Suggestion 15 years later and too little has changed

[lincore]

Hello.
This post may sound like a rant, but I just want to express my dissatisfaction with the product and explain why I decided not to buy it and go with a superior product instead. I don't think that anybody should care, but maybe someone wants to put it into salesforce

I remember using 2003 and XP quite a long time. When I recently felt the desire to spend my free time working on a toy RPG, I downloaded the trial. To my dismay, the software hasn't changed that much. It seems a bit brazen to rebrand the same editor I used 15 years ago and sell it as new. Now I don't mean to imply that nothing has changed, but the features that have been implemented are either details or the HTML runtime (not having that would have made the product irrelevant so in my view it doesn't illustrate the company's interest to improve it, which is what my whole rant is about).

The first problem is that the editor is as flexible as a slab of concrete. I don't expect it to be expandable a la Unity, but at least give me custom database records and event commands (the clunky plugin command is a makeshift solution at best). Why do I still have to put up with the text box system that can't handle word wrap, long text (without destructively converting them into multiple text box commands) or in-text choices a la ink, not to speak of variable references? Why can't I make events move via pathfinding, which has already been implemented for touch controls?
The so called database is a disgrace. It has barely changed, except for the very important 'notes' field. When I first read that peope use that to circumvent the editor's shortcomings (via plugins), I couldn't help but laugh. What is the editor good for if you can't change the specific game rules already baked in, character stats inspired by FF and similar games of old. Don't use hardcoded dialogs, allow users to add new fields to the database, like d&d attributes etc.

The second problem is that the default game is not good/fun. It obviously can be tuned to make fights meaningful and fun, but when I create a new project and start a battle test, it's among the worst the genre has to offer. Final Fantasy VI uses a similar system, is 26 years old and still much better than RPG Maker. That is quite an achievement considering how much game design has improved since then and tight game mechanics have displaced number pushing slugfests of old. I understand that nostalgia is a driving factor for many users (myself included), but the default should be enjoyable and guide users into the right direction when creating their own game design. Another pet peeve of mine is the bad UX. Of course JRPGs are infamous for their sprawling menus and I understand that RPG Maker has to honour that tradition of bad interaction design. But the battle system is arguably worse than many 90s SNES titles. It's basically text driven, so players have to read repetitive and sometimes verbose status messages to keep up. State is hardly communicated outside this window. That was fine in 2005, not today. There is often no discernible connection between the various elements on screen. Rather unimportant elements like character portrays have a tendency drown out the more important stuff like character stats. This is worsend by having portraits and stats clump together in one big blob of confusion (see fundamental design principles). The various colours used to display these stats might be considered pretty by some, but I will just call them meaningless and distracting. Important things should look important and they eye should have no difficulty finding them. Visual clarity should be the guiding principle in general, but especially when designing a UI for a fast paced battle system.

The third problem imho is the runtime and that it's arguably not written to be flexible and easy to adapt. Reading the window code reminded me a lot of the ruby counterpart from 15 years ago. Too much is hard coded, only what's in the editor is data driven. Why is the UI so rigid? The developers favour inheritance over composition and overall it didn't strike me as the kind of code that you want non-programmers/beginners to deal with (arguably the vast majority of your users). Also I'm personally offended to be exposed to ES5 without a warning, couldn't you have migrated to ES6 in the last few years or so? The documentation is lackluster, patchy and often not very descriptive (the language barrier probably doesn't help). I've seen a staff member providing a reference in a google spreadsheet! You know you can programmatically create documentations, right? I'm eternally grateful for the community member who provided a d.ts file, this should come with RPG Maker.

So that's it. RPG Maker had and has potential to be much more than it currently is, but on the other hand there are not many comparable products on the market so there's probably little incentive to change. There are vastly superior game engines, but those are also more difficult to use and there is no large community dedicated to making RPGs and hardly anything else. That's the dilemma I have. I would like to be part of this dedicated community, but I just can't bring myself to use the software it's centered around. If anybody reads this, thanks

 

[Milennin]

It's honestly sad RPG Maker hasn't changed much, and if it wasn't as big of a hobby of mine as it is, I wouldn't be getting each new version. The RPG Maker core is so good, but there's so much potential for more that isn't utilised, I feel. From VX, to Ace, to MV, to MZ, all feel like gradual upgrades, but nothing very major. There's been so many features people have requested for years, and still aren't implemented. There are features from RM2K(3) that still haven't been brought back to newer versions. Too many times we get told to get a plugin to get things done, as if there's just plugins for these things to find, but that's not true.
Getting plugins for common RPG features isn't as easy as "just getting the plugin"; even my paid request for plugins I'm looking for hasn't been getting any offers for over a month, lol. It's such a chore having to dig through forums and waiting for offers to get my game to be a little different than the default.

