended over the years and recently BingShan released an entire new RPG Maker 2003 compatible engine. We can already say that we do not intend to implement all of the patch functionality, especially not TPC (That is a built in script engine that generates event commands). We will cherry-pick the features based on demand.

Right now EasyRPG Player detects the patch and warns in most cases about unsupported commands. (#2486)

Though we started to implement some functionality:

• The unarmed battle animation for enemies can now be configured (#2498)
• The new event commands Load, Save, Get Save Info and Get Mouse Position are supported (#2623)
• The Key Input Proc event command learned how to read from mouse buttons (#2623)
• Show Picture, Move Picture and Erase Picture event commands were enhanced with Maniac Patch functionality. This includes features like Blend Mode and Flip (#2628)
• Certain event commands gained the functionality, besides constant value and Variable, to read indirectly through a variable, e.g. when in Var 1 is a 5 the value in Variable number 5 is used. Because all event commands go through the same lookup logic here and Maniac Patch sometimes differ from it we cannot give a full list where it works.

Launching protected games

Some games use patched files to ensure that it is not easily possible to view them in the editor.

The most simple protection we defeat since a decade is replacing the header of the files, e.g. instead of LcfDataBase the LDB uses a custom string such as EasyGameABC.

More sophisticated is changing all file extensions. Laxius Power e.g. changes:

• RPG_RT.ldb to RPG_RT.set
• RPG_RT.lmt to RPG_RT.lxb
• MapXXXX.lmu to MapXXXX.ont

This protection is now defeated by EasyRPG Player and the game launches: The LDB and the LMT is determined based on the size (the database is larger) and the maps based on the Map-prefix. (#1920, #2271)

Sometimes you will encounter games that only consist of a single RPG_RT.exe: These are usually protected by Molebox or Enigma. EasyRPG Player is unable to run them directly but there are unpackers available in the internet.

Translating games

Games can be translated now. Please see our previous blog post and the linked guide in it for further information. (#797, #2287)

It is now possible to translate certain, until now untranslatable terms. These are implemented in terms of new database chunks. Unfortunately our editor is not ready yet so editing them requires a tool like lcf2xml. (#2362, #2473). Also see the related liblcf commits. (#414, #419)

The now translatable terms include:

• Status Scene: Name, Class, Title, Condition, Front, Back, Confirm, Redo
• In RPG Maker 2003 battle the messages displayed when monsters to Double Attack, Defend, Observe, Charge, Self-Destruct and Escape

Support for games from ZIP archives (VFS) (#2189, #2277, #2460, #2471)

In 0.7 we replaced all chunks of code that were responsible for reading files with an abstraction layer called VFS (Virtual Filesystem). We wanted to do this since years and it was a huge amount of work.

Basically this works through Filesystem classes that offer functions like File exists, Open & Read file or List directory and all Input/Output goes through this abstraction layer.

In 0.7 their is one new feature powered by VFS which also proofs that it works: The Player can now launch games directly from ZIP archives! Only archives with compression method Store or Deflate (not Deflate64) are supported. When you use this feature the savegame is put in a folder next to the ZIP archive. You can either launch them through our Game Browser (who learned to navigate into subdirectories by now) or by providing them as --project-path on the command line. As for games the encoding of the ZIP archive is auto-detected, so if you are unable to extract a ZIP on Windows: Try launching it through EasyRPG Player instead. (#1085, #2562)

The main motivation for this change however was supporting platforms where normal input/output functions by the standard library are unusable. This affects Windows Store Apps (UWP) where the security model forbids normal file access outside of the app directory and as of November 2021 also Android: All updated apps must use the Storage Access Framework (SAF), this also enforces such security checks.

By now UWP or SAF are not supported by us but our VFS code makes it very easy for us to hook them in later.

Also we are asked alot about offering RPG Maker games directly in the Play store: We are very close to supporting this use case (Game files directly in the APK and launching them without using the Game browser). Please wait for our announcement!

