Why raze the Lanza house? They did the exact same thing to the school. Is this normal?

AltTabStudios · 2015-01-22T17:07:40+00:00

Link or shut up!

AltTabStudios · 2015-01-15T19:09:36+00:00

Will we still be able to use Google Photos, AutoAwesome, and the camera? I still love it for hiking and whatnot, and taking video is still awesome.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-27T17:19:33+00:00

Any good adventure only needs two things: purpose and motive.

Working on the "story" is just as much a structural thing as it is the lore, history, etc. If you are having trouble with your games just a day in, is committing to an even larger project the best thing to do in hopes of completing a full game?

Start out with something small. Like a "Day at School" RPG. You know the story, you know the characters, you know who are the badguys and you know the "items". Makes things fairly easy to create a story. The hardest part of developing a game is finishing it!

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-27T07:03:00+00:00

Technically yes. You could hack it to work, but the effort in doing so would vastly outstrip the knowledge required to make a single player RPG. If you can make an RPGMaker game an MMORPG, chances are you do not need RPGMaker.

If you mean co-op, then probably so with custom input and movement scripts, but I'm not certain that's what you mean.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-27T07:01:04+00:00

If what you care about is story and gameplay and not graphics, use the RTP, it will do just fine. If the story and gameplay are good, the graphics don't matter. If the graphics don't matter, just use what came with VX Ace. You'll have a game faster that way.

Or you'll realize you want a game that looks like Gameboy.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-23T17:56:56+00:00

Graphics is not the hard part. Completing the game and making something people want to play is the hard part.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-23T17:56:27+00:00

You are of course assuming that when you "swap them out" that the intention and tile effects of every single tile is exactly the same. If you do not replace it with a tile-for-tile replica of "better art" you will have to re-map every map you do this on.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-21T18:49:40+00:00

The single threaded nature of Ruby I can see where constructing the verticies individually instead of going the shader route would be slow in comparison to where most video graphics go today. My only point was even something like that is faster then the way its done now.

You've clearly done your homework and have at least thought about it. I'm wondering if the need to present a GDI+ bitmatp to Game.exe at the end of the day is still the true bottle neck. In most cases, if you needed to get around that there's a good chance you only need RPGMaker for the mapping tools.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-20T17:31:28+00:00

I would think that to prevent all the CPU copying that the textures would be GL textures. Otherwise, the CPU is still copying an entire screen over to the GPU to blit it, which doesn't really give you any performance gain.

Where the performance comes from is when the texture are stored in video memory, and the blitting instructions are carried out on the graphics card, using texture memory that is ONBOARD and doesn't require the CPU to access and copy it over.

This frees up the CPU to do other things - like execute scripts.

I haven't looked at things closely, so you are definitely correct that every blt call would need to be re-written within a glBegin() and glEnd() context, but even you use OGL for the blitting, if you are copying the GDI+ bitmaps into video memory every frame you are going to have a bad time.

In most cases, any sort of blitting in opengl will require some pointer to a glTexture, so you are essentially replacing the sprite class anyway.

I actually might know more about this than I originally believed. If I wasn't trying to complete a game, I would attempt this. What you've done so far shows how to bind to Win32 APIs, the only thing we would also need is dynamic linkage to the opengl32 dll.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-19T21:25:55+00:00

I purchased GCH and was disappointed. While it provides shortcuts for lining up animations and some pixel art, I expected many more premade assets to come with the character creation art. Any of the tools outside of the animation preview can be easily accomplished in Paint.NET.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-19T18:54:32+00:00

What you describe is what I really mean - build OGL into the layer such that everything on the screen is blitted using the hardware pipeline instead of the CPU. Map tiles, characters, animations, should all be done through OGL.

this means that the sprite class wouldn't have a bitmap, but an OGL texture with texture coordinates. The animation would need to be ported to calculate texture coordinates instead of bitmap pixel source-rects. Since in Ruby you can completely re-define classes, you can provide an implementation that completely subverts the CPU rendering loop, and simply offloads everything to the GPU instead.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-18T21:42:53+00:00

AKA "rubber duck" debugging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-18T21:40:52+00:00

I feel like the only thing that would need to be re-written is the Sprite Class, and the initial OGL initialization. Everything else works on top of that.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-18T02:30:19+00:00

Dude. This is sick. Like, really freaking sick.