 

[sb~]

I generally agree the vanilla RPG Maker is almost physically painful to use, and most RTP games equally painful to play. However at the end of the day it's a simple game engine that allows users to start somewhere.

Like other game engines, I think we can judge its potential with the games that are made on it. Just to name a few: OneShot, Lisa, and To the Moon are all critically acclaimed games made with the software, so I would argue the potential is there to create something amazing with it. Would it be nice if we had more flexibility with the base engine? Sure. But at least the capability is there to modify almost every element of the game to make something unique.

 

[ロリ先輩]

If you look into the Japanese mastery of recent internet/web technologies, it's pretty impressive that they've gone this far.

Many Japanese web sites/web apps still have a very late 90s/early 2000's feel to them, and there isn't as much driving force there in the JS/TS development field as you have overseas (there are a ridiculous number of full stack .NET/TypeScript/Angular/React positions always seeking additional hands in the West), and that's really going to trickle down into the development stack. Often times, I get the feeling that the decision to use a Web-based stack for MV/MZ was to easily port to other platforms, rather than necessarily taking advantage of the actual capabilities of the platform (especially since MZ uses webassembly to access the animation engine for battles, so you're hemorrhaging a lot of performance each time you switch into the webassembly context).

Realistically, in the core Japanese audience, there's not really a demand to push it further. RPG Maker and the RTP packages are more than sufficient for some doujin games, and that's it. It meets all the criteria that it needs to for that market, and doesn't really surpass it or butter beyond that core of that piece of bread.

 

[ramza]

I wouldn't consider myself real big on the actual playing of rpg maker games, but I can speak to your concerns with the UI of the editor:

They are correct. The editor is rigid, and basically unchanging, and they deliberately keep it basically the same as in all previous makers so that it remains simple and easily approachable to beginners, while remaining familiar enough to people who have used previous versions to not be completely offputting.

This program is designed for a novice to create "babies first rpg" first and foremost, so heavily customizing the editor isn't real high on the priority list. Why? Because if you're advanced enough to be adding in modules and fully customizing every aspect of the whole engine, you're advanced enough to progress to something for a more advanced user.

I will admit, some of the things you've mentioned would be nice to have, specifically the ability for plugins to modify the editor in some way, would be great. The inability to move events to a set location via pathfinding is a bit strange too, now that you mention it, but the majority of issues with the editor are not likely to ever be changed for the above reasons I mentioned. Likewise, the reason why you don't have an infinite list of customizable hero attributes, like a DnD character sheet is because this engine is designed to make a standard vanilla JRPG, and as you move further away from that vision, you start to need plugins to change those things.

That statement kind of leads me into your second issue, the default engine itself being unfun. The default battle system, with the default heroes, and their default skills/classes, fighting a default monster is unfun because it is a blank template. It is designed to be as bland and generic as possible, so that the developer can make it into their own thing more easily. If the default battle system went over the top with combo hits, special dual attacks, crazy enemy AI, and all kinds of other stuff, the vast majority of that would go unused in a lot of games, or worse, every 'RTP Style' game would use that stuff to death, and cause it to be the lame uninteresting tripe that a battle system from 26 years ago is now.

What would you suggest to make the battle system less bland and uninteresting? What can you suggest that once you see it in four dozen 'Harold Saves the World' RPGs would you still believe to be interesting? The fact is, it's not on Degica, to make the default system interesting, it's on you as a developer to make something out of that system worth playing, whether that be by having an interesting story, unique battle mechanics, fancy graphics, or whatever you decide on.

Your third problem seems to me to boil down to "I don't like the way it looks", either through the way windows are drawn, or the individual colors on gauges, or the stats displayed in battle, or on the menu, or that the menus themselves are too rat-nest-y. To that, the answer, my dude, is plugins. Going back to what I said for the first point, this engine is designed to emulate a certain kind of game, and you even mention that already, so you're already aware of it. If it does something you don't like, change it. Just because it doesn't have a thousand confusing options with poor documentation hidden away in context menus behind other context menus doesn't mean you can't change it.
They left it a certain way so it would most easily make a certain kind of game for a certain kind of developer. If this doesn't speak to your interests, you can change them via scripting, which is waaaaaay more robust, and way easier on degica to account for than a million menu options that no one will understand anyway.

With that being said, some of my favorite rpg maker games are from the before times, when RMXP was a dream, and all you had were the event commands to work with. Some people did some amazing stuff entirely with those default commands, because there was no other way. People can continue to do that now too, it's just much easier to customize than it had been (read: at all).

Honestly, if the newer makers don't appeal to you because they're too much like the older ones, that's fine, don't buy it. If you want something that's infinitely more customizable, you're gonna wanna look for an engine that isn't designed for 'babies first vidya game'.

