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.
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.
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)
Gauge battle style and actors are displayed as battle animationsThe judge is happy about the new battle interpreter
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).
We are happy to announce the next major EasyRPG Player release. We want to thank all our developers for the huge amounts of time they invested in improving the Player. The new release is called “slime” everyones favourite enemy. You can get it in our download section. But what is the 2nd most popular enemy? You will see when 0.3.1 comes out.
Official RPG Maker 2003 release
Before we write about the new features we have an annoucement to make. It was a really unexpected news for all of us: An official English version of RPG Maker 2003 was released. Instead of using an illegal fan translation you can buy a legal version now. This is basicly your only option because our own editor is still far away from being in a usable state. (No we were never in contact with Enterbrain and are not payed for this statement). We read that the sourcecode got lost. Therefore they have to use binary patches. This means the risk that gigantic new features are provided is reduced – Which is good for us. The new English RTP is automatically detected by the Player (#454), games made with the new version will work as good as the old ones.
New features
Now back to the new major release. It brings many important features, some of them were completely missing before, these are:
Vehicles
Vehicles (#219) was one of most important missing feature, breaking many games depending on them. A well known game broken directly at the beginning by this was Don Miguels Sample Game, you can now cross the lake together with Marcus! The implementation includes boarding/unboarding, vehicle teleport, on board music change, save and load position support, airship terrain based landing check and system graphics based airship shadow (#434, #436, #441).
Don crossing the sea
Map loop
Another important feature implemented is the endless scroll map, vertical, horizontal or both. This was required by some games to work properly and some of them didn’t work without this at all. The implementation includes support of special movements, like jumping between loop edges, and takes care of event picture, panorama and camera movement. This change makes the dreams in Yume Nikki finally completely enjoyable. (#455,#457)
Battle improvements
The battle system is one of the most complex and most commonly used parts of RPG Maker. We added further additions to our implementation, including: Items dropped by defeated enemies are now added to the party’s inventory (#398) and multi-use items are really multi-use now (#420). Some skills crashed the game when used (#405).
When a timer reaches 0:00 the battle ends now. This is a strange behaviour because there is no way to call a timer based event in battle. But that’s the RPG2k way.
The event interpreter got some bug fixes: The command “End battle” is now supported (#393) and weather/tone effects are visible now on-screen (#396). The condition checks “Monster/Hero can act” and “enemy hp” were broken (#367)
We also fixed a deadlock that sometimes occured in the RPG2k3 battle system. (#474)
Save
As you know RPG Maker uses a binary format and we try to figure out the fields to improve compatibility. Our main problem is still the save file because we are the only ones who try to figure out the format. We don’t provide our own format but are compatible with the original RPG Maker savefiles. There were many new fields discovered, some statistic:
In 0.2.2 release we had 1103 chunks in all binary formats (LDB, LMU, …) of which 81 were unknown (92.66% known). Now with 0.3 new chunks were discovered resulting in a total of 1122, of which 31 are unknown (97.24% known). Yes, 19 new chunks were discovered, it’s possible that we discover even more. (#128, #132 and #133)
A nasty bug preventing parallel events from continuing after loading got resolved. (#474)
Fix savegame corruption for Russian games when encoding was specified in RPG_RT.ini file (#139)
Android
If you checked the PlayStore the last weeks you probably noticed that we made some updates to the Player. Thanks to a new developer (BlisterBoy) the Android version got significant improvements. He added support for the long-awaited button mapping, now you can enjoy all RPG Maker 2000/2003 because all buttons are available on the screen if you want. (#443)
Besides these there were some minor improvments:
Accessing the settings for changing encoding crashed the program when the INI file was missing (#435)
Further extensions like support for different game directories and game/engine dependend will come later because our Android developer is currently busy with real life.
Run in the Web
As already mentioned in an earlier blog post EasyRPG Player runs now inside your web browser. This port was further improved and supports now asynchronous loading of assets. That means not the whole game is downloaded during start up which significantly improves the loading times. All images and music is downloaded on demand and map files are downloaded while the transition plays. Save files are locally stored, they are lost when you clear the local storage of your browser (#389,#417, #425 and #462).
How about playing a round of Ib? More games will come! We can also help you in releasing your own RPG Maker games to the web. Just contact us!
You will need an up-to-date browser. Firefox runs the games a bit better then Chrome. This could change when new versions of the web browser are released.
Other
Now about other fixes that don’t fit anywhere else:
The most funny one is probably a Polish fan translation of RPG Maker that translated a bit too much. The “stop music” event specified by file name “(OFF)” was translated as “(Brak)”. The Player accepts now both strings. (#391)
Frame skipping is now more smooth (FPS stay constant). Before frameskip was speeding up and slowing down the game which felt strange (#287)
PNG transparency was incorrectly applied in some cases. (#358, #430)
This is us reading the libpng docs
Referencing a variable indirectly via another variable wasn’t working correctly (#387)
Transparent textshadow color in Wadanohara fixed. (#394)
Common events were reset during map change. In Vampires Dawn this resulted in recasting of transformations after each map change (#402)
Switch items (e.g. save stones in VD) were not consumed. Same for skills of type switch. (#403, #404)
Support for ThisEvent in CommonEvent (references callee of CommonEvent instead of crashing) (#412)
RPG2k VALUE (a newer version of RPG2k) uses a different way to encode the Key Input Event (“Enter password” in Don’s translation). (#424)
Rendering of some sprites/tiles was off-by-one pixel (#428)
MoveForward moves now always correctly, map passability fixes and animation speeds more consistent with RPG_RT (#451)
Too many games relied on RPG Maker ignoring access to switch/variable 0, which is an invalid index. EasyRPG doesn’t warn about this access on-screen anymore. (#458)
32 new chinese characters and Wong sign added to built in shinonome font (#464)
Bush depth (Character bottom becomes transparent over bush tiles) implemented (#468)
KeyInput command was improved. The game NASU (included with YumeNikki) is now playable! (#469)
liblcf
Most changes in our lcf parsing library were support for new chunks mentioned earlier under “Saves”.
We fixed a bug in the number parsing code that broke a few games (because the database failed to parse) (#128)
