Enjoy your favourite RPGs on Android

Merry Christmas everybody.

Today we have a special gift for you:

A port of Player for Android. Click here to download the apk or scan the QR code below. You must enable installing of non-appstore apps. This option is somewhere in the Android settings, depending on the version.  under Security -> Unknown sources. Warning: Be careful when installing apks that are not in the app store. We will only provide APK downloads from our domain (easy-rpg.org).

Download EasyRPG for Android (Scan me!)
Download EasyRPG for Android (Scan me!)

System requirements:

  • Android Api10 (2.3.3 and newer)
  • OpenGL ES2
  • CPU with hardware floating point (armeabi-v7a)
  • The fastest CPU you can get (runs okay, but not great, on a Tegra 2)

If you are unsure about OpenGL and hardware floating point: When it crashes on startup you probably lack these features ;). If you know how to use logcat you can provide us with the output when it crashes.

What to do after installing the apk:

Place the game folders in “[sd-card]/easyrpg/games”.

For midi music you need timidity, download timidity.tar.gz from the SDL mixer page and extract it into “[sd-card]/easyrpg” (when done correctly you should have a timidity.cfg and instruments in “[sd-card]/easyrpg/timidity”)

Games depending on a RTP expect it in “[sd-card]/easyrpg/rtp/2000” for RTP 2000 and in “2003” for RTP 2003.

Special features:

Do a long click on a game in the game browser to set the region. “Western Europe” is the default, select “Eastern Europe” for Russian games and “Japan” for Japanese games obviously.

The FPS and the virtual buttons can be enabled/disabled by pressing the menu button of your phone.

About 0.2

We expected to release version 0.2 of Player this year featuring battle system and savegames. Unfortunately we will miss that deadline and need more months to finish them, sorry. We will also try to get the Player in the Google App Store when 0.2 is ready.

But in the meanwhile we got some other new features:

  • SDL2: We updated to a new version of the SDL framework. 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 ;)
  • A strange bug was fixed: When a common event that displayed a message box was called via [Call Event], and the command after that was [Show Message] the message box wasn’t displayed. This was especially bad when that message box contained choices.

Screenshots

RPG Maker Testsuite on Android
RPG Maker Testsuite on Android
Game browser
Game Browser

OpenDingux port by Shin-NiL

Shin-NiL ported the EasyRPG Player to OpenDingux (original post) (#169). This allows running games on the open source handhelds Dingoo and GCW Zero. For optimal performance the GCW Zero is recommended.

Dingoo and GCW Zero running EasyRPG Player
A Dingoo A320 and a GCW Zero running EasyRPG Player and TestGame.

The port was added to the download section.

Installation instructions:

  • RPG2K games: Copy the RTP files to /usr/local/home/.easyrpg/rtp2k
  • RPG2K3 games: Copy the RTP files to /usr/local/home/.easyrpg/rtp2k3
  • (Dingoo only) Copy EasyRPG and run.sh files into the game folder (the folder where RPG_RT.exe is)
  • (Dingoo only) Run the run.sh script
  • (GCW-Zero only) Copy the desired game to your device (this folder name must not contain blank spaces)
  • (GCW-Zero only) Run EasyRPG then navigate into the game folder and select the RPG_RT file to play

Now is your turn dear reader. Do it like Shin-NiL and port the Player, too. How about PSP or Android? ;)

EasyRPG Player 0.1.2 “EV0003” released

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)

Debug scene
Debug scene
Status scene
Status scene
Darkened picture with weather effect in background
Darkened picture with weather effect in background
Tint Screen Effect
Tint Screen Effect