Category: Release

Half a year after the 0.5 release we provide the first bugfix release which brings interpreter fixes (as usual), a few new features and resolves a crash we encountered in 0.5.

Crashes fixed

Unfortunately our Tone performace improvements had a bug which resulted in a crash when the ChipSet is smaller than the default size and the tone is changed. This broke at least Aëdemphia and Mystic Star (#1037, #1048).

Audio changes

This time the audio subsystem changes are not as significant as for 0.5.0. For the normal user basicly nothing changed. The audio system uses now a generic code which handles all the mixing of music and sound effects. This allows us to heavily simplify the code of our ports.

SDL mixer is now an optional dependency. For the Wii version we dropped SDL mixer completely, the same will happen soon for the Android version. The 3DS and Vita code were improved and the 3DS version finally supports MIDI playback and all noise-bugs when playing sound effects should be gone. The new Vita audio code results in a much better performance and less lag (#968, #1100).

Map interpreter

Screen shake, a very elementary feature of RPG Maker, got implemented. Besides Video playback this was the last event command that wasn’t supported (#565). You can see a screen shake in the video below.

The move command “Change graphic” incorrectly changed the current movement frame to “middle”. The frame is now untouched which fixes a visual issue in the intro scene with the red haired woman in Velsabor (#658) and a glitchy door open animation in Deep 8 (#1114).

The PicPointer patch got implemented (#1033). This is a quite popular modification of RPG_RT which allows using Variables to point at pictures. This fixes the games Aëdemphia, Sternenkindsaga and probably many more.

The ship in Dunkle Schatten never arrived to rescue the party. Movement event commands for vehicles were simply not working (#1050).

The method “Remove all equipment” of event command “Change Equipment” was not implemented. (#1050).

Picture rotations and sine wave effects were not stopping when a “Move Picture” command didn’t contain any effect. Additionally rotations take care of the remaining rotation time now and stop the image always when it is at the initial position, if there is not enough time left for another full rotation. (#1046, #1063)

The custom battles in Razas did not start because they are invoked through a parallel event which does a teleport followed by a transition. Parallel events of old maps stop executing forever when they are interrupted, which was the case for transitions. We fixed this behaviour (#1032).

Due to a bug in our performance improvement code of 0.5 we broke the transparency when rotating images that had no alpha channel. This affected the UFOs in Yume Nikki (#1077).

The room “SH1” in HOME hanged our Player, because the code to move events away lacked a sanity check and this room contained more then 10 cows which push each other (#1082).

The boat minigame in Wolfenhain did not start because boarding of vehicles during a teleport resulted in a hang (#1079).

When the hero is placed directly on a “Same level as hero” touch event the event is not executed anymore. This fixes a softlock in Rip-The-Blood’s Ford in Space Funeral (#1084) and allows further progress in the game Sternenkindsaga (#1086).

Touhou Alive (東方ALIVE) did a huge amount of out-of-bounds reads in the variable array. This array is dynamically resized but our code was not optimized for this many resizes resulting in a significant framedrop (#920).

Events that are above or below the hero and have start condition “Hero Touch” don’t trigger anymore while a move route is executed. This fixes incorrect teleports into cities while travelling with the airship (which is a scripted airship, not a vehicle) in Mystic Star (#1051).

The event command “Change Event Location” supports now changing of the facing direction for the “Constant location”-case (#1118).

The tutorial of The Huntress of the Hollow was impossible to continue because a bug in the handling of “Change Class” resulted in the Scout skill being removed, which must be invoked once to proceed in the tutorial battle (#1131). Additionally we fixed the “level up” and “skill learned” message box behaviour when using “Change Class” to match RPG_RT.

Battle interpreter

The “Enable Combo” battle command was implemented (#945). Skill reflection and Skill (de)buff are supported now by the battle system (#1069).

A really annoying bug in our RPG Maker 2000 battle system resulted in actors executing multiple attacks per turn. We were aware of this bug since a year but had no idea what was causing it. In the end the cause was that we removed actions from the wrong side of the action list (#933).

The hit rate calculation for normal attacks and the calculation of fatigue were incorrect (#1055). The escape algorithm was fixed, escaping is much more unlikely and escape correctly plays a sound effect now (#1103).

The skill “Eule” was not working in Wolfenhain due to a bug in the check for “BattleCommand used” (#1080).

Two additional game breaking bugs in The Huntress of the Hollow were fixed. We didn’t handle the “Abort Battle” command correctly and executed the Victory handler instead which resulted in an incorrect cutscene (#1127). The battle interpreter halts now immediately when any battle end condition (Victory or Lose) is fulfilled. This game called a common event after killing all enemies and this event hanged the interpreter. Now the event is not called anymore because killing of the enemies is a victory condition (#1129). Note that this is actually a game bug… ;-)

The “Preemptive Attack” setting is now respected when starting battles in RPG Maker 2000 (#1137).