Audio

A new Audio system for MIDI (#2250, #2302)

MIDI is not like your typical audio format: Contrary to WAV or MP3 that encode a waveform, MIDI files are event based: They contain which instruments and notes are played. This also means that they sound different depending on the library used. Most of you are used to Windows MIDI (Roland General MIDI). Additionally RPG Maker 2000/2003 has special features for MIDI files:

• Pitch (playback speed) changes
• Volume changes
• Loop Event (Control Change with Event 111)
• Obtaining the current playback position (MIDI Ticks)

The first two features work by injecting MIDI events and for the Loop event case to send MIDI events from the start of the loop again.

Until recently we used SDL Mixer on Windows and macOS for this and on all other platforms WildMidi or FmMidi. SDL Mixer ensured that we sound like RPG_RT by using the native API on Windows. Except for FmMidi, which is not very popular among users because it sounds “wrong” to them, none of these libraries allows injecting of events meaning that we were unable to implement the harmony.dll (The audio engine of RPG_RT) behaviour.

But with 0.7 this is finally solved! How does it work: Almost all MIDI libraries (except WildMidi, we will talk about this alter) support processing of external events and then converting them to audio.

For this we use the FmMidi sequencer to play all MIDI files. FmMidi is split into two parts: A sequencer that processes MIDI events and a synthesizer that converts these events into audio. Note that we use the sequencer here, so the component that handles events.

We forward these events to the native MIDI interface on Windows, Linux and macOS or to our libraries FluidSynth (to play SF2 files / soundfonts) and FmMidi (for the fans of electronical sounding music, it sounds like a Yamaha YM2608). Additionally for volume or pitch control we inject additional events (that we traced by observing harmony.dll). In short: This works excellent and all our MIDI problems are solved… except WildMidi.

WildMidi is a “fire-and-forget” library: You pass the MIDI file and it plays it. No way to control the behaviour. To ensure that everything still works we count how many samples WildMidi must have played by now relative to the MIDI tempo and this way we still got MIDI ticks and looping to work. It feels like a giant hack but it is not stupid when it works. Unfortunately getting the Pitch right is impossible, this will still sound incorrect.

Why so many MIDI libraries? Well, MIDI are special: Everybody likes them different. Some like the Windows default MIDI (known from RPG_RT), some have a favourite soundfont (FluidSynth), others want GUS patches (Wildmidi) and others love the electronical version offered by FmMidi.

Problems solved by our new MIDI interface:

• Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle: Sound effect repeating incorrectly (MIDI loop point) (#834)
• MIDI synth restarts every time the music changes, giving a short lag on some systems (#951)
• FluidSynth/FluidLite MIDI playback support (SF2/SF3 files) (#1322)
• Improve consistency in MIDI sound (#1434)
• Helen’s Mysterious Castle had inaccurate BGM playback (#1556, #2587)
• Return of Touhou Mother: MIDI-Tick Regression (#1733). This game uses a MIDI-tick based combo system meaning this never worked correctly anywhere except when using FmMidi.
• Tempo changes the Tone of MIDI songs (#2029). This bug is not solvable in WildMidi but it works for all other libraries.
• Dの冒険Ⅶ: Hang after investigating the grave (#2106). Needed MIDI tick support.
• Implement Ticks for: libsndfile, FmMidi and Wildmidi (#2118)
• Return of Touhou Mother softlocked in the Battle System on Android (#2241)
• FmMidi: naive harmony-like loop support (#2245)
• Improve MIDI playback accuracy (#2478)
• RTP Shop 3.mid plays noisy (#2588)

But all this was at a cost: Before our MIDI fix the vending machine in the Bathhouse of Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) only gave you tasty chocolate milk. Now you can also get boring whole milk (3.5% fat) and skimmed milk (1.5% fat) besides tasty chocolate milk. How sad!

We are not completely finished here: We plan to offer an interface to configure MIDI in 0.7.1. The soundfont used by FluidSynth is not configurable right now. Currently a easyrpg.soundfont in the game directory is used.

