Category: Release

If you are celebrating christmas: Merry christmas! For everybody else: Today is your lucky day!

Today we release version 0.4.0, Codename “Poison Attack”.

This version introduces a simple game browser for all platforms (except Android, which already has a native one) and fixes lots of important issues in the game interpreter and battles. Furthermore the new conditions and events of RPG Maker 2003 v1.11 (The official English release) are supported now.

The new version codename refers to the next database tab (skills), and “Poison Attack” is the first skill in the list.

Battle

The battle against Sylvia in Unterwegs in Düsterburg resulted in a hang because battle animations were repeated endlessly (#656).

Fixed a divide by 0 crash during battles in Mystic Sunrise because some battlers had zero MP (#653).

Battle event pages with start condition “actor turn” or “enemy turn” don’t run multiple times now in the same turn. This fixes repeated message issues in OFF (#674).

Fix hang in battles in Monigote Fantasy when using idle animation states (#608).

Pending battle events were not correctly cleared in RPG Maker 2003 battle system when the battle ended. The next battle deadlocked the game (#652).

Loading a save from RPG_RT didn’t restore RPG 2003 battle commands correctly, rendering battles impossible (#601).

Pressing F12 during a RPG Maker 2000 battle crashed the game the next time a battle started (#419).

Interpreter

There were many fixes to the interpreter which are a bit difficult to explain. Most of them are related to the execution order of events and special corner cases of the RPG_RT interpreter. In short: Many games will work better.

Ib: Interpreter hanged in the sketchbook bucket house (#629).

Ib: Picking of one piece of the Guertena painting was not possible. The reason for this was that there were two events that started when pressing “Enter” but Player only started one (#669).

Ib: Pressing decision/cancel key in the Mirror was closing it mostly instantly. This issue was also affecting Wadanohara (#645).

The “Measure time until key is pressed” method of “Process Key Input” incremented the counter ten times faster than RPG_RT, affecting Clock of Atonement (#659)

Mimicry Man: Message Window was not closing (#589).

Monigote Fantasy. Entering houses required touching the tile twice (incorrect handling of “On Touch” events) (#654).

Unterwegs in Düsterburg. A bug in move route handling  (Event command: Proceed with Movement) resulted in a hang in Grandys house (#650).

Unterwegs in Düsterburg. The interpreter froze in Grandys Zimmer at Königsberg (#665).

The Sacred Tears: TRUE and Standstill Girl
The main character was not able to move because these games used move routes that could finish in one update tick (e.g. commands like “Change sprite” or “Face left”). RPG_RT will not block the movement in such cases but Player did. This fixed movement in The Sacred Tears: TRUE and Standstill Girl. Which is quite ironic because of Standstill :D.

The cursor in the title scene of Sacred Tears: TRUE was not displayed (#559).

Switching from charset to tileset graphics was broken. This resulted in a hang in the library of Boy Ichiro’s Modesty (#667).

Support for music loop condition in conditional branch. This fixes a hang in the intro cutscene of のび太戦記ACE (#655).

The rain sound effect was played hundreds of times in Vampires Dawn. Parallel common events are now suspended when the start condition is not met anymore (instead of reset) (#453).

Incorrectly render order (Z value) when tiles were substituted in Æ:  (#620).

The new event commands and conditional branch conditions introduced with RPG Maker 2003 v1.11 (English release) are supported now (#587).

The “Change Equipment” was not working correctly (#688)

When an event contained multiple battle encounters the interpreter jumped to the condition handler (win/lose) of the last one (#610).

The call inn command was not working properly, it was not recovering the party and this was making games much harder to play (#631).

Fixed KeyInputProc for games that were created with RPG Maker 2000 and later converted to RPG Maker 2003 (#604).

Events on the map were not refreshed by all events that altered variables (#590).

Screen flash timing was not working properly (#644).

F12 (Return to title) did not reset all values (#651).