Other improvements

Our built-in font Shinonome got a proper Wave dash (〜) for japanese and missing glyphs are now indicated by a replacement glyph. Additionally some glyphs were visually improved (#1045, #1047).

The WenQuanYi font was added to Shinonome. This allows proper rendering of most chinese glyphs (#1058).

The FPS counter got a semi-transparent background to make it easier readable on bright backgrounds (#1049).

The keys Page Up and Page Down are supported now in single column selections (like the game browser or the menu). This makes scrolling in long lists more convenient (#1049).

When the map was looping, event tiles appeared half a tile too late (#716).

Due to an error in our rendering code, parallax backgrounds jumped sometimes (#761). The same issue resulted in an incorrect background in the designer room in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle (#961).

The rendering order of Pictures and Battle Animations depends on the version of RPG Maker used. Currently EasyRPG renders battle animations behind pictures but since RPG Maker 2003 1.05 and RPG Maker 2000 1.50 the order was swapped. We added additional heuristic to handle this edge case (#1031). This is mostly noticable in the battle system of Live Together.

VX-Ace like charset behaviour (width and height are calculated based on the image proportions) can be enabled now by prefixing the filename with a $ (#1067). This is just a visual change, the Player won’t adjust the rendering order for too large CharSets.

The “redo” function in the infamous reordering scene was broken and cancel correctly removes the last selected actor now (#1072).

The calculation of the string length when writing LSD files was incorrect when the strings contained non-ascii characters. This was no problem for our Player, but RPG_RT refused to read these savegames and reported “Stream read error” (#1090).

A very rudimentary input record and replay functionality was implemented. This functionality is not useful for general use yet and is used for testing purposes (#1096).

The random number generator (RNG) uses modern C++11 random APIs now which should improve the randomness and the RNG is now portable which means you get the same sequence of random numbers on any platform. This is important to get deterministic replays (#1104).

The item usage count (for items with more then one use) was handled incorrectly which resulted in infinitely usable items when loading a RPG_RT savegame (#1087).

It is now possible to speed up the game (3x) by pressing “F” or through a new touch button on Android (#1010). Because the music speed stays normal this can break a very small amount of games which use the music position in events.

Shop merchants payed the full price when selling items. The deal is now more in the interest of the merchant: The price is halved (#1110).

Event IDs were not correctly restored when loading a savegame. This resulted sometimes in the warning “Event ID 10005 is invalid” because ID 10005 refers to the current event and for this lookup you need a proper event ID. This resulted in minor issues in Yume 2kki that were fixable by leaving the virtual computer (#1131).

Panoramas were not correctly rendered when a savegame created by RPG_RT was loaded (#1071).

Improvements to RTP handling (#1139):

• The environment variables for adding RTP paths support now multiple directories (delimited by “;” on Windows and “:” everywhere else).
• The official English RPG Maker 2000 RTP is now supported.
• Our EasyRPG RTP is now supported (though, still quite incomplete).

Basic support for mouse and touch input was added. This is currently opt-in and must be enabled through the command line arguments “enable-mouse” and “enable-touch”. These features are the first step for a multi-platform touch UI (#1057).

Android

The Android game browser supports displaying of title images in XYZ format now (#1074).

The “Report a bug” function crashed on Android 7 due to changes in the security model (#1105).

Wii

The Wii version finally supports automatic encoding detection through the ICU library. The Wii version was the only one that lacked ICU, due to the CPU of the Wii which is a PowerPC. PowerPC is “Big endian” and most other platforms (like PC or Android) are “Little Endian”. The endianess influences how bytes are stored, e.g. Big stores as AA BB CC DD and Little as DD CC BB AA, so you have to swap the data (we do this when reading LDB and other files). To compile for Wii we “cross compile”, that means we use a compiler on our PC, that generates PowerPC code for the Wii (that’s faster and more convenient), but ICU doesn’t support mixed endian builds (because their build system involves running some tools on the PC which don’t support byte swapping). But we were finally able to find the bug in the ICU build system and now have a working version for the Wii (#1095).

PSVita

The Vita version supports now shaders. To toggle them you have to use the 4 corners of the screen. This may not be very intuitive but we still lack a generic settings Ui :). The rendering runs now in an extra render thread, this means the framerate slightly improves and shader effects will not slow down the Player at all (#1078).

liblcf

A heap corruption bug in “ReadString” was fixed (#194). The usual safety rule apply: Don’t run content from untrusted sources through liblcf or in EasyRPG Player. The Player is probably easy to exploit using a malformed file but we try to keep liblcf safe :).

The calculation of the event size for non-ascii strings was wrong. This was the same bug as in the Player but in this case it fixes the problem in other tools like xml2lcf (#196).

