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[RM2K3] Rpg Maker Maniacs Patch (for official version)

08/28/2021 04:01 PM
author=KotatsuAkira
Supporting some additions from EasyRPG (ID: 203~216). What does that mean?


There are some hardcoded strings in RPG_RT.exe and in EasyRPG Player the strings can be translated through additional LDB chunks.

This is now also supported by ManiacPatch.

We communicate a bit with each other to prevent redundant stuff in the database :).

Fields Easyrpg

[RM2K3] Rpg Maker Maniacs Patch (for official version)

06/02/2021 01:11 PM
What was achieved in 2-3 years (guess there was some work before to document everything) is really impressive. 3 years is very fast for this.

BingShan should become a security researcher, is really smart in figuring out / patching assembler code it seems.

To answer the question where we wasted time for comparison. By now we could likely write EasyRPG Player again in 5 years, we gained so much knowledge over the last 10 years. I started C++ programming in 2008 so I was still very inexperienced (also C++03 sucks, C++11 made the language so much better).

Our goals are a bit different. BingShan "only" targets RPG Maker 2003 Steam on Windows. One could say the Maniac Patch is now a new game engine. Our goal is to make RPG Maker 2000/2003 games run everywhere.

- No need for RPG Maker 2000 specific support (also no 2000 battle system) or bugs in older engine versions
- Not multiplattform (no platform specific bugs to fix, they are annoying. Also
developing for Android sucks so much, all developers in the team equally hate it. It is zero fun to target this platform, I only have hate against Android).
- No support for additional patches such as Ineluki Key Patch

Especially the Web Player support made our code more complex: You must return every frame to the browser, so something like "Start transition, render the transition for one frame, End transition" in a tight loop doesn't work anymore, you must enable the transition, yield the interpreter, return to the browser, do the transition, resume the interpreter. When you don't do this the web browser will report your tab as stuck and kill it :(.

And by far our biggest time waster in EasyRPG development was that we only relied on "blackbox testing" for figuring out stuff. This just wastes tons of time because you usually do not catch the quirks / edge-cases.

We were stuck in the following cycle for years:

1. You get a bug report with a stuck game submitted
2. You open the game
3. You notice the game event code is a terrible, undocumented mess out of 100 parallel processes, so you try to understand the game code first and why it hangs in Player (this takes hours)
4. After 8 hours of figuring out what the game does you introduce one line of code to the Player that fixes it
5. a Week later you get a report that a game that worked before broke and guess what, it was the fix you just added!

We were kinda stuck in this situation for years, Event and Move Route handling must be frame-perfect, otherwise you break too many games.

Since last year we started to analyze the RPG_RT code and this dramatically improved the compatibility because you suddenly saw the hundreds of edge cases we missed and then suddenly all the game-breaking bugs are gone, the games just worked.

Then we did the same recently for Battle 2000 and 2003 (we had lots of problems with event timings): The 2000 Battle code is quite nice but the 2003 code is a disgusting ugly sphagetti code monster. Whoever wrote this had no idea what they were doing. (I'm imprssed that BingShan got the battle working)

When you analyze RPG_RT for a while you notice quickly, that the RPG 2000 devs were smart developers and RPG 2003 feels like some outsourced garbage pile. Probably tight deadlines, completely new dev team and Enterbrain wanted to make some money. Their added features introduced lots of bugs because they didn't consider all the places where it interacts with old functionalty. The change class event command is just broken and the same applies to equipment that invokes states. The 2003 battle code is also a mess, the algorithms have bugs and the CBA (item animations) code is also ugly.

Old/Lost RpgMaker Games - SegNin's Rare/Obscure RM Games Request Topic

07/08/2020 11:46 PM
I have no idea why you'd go through web archive to find games that are still on the site just fine? This seems scummy.


Hm?
The pastebin games are all still online but the download links are dead. (at least most of them, my script is not perfect)

The ones I listed here are all 404, thats why I linked archive.org ... Try them without archive.org you will see it.

Old/Lost RpgMaker Games - SegNin's Rare/Obscure RM Games Request Topic

07/08/2020 11:13 PM
Thanks for your help :) And EDIT. Made a mistake. I have more of them then I thought already. Somehow my local filenames were wrong. I removed the ones I have.

Lets make it a bit worse. Data mining ftw. ;)

The next list is a bit longer (247 items) so I won't post it directly here, is a bit spammy xD

https://pastebin.com/GFJAs2zm

The list contains games still listed on rpgmaker.net that only have "external download links, that are dead". Also machine generated, probed with jDownloader, so will have some false-positives (but even if they are, you should download them ASAP, they are high risk to go offline!). I already prefiltered stuff like itch.io and gamejolt.

Old/Lost RpgMaker Games - SegNin's Rare/Obscure RM Games Request Topic

07/08/2020 10:42 PM
Yeah that list was partially machine generated. Thanks for the help. It is indeed the Infinite Mana you linked. There were actually 126 games that are gone but except for these 40 I have all of them ;).

Old/Lost RpgMaker Games - SegNin's Rare/Obscure RM Games Request Topic

Old/Lost RpgMaker Games - SegNin's Rare/Obscure RM Games Request Topic

06/18/2020 10:10 PM
rmarchiv.tk is currently down. The new address is rmarchiv.de.

There was an abuse report and the domain hoster decided to directly block the domain without forwarding the abuse to the webmaster so they can react on it...

Never get .tk domains, the domain provider is bad -_-

Just started streaming!

05/23/2019 01:19 PM
@bulmabriefs144

Question about the title:

I noticed in the stream that the title says in Japanese とうきょう の よげんしゃ (Toukyou no yogensha) but the game title is "Oracle of Tao" and not Toyko.

Is there a story behind the English vs Japanese mismatch? :)

Old/Lost RpgMaker Games - SegNin's Rare/Obscure RM Games Request Topic

04/16/2019 02:21 PM
The problems with ZIP files are that there is no standard how the filenames are supposed to be encoded.

The basic rule is: Never use the built-in zip program from Windows! I think they fixed it in Windows 10 but just never use it for packing any zips!!!

Just use WinRAR or 7zip for creating "zip" archives. They have the correct encoding (UTF-8/Unicode) and will extract on any system properly (if you don't use the Windows built-in ZIP tool).

And best is when you don't use any fancy algorithm when creating the zips, best is "Deflate", this will extract anywhere without issues (Deflate64 is already unsupported by the unzip command line tool).

For problematic ZIPs (and LZH, but this is more a Japanese thing, these are these "Game discs" created from the editor) you can use "unar" (unarchiver). This program can guess the encoding of the archive, the same way EasyRPG Player uses to support games of any region which are problematic in RPG_RT.

Old/Lost RpgMaker Games - SegNin's Rare/Obscure RM Games Request Topic

02/28/2019 01:33 PM
Yeah, I apologize for not getting around to this sooner. This collection of games should also have some of the games you guys mentioned here that I mentioned I was gonna upload awhile back

Oh thats great, will check this.

EDIT: Were you guys able to grab Davy Jones' collection of games on multimediaxis.de

I have a copy of that collection but providing this mess is not worth it, all games from that list can be found well organized on rmarchiv.tk.

The mods had to remove the link because MMX is very strict about copyright violations.

German law problem, there is nothing like "Fair use". They have to remove links to stuff when they are made aware of copyright violations well and to be clear almost any German game has SNES asset rips or stolen Music. They got so many hints about stuff in the MEGA Box, that they had to remove the link.

rmarchiv community is currently not hostile enough, so we don't have any copyright trolls yet which report all games. ^^
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