EasyRPG Player 0.2 “Alex”

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)
RPG Maker 2000 Battle System
RPG Maker 2000 Battle System
RPG Maker 2003 Battle System
RPG Maker 2003 Battle System

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).

Russian language support (old: left, new: right)
Russian language support (old: left, new: right)

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).

New output
New output

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.

Editor Qt
Editor Qt
Editor Qt Database
Editor Qt Database

Gameplay Video: Battle system on Android

Server downtime

As some of you probably noticed our website was unreachable for nearly two weeks. Sorry for the long downtime!

Our server was actually working fine but we had problems with the DNS, therefore easy-rpg.org didn’t resolve to our server… The same problem occured for rpgmaker.es, because they share the same server.

Our next blog post will come during the next days and is about the current progress of the EasyRPG Player and other related projects. Stay tuned and happy Easter!

HTML5 port plans

So much time without updating the blog. Well, we have been pretty busy preparing the upcoming release of EasyRPG Player: 0.1.3.

Version 0.2 will be delayed because of narrower spare time from development team to complete the Battle System. However the next version feature list is yet relevant and will be announced in a not much later blog post.

But now, let’s introduce the yet another next-gen, cloud-enabled, big-data-capable, RPG-as-a-service and The-Internet-Of-Things-embeddable port: EasyRPG Player HTML5 Port (alternate name: EasyRPG.js).

Play your own RPG games in the cloud!

With the HTML5 port you will be able to play your games in any HTML5 compatible browser, share your game with your friends and conquer your neighborhood with your amazing RPG skills.

Let’s make it faster!

Increasing Player popularity with HTML5 will help with development, becoming attractive for Facebook, which could buy our product for a few billions and allowing us to have full time developers improving the Player engine even the Editor.

Run your RPGs everywhere!

The Internet Of Things makes Internet available in unexpected gadgets. With the HTML5 port you will be able to play RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 games in your microwave embedded browser while preparing popcorn!

We plan to release the HTML5 version some day of 2014, expect us!