The XML converter for LMU (Map) files doesn’t write an empty ID field anymore (#186), which was never intended to be used anyway and caused confusion.

A Chinese translation of Wadanohara was detected as encoding GB18030 which is not included in the ICU version used by most of our ports and resulted in an error. This encoding is now handled as Simplified Chinese (codepage 936) (#187). This game is a really bad mojibake-offender: To get correct filenames you have to extract the japanese Wadanohara archive with a Simplified Chinese encoding.

liblcf doesn’t update the timestamp value of savegames anymore. This was problematic because lcf2xml wrote a new timestamp each time the files were converted instead of using the original one. EasyRPG Player sets the timestamp correcty during save now (#195).

The default value for a Battle2 animation_id is now “1”. This fixes an invalid animation error (e.g. in Space Funeral: Legend of Earth Birth) when the first animation is used as Battle 2 (#193).

It took a long time but we finally reached a new milestone 0.5 with codename “Potion” and we promise you: The waiting time was totally worth it. Initially we planned to do a 0.4.2 release in-between, but we were busy adding too many new cool features. Therefore we wanted to integrate them properly before doing another release. If you can’t wait go directly to our download section.

Two of the bigger achievements in this milestone are a completely new audio interface and huge performance improvements. These changes had the biggest impact on the Wii version, for the first time you can experience completely working audio and a constant frame rate (in most situations). EasyRPG Player runs now as homebrew on the Nintendo 3DS and the PlayStation Vita, raising our supported system count to nine! Another long awaited addition is the new user interface for the Android version, which should finally run properly on Android 6.0 and features a beautiful game browser.

Alongside these additional features we fixed tons of interpreter problems, improved the accuracy of both map and battle interpreter, which are now very close to RPG_RT, and implemented many missing battle commands. When your game did not run in 0.4.1: It should run now, otherwise please file a bug ;).

Table of Content

• Audio Interface
• Performance
• Map and Interpreter
• Battle system and interpreter
• New Android user interface
• Emscripten (EasyRPG Player for the Web)
• Ports for PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS
• Misc
• For Developers

Audio Interface

One of the worst parts of EasyRPG Player was the Audio system. We use a library called SDL2_mixer for this, but it has some serious shortcomings for us: The problem is that we have to support arbitrary audio files, because any game uses different formats (Stereo, Mono, compressed WAV (ADPCM), uncompressed WAV (PCM), MP3, …) with different sample rates (e.g. 8 kHz, 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz) and SDL2_mixer does not support arbitrary resampling of these formats, which usually resulted in noise. The worst was the MP3 playback, most files were not even detected as MP3 because the MP3 format has no magic (common byte sequence) in the header and the heuristic often failed. Furthermore some features like pitch changes (playback speed) were impossible to implement.

We are happy to announce that all audio problems are now completely solved! The solution to all these problems is our new Audio Decoder. We still use SDL2_mixer for the playback, but the whole decoding and resampling is now done by our own code.

The libraries and their purpose:

• WAV: Using libsndfile (#859) and a built-in WAV decoder for PCM files on platforms with slow file access (embedded systems like PSVita and 3DS, #984)
• MP3: Using libmpg123. Additionally we added an heuristic to detect the MP3 files which were previously not playing at all for example because they had an empty frame (0-bytes) at the beginning (#818).
• MIDI: As a built-in MIDI decoder we use FmMidi which synthesizes the audio on-the-fly. This has the advantage that it is very small (we use it now for Emscripten, saves you 16 MB of download) but quite resource heavy (#752). Alternatively we support WildMidi, which is compatible to the files Timidity in SDL2_mixer used before (#923).
• OGG: Using libogg and libvorbis. OGG is an EasyRPG extension, the only game we know that uses OGG is Oneshot, but this game is so heavily modified that it does not work in our Player at all (#923).
• MOD: Using xmp or xmp-lite. Tracker files are supported in RPG_RT through Audioremony and very few games (e.g. AE) use them (#967). This is currently only enabled for Linux, Android and the Wii. Other platforms follow later (Windows and MacOS already support MOD through SDL).

All the resampling magic in the background and the pitch (playback speed) is handled by libspeexdsp or libsamplerate (#908).

Additionally we added a caching system for sound effects, this fixes many lags that happened on slow hardware (mainly a problem on Wii, #1016).

The worst system concerning audio was the Wii. It had no working resampling at all, everything played too fast or too slow. But all these changes allowed us, after waiting for three years, to provide a Wii version with correctly working audio!

tl;dr Audio is the smallest of our worries now…

Performance

Another annoyance in EasyRPG Player on slow embedded hardware (especially the Wii) was the rendering performance and the startup time. At the beginning starting Yume Nikki on the Nintendo 3DS took more than 5 minutes (the Wii had similar problems). The reason for this is that our FileFinder did an extra system call to get the filetype for each file it encountered, but this information is actually already provided when iterating the directory. Removing this unnecessary function call improved the startup time by almost infinity% (#846).