More Audio improvements

Because RPG_RT uses DirectSound it uses a logarithmic volume scale instead of a linear volume scale. This means until now all sound effects and most music were played too loud compared to RPG_RT. This is now fixed.(#2236, #2551)

For certain platforms we used a custom implementation to play WAV files because libsndfile was too slow on them. Our custom implementation was severely limited and we finally replaced it with dr_wav. dr_wav is a single-file-library that can be directly embedded and it supports all relevant WAV formats. dr_wav is now the default for all platforms. The only issue we found is that dr_wav crashes when playing certain sound effects on the Wii but we were able to solve this. (#2571)

The quasi-standard for looping in OGG and OPUS files are the tags LOOPSTART and LOOPEND or how RPG Maker VX calls them: LOOPSTART and LOOPLENGTH. After implementing looping for MIDI we knew about all technical difficulties, making it easy for us to add this functionality. (#2618)

Event/Interpreter

The vehicle is not rendered in the custom battle of Dragon Fantasy II anymore. Fix unclear, but it works. (#2235)

The vehicle is disembarked when a Teleport or Escape skill is invoked. (#2316)

Wadanohara does not display warnings about invalid equipment anymore on startup. The invalid equipment is now removed silently. (#2506)

Multiple bugfixes for Key Input Proc:

• In the legacy Steam version (not the Unity port) of Ara Fell crouching with Shift was not working because we forgot to enable the “Engine is updated” flag when enabling the features for RPG Maker 2003 English release. This update flag is used in Key Input for certain keys. (#2531)
• In Zelda LA it was impossible to input a name because the direction keys were not working. This game uses the RPG Maker 2003 translation by RPG advocate. Such old versions only supported “All Directions” for Key Input. This is now properly handled. (#2546)

Movement / Move Routes (#2208)

Another huge refactor was the behavior in terms of character movement and move routes. This fixed again tons of edge cases where we were previously clueless what was going on here. We are even bug compatible now. You can decide if this is good or not but it is needed for perfect game compatibility.

• Multiple accuracy improvements for Move Type Random (#1638)
• Boarding an airship is a few frames slower when it has a move route assigned. Do not ask us why. (#1645)
• Support for some funny vehicle glitches. (#1852)

• When talking to a character in Saint Seiya -Il Mito- it disappeared. This was caused by incorrect handling of diagonal movement. (#2196)
• Barrels did not roll in the Donkey Kong minigame available in Saint Seiya -Il Mito-: When changing between move routes that have exactly the same move commands the new move route continues at the exact same position instead of restarting. (#2197)
• Incorrect handling of move routes when a switch disabled the route. (#2255)
• A Change Graphic event will change the vehicle instead of the player when boarded. (#2286)

Battle

After refactoring most of the RPG Maker 2000 battle system, the RPG Maker 2003 battle system received the same treatment: Almost everything should work now, even the enemies attack you now while you navigate the menu (ATB / Active Time Battle). Some of us hate this, but it is how RPG Maker 2003 does it. (#2399)

This was again a fairly complex change so it is hard to write it down. Just try it and you will see what we are talking about.

This fixes the following issues:

• Correct placement of battlers in their specific battle row. (#278)
• The Row battle command is now implemented (#680). This command is pretty useless, it changes the defense multiplier of the actors and that’s it.
• Minor battle bugs in OFF (#1277). The message Purification in progress was not displayed.
• Final Tear 3: Multiple minor bugs in the battle system (#1314). This game had multiple graphical issues, e.g. wrong background graphic and the battler placement was wrong.
• New feature: The editor of RPG Maker 2003 English release allows specifying of negative E rate values but this was never implemented in RPG_RT. We added this feature (#1391)
• Mother: Cognitive Dissonance (#1414). Multiple rendering issues and Dual Wield (using two weapons) was not supported (#1727).
• Support for special battle types in RPG Maker 2003 (Surprise, Back, Pincer and Surround attack) (#1454)

• The battle animations in Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis work  (#1496)