Web

Web Audio issues were resolved and now supports MIDI and MOD playback (#641).

Fixed Ogg Vorbis noisy audio playback (#672).

Android

Many improvements for Android (they were already available in the PlayStore since months, but to sum it up):

The buttons are resizable and multiple layouts can be saved. Also portrait orientation is now supported. You can get vibration feedback when you press a button (#598, #597, #591).

Support for systems with x86 CPU (before: only ARM). If it was crashing on start up on your device: Try again.

“EXFONT” rendering  (glyph symbols rendered when using $a-$z and $A-$Z codes) finally works. It was broken because our lazy Android maintainer did not update our library for PNG rendering since years :P .

Hungarian translation (#648). Thanks to Farkas Ürdüng.

Japanese translation (#642). Thanks to Mephisto.

Portuguese translation (#686). Thanks to Kennedy Cirino da silva and Daniel Paim de Mattos!

Other fixes/improvements

XP support was dropped, sorry!

A Game browser was added (#664). This allows loading games from the current directory. Navigating in other directories is not yet possible, but is useful for embedded devices.

Vehicles displayed on wrong map (#593).

Tile substitution did not correctly update the terrain ID (#638).

Files with names starting with “.” were ignored (#637).

The money window (“\$” command) was broken (#632).

Sometimes \c[0] returned the wrong color (#612).

Weather effects were not persisting between maps (#592).

NOT included in this release

Some features were planned for 0.4 but couldn’t be finished error free in time: Screen shake and tiled rendering mode for system graphics. They will come in a later release a few months later.

For developers:

This version started using C++11 features to make development more pleasant.

Windows: Because of C++11 you need to build Player with Visual Studio 2015 and because older versions are already unsupported (#595).

This was a quick one. In 0.3.1 we found a critical bug that hung the Player when loading some maps. This version is codenamed “Hornet” because that’s the 3rd enemy in the official English RPG Maker 2000, in Don’s translation the 3rd one is “Spider”.

Besides this crash fix we also introduced some other improvements that didn’t finish on time before 0.3.1: Battle animations finally work as expected everywhere, this includes animations on the whole screen and animation on targets, additionally sound effects and flash effects are executed now (#365, #574)

Another interesting one broke ゆめ２っき (Yume2kki). This game faded out the screen at the beginning and then showed a message box which got instantly closed using “\^” and showed the screen again. So this message box was never visible and completely useless (same for the fade out/in), but the Player had a bug that had the closing logic of the window in the drawing code which was never called because it is faded out. Now the closing logic is in the normal update loop and the game finally starts. It seems this game was designed on purpose to break the Player :D. (#577)

Music was not playing in the battle in OFF. The cause for this was that many parts of the Player code used the Database default music/sound effects and not the ones in the savegame data (the ones that can be altered via events). A gigantic “Search & Replace” resolved this issue everywhere. (#581)

Another annoying bug that crashed the Player randomly after ending a battle since a long time and nobody ever found a reason for is #580. But the cause is finally found: It happens when a battle animation plays on the map while the battle is started. But this is finally resolved so you must not be afraid of that crash anymore :)

Games that used bitmaps with a width that was not a multiple of four were rendered incorrectly. This affected the game “Mimicry Man”. (#583)

liblcf got some more chunks documented. These chunks are not yet used by the Player, but will be in a future release. Thanks to Cherry for the help! (#152)

 

The hot days are over and the developers move from outside to inside again. The result is the next bugfix release 0.3.1 (Codename: /\../\ (Bat), the flying friend of slime).

The most significant changes are as usual: Interpreter and battle improvements resulting in the best version of EasyRPG Player by now.

Another guy who likes bats is the main protagonist, “The Batter” in OFF. This game is now compatible with EasyRPG Player. Bat (0.3.1) makes the battles with The Batter and his bat better. Everything is better with Batter. Sorry for the bat puns :)

Besides OFF the following popular games got fixed: The battle against Sal in Wadanohara, drinking blood in Vampires Dawn, the intro of Vampires Dawn 2 (rescue your mother).