The next problem we had to deal with on the old 3DS was that it only reached 25 FPS. Due to many small improvements in the rendering code (e.g. not rendering the background when no transparent tile is on the screen or not using a Blit that respects alpha when the bitmap is opaque), we were able to reach 60 FPS on the TestGame map. These changes gave a ~25% gain on all platforms, which means the Player performs much better everywhere and gives a much smoother experience.

Even worse were Tone changes (coloring the whole screen) and Saturation changes (Greyscale and Oversaturation), these were the biggest performance killers in the whole Player. Besides that oversaturating was never rendered correctly, we improved the performance of all screen effects by at least 50%. And even better: When the fading part of the effect is finished and the colorization stays constant the speed penalty is zero due to an improved caching strategy which only renders the tone effect once per Sprite and Tilemap tile (#855, #1017).

And the last addition is an improved Bitmap caching strategy which keeps loaded graphics longer in the memory, this improves the performance for commonly accessed graphics (#1018).

Map and event interpreter

RPG Maker 2000/2003 has an interesting feature for event movement: When events walk behind each other in a row and an event that is not at the front of the row is blocked in movement it will ask the event in front to make way by preempting it’s update routine. When this was successful the event continues it’s move. This is completely different behavior to all other interpreter situations where it goes from lowest to highest ID and no way to change it (#884). Implementing this fixed the caterpillar system (#703) in Pom Gets Wi-Fi and resolved a hang that happened after “Stop!” message. That Stop situation was another corner case of that corner case: The event asked the other to make way but with another side effect: When the collided event executes a Wait event the wait will go down twice as fast! This quirk is now implemented (#937) and it doesn’t hang anymore. A hang in the intro of Aurora Wing got fixed in the same way. This was related to diagonal movement and the order of movements (#1030). Unfortunately the game hangs a few minutes later after the enemy finished his move and is still unplayable.

The Events “Set Teleport/Escape Place” and “Enable/Disable Teleport/Escape” got implemented. These commands are quite unloved, only a few Japanese people reported them missing (#690). Together with this we fixed another oversight: Items that invoke skills that toggle switches were not working.

When visiting an Inn the screen fades out, the BGM plays exactly once and the screen fades in again. When the Inn music failed to load the “Played once” flag was never set and the game froze (#956).

Classes in RPG Maker 2003 are a really strange feature and their handling is not intuitive at all. We noticed that class modifiers (Curves, Single/Dual Weapon, …) are not applied at all on startup, but only when “Change Class” in executed. This behavior is correctly implemented now, but the “Change Class” command itself still behaves wrong for some cases. We plan to fix this in the next release (#921).

Battle encounters are not triggered anymore when the Player is in the airship (#928).

The amount of snow got heavily reduced, the effect was adjusted and the snowflakes are smaller. This matches now better the amount of snow RPG_RT renders (#901).

In PeuterisGrey The heroine did two steps instead of one when moving. This was a problem in our handling of the remaining steps, these were decreased one frame too late (#872). Furthermore this game simulates deleting of characters in the message box by using instant speed commands “\>”. Instant speed was not correctly handled in all cases. The flickering in the message box is normal and happens in RPG_RT, too (#871).

We are aware of another bug in this game which results in strange screen scrolling, this is not fixed by now.

Multiple issues in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle got resolved: The Post-credits scene appeared twice. This was a bug in KeyInput handling when a message box was visible (#963). A paper note in the game was not displayed at all because we ignored the “Wait for Input” option supported by picture commands (#831). The battle animations used for the battlers were not correctly saved in the Player, resulting in a load error when using them in RPG_RT (#602).

Ib had problems with statues in the Yellow space which randomly disappeared and a hang in the disturbing doll room (#946).

Dragon Quest IV: The Legend of Rivast got stuck after displaying the custom menu. This was due to a race condition between events, because our message boxes rendered too fast. The rendering speed is now on-sync with RPG_RT behavior (#989).

The cursor was not moving in Dhux Scar when using the navigation map. The Key input event waits now when a message is visible (#929).

When opening the custom menu system in Calm Falls the normal RPG Maker menu opened instead (#940). Something similar happened in Vampires Dawn, the RPG Maker menu opened after the custom menu got closed.

A popular patch in the German Community is Ineluki’s MP3 patch. This adds MP3 support to very old versions of RPG Maker 2000 by replacing the harmony.dll with a custom version. The patch works through “link-files”, these are text files in the Music folder with name “audiofile.link.wav” and the first line in these files points to the path of the MP3 file. We provide limited support for this now, the linked Audio file (for doesn’t matter, but is only used for MP3) is played now as the BGM. Multiple BGMs and disabling of looping (no loop statement in 2nd line of the link file) are unsupported. This results in working audio in Calm Falls (#939).