• Assets are now flipped to ensure they always look at the hero/the enemy (#1564)
• Death animations were rendered incorrectly (#1681)
• The game Memory of Moshimo uses a modified database with a Monster called Turn End Processing (ターン終了処理) that has 0 HP and is used for scripting. This quirk is now supported. (#2153)
• Legend of Tank: Fix softlock in the battle against Battleship Mikasa (戦艦三笠) (#2154)

• The behavior when an actor receives a state that results in provoke is now correct (#2169)
• Actors that are killed and revived in the same turn do not execute their battle action anymore (#2169)
• Reflecting of spells is now properly implemented (#2251)
• It is possible to alter the color of monsters. In some cases the calculation was incorrect. (#2266)
• Flipped battle animations are now supported (#2310)
• Many UI improvements to ensure we are pixel perfect when compared to RPG_RT (#2354, #2483)
• The Battle start message is now supported (#2357)
• Proper timing and wait frames between actions (#2357)
• Support for ATB active mode (#2360)
• The Change Monster HP event command has an option that decides whether the HP reduction can be lethal (#2370)
• Monster sprites were not rendered anymore after revive (#2372)
• Fix Skill and Item usability (#2380)
• The runaway animation is now supported ( #2383)
• When a battler receives a restriction such as sleep the current action is now cancelled. Before it was possible to sleep and revive the battler in the same turn and still doing an action. (#2385)
• Enemies do not flash anymore when it is time for a turn but they have a no move restriction such as sleep. (#2388)
• Support for simultaneous battle animations on enemies and actors (#2409)
• Battlers were incorrectly positioned when the party was changed through an event command. (#2418)
• The Gauge is not rendered as full anymore when the maximum SP value is 0. (Reported for Shyouzen 2, #2443)
• Death animations do not loop anymore. (#2481)
• Sprites are rendered at the correct position and support flipping. (#2482)
• When highlighting an enemy in battle, up to five active states are displayed in the help box, until now we only displayed one. Ara Fell uses this a lot in boss battles. (#2487)
• Flash and shake effects are now properly handled for battle animation sprites (#2505)
• In Grimm’s Hollow the damage is decided based on the position of a swing meter you have to stop at the right moment. This was appearing even when no attack was executed. (#2535)
• In battle RPG_RT is more tolerant than on the map: When an image is missing the battle will continue without showing the image. This is fixed now because it broke the final battle in Unterwegs in Düsterburg: The pictures were deleted and instead integrated into the backdrop (stuff like Left Hand, Right Hand, Main Part of the boss…). In our Player the missing pictures rendered as lots of checkerboards. (#2561)
• The small battle system of RPG Maker 2003 is now supported (#2575)

Character Battle Animation (CBA) (#1269, #2484)

Another feature of the RPG Maker 2003 battle system is Character Battle Animation or CBA. With CBA actors can swing swords and throw spears or boomerangs. Additionally an Afterimage can be configured (the previous movement frames are shown with increased transparency) and the attack behavior of weapons can be altered. CBA is fully supported, except for the following Ranged attacks: Boomerang (this is just visual) and Attack in Sequence (this means such attacks deal less damage). But we are happy that one of our longest standing issues is almost resolved.

• Dragon Ball Z: The Legend of Z: Wrong pose displayed for CBA skill animations (#1708)
• Enemies in OFF did not charge at the heroes (#1277)
• Afterimage not displayed in Final Fantasy: Blackmoon Prophecy (#2538)
• This affected many, many more games but we did not track bugs for all of them

Algorithms

In short: The algorithms are now perfect or close to perfect.

