Sep 14, 2017
RPG Maker 2003 - Archeia
Hi everyone! We have a new update for RPG Maker 2003 and it is huge!
The Changelog is over here.
- It is now possible to resize and maximize some of the dialog windows (database, event editor and a few miscellaneous ones). Due to technical limitations, the layout is not always perfect when a window has been enlarged.
Engine
- The “This Event” target may now also be used in common events and will refer to the last map event in the call stack. (For example: Map event A calls map event B, which calls common event C, which calls common event D, which moves “This Event”. Result: Map event B will be moved.) The “Erase Event” command behaves the same way, erasing the last map event in the call stack.
- Large picture functionality revamp. The helpfile is updated to reflect this.
* Variables can now be used instead of fixed values for picture ID, filename suffix, transparency and zoom.
* The following point may affect only a certain group of people: The engine (not the editor) is able to understand the format of the unofficial mod “PicPointerPatch” for version 1.08. This means that picture commands with PicPointerPatch-specific data such as fake picture ID 5XXXX will work in version 1.12’s game engine, but in the editor it will show up as “picture ID #5XXXX” and not as variable reference, and when you edit such a command, you need to be careful because the numbers are capped to the normal limits and you would need to manually set the variable references again, but this time in the way the official version does it.
- The Z position (layer) in which a picture is drawn can now be changed (for example, pictures can be shown between the tileset and the events, or even above message windows, etc.).
- Pictures can now be used in battle as well.
- For each picture, it’s now possible to select whether it is affected by screen shake, tint or flash effects.
- For each picture, it’s now possible to select whether it should be automatically cleared on map change and/or on battle end.
- Spritesheet feature: Pictures may get their graphics from a spritesheet with variable size. It’s possible to select a fixed sprite to display or set it through a variable.
- To simplify the process of setting the number of sprites per sheet when selecting a sheet, it’s possible to include “[x,y]” in the spritesheet filename, where “x” and “y” are the number of sprites per row and column (e.g. “my_sprite[5,3].png”). When doing so, these numbers will be automatically set when the spritesheet is selected.
- Automatic animation: A spritesheet with individual animation frames can be used for automatically animating a picture with a user-defined speed. The animation can be run in a loop or once. In the latter case, the picture is automatically erased once its animation is finished. This feature can be used to show picture animations in battle, where no parallel process event for manual animation may be used. Using a spritesheet for animation will also reduce the disk and CPU load compared to manually loading a new picture for each frame.
- “Show Picture” used in a loop with the same picture file will no longer cause high CPU and disk load (which led to lags): When attempting to show a picture with the same filename which is currently already loaded for the same picture ID, the picture loading is skipped and the command behaves like “Move Picture” performance-wise. Note that it is still advisable to include a “Wait 0.0” command in tight loops.
- Displaying a picture with 100% transparency will now skip the drawing step entirely, instead of wasting CPU power on invisibly drawing the picture and calculating effects (if applicable). This means that moving a picture to 100% transparency can be used as a performance-light way to hide a picture temporarily without resetting its properties (effects and spritesheet animations).
- The game volume can now be controlled from the video options dialog. This setting is directly linked to the per-process volume of the Windows audio mixer. For Windows XP and below, it is instead linked to the system-wide master volume.
- When using a gamepad, the D-Pad may now be used as alternative to the analog stick.
- Comments in events can now have an arbitrary length and number of lines instead of being limited to 4 lines with limited width.
- When importing music files, all allowed file types (mid, wav, mp3) are now shown at once.
Engine
- The “restart game” hotkey is now Alt+F12 instead of F12. This change was done to avoid frustrating accidental restarts, especially when the user is used to pressing F12 in order to create a screenshot (like it’s done in most Steam games). When F12 is pressed, a message is now displayed instead.
- The default database’s “Poison” state was set to increase HP instead of decreasing them.
- In the help file, information about “\n[\v[...]]” and “\n[0]” in messages was missing.
- On newer versions of Windows, when closing RPG Maker, a temporary folder was not deleted, instead the RPG Maker silently crashed during shutdown.
Engine
- On multicore-processor machines, a race condition would cause key states reported to events to be unreliable while a key was being held down (it would appear to “bounce” instead of being reported as continuously pressed).
If multiple events were stacked on top of each other on the same tile, their drawing order would change in unpredictable ways based on the position of other events (including the player). Now, they are sorted by their IDs (highest ID drawn last).
- When the game was launched without focus, e.g. because another window had become active while the game was being launched, and in some other edge cases, the game would accept keyboard input despite being in the background.
- Escaping a backslash in a message with another backslash (“\\”) would not work properly and cause weird behavior when the following character was “n”.
- When an event had changed the tileset on the current map, this change was not preserved after loading the game from a save file. (It was still saved, just not loaded correctly, so this fix will retroactively make it work for existing save files.)
- The current position of the parallax background was not saved in the save file.
- Under rare conditions, the game could crash with an error “List index has exceeded its valid range (-1)” when a vehicle was displayed.
