RPG Maker series + Rants

[kyonides]

Chapter One: Rants

We already know that the oldest versions of this software were quite basic and relied heavily on game variables and switches. I'm not saying that was bad, still, there were relatively simple changes in how a scene or a battle should evolve that required the use of LOTS of them just because. It was sad because most games were excessively simple.

Gladly, some people showed up and provided the audience with plugins, written in C or C++, that allowed you to add some feature. The downside was that it usually meant another plugin would not be loaded or would replace the previous one.

Later some remakes allowed people to add a bunch of preselected improvements, that were not customizable. They also made your game incompatible with the default player or its dlls up to some point. Plus, those versions were illegal most of the time.

By the way, you might wanna know that those early versions of the engine had infernal names like Dante or lcf that might sound like Lucifer, the devil, even if they always claimed it was some anagram for a file format only. The truth seems to be that Ojima has been obsessed with the dark side for some weird reason. Many Japanese mangaka include weird contents in their manga and even in anime so Ojima might be following their example.

Then XP came and changed everything by including scripting thanks to Ruby, a scripting language another Japanese developed, namely "Matz" as Rubyists know him worldwide. Sadly, he dropped vehicle and faces support.  
The good thing was that you could still reinstate them via scripts!  
As you might already know, its mapping system is the best so far, it includes old features plus the fact you can organize stuff in three separate layers! You can also setup every single tileset independently!

Later on the VX fiasco showed up. Many stuff was downgraded and some new modules showed up. Mapping became pure crap for the first time.

VX Ace came along to "solve" the issues caused by VX. The dark side is that mapping just got weirder but it's still extremely limited and it hopes you'll focus more on parallax mapping. Even so they included regions by tile.

+2 for adding Graphics.resize_screen(width, height), in game snapshots and text outline.

MV is just VX Ace for javascript and might let you make games for Android and iOS. What they don't tell you is that it's not a straightforward process and it might fail. When it works, games look weird in Android thanks to its button placement or their dialog windows, and they run as slow as snails. Games need more disk space than in any previous engine iteration.

Of course, they don't care because graphics can be drawn larger than before because their tiles and character sprites can now be 48 pixels wide. (There might be some ways to alter that or so they say.)

Usually people say that it's worth buying MV. I disagree with them. Once Kore told us that for the price you purchase RPG Maker, it's a fair program. I strongly refute it. While we can't really say $60 to $80 is a high price to pay for it, it happens that other products, especially well known ones like some offline and online RPGs and shooters, can or could be bought for less! And nope, it's not because they were part of a humble bundle. Those engines are much better and do let you do a lot more stuff, even in 3D or pseudo 3D (the so called 2.5D).

Then why hasn't RPG Maker truly improved its features? Well, it might be Ojima's fault. He's almost a mystery man. Even if his name could be fake and own by some company or corporation, like some film directors that are totally fake, the quality of his products is always low. You know, most of the fixes and some improvements (a la Scene_Base from SDK) come from the online community and not from Ojima and his team. That's especially true for MV itself.

I know, if you include too much default features, many people will be inclined to not work seriously on developing their games. So what? Some people are aficionados and wanna remain there. It's their right to do that if that pleases them. Nonetheless, Enterbrain's and Kadokawa's decisions doesn't really reflect the needs of the community. Just look at their other products, they always seem to look inferior than any other solution available online.

When Ancurio, mkxp's developer, was making his RM replacement, he soon noticed that RM's design really sucks. Basing its timer on frames was not really the best choice, Ojima could have picked actual seconds or milliseconds or even nanoseconds but he didn't. So if you play a game in a Pentium 2 and later in Pentium 3 or some i5 or i7, it won't run in a similar way and things will get quite nasty. It's not a must to run based on real time, but they have never offered that option. It's not the same to reimplement it via scripting, you better add the code and compile the binary yourself. The engine design also prevents you from including more OpenGL kind of stuff that could really impress gamers, especially those used to fiddle with Unreal or Unity or Godot. They say that might be possible with WebGL in MV, but that's not a common feature.

I might accuse Ojima of not showing true love to his engine's fans. It's like he just wanted to make the least effort possible.
Yeah, I know it's not exactly easy to develop software. Nevertheless, for a guy that's been around for almost two decades we would expect more from him than what he has showed us so far.

I hope I don't need to ever post a second chapter.

[Qeo]

I would disagree with RMMV not being worth it - there's some really neat things that can be done with the battle system.

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

The map engine taking a sledgehammer to the knees in VX is still a sore spot to me. The main reason I didn't bother with RM post XP.

By the way, you might wanna know that those early versions of the engine had infernal names like Dante or lcf that might sound like Lucifer, the devil, even if they always claimed it was some anagram for a file format only. The truth seems to be that Ojima has been obsessed with the dark side for some weird reason. Many Japanese mangaka include weird contents in their manga and even in anime so Ojima might be following their example.

This, in the other hand, is a hilarious bit of trivia.

[DerVVulfman]

With all this talk, it is clearly an enterbrain-less discussion. So ... moved to Games where I can slap the enterBrainless tag on it.

[kyonides]

A Quite MeZy Release

Some of you might have noticed that MZ has been released in the last few days. Guess what? I've come here to show you why being an early bird means nothing when dealing with Kadokawa's products. Really you better wait till they finish debugging their latest engine.

Now you can't even browse a folder to open a new project or manage your music resources.
These bugs were reported on the official forums not long ago. Nope, there are other bugs as well.
Even a global moderator working there stated MZ doesn't get along with Audacity. This means those that love to edit soundtracks and sound effects will need to get rid of their useful tool.