The game 葬 (Sou) hanged after entering a new map. This was caused by an auto-starting event that takes 1 frame to complete and Player wasted one frame when restarting this event, which resulted in timing problems (#927).

Leaving of some maps was impossible in Echoes of the Past, they were automatically re-entered. This game uses a parallel event to trigger teleports based on the Player position and after leaving the map the Player continued his movement and triggered the on-touch teleport to the old map again (#903).

Dragonball Z: Legend of Z resulted in a buffer overflow in the Player. For debugging purposes we write the map name and the LMT path in a logfile and the write function uses a predefined buffer which is usually big enough, but this game used such a deep tree that it exceeded the limit and overflowed the buffer. We added a sanity check (#891).

.flow is a RPG Maker 2000 game, but it got converted to a RPG Maker 2003 game. Player detected it incorrectly and the menu was empty. This doesn’t happen in the original game because it still uses a RPG_RT from RPG Maker 2000. We improved our engine detection to handle this corner case correctly (#885).

An interpreter hang in (修正版)のび太戦記~導かれし者達~ got fixed (#860).

The extremely long intro cutscene in もえ～伝 crashed because of invalid weather effects (#860).

Bullets stayed in the air and didn’t move in Desolate City (#860).

The picture commands in サ イコ・プラトーン(PsycoPlatoon) behaved incorrectly (#906).

もしもスマブラだったら: This is a really awesome Super Smash Bros. clone. A problem we observed here was that characters couldn’t fall out of the bottom of the arena. This was a problem in our screen code, the scrolling was off by two pixels (#892).

The gun in Doraemon: Nobita’s Resident Evil 2 did not hit enemies more than one tile away. Additionally the gun was always shooting downwards. This was due to a problem with move events that changed the orientation follwed by an event page change (#1019).

Message commands can contain command codes in \N hero names. Player did not interpret them before, which resulted in incorrect message rendering in The Longing Ribbon and other games (#460).

Vampires Dawn: Skills that toggle switches (e.g. “Fledermausverwandlung”) were not consuming SP (#816).

When entering the bed in the spaceship in Yume Nikki the screen scrolled incorrectly (#801). The same happened at the beginning of Ara Fell when jumping over the first gap.

The bullets in the bullet hell game 特に理由のない暴力がウォーターⅠを襲う where not moving towards the player but got stuck or moved to the right making this game incredible easy (#1023). This was a bug in the handling of switch and variable events that only modify a single switch/variable. These event commands support setting of a range and the Player used the range code for the single case because start equals end in this case, but these games had invalid values for end.

Win’ Wind’ Windy’: The first intro screen was not rendering correctly. A similar bug was in stage 3-6: The Vampire was not moving at all (#1024). This was the same bug as explained above the video.

The game Razas got stuck before the start menu appeared because of incorrect handling of “Erase Event” in Parallel events (#1022).

Battle system and Interpreter

In previous versions the state of the battle system was very basic. The event interpreter was unfinished, states (Blind, Berserk & co.) were not correctly implemented and modifiers (e.g. SP halved, immune to some elemental attacks and others) were unsupported. Most of the battle improvements were tested against Ara Fell, this game should run (almost) error-free now (#897, #905).

For the battle system we used a different interpreter due to different event commands, but in RPG Maker 2003 you can invoke all the map event commands through a common event. Most event commands (Except the ones that make no sense in battle at all) were moved to our shared interpreter mode and run properly in battle now (#788). Another problem in the 2003 version is the strange execution order of event pages compared to RPG Maker 2000 battles where the pages are executed in a total logical order. The event page order got changed to:

1. The Turn counter is increased (global battle and current actor counter)
2. Pages with turn-based (doesn’t matter if battle or actor-based) event triggers or battle action triggers run
3. The Battle action is executed
4. Pages with other event triggers run

This replicates now the observed behaviour in the original interpreter (#488).

Variable Operations for Battles got added to the interpreter, the conditional branch “Monster is Target” was implemented, the enemy action condition “Party size” was added and the event command “Force Flee” got implemented.

The algorithm used for choosing the enemy actions got fixed. It selects now the candidate with the highest probability and then adds further candidates that are up to 9 less in probability and then picks one of them randomly. Before it used all candidates in the random pick. Furthermore enemy actions can toggle switches now.

The battler animations reflect a new state now immediately, before it was only updated when the battlers had a turn or got hit. Event commands can kill or revive battlers now and the sprites correctly switch to the proper state (#380).

The actor placement in Space Funeral: EARTH BIRTH was wrong because we used an incorrect default value for X and Y position (#851).