The Changelog is over here.
Added
Editor- It is now possible to resize and maximize some of the dialog windows (database, event editor and a few miscellaneous ones). Due to technical limitations, the layout is not always perfect when a window has been enlarged.
Engine
- The “This Event” target may now also be used in common events and will refer to the last map event in the call stack. (For example: Map event A calls map event B, which calls common event C, which calls common event D, which moves “This Event”. Result: Map event B will be moved.) The “Erase Event” command behaves the same way, erasing the last map event in the call stack.
- Large picture functionality revamp. The helpfile is updated to reflect this.
* Variables can now be used instead of fixed values for picture ID, filename suffix, transparency and zoom.
* The following point may affect only a certain group of people: The engine (not the editor) is able to understand the format of the unofficial mod “PicPointerPatch” for version 1.08. This means that picture commands with PicPointerPatch-specific data such as fake picture ID 5XXXX will work in version 1.12’s game engine, but in the editor it will show up as “picture ID #5XXXX” and not as variable reference, and when you edit such a command, you need to be careful because the numbers are capped to the normal limits and you would need to manually set the variable references again, but this time in the way the official version does it.
- The Z position (layer) in which a picture is drawn can now be changed (for example, pictures can be shown between the tileset and the events, or even above message windows, etc.).
- Pictures can now be used in battle as well.
- For each picture, it’s now possible to select whether it is affected by screen shake, tint or flash effects.
- For each picture, it’s now possible to select whether it should be automatically cleared on map change and/or on battle end.
- Spritesheet feature: Pictures may get their graphics from a spritesheet with variable size. It’s possible to select a fixed sprite to display or set it through a variable.
- To simplify the process of setting the number of sprites per sheet when selecting a sheet, it’s possible to include “[x,y]” in the spritesheet filename, where “x” and “y” are the number of sprites per row and column (e.g. “my_sprite[5,3].png”). When doing so, these numbers will be automatically set when the spritesheet is selected.
- Automatic animation: A spritesheet with individual animation frames can be used for automatically animating a picture with a user-defined speed. The animation can be run in a loop or once. In the latter case, the picture is automatically erased once its animation is finished. This feature can be used to show picture animations in battle, where no parallel process event for manual animation may be used. Using a spritesheet for animation will also reduce the disk and CPU load compared to manually loading a new picture for each frame.
- “Show Picture” used in a loop with the same picture file will no longer cause high CPU and disk load (which led to lags): When attempting to show a picture with the same filename which is currently already loaded for the same picture ID, the picture loading is skipped and the command behaves like “Move Picture” performance-wise. Note that it is still advisable to include a “Wait 0.0” command in tight loops.
- Displaying a picture with 100% transparency will now skip the drawing step entirely, instead of wasting CPU power on invisibly drawing the picture and calculating effects (if applicable). This means that moving a picture to 100% transparency can be used as a performance-light way to hide a picture temporarily without resetting its properties (effects and spritesheet animations).
- The game volume can now be controlled from the video options dialog. This setting is directly linked to the per-process volume of the Windows audio mixer. For Windows XP and below, it is instead linked to the system-wide master volume.
- When using a gamepad, the D-Pad may now be used as alternative to the analog stick.
Changed
Editor- Comments in events can now have an arbitrary length and number of lines instead of being limited to 4 lines with limited width.
- When importing music files, all allowed file types (mid, wav, mp3) are now shown at once.
Engine
- The “restart game” hotkey is now Alt+F12 instead of F12. This change was done to avoid frustrating accidental restarts, especially when the user is used to pressing F12 in order to create a screenshot (like it’s done in most Steam games). When F12 is pressed, a message is now displayed instead.
Fixed
Editor- The default database’s “Poison” state was set to increase HP instead of decreasing them.
- In the help file, information about “\n[\v[...]]” and “\n[0]” in messages was missing.
- On newer versions of Windows, when closing RPG Maker, a temporary folder was not deleted, instead the RPG Maker silently crashed during shutdown.
Engine
- On multicore-processor machines, a race condition would cause key states reported to events to be unreliable while a key was being held down (it would appear to “bounce” instead of being reported as continuously pressed).
If multiple events were stacked on top of each other on the same tile, their drawing order would change in unpredictable ways based on the position of other events (including the player). Now, they are sorted by their IDs (highest ID drawn last).
- When the game was launched without focus, e.g. because another window had become active while the game was being launched, and in some other edge cases, the game would accept keyboard input despite being in the background.
- Escaping a backslash in a message with another backslash (“\\”) would not work properly and cause weird behavior when the following character was “n”.
- When an event had changed the tileset on the current map, this change was not preserved after loading the game from a save file. (It was still saved, just not loaded correctly, so this fix will retroactively make it work for existing save files.)
- The current position of the parallax background was not saved in the save file.
- Under rare conditions, the game could crash with an error “List index has exceeded its valid range (-1)” when a vehicle was displayed.
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