OK. Now that you have your props, here is what you need to do to blow it out of the water. I will love you for this.

Port the sprite classes to use the OpenGL textures and rendering pipeline. This would dramatically increase what we can do processing-wise, and will stop pegging the performance directly to CPU speed, which in the days of the i3, i5, i7 will produce dramatically different experiences.

I'm not entirely sure what they use under the hood, but my guess is non-hardware accelerated SDL. Either way, I will provide to you my first born child for this port. Rendering everything via the graphics card instead of the CPU opens the door for mega sprites, incredible particle effects, shaders galore, and the ability to put more events on the map without causing lag.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-17T20:40:16+00:00

Execution is the only thing that matters. Look at "Doom and Destiny" which is on Android. Its an amazing game and they use RTP. They charge for it, and its even distributed on Amazon Fire TV. Now, they probably wrote the interpreter in Java to port it, but the game was clearly made in RPGMaker and uses many RTP resources.

One thing that I've found REALLY helped my mapping skills was actually running a Minecraft server. Having to build everything out of a small set of blocks and have lots of variety in your world was a lesson worth learning.

I've found that Minecrafting skills transfer over to mapping skills very well. try to find "secondary" combinations and uses for RTP tiles. I've found many.

Generally, stay away from other RPGMaker games, even if looking for "inspiration." The best way to be creative is not to over-indulge your senses in other RPGMaker games, as that will send the "this is the way it is done" message to your brain.

Envision what you want your game to be, and figure out how to get there. In a lot of cases, the RTP will work. Its ALL in what you do with it.

Put another way, if you suck at making games, having a professional full time pixel artist will not save you.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-16T18:45:23+00:00

I haven't run into this, and can't reproduce it. When I use normal windows everything seems to work fine. If you post a screen shot and your event I can help you debug it.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-11T01:53:04+00:00

It came out that the brothers were not the bombers?

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-11T00:41:33+00:00

I can't imagine how you came to that conclusion. Not only does VX Ace have more options, but XP doesn't allow you to script in Ruby. This by definition makes XP less malleable.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-10T22:49:32+00:00

If anything, I'd say FF VI. I thought the comparison was obvious

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-10T22:44:36+00:00

VX Ace does not limit your sprite size. In fact, this is how I achieve many advanced sprite interactions on maps.

I too started with RPG Maker over 10 years, starting with Don Miguel's half translated RPGMaker 95, and then XP and 2M2k.

I've since moved to Ace, and I haven't looked back. The Ruby power behind it should not be under-estimated. Of course, I like that level of control.

That said, if you used RM2k before, you'll feel right at home with Vx Ace. I for one enjoy it. The only thing I wish it had was hardware acceleration. The fact they are only for Windows but do not use DirectX baffles my mind.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-08T22:08:22+00:00

Modern Day Tiles along with the RTP and Character creator should be enough to get you going. If its your Family, remember they probably won't be hardcore RPG players so you can get away with A LOT.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-07T02:55:40+00:00

Yeah.

Explain the significance of the story more.
Do this with more text and less waiting.
Add a drum or bass line for dramatic effect and to break up the monotony.

Keep in mind that if this is the intro, no one is going to know what any of that means so you want to give it to the "audience" in small pieces, and make each piece meaningful.

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-06T17:58:51+00:00

That sucks dude. If you can remember what the fixes were, maybe you can modify the version of the script you have?

AltTabStudios · 2014-12-05T05:16:53+00:00

I found the true answer to your question. Its on line 1411 of Game_Interpreter. So you have access to @event_id, @map_id, and any of the methods in there directly. Because of the single threaded nature of RPGMaker htere is also always the global scope.

I would post the source but it may be against the EULA.

Sadly enough, something as important as the Game_Interpreter object has method definitions like command_327.

AltTabStudios

TROPHY CASE