Monsters use now the battle animation with ID 1 when doing normal attacks. Battle animations that targeted the whole group were displayed incorrectly. Unterwegs in Düsterburg uses this when a battle starts to display the actors in the party (#782).

Terrain settings for battles were not correctly applied, resulting in incorrect background images being used (#789).

Heal items that heal or revive give now the correct amount of HP (#568). Automatic healing of states (e.g. X% heal chance when hit or Heals with X% chance after Y turns) is implemented now.

Formula improvements:

• The Skill formula was wrong and usually resulted in too much damage making battles really easy
• The Skill formula respects the flag “Ignore Defense” now.
• Elements of the used weapon or skill are considered now in the damage calculation
• When an actor wears an item with flag “increased dodge rate” the dodge rate is now 90%, not 70%
• The handling of critical hit probability was completely wrong. We interpreted it as “X percent of attacks”, not as “1 out of X attacks”. Critical hits are now much more unlikely.
• The defense command displays now the defending state correctly and the defense state is considered in the damage calculation.

The item modifiers “SP costs halved”, “Preemptive” (Gauge is full on battle start), “Using item costs SP” and “Increased dodge rate” are implemented now.

The gauge is not updated anymore for actors that can’t act (Sleeping).

This short video of Ara Fell is a perfect summary of many obvious improvements in the battle system since 0.5: The background is correct, the animations of the battler are fixed, multi target skills show animations on all targets and the damage calculation is correct.

New Android User Interface

The Android interface got a huge pile of improvements. The old interface used old legacy UI (for Android 2.3.3) everywhere and this caused many incompatibilities especially on Samsung devices. The most frustrating problem was the non-working menu which made Layout editing impossible. Thanks to the Android App Compat library we are able to provide a modern looking interface on all Android versions and solve all usability problems in one go (#919, #925, #982).

Another new functionality is the possibility to disable sounds in the application settings (#835).

Emscripten (Player for the Web)

Our latest version of Emscripten does not need PHP on the server anymore. Instead we use a JSON-based index file to resolve file references (#833). Please see the tutorial for setup instructions.

The first game using this new version is Dogengam which is hosted on itch.io. How about presenting your own game on a website, too?

Timidity got removed and replaced by FmMidi, this reduces the startup time because you only have to download 4 MB now instead of 20.

We fixed a bug in the URL encoding, % and # were not properly encoded (#894).

Ports for PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS

Thanks to Rinnegatamante the Player runs now on PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS (#863, #973). The compatibility is similar to all other versions and they are regularly recompiled in our nightly build section.

A few issues are not fixed yet: The 3Ds version has no working Midi and a few sound effects are broken (loud static noise). The PSVita version has a bit of lag when too many sound effects are played and lacks the sound effect cache.

Please see the dedicated articles for PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS.

PS Vita Video (Direct link):

Nintendo 3DS Video (Direct link). Warning: Don’t use headphones, loud static noise!

Misc

Yume2kki used invalid initial equipment which resulted in having some items after startup which you were not supposed to have. The problem here was that the hero had items of invalid type equipped (e.g. a Sword that was actually Armor). These items are now filtered and we noticed that many games had the same problem (#977). Another problem was that this game tries to save memory by referencing images outside of the expected path, e.g. they access a Title image as Panorama by using “../Title/Title”. Our FileFinder understands such paths now, traversal outside of the game directory is still prohibited (#976).

Nepheshel contained an invalid system graphic in the title scene, this resulted in a libpng error (IDAT: invalid distance too far back) and a termination of the game. We improved all picture related error handling and they fall back gracefully now and only show a warning (#856).

Bitmaps with a depth of less then 8 bit crashed. RPG_RT didn’t support them, see this as an enhancement in our superior RPG_RT replacement (#432).

Mac OS X does not set the working directory when being double clicked from the File browser, we added additional code which adjusts the startup directory. The Player behaves now like in all other operating systems when started this way (#705).

The encoding detection algorithm got improved, it detects now the language of Yume Nikki and Yume2kki correctly but still fails for .flow (#986).

While in TestPlay mode the Debug menu (F9) is now reachable through the menu. Besides editing variables and switches it supports now saving and loading, too. For quicker save access press F11. (#966)

The Windows RT version is currently broken, we are working on a fix and provide this release later.

The GCW Zero version is unmaintained and there will be no 0.5 release in it’s current state. If you want to help, please contact us.

For developers

Our code is now completely free of Boost dependencies. Any boost-related code got replaced with the C++11 equivalent (#842).

Our audio system got heavily changed and has many new dependencies. Please see the library list under “Audio Interface” for additional information. New libraries: libsndfile, libmpg123, libogg, libwildmidi, libxmp OR libxmp-lite, libspeexdsp OR libsamplerate.

We updated the CMake File, it is now on-par with autoconf again (#952).