• RPG_RT Autobattle algorithm is now supported properly (#1586). Previously we used a very naive algorithm: Attack a random chosen monster with a normal attack but this broke many scripted battle systems that relied on Autobattle behaviour.
• The Agility calculation for the attack order in RPG Maker 2003 was incorrect (Reported for King of Grayscale, #1820)
• The enemy AI algorithm is now compatible with RPG_RT. Games that heavily really on a certain AI behaviour work now properly. (#1831)
• Correct escape chance calculation (#2150)
• Proper variance calculation for damage (#2157)
• Correct hit rate calculation (#2320)
• Support for the row command and the implications on the damage based on the row of the battler (#2321, #2322)
• Support for negative attribute modifiers (#2329)
• Fixes for skills that do Absorb when the target is killed by it (#2351)
• Hidden enemies are not targeted anymore by skills that target the entire party (#2373)
• When both ally and enemy have the same agility the enemy gets the turn first (#2382)

Savegames

In some cases the Player failed to correctly load picture and spritesheet data. (Reported for La Leyenda Heroen, #2262)

When saving and loading in LunarLux the Player was not visible anymore. (#2419)

When saving on the Shogi Board map in Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) and loading this save in RPG_RT the events looked glitched. (#2207) Note that saving here is only possible through the debug save functionality of EasyRPG Player.

Hero transparency was not saved or loaded properly. (#2224)

For better savegame compatibility the scene ID is now saved as part of the savegame. This value is not used at all by RPG_RT or the Player when loading. (#2298)

Scenes and Windows

The game data was not properly reset when returning to the title screen with F12. (#1524)

Lots of minor visual adjustments across scenes such as the menu to ensure we are pixel perfect in rendering. (#1617, #2216) Also all text offsets were checked and adjusted (#2264).

Window and Message timing were improved even further to match RPG_RT. This is too complex to fully explain it in a blog post, see the linked pull request for more information. (#2026)

We took the first steps for adding a configuration scene but it is still not in a state that is suitable for the user. (#2108, #2112)

The encoding detection (guessing how the filenames of a certain game are encoded to ensure it starts properly) was improved (#2641) and even supports now problematic games like the English translation of .flow (#2554). It still uses Japanese filenames but contains English strings, so the game was incorrectly detected as Western European and the assets failed to load.

In the debug scene it is now possible to invoke map and battle events (#2210) and the level of actors can be changed (#2645). Happy cheating ;)

RPG_RT supports animated down and up arrows on windows to indicate that the window can scroll. The debug scene got now left and right arrows to indicate that the pages are scrollable this way. (#2248)

When states were above 1000 (because of equipment) the rendering was incorrect: They must be clamped to 999. This also affected the shop scene: An equipment that resulted in 1050 was considered equal to equipment that resulted in 1040. (#2453)

The system graphic of the load scene is not replaced anymore right after loading a savegame. (#2456)

It is not possible anymore to buy more items than would fit in the inventory. (#2464)

The ExFont (Symbol font) of Grimm’s Hollow was incorrectly rendered. (#2512)

When the equipment is not changeable (fixed) the equipment scene does not display the other available equipment in the inventory anymore. (#2576)

When equipping an accessory in Monster World RPG everything else was unequipped. Even for non-weapons the two handed flag was considered. This is now fixed. (#2603)

The transparency of the message window was not perfect. (#2626)

Negative terrain damage is now supported. (#2632)

The menu cursor scrolling speed is now closer to RPG_RT. (#2634)

The window does now a smooth scrolling when the cursor scrolls the text in a window. (#2659)

In Test Play Mode the Abort Event hotkey (F10) is now supported. This hotkey cancels the current event and active move routes. Very useful if the game hangs due to a bug. The Screenshot hotkey was moved to F7. (#2660)

Pictures

When launching a battle through the debug scene pictures and weather effects were not shown. (#2120)

When a rotation is cancelled the rotation will continue until it reaches the normal position. Reported for Saint Seiya -Il Mito- (#2198)

Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) is known for abusing RPG_RT implementation specific behaviour that is not exposed through the editor. This time they used Show Picture to display a picture with an empty filename. In this case RPG_RT will preserve the old image but overwrite all options with the new ones. This was used to achieve a transparency effect. Do not ask us why they did not use Move Picture for this like normal people do (#2523)

