The Weekly Gazette 09-24-2023

[DerVVulfman]

(September 18 to September 24, 2023)

Welcome dear readers to the latest issue of the Weekly Gazette! Here in the Gazette, we give you the news in brief of what occurred in the past week as well as provide any news happening in Save-Point itself

Official Area

Occasions

Near the end of the week, meustrus appeared. A member of the RPG Maker community from 2002 to 2009, she made many popular scripts including the pseudo-3d "Mode7" script available at ChaosProjects. She's been working on and off upon a 3D tilemap renderer for Unity, and thought a smaller community like ours fit her more suitably than a larger entity such as RPGMakerWeb. She was greeted by an apparently very-shocked DerVVulfman who remembered her works, and let her know that Unity Tags for her endeavors were present. And she was greeted by kyonides who was pleased to see another RPGMaker XP veteran appear.

General Chat

For many nations, immigration issues are the News of the World as the U.S. Biden Adminstration grants photo ID for those crossing illegally, and gives amnesty to 18 Thousand from the Afghanistan withdrawl who could not be vetted. Meanwhile, Italy's Prime Minister calls out the European Union over their open border policy, stating its making human traffickers richer. And UK Brexit leader Nigel Farage is at odds over the Labour Party's border an immigration plan. Things heat up within the U.S. Congress as the first Impeachment Inquiry into President Joe Biden is scheduled this up-coming Thursday. But already passed was Congress's summons of the Attorney General over his handling of justice, letting statue of limitations against the President's son's dealings with Burisma expire, the notes to the FBI to call out parents groups and catholics as dangerous, and the revelation that a man caught on video for two days straight calling for the January 6 riots to get misdemeanor charges. Climate activists defacing Berlin Landmarks, a climate scientist denouncing his own published wildfires study for leaving out other influencing factors, a missing $1 million dollar plane, Canada and India coming to a head, and much more hit this week's news.

Tech Talk

Lawsuits and legalities his the News of the Cyber World this week, an anti-trust lawsuit against Google for leveraging the market, paying other companies to define their search engine as a standard above all others. And British comedian Steven Fry, from V for Vendetta or as Mycroft Holmes in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, gave a stark warning of A.I. being able to clone voices as he played a clip at the CogX Festival of an AI system mimicking his voice to narrate a documentary. Walmart is working with lobbyists to create a new credit-card routing mandate that would strip away rewards and anti-fraud protection, while falsely advertising the bill as a 'Competition protection' act. Musk's less-than-desired subscription quota for SpaceX, Russell Brand's Youtube videos demonetized, and more hit this week's cyber-news.

Games Development

Development Discussion

Project developments and fixes were What's up with some of the forum's RMers this week. DerVVulfman continued with his windows widgets project, being able to introduce a visible parameter into two problematic windows objects. He then crafted number-boxes, and later introduced image graphic options to much of the widgets, allowing both the backgrounds and window bars to be altered at whim. Meanwhile, kyonides found that Linux's FluidSynth library had a major update, and later had to determine what issue with the SDL Sound system was preventing playback of digital audio music after a sythensized Midi piece had finished.

There was so much BACKLASH AGAINST UNITY'S PRICE CHANGE that over 500 Developers joined the Advertisement-blocking protest against their runtime fee. Unity began backtracking, but perhaps it was too late. A European Trade Group asked governments to scrutinize Unity's trade practices, and develop new regulations to curb any monopolistic behavior. What happpened before the week ended was a formal apology issued by the man who leads the Unity engine and editor teams. The revised regulations remove any fees from the personal edition of Unity and apply its pricing structure only to Professsional and Enterprise edition users. Said pricing is also dependent upon the country where the product is produced, which made DerVVulfman question why such lower prices were given to the developers of Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. There was negative feedback over Unity's pricing to be sure, and this within the forum; Bounty Hunter Lani saying that trust with Unity had now vanished while Re-Logic (the makers of Terraria) donated $100,000+ to Godot and FNA, Remi-chan scolding Unity as teams would need to spend months to years to convert their works away from Unity to any game engine, and kyonides made suggestions that Unity would attempt to force users to upgrade to one of the fee-producing editions.

Material Development

Tools

The HiddenChest RGSS Player Executable for Linux users went through another update, fixing an issue related to the new FluidSynth library and the SLD Sound Fork that was within the MKXP library. But while the issues that were repaired for the music tracks, the Sound Effects are suffering from a division-by-zero glitch that he encountered once the new FluidSynth library was introduced.

Scripts Database

For both RPGMaker VX and VXAce, kyonides crafted KSkillMsg which allows the user to change the message that appears when a hero or enemy executes the escape skill to exit combat. String replacement options for a variety of skill escapes for actors and enemies were introduced not long thereafter.

This week, kyonides was asked to re-adjust the HUD for Falkoner, setting up HUD background variations.

Just recently, the Aleworks Input Mouse Sprite Add-On made by DerVVuflfman added a crash-preventative update which also allows end-users to set the hue of the mouse cursor being loaded.

Creativity Section

Music and Audio

Continuing with his low-fidelity conversion project, Eric Matyas's Original Music and Sound topic reveals three tracks from his Science-Fiction music page now have lo-fi versions. Herald back to the 80s cyber and synth era with pieces like "Stranded in the Outer Rim" and "Alien Colosseum". While the music is very much available for free in MP3 music, he does recommend his Ogg versions for their richer sound and seamless looping capacity.

Art and Design

It may appear wholesome and sweet, seeing two at a picnic, but viewers should note within Remi-chan's Neato Arty thread thing! that one of the two has a scythe in hand. If the scene appears familiar, Remi-chan did reveal this scene within her prose thread, Remi-chan's Writing Snippets~, detailing a calm time spent between her two most lethal antagonists. And as usual, this work has a speed-draw video attached.

Well, that's it for this week.

"You know you’ve reached middle age when you’re cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police." - Joan Rivers (1933-2014)

PROSPECTIVE GAZETEERS!

If you are the creator of a thread in Save-Point, you have the option of sending/writing your own entry into the Gazette. The Gazette accepts write-in announcements (which will be doublechecked). Likewise, the Gazette would welcome other content such as a comic-strip series, ongoing story arc, or the like.

Just PM DerVVulfman with the submissions. Submissions must be in by 10pm EST.