Category: Release

Only 5 months behind schedule we are glad to announce the next stable release: Version 0.2

This version is named after everyones favourite hero “Alex”.

What is new for users?

As already stated in the Android post in December, SDL2 is used now. The major differences you will notice is that you can play now in fullscreen mode without having resolution changes, so all graphics are perfectly sharp and pixelated now :).

The Android port is now also distributed via the Google Play Store. The account is managed by our developer lobomon. Because the updates are uploaded by hand and are verified everytime by Google before publishing the releases are usually some days behind. You can find more up-to-date ones on our website in the download section.

Battle System (and random encounters) for RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 (#218) with some limitations:

• Only traditional battle style supported for RPG2k3
• Battle event interpreter not well tested
• Conditions (Poison, Sleep, …) unsupported
• Some battle commands unsupported (you get a warning in that case)

Support for saving and loading (#186). The files are written in the LSD format. In theory they are compatible with the original RPG_RT. Because the LSD-format is not fully understood yet, not all data is saved/loaded yet (we support ~75% of the data), but should be good enough for most cases. As a side effect the arbitrary 50 pictures limit was removed.

All missing move commands implemented (diagonal movement and jumping). Further more some issues with incorrect passability checks (Whether you can (not) walk on a tile) were fixed and the movement frequency is now more accurate when compared with RPG_RT (#224).

Support for half-width cyrillic fonts in our built in font “shinonome” (#216).

Support for command line arguments (See wiki page for further details, #225).

The game title is now read from the RPG_RT.ini and displayed in the title bar (#52).

When returning to the title scene (via End Game or F12) some data was not reset (#192).

In TestPlay mode pressing F11 opens the save scene.

The annoying, game blocking warnings messages are replaced with a quake-like drop down console and therefore don’t halt the game anymore. As a side effect you get full unicode support in the messages (e.g. for asian languages). (#193).

What is new for developers?

Readers was renamed to liblcf and relicensed to MIT license.

Improvements in the build system. The Player and liblcf should compile on more linux distributions now.

The makefiles for the PSP (Playstation Portable) build were removed. Nobody contacted us in the last years to maintain the (broken) PSP build.

Anything else?

Yepp. MarianoGNU is working on a new editor called “Editor-Qt“. It is making good progress but is Not really in a usable state yet, but you can grab the Windows binary from our jenkins system. The Linux version will be released later.

Gameplay Video: Battle system on Android

Compared to the current development state the half a year ago released 0.1.1 version is already quite dated and has bad compatibility. We continue our naming scheme for the 0.1 releases and name this one “EV0003”.

The new release adds some bugfixes, improves the compatibility in general and adds new features. Furthermore the build system was improved and should compile better on Unix systems. Bad news first: No, battle and save/load are still missing. They are planned for the 0.2 release we expect to get released this year.

Summary of changes (issue number is linked and contains further information):

• Fixes for the games Yume Nikki (#115) and Ib (#151)
• Status scene (#127) (see picture below)
• Debug scene (#133) (see picture below)
• More move commands implemented (#124)
• Problems with picture rotation fixed (#134)
• Writing non-ascii characters (basicly all non-English characters like äöü or あえい) to files caused corruption. This broke savegame writing and our tool LCF2XML (#135)
• Incorrect charset rendering when charset has non-default size fixed (#137)
• Mistakes in the RTP translation table corrected (that one is used to run japanese RPG Maker games with an English RTP and vice versa) (#149)
• Add screen effects (Tone/Tint and flash). Tone change was already supported for normal pictures but was very slow, the algorithm was replaced with a faster one. (#118, #153)
• Weather rendering was refactored and is faster now, too. (#118, #153) (see performance notes below)

Only for developers:

• Build system improvements for Unix based systems (#128, #130, #132, #136 and many others)
• OpenDingux Makefile updated (#144)

Performance notes:

Tone change and weather rendering are quite demanding and can cause lag on slow systems. I made some tests to approximate the cpu usage. Results:

• Weather increases CPU usage by 25% (1.25 times more)
• Tone change by 100% (2 times)
• Reducing saturation by 300% (4 times)
• Increasing saturation by 400% (5 times)

Calculating the CPU usage for combined effects is left open as an exercise for the reader.

Gallery: (click image for full size)

As promised we want to speed up our release process. Today we want to release a minor update that fixes some bugs that were encountered in EV0001, so this is basicly EV0002 and provides some additional features.

If you don’t want to read about the changes you can grab the program directly in our download section.

Now the changelog:

• Linux: Support for detecting the RTP path by reading the Wine Windows registry (this means you can install the RTP via Wine)
• Fixes for the Android build system (still not working, are you an Android developer? Contact us!)
• Wii support
• Windows 98 support (compile with VS2005)
• For developers: Switched to Javadoc comment style and updated Doxygen documentation with new features (e.g. call graphs) (issue #67)

Gameplay related: (when this fixes an issue in a specific game it is mentioned in [brackets])

• Fake Battle System. The battle itself doesn’t work but you can select the outcome (Victory, Defeat (only for scripted defeats, doesn’t trigger a Game over) and Escape). Far away from being perfect but better then terminating like in 0.1
• Fix integer overflow on large maps (resulting in incorrect passability checks)[Hero’s Realm]
• Don’t restart BGM if the song is the same [Hero’s Realm]
• Fix passability check for event layer chipset tiles (issue #121) [Dragon Warrior 1 Remix]
• Fix transparency of autotiles (resulted in an orange tileset when parallax backgrounds were used, issue #104) [Dragon Slayer Gaiden] [Yumme Nikki]
• When a party member is on the maximum level, instead of displaying “——–” the current experience is displayed now, because this was confusing
• Adjusting music volume (needs support in SDL_mixer, probably not working for all files)
• MessageBoxes close now when a wait event occurs, should fix many not closing message boxes
• Experience and Level system implemented
• Switch command: Fixed indirect switch setting via variable
• States (Death, Poison, …): Display correct state in menu
• Fix item count underflowing (from 0 to 99) when an item that the player didn’t have was decresed
• Fix change hero sprite command
• Move event: Player transparency

The Player is still not suitable for daily use, please report any bugs you encounter in games so we can make it better. Thanks!