[RM2K3] MANIACS HELP

I'll be pleased to answer questions but these are a bit open ended. I recommend reading these blog posts on maniacs. They do a great job explaining the new stuff, better than I could with an open-ended question.

There are several other blog posts too, but you'll have to translate. Machine translation in 2023 is pretty good though.

It can, through the "Control Battle" command. That retrieves certain battle information during that specific frame when the flag you're looking for happened. It's covered in the 3rd blog post on Maniacs-specific commands iirc.

edit: to be clear, that command just gives you information in the form of 6 variables. how you're gonna turn those 6 variables into a display is up to you, your imagination is the limit.

kentona
Does anyone know if Maniacs and EasyRPG jive yet? Because I'd hate to convert to maniacs (because it does look very interesting and has features I could probably use to elevate HR remaster, but I don't want to shut out people who were hoping to play this on Macs or Androids :(

The EasyRPG blog cites compatibility with Maniacs commands having been implemented with two major limitations: It's only up to the version where BingShan rewrote the engine (I don't remember which version was that, or if that's exactly what happened technically) and Battle-related commands are out of the picture as rm2k3's battle system is much too delicate and adding in new commands would add unbelievable development costs.

With that being said, you can check out whether the actual commands you want to use are officially supported, and just a single command can make an entire difference in your workflow or shorten hundreds or thousands of lines of code. Just the ability to use variable pointers for instance, or the much improved loop command. My favorite command obviously is Show String Picture which is also supported.

It's not complicated as to why rm2k3 is missing out on features. rm2k3 is literally just built to make final fantasy 4/5 (if barely that) and nothing else. They made a hammer that slams down nails, that's it. Even with DynRPG or Maniacs you really shouldn't go against the grain too much. Maniacs is really nice if you want to save time or just have that one area of inconvenience dealt with. But you're still hammering nails.

author=kentona
Does anyone know if Maniacs and EasyRPG jive yet? Because I'd hate to convert to maniacs (because it does look very interesting and has features I could probably use to elevate HR remaster, but I don't want to shut out people who were hoping to play this on Macs or Androids :(

easyRPG cannot do battles when paired with Maniacs yet and it looks like the way battles are coded in rm2k3 is a reverse engineering minefield. So it'll probably be awhile. Having said that... I don't know if Linux/Mac users are entirely worth it (though porting to just about anything might be). It's like potentially 1% of your playerbase. EasyRPG is really nice though, mostly due to the rendering and Direct2D wrapper getting rid the screen tearing that even the official Steam release still has. It's a choice of future proofing (sticking with easyRPG only) or future proofing later (Maniacs but then eventually easyRPG figures battles out).