In our ongoing approach to port the EasyRPG Player to highly important platforms we want to provide a glance at our newest port supporting Windows 98.

In 2012 the market share of Windows 98, 2000 and NT together was an incredible high value of 0.13% so a port was totally worth it.

The hardware and software requirements of the application are minimal. You only need an Intel Pentium 2 or newer or an AMD K6 or newer. Operating system: Any Windows since Windows 98.

Player was run on a 350 Mhz Pentium II system. With resolution 640×480 the test map runs at 30 FPS, with 320×240 at 60 FPS. The strange chipset is our placeholder chipset until somebody draws a new one for us (maybe you?).

We render at 32bit, the output quality is improved compared to RPG_RT on color intensive scenes but our feature that allows playing of games from other countries (e.g. Japanese) on a european Windows is gone because of operating system limitations (limited Unicode support).

Time for some retro feeling! Get your old PC down from the attic, remove the dust and enjoy. (needs the Microsoft Layer for Unicode, place unicows.dll in the same directory as Player.exe, if it crashes on startup the DLL is missing)

And something completly different: The Wii nightly build is back and 0.1 builds for Caanoo and Pandora (thx Rikku and Kazuki) were contributed.

The last official release (the Alpha) was more then two years ago (February 2011). Today we want to finally release a new version that we declare as stable: v0.1 (codename “EV0001”)

This release is dedicated to our IRC bot named “EV0001”, thanks for serving us with log files and pizza in the last years.

Together with the new release of the Player we also release a new website. (this blog will serve as the news section of the site, so nothing new here)

Noticeable changes in 0.1:

• An embedded font (called Shinonome) that looks like MS Gothic. No external font file needed anymore!
• Improved event interpreter, many games that were broken before are more playable now (e.g. going to bed and entering the dream in Yume Nikki works now)
• Rendering issues with some BMP and PNG files were fixed.
• Screenshot function (press F10)
• New Name Input dialog with better layout and support for Japanese characters
• Huge improvements in the internal memory management of the Player, crashes because of deletion of still referenced game objects shouldn’t happen anymore.
• Multi-language RTP support. Play Japanese games that use files from the RTP with the English RTP (and vice-versa). The Player handles all the magic in the background for you.
• For developers: The graphic backends SDL and SoftBitmap were removed, Pixman is now the one and only (Audio and Input are still handled by SDL)

You can download the Player in the download section of our new website. For 0.1 we only provide binaries for the common systems Windows, Linux and MacOS X. We don’t have enough developers to maintain lots of ports and they were slowing down our development process. But don’t worry, our Player is still perfectly portable to other systems. Ports for other systems will be readded in our ongoing development process. At the moment improving the compatibility and the user experience of the Player is our highest priority.

The next release (v0.2, codename “Alex”) will probably be released this year and on our roadmap is the long awaited battle system and and a better save system and of course improvements in the user experience. And we plan to make new stable releases more often so that you don’t have to wait two years again :).

At last we recommend that you check out our new user section in the wiki containing many useful information about features of the Player!

Welcome in 2013

Development is still going on. We actually plan to release a “stable” version (0.1) soon. Battle and Saving is still not really working but we fixed lots of bugs in the event interpreter, intro cutscene of Unterwegs in Düsterburg (quite popular game in Germany) works now.
Check out the video proof at the bottom of this post!

Downloads

You can find all nightly builds as usual on our jenkins site.
Remember that these are automatic builds, so they are untested!

Pandora Port

Kazuki ported the EasyRPG Player to the Pandora console. You can find the port in the OpenPandora Repo.

Video

This is a video to show the changes in the event interpreter. That video shows EasyRPG on the left and RPG_RT on the right. As you can see EasyRPGs simulation is still a bit away from being perfect, but the intro works :).

Download video

The cutscene plays by itself, no input is done. Audio is from Player.
The Black Screen at the start is for synchronisation purposes.

And no the PSP build is still broken, sorry for that.