Yeah we know that the German community says that Vampires Dawn is overrated but for testing the battle system of the Player it’s great.

Just retest your favourite game, maybe it works now, too?

Events

In terms of events some really significant features were implemented.

• Fix issues with Change Tilemap command (#495)
• Characters on lower layer can pass the Hero now. (#486)
• When using more then 50 pictures the picture data got corrupted and the Player crashed (#485)
• Message command “\!” (pause) printed sometimes the next character (#515)
• The ESC key was not recognized by Ahriman’s prophecy (#433)
• The command “Continue event execution” when combined with a Move command does not result in random dead locks anymore, this happened e.g. in Unterwegs in Düsterburg before fighting any random encounters. (#344)
• When the hero is moved by an event and touches “On touch” events on his route these touch events are now executed when the event that executed the move route ends (#331)
• Another game that got fixed thanks to these changes is “Vampires Dawn 2”. When Nyria comes back to her house at the beginning you got an instant game over before because the timer did not start.
  Basicly these improvments fixed probably hundreds of games.

Battle System (#482, #552)

General battle improvements

• Normal attacks can hit critical now
• The enemy can now use skills that target a single battler
• The enemy can now use the abilities: Escape, Charge and Defend (#330)
• Probability calculations are respected [A]-[E]
• States are partially supported
• Support for “States auto heal after X turns”
• Multi-target skills only cost the MP once, not for each target (#399)
• Correct battle interpreter page execution order for RPG2k (#483), RPG2k3 is more complex and still executing incorrectly
• Visual bugs in battle animations fixed
• Actors with auto attack (condition) auto attack now ;)
• Support for skills doing absorb

RPG2k3 battle related battle improvements

• Support for battle styles alternative and gauge in RPG2k3
• Actors with animation type “battle animation” work now (before only “Character pose” was working)
• The actor animations respect the state now
• Automatic placement of actors improved, was before totally wrong, but is still not correct :(
• Interpreter supports Fork conditions “Last action” and “Actor/Enemy turn”, this fixes the tutorial battle in the game “OFF” and the battle against Sal in “Wadanohara”. (#529)

Other changes

• RTP of the official English RPG Maker 2000 release is now used when installed
• Tone change “Saturation” looks now correct and is faster then before. (#357)
• Medicine and material items supported in Item scene (#524, #525)
• Fixed a regression that resulted in rendering errors of the bottom window frame (#544)
• Render priority for Star (☆) tiles fixed (#333, #546). This was a very old one, you probably noticed it while walking under trees, the character sometimes appeared over the tree for a few frames.
• Minor bugs in the Ordering and the Shop scene fixed (#547)
• The Filefinder on non-Windows systems failed to find files that were in subdirectories. Placing files in subdirectories is not officially supported by the RPG Maker editor (#543).
• Remove bottom-half transparency from RPG Maker 2003 1.10 (English release) (#539)
• The maximal values for HP is now 9999 for 2003 (was 999). Same for Exp (now: 9,999,999, was 999,999)

Android

• Improved game browser, changing the encoding is now more obvious
• Prevent screen from shutting down resulting in a hang (#493)
• Because of inconsistent behaviour among devices the menu is now called with the Back-button instead of the Menu-button. (#511)
• How-to-Use Popup on first run (#512)
• .nomedia file added to prevent that RPG Maker graphics and music appear in Gallery or Music app (#532)

Emscripten (the web version)

• Website redesign (#504)
• Games with non-ASCII (e.g. Japanese) file names work now (#508)

Mac OSX

• The OSX-build is now distributed via homebrew.

Nintendo 3DS Version?

Maybe you saw the video we linked on twitter but we don’t have any new announcements to make about this port, it’s still not usable, sorry.

liblcf

• Nothing special here, some incorrect default values were adjusted and some fields renamed.