Android

On Android 11 accessing games is possible again. Though starting November 2021 Google requires the usage of a new API for file access (Storage Access Framework, SAF). To submit any further updates to the Play Store we must rewrite our app first. Very annoying… (#2415)

EasyRPG Player is now available on f-droid.org. A store providing only open source software. Note that updates on f-droid are not under our control meaning 0.7 will be released later. (#1222)

The support library was upgraded to AndroidX. This solves some visual issues in the game browser on newer versions of Android. (#2018)

When bundling a game with EasyRPG Player (so-called standalone mode) the audio was disabled after running the game once and there was no way to reenable it. Note that the standalone mode is experimental, please wait for an official announcement. (#2524)

Emscripten (EasyRPG Web Player)

The HTML shell file was updated to the latest release. (#804)

The format of index.json was updated to be more compact and it supports normalization of filenames. Depending on the operating system a file can appear to have the same characters but uses a different byte sequence. Normalization solves this issue. (#1729)

The Web Player does not freeze anymore when switching the tab. This was solved by updating SDL2 to the latest version. (#2228)

Basic touch input (Only Confirm and Cancel) was added (#2426).

The minification of the shell file was disabled because the result was invalid HTML. (#2446)

The character + is now URL encoded when it appears in filenames. When not encoded + is interpreted as a space and the files failed to download. (#2514)

RPG Maker 2003 English release, Maniac Patch and DynRPG are now automatically detected by the web player. This means spritesheets finally work without passing an engine parameter. The web player has a hard time with detections that involve scanning of the game directory because all files are downloaded on demand. (#2520, #2526)

libretro / RetroArch core

As a service for the community we offer now our own libretro cores for Windows and macOS. This includes continuous builds who will not be available on the libretro buildbot which means you will be able to profit from the latest developments (at your own risk). This will not replace the libretro buildbot, you will still be able to download 0.7.0 through the core updater on all supported platforms.

Some core options did not load because the configuration key contained spaces. (#2493)

The ending .easyrpg was added to the supported file extensions. You can put a file GAME_NAME.easyrpg in the game directory and have individual game options configured this way. Using RPG_RT.ldb did not work here because RetroArch maps configurations to filenames and they were the same for all games.

Consoles

Nintendo Switch

Unfortunately Nintendo messed up the filesystem driver making anything that contains e.g. umlauts or Japanese unable to be loaded. We cannot solve this but workaround it: Simply put the game in a ZIP archive and launch the ZIP through our game browser (see Support for games from ZIP archives) (#1747, #2205)

The most recent version of libnx is now supported (#2454, #2566)

Nintendo 3DS

When you do not need the numpad you can turn now the bottom screen off by touching a button. (#2617)

PlayStation Vita

VSync is now enabled by default. (#2507)

The on-screen numpad of our Switch port was ported over to the PS Vita. Now you can properly play Yume Nikki and other games. (#2635)

Other

Finally a solution for laptops without a numpad: Both numpad and the normal number keys work now in key input. Additionally +, -, *, and / are now also mapped to additional keys. Though we do not know any game that uses them. (#1121, #2567)

Some games use increased limits for hp, mp, atk, def, exp… These games are still not supported but we added custom chunks to the database to support them in the future. (#1375)

The recording format used for --record-input was significantly improved. Playing back the old format is still supported. (#2301)

The key for x10 fast forward is changed from CTRL-+ to G. (#2544)

The licenses of our fonts are now mentioned in the Readme file (#2580).

Terminal output is now colored. (#2608)

A new command line option --rtp-path was added for specifying an additional RTP path (#2448)

We added support for certain new database settings that could be useful in your next game. Unfortunately setting them is hard until our editor is finished. If you are curious what they are click the issue links. (liblcf #421, #2564)

For Developers

Do not forget to update liblcf to 0.7.

