EasyRPG Blog

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

What is new for users?

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

Lots of movement related issues were resolved:

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

Fixes for the event interpreter:

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

Improvements to Image handling:

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

Improvements to Audio handling:

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

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

Messages:

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

Skills that change switches were implemented. (#274)

Allow creation of Monsters without graphics (#125)

The Menu scene got some bugfixes:

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

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

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

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

Handling of the RTP was improved:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is new for developers?

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

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

We were mentioned in the Press

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

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

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

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

 

 

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