It’s time for the first bug fix release since December. The new release features a heavily improved event interpreter, many fixes to the battle system and other minor improvements.

But at first something completely different: In December one of our developers held a lightning talk at the 32c3. Check out the article and the slides. And there is the lightning talk:

One port that is not maintained by us, is for the Pandora. The user “Ingo Reis” has a Youtube channel where he showcases all the homebrew for the Pandora. Check out running “Zelda Links Awakening” (Inofficial RPG Maker version) on the Pandora:

Watch the Video

Now back to the changelog. As usual we group the detailed changes in our blog post in “Interpreter”, “Battle system” and “The other stuff” ;).

Interpreter

The way how interpreter updates are executed in the original engine was figured out via many hours of testing and using a tool we invented (“event tracer”). This probably fixed hundreds of games. The games we are aware of the got fixed are Doraemon: Nobita’s Resident Evil (#692), Dungeoneer: A Beautiful Escape (#677), the combat system of Violated Heroine and speaking with Marin in Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Read the details in the linked issue if you want to know, how chaotic the interpreter is: #753

Event movement speed/acceleration was too high due to a script bug (#762), which made the school hunt event in .flow unplayable:

Above/Below hero events that collide with the Player character are now triggered. This fixes the game Dyhortfight. (#661)

After defeating Orca the game Wadanohara did not continue properly. This was a bug in the way how win-handlers are executed. (#702)

Nyria can rescue her mother now in Vampires Dawn 2. This was caused by a quirk in the way how RPG Maker encodes events. (#724)

The game Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle got many issues resolved:

• The “Frame” (a strange RPG Maker 2003 feature which overlays a frame over the map and is not scriptable) got implemented (#694)
• Tile opacity was not restored after loading a savegame (#695)
• Scripted events did not continue properly after losing a fight. We are not sure how this got fixed, probably same issue as Wadanohora. (#682)

After using an Inn in 7thjojo a black screen appeared. #769

The Sacred Tears: TRUE crashed in the savegame scene. This was due a bug in the reencoding of strings in movement commands. This bug got fixed in liblcf. (#556)

Issues in Doraemon: Nobita’s Resident Evil got fixed by improvements to the event interpreter and by implementing “Condition: Started by Action Key”

Ara Fell heavily relies on variable changes for the fade-in effect on the title screen. This way we found a performance bug: The Player always refreshed common events when variables were updated. This doesn’t make sense because common events are only influenced by switches. Now the title screen in Ara Fell is fading in smoothly. Another title crash was caused by another data structure optimization of RPG Maker, this time in terrain data. (#785)

Events can now jump onto the field of the Player when they are above or below the hero. This fixes a game breaking bug at the end of のび太戦記ACE (Nobisen ACE). (#822)

Picture rotations calculates the angle now correctly. (#722)

The interpreter holds execution now when a vehicle is (un)boarded. (#768).

The ATB flag for RPG Maker 2003 battles is now saved and toggling and checking via event commands works now. (#796)

Calling a non-existant Event page shows a warning now instead of crashing. (#689)

When a message contained a “kill” (\^) command and a choice the kill flag was not reset and killed the next message. (#783)

Using of “*.script.wav” files result in a more descriptive warning now because they require Ineluki’s Key Patch which is not implemented (#731).

Exit Game (RPG Maker 2k3 1.11 feature) returns now to the Game Browser (if available) instead of closing the Player (#791).

Battle system

The using of skills and items in battle was improved. This fixes problems in Vampires Dawn 2 and Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle. This affected especially equipment (swords & co.) which contained a skill. (#732). Equipped equipment is also listed now in the item window and usable as a skill. (#745)

Battle music did not play in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle (#600). This was again a liblcf issue, the battle music was not correctly set after loading a savegame created with the original engine (RPG_RT).

Spell drain (e.g. Blut saugen/sucking blood in Vampires Dawn) was draining HP and not SP due to a typo (#808)

Inflicting states (e.g. Poison) broke due to a bug invented months before 0.4. This works again now and additional effects (HP drain when poisoned) got invented. (#815) Furthermore RPG Maker 2003 battles did not apply states at all (#764)

The “0” (zero) was not always rendered in the Gauge battle system (RPG Maker 2003) because we failed in math (#678), e.g. in Vampires Dawn 2:

Another problem with Vampires Dawn 2 was, that it does not use cursors for actor selections. Therefore it was not possible to see which actor is highlighted for items or skills. The highlighted actor flashes now like in the original engine.(#825).

A crash was fixed in OFF when fighting with an enemy group which spawned additional enemies. Also the gauge of invisible enemies is not updated anymore and heal skills invoked by enemies don’t deal damage to them anymore. #723

The “Rundumschlag” Skill always missed in Unterwegs in Düsterburg because it had a base damage of zero (#766)

Return of Touhou Mother locked up in battles because it uses “Get Midi Ticks” for timing (#744). This is still not 100% reliable, at least the combo system won’t work.