This is the last version supporting C++14. Right after this release we will move to C++17. The compiler support is good enough by now.

libfmt is a new required dependency that makes it much easier for us to fulfill all our text formatting needs. Every ancient version down to 5.0 will work. (#2181)

SDL2_mixer was removed and is not supported anymore because the API was too limited for our audio requirements.

libxmp (a recommended dependency for playing MOD/Tracker files) requires now 4.5.0 or newer because the previous versions did not support providing custom IO callback functions. (#2595)

For native MIDI playback on Linux (through a MIDI daemon) the recommended dependency ALSA/libasound is required.

For playing custom soundfonts (SF2) libfluidsynth is a new, recommended dependency.

Deprecation of Makefiles: Except for 3DS, Wii and Switch we build now all supported platforms using autotools or CMake. We will completely drop building through custom Makefiles with 0.7.1. We ask all maintainers using custom Makefiles to migrate to a supported buildsystem. Right now there are still some Makefiles e.g. for Amiga or Dingoo in the repository that are not maintained by us: These will be deleted before 0.7.1!

Building for Android is always a bit special because of Gradle. Instead of using the deprecated ndk-build, Gradle invokes now CMake making building much easier. (#621, #2475)

Further CMake improvements:

• The minimum supported CMake version was increased to 3.10 (#2532)
• The unit tests compile now when targeting Emscripten or macOS (#2303)
• The bash completion scripts were not installed on Linux when using CMake. (#2396)
• Multiple fixes for CMake to ensure the libretro core builds on all platforms. (#2400)

EasyRPG Player is now available on the snap store. This package is not maintained by us. Use at your own risk! (#2413)

liblcf (RPG Maker File parser)

Parsing LCF files is now much faster and takes less memory. This means games start faster and on devices with limited memory (handhelds, old smartphones, etc.) more games launch.

Game	Database size	Memory usage in 0.6.2.3	Optimized memory usage
HH3	16 MB	135.7 MB	68.5 MB
Hero’s Realm	27 MB	301.6 MB	143.3 MB
Violated Heroine	11 MB	75.9 MB	40.6 MB
Yume 2kki	1.4 MB	8.0 MB	4.8 MB

The database size is just for information and does not always correlate with the memory usage. The database is smaller because all data is stored in a compact way that is not efficient to read from when running the game. The largest amount of memory is consumed by battle and common events. As you can see we were able to (almost) half the memory usage. (#379, #390) More optimizations are planned to reduce the memory usage even further.

New features in C++17 and C++20 are std::string_view and std::span. std::string_view reduces the amount of copying required when using a string and span does the same for vectors and other types of containers. We implemented these classes for our compiler version (C++14) and this gives nice, small speedups everywhere. (#384)

lcf2xml, a tool to convert LCF binary files to XML and back was moved from our Tools repository to the liblcf repository. (#302)

All data can now be printed on the terminal for debug purposes. (#368)

When you modify liblcf code the whitespace configuration (tabs vs. spaces) is now correct because we added a .editorconfig file. (#376)

More Maniac Patch event commands and chunks were added. This is just for documentation or later use in Player and does not improve compatibility. (#381, #417, #432). Note that how we save flip and blend mode of pictures is incompatible with Maniac Patch because the patch recycled an unrelated chunk (bottom transparency) for this. We decided to implement this in a cleaner way. (#434)

A new feature called ForEachString was added that makes it possible to enumerate through all strings in the database. This is used by the translation feature. (#388)

Database and MapTree are not stored as global data anymore. This makes it possible now to load multiple database and map trees at once – useful for the editor. (#405)

Missing chunks for Character Battle Animation (CBA) were added. (#406, #424)

For Developers

The entire liblcf repository was restructured and everything moved into namespaces. E.g. instead of Actor the class is now called lcf::rpg::Actor. This also improves the error reporting because you can see directly where the error occured from. (#342, #361)

The GNU compiler extensions are enabled now if supported. These are required by certain ports such as AmigaOS. (#366)

Building with gcc5 works again. (#374)

Expat 2.2.10 and newer are now supported by the CMake build system (#385)

The supported versions of CMake are now 3.10 and newer (#422)

Using liblcf from CMake does not require pkg-config anymore. (#431)

 

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)