GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

Congrats on finishing the game!

I remember playing one of the earlier demos back in the Township Demo Day's and now that its finished I'll have to give it another spin (and see how long my sanity lasts, wooo!)

That's the visual aid I was talking about. Without it, it would've taken me even longer to reach the third boss (which is where the game really opens up). There's no way I could ever find the time to figure out the game on its own.

http://grs.negative0.net/RMXP/Rm2k3%20Fonts.rar

Download and copy the fonts to your Windows\Fonts directory. If that doesn't fix it, use the RPG_RT.exe included with that file in place of your current one.

(If you don't have WinRAR, use this instead)

author=Darken link=topic=726.msg9723#msg9723 date=1204056825
However, I find alot of my game requires specific songs that can only be found in midi format and I cannot find the mp3 adaptations.

You can convert MIDI to MP3 without too much effort. Winamp can export any music file it can play as a *.wav file using the DiskWriter output plugin and then throw that *.wav file into a file converter to make it a MP3/OGG/ect. . I've done it with some SPCs which I can't find in MIDI format, plus it makes editing much easier like cutting intros to improve the track looping (and lets not even bother talking about SPC->MIDI converters, I tried it once and the result sounded terrible, but I've got all the musical talent of a pair of socks)

If you're smart when dealing with digital music (MP3s and the like), you won't have the same level of size explosion when using them. The newer RPG Makers (XP and VX) support the OGG format which can compress at lower bitrates and still keep the quality of the music good while MP3s pretty much sound like a cat in a blender at the same bitrates. Encoding music as OGGs at 48kbps usually means a great drop in filesize with a small drop in quality. Don't touch the sampling frequency though, that reduces the filesize marignally for a huge drop in quality. Bitrate only.

There's also speeding up music at x2 speed so that it takes up half the space and when playing the game, the music is slowed to 50%. I remember this technique was used back before the MP3 plugin for RPGMaker 2000. I tried it once years ago and didn't like it, but I don't remember why so it might be worth looking into.

There's also editing the content of digital music so that there's less redundant content. Most of my VGM stuff loops twice before fading out and if you're using a track like that in your game, edit out the second loop + fadeout before making it a MP3. Plus it helps when the music ends, removing the fadeout really helps.


To show how this helps, I currently have 11:18 worth of music in my game spread across 8 tracks and its a whole 3.2MB. They're all OGG encoded at the lowest bitrate possible (I was aiming for "what I could live with", but I couldn't knock the bitrate that low) with edits to remove double loops and fadeouts and to improve the transition from the end of a track to the start so it wasn't as noticable.



So, uh, yeah. Go digital music! Big filesizes don't really matter to me as long as its a single download that doesn't require any extra work besides starting it. I can just leave the download open and get to it when it finishes. There's an upper limit for how far I'll go, but I doubt any RPG Maker game will actually reach that limit.