The “End battle” command was not ending battles (#741, #739)

After reviving a character the dead state was not correctly removed when the item/skill had a power of 0. The revived actor gets now 1 HP instead (#825).

We fixed many deadlocks (battle hangs and you must close the Player) many happening because of death in the battle system (#825):

• After reviving an actor the dead animation was not reset to the idle animation, which resulted in a hang because the battle system waits until the actor returns to the idle animation.
• When an enemy and an actor reached a full gauge the same time and the enemy does the turn and kills the actor the dead actor will get the turn and hang the battle. Dead actors get now a gauge of 0.
• The algorithm for picking the next movable actor had an error in the way how it looped over the party resulting in dead actors being selected which hangs the battle like in the previous case.
• Enemy Self Destruct and Enemy Escape actions hang the RPG Maker 2003 battle. (#763)
• The GameOver event command resulted in an hang when used in battles, too. (#771)

The algorithm for battles got improved and supports now the following features (#826):

• Attribute multiplier and resistance are supported now (e.g. Fire skills that are weak to water enemies)
• Weapons respect the “Attack attributes” now for getting damage multipliers
• Weapons can increase the critical hit rate
• Weapons can inflict conditions
• Weapon can ignore the target’s dodge rate
• Weapons consume SP now when they have a SP cost and are used as a normal weapon.
• Atk, Def & co. changes as results of skill/item damaged are applied now in battle. (#767)

Save

Saving the next script line instead of the current one as the next executable line. This resulted in problems in loops because this way loops got exited when the saving occurred while an interpreter was on the “Continue Loop” command. (#770)

The way how states (Dead, Poison, …) are saved by RPG Maker was incompatible to the way we stored them. This was adjusted and we write more proper savegames now. Together with other minor fixes savegames created by EasyRPG Player are usable in RPG Maker Runtime (RPG_RT) now (though, in some cases, we found more incompatibilities)! (#670)

Android

Starting from Android 4.4 (KitKat) the SdCard is not writable anymore by default. This rendered our additional game directory implementation almost useless. The save directory is redirected now to a directory on the internal storage to work around this issue. (#534, #726)
The architectures armeabi, x86 and mips are supported now. (#413)

Our App is now also available in Korean language (#790).

The buttons enter/cancel/shift were not usable anymore in the layout editor, because their names were not translated. (#777)

You can now send bug report emails from the in-game menu. This feature is heavily used since then and we already got hundreds of emails. Thank you for your help improving the Player!

Emscripten

Player Emscripten failed to download sound effects invoked via “Play Sound” in movement commands (#509)

Because the emscripten version downloads game resources asynchronous race conditions can occur when assets finish downloading out of order. This was resolved now by rewriting the downloader to abort requests, that are not required anymore (e.g. because they were on the previous map or the BGM was already stopped).

OS X

OS X had a tearing issue in fullscreen (#704)

Wii

The Wii port got some love, too. Debug log messages are not spammed on the screen anymore (#742) and overscan issues got fixed. (#743)

Misc

System background mode “tiled” got implemented (#479), now the menus render correctly in AE:

Fixed equipment can’t be changed anymore in the Equip scene (#800)

The savegame path stayed at the toplevel directory when using the game browser (#750). When launching multiple games from the gamebrowser, the first engine of the first was used for all (#755).

Rendering issues for HP/MP got solved in RPG Maker 2003 games (#715), for example in El Heredero del Rey:

“F12” and “end game” stop now the music playback when returning to the title scene (#756).

The ICU data file got updated to support Thai. Thai itself is currently unusable in Player due to missing font support. But this is a first step. (#746) Another encoding problem got resolved in Nobita’s Biohazard (Korean version). Some files were not found (#649).

The Player is now packaged via the Open Build Service. (#499). You can download packages for your favourite Linux distributions.

We support now Windows RT. Read the previous blog post for additional information (#728).

We work around a bug in the audio library (SDL2_mixer) we use, which fixes MS ADPCM playback (#710).

liblcf

As mentioned earlier savegames in Sacred Tears broke due to an encoding bug in liblcf. (#155)

The message stretch settings was not written to the save game data. (#170)

Battle and other music effects were not correctly loaded from a savegame. (#173)

The ATB (for RPG 2003 battle) field was added. One field less to go. The savegame compatibility gets better and better! (#171)

The savegame parser is now more fault tolerant and should crash less when encountering bad savegames (#175)

For developers

• The CMake build passes the C++11 flag now #737
• Autotools generates proper (not tainted) tarballs now. #712
• The “platform” subfolder got removed and the files are now stored in the src directory like all other files #772