CHERRY'S PROFILE

Actually, one of my very early creations was the so-called "Power Patch", which allowed very limited scripting using Lua.

Later I started creating CGSS (http://cherrytree.at/cgss) which is actually something like DynRPG, but using Lua. I stopped it in a very early stage though (you can download a demo on my page) because I noticed that the performance was terrible. And even with optimizations (which would have made the system less transparent, on the other hand) it would never have been worth the effort because most "exciting" things would just slow down everything so much that it wouldn't have any real-world usage.

That's partly to poor design of the RPG Maker system itself and partly due to all the marshalling which is necessary to interface Lua with the RPG Maker, mostly when callbacks come into play (and be honest - without callbacks, DynRPG would be far less powerful!).

The fact that DynRPG uses compiled C++ allows for much better results. Firstly because it's using compiled code, no interpreting is needed there. Secondly because accessing the RPG Maker system is mostly "direct". For example, writing RPG::system->scene = RPG::SCENE_MENU; produces about the same machine code as if the RPG Maker would do the same thing natively! That's because the DynRPG classes have been designed in a way that their memory layout matches the layout of the internal classes of the RPG Maker so that the C++ compiler can generate the optimal code. Even most method calls (like RPG::Character::move, for example) are only very thin wrappers around the corresponding interal functions of the RPG Maker, mostly in order to translate C++'s calling convention (using stack only) to Delphi's (using the eax, edx and ecx registers), so that the overhead is minimal. This means that DynRPG code is at least 90% as fast as the native code of the RPG Maker.

This also means that exposing the full DynRPG API via Lua or Ruby or anything else would probably need many times more effort than creating DynRPG itself needed! It's like building an adapter cable for DVI>HDMI versus building an active converter for VGA>HDMI. The first one just needs the right wiring and the right plugs (and doesn't need any actual curcuitry apart from the connections), while the second one is a complex device which needs to actually "translate" an analog signal to a digital one!

Probably a temporary error with DirectX in general.

No problem, since neither of these trigger the main game menu.

Run this tool once whenever you have any keyboard issues: http://share.cherrytree.at/showfile-2704/kbdreset.exe

Based on the values shown in the screen, I am pretty sure it is this error: "The game would crash when you removed an actor in battle when this actor was the last to do his turn."

Example:
- 4 actors in party
- 3rd actor in party does his turn
- Event removes 2 actors
- 2 actors in party
- Crash because the game tries to access the now non-existent 3rd actor

Try applying this bugfix: http://share.cherrytree.at/showfile-7303/rpg_rt_2k3_108_battleactionbugfix_and_getpartymemberbattlebugfix.ips

It fixes this bug, plus the bug described here: http://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/11476/

Alternatively, you can install DynRPG which fixes this bug too.