 

[Winshifter]

In general I would agree with some of your comments about the engine. I personally believe it is really a very good engine for beginers or for those who don't have much experience in programming or game development. Granted, it's not this magical sand box that allows you to create pretty much what you want like Unity or Unreal Engine, but it has the basics to create a game, and even in previous versions you could use it for things that were not really designed for.

As a programmer, my main concern is their lack of propper documentation of the default code methods, and trust me, in more than 10 years of experience working for and with several companies, this looks like amateur level of documentation. If I were to ask, and I think I did when MZ was announced, was that, they really documented their code, to a degree that improved, but man, I did better documentation in my programming clases in college than this guys, and japanese, coreans and chinese programmers have a very good fame (at least where I live) about having the best code pactices and documentation, but I digress.

I think that for what is designed RPG Maker (any version) works fine, they have room for improvement (a room the size of a football stadium ), there are lots of plugins or code for your game if you want to have specific things and, if you know programming, you can create you own stuff your own way and make the game as you would like, in XP, VX, VX Ace, MV and MZ more than 2000 or 2003. Like others have said, if you want something much more sophisticated, there are other tools that might help you better.

Sometimes is not that the tool is not working, maybe is just that it isn't the tool that you require.

 

[TheoAllen]

I don't disagree with some of the points. But I will highlight some point that I could respond

To my dismay, the software hasn't changed that much. It seems a bit brazen to rebrand the same editor I used 15 years ago and sell it as new.

If it is not "the same", it will not be an RPG Maker we know.
If it is not "the same", it is probably won't be familiar to us and had to re-learn, and at that point, it probably won't be "RPG Maker".

I don't expect it to be expandable a la Unity, but at least give me custom database records

You're describing Unity.

Why can't I make events move via pathfinding, which has already been implemented for touch controls?

For user's "safety", it is better to customize the path yourself.
If you're using pathfinding, especially in the long-range, the character could pick any path and get stuck. And that could be the user's fault, why? because maybe in the middle of their trip, another event blocked the way.

Besides, pathfinding in touch input has a limited search range. For example, the search range is 10 tiles. if your destination is more than 10 tiles range, and I mean, you need to walk more than 10 tiles, the pathfinding fails to get the path and your character would be dump enough to walk and get stuck. Why is this? I would assume that pathfinding may consume processing resources so that limiting the search range is not a bad choice.

What is the editor good for if you can't change the specific game rules already baked in

You can, but it won't be easy. This complaint is mostly from people who can not code, which is totally understandable. They don't want to deal with technical detail and want everything to change everything within the editor. We plugin developers are here to help though.

For example, I use the Weapon database as a perk database so that I don't mix it with my states database because I'm not using the weapon database in my game.

The second problem is that the default game is not good/fun

They never meant to be. They are teaching you how things work rather than a game.

but the default should be enjoyable and guide users into the right direction when creating their own game design

And the user is like "I will just modify this and done", then you get a bunch of same game on the internet, which is already happening, then you make it worse.

But the battle system is arguably worse than many 90s SNES titles. It's basically text driven, so players have to read repetitive and sometimes verbose status messages to keep up.

I partially agree with this. But MZ had been improved slightly better on the default battle UI. Which is one of the reasons why I'm skipping MV.

The third problem imho is the runtime and that it's arguably not written to be flexible and easy to adapt.

Depends on what you mean by "easy to adapt".
If you mean that it is hard to learn, I don't disagree.

But if you mean, hard to be modified, I don't think so. If you're making a game, you're bound to hardcode everything to make your target mechanic works. I'm assuming that you're not aiming to release a public plugin.

Reading the window code reminded me a lot of the ruby counterpart from 15 years ago. Too much is hard coded, only what's in the editor is data driven.

I'm going to wrap this up as "the menu should be able to be modified in the editor".

The developers favour inheritance over composition and overall it didn't strike me as the kind of code that you want non-programmers/beginners to deal with (arguably the vast majority of your users)

The user is never expected to code.
Also, the trait system is basically like composition, but ok.

Also I'm personally offended to be exposed to ES5 without a warning, couldn't you have migrated to ES6 in the last few years or so?

How does ES6 help with plugin development?
And by ES6, are you saying the class syntax?

The documentation is lackluster, patchy and often not very descriptive

This is a complicated matter.
RGSS3 (VXAce) has a comprehensive help file and no one seems to read it. Most of the basic questions asked can be answered by reading the help file. But when the help file is not complete, someone also complains.

----------
Now I assume that the thing you wish is granted.
Who would be using the new "RPG Maker"?
A veteran developer?
A teen y/o kid with no programming experience?
Both?

 

[Beregon]

For user's "safety", it is better to customize the path yourself.
If you're using pathfinding, especially in the long-range, the character could pick any path and get stuck. And that could be the user's fault, why? because maybe in the middle of their trip, another event blocked the way.

Besides, pathfinding in touch input has a limited search range. For example, the search range is 10 tiles. if your destination is more than 10 tiles range, and I mean, you need to walk more than 10 tiles, the pathfinding fails to get the path and your character would be dump enough to walk and get stuck. Why is this? I would assume that pathfinding may consume processing resources so that limiting the search range is not a bad choice.

To respond to this particular issue, you actually can have events use the default pathfinding for movement, all you need to do is use a script call. As for events getting stuck, I didn't see an issue like that, the events went around each other if they got in the way and it worked fine. I guess there could be problems if you have really narrow maps with lots of 1 tile passages, but even then you can design around that or use workarounds/modify things.

The pathfinding search limit is trivial to change, just like the max amount of party members in battle, all you need to do is literally just change one number.

As for performance, well, events don't update their movement off-screen, so if you don't change that, it shouldn't have that much of an effect, atleast if there's no event with pathfinding on screen. Now, if you do change that and have events move offscreen, then changing the search limit to something ridiculous like 200 or so does affect the game performance, but that's to be expected.

 

[AeroPergold]

Idk, I like how consistent the RPG Maker engines has been and I see it as more of a comfort zone more than anything else. But I feel that its up to the user to what extent the engine should be modified via plugins and other methods.

BUT I like the traditional turn based mechanics because I'm a Trad Chad. But I do get why the battle system is boring. The only choices in changing it is learning to program with minimal documentation of what RPG Maker can do OR buy one of those pimped out plugins from VisuStella or Yanfly or whatever. My only complaint about it is that no one has ever remade the battle engine from EarthBound outside of aesthetics!

But I'm whatever about RPG Maker not changing, I'm either insane for doing the same thing over and over again or I'm wwwwaaaayyyy too comfy with the engine. I feel non-aligned on this issue.

 

[TheoAllen]

@Beregon
I don't disagree with using pathfinding. I use it myself on VXAce that I make my own pathfinding. It greatly improves the QoL but mostly I'm using it for a short path rather than go from the top left to the bottom right of the map.

I guess there could be problems if you have really narrow maps with lots of 1 tile passages, but even then you can design around that or use workarounds/modify things.

I'm highlighting this problem. Often, when it is "broken", the user will blame the program rather than reflecting themselves on what is wrong with their setup. It is purely for the "user-friendliness". When you deliberately put move command step by step, if something is wrong, you know you're the one to blame. But if you tell the program to "move this character to this tile", and it is not doing what it's been told to do, they will blame the engine which may or may not be the case.

 

[estriole]

i actually think that not much change in RM editor partially good thing... since old user will transition easily to new engine... for example in MZ... they changed the animation system... and i really hate that change... since it force the user to learn external program to make the new animation... they should have add that as an alternative / addon /optional instead of replacing good old animation system...

but honestly my biggest disappointment with RM series is their 'mobile deployment' promise which is not like what i expected... when i buy MV few years ago... i expect that i can deploy the game directly and make apk files... even i did not put it at playstore... at least i can install in my phone / my friend phone... but alas... the mobile deployment is not like what i expected... not to mention even when i do all those complicated method to make apk files... the game still not run smoothly in mobile... many bugs... lags... delayed audio... sometimes graphical error (black screen) at the start of the game... and so many more...

and now in MZ... not much improvement on how to make apk files... still complicated... and i'm too lazy now to even try does it work better in mobile environment than MV... I'm guessing it still sucks though... (correct me if i'm wrong ).

 

[Frogboy]

RPG Maker had and has potential to be much more than it currently is...

I largely agree. There's little to no reason why they couldn't have an "Advanced" button in each database tab that allows for greater customizability that can be ignored by novice users and utilized by advanced ones and not converting over to ES6 is borderline criminal. But keep your eyes peeled, I'm working on it. It'll be a while but stay tuned.

 

[Beregon]

@Beregon
I don't disagree with using pathfinding. I use it myself on VXAce that I make my own pathfinding. It greatly improves the QoL but mostly I'm using it for a short path rather than go from the top left to the bottom right of the map.


I'm highlighting this problem. Often, when it is "broken", the user will blame the program rather than reflecting themselves on what is wrong with their setup. It is purely for the "user-friendliness". When you deliberately put move command step by step, if something is wrong, you know you're the one to blame. But if you tell the program to "move this character to this tile", and it is not doing what it's been told to do, they will blame the engine which may or may not be the case.

Yeah, I get that, this was meant as much for the OP to tell them it is possible, but for whatever reason, their quote didn't show up. I used it for monsters chasing the player. Didn't have any problems with it except performance related when I put search limit to 200 and allowed events to move off-screen. But I can certainly see how people could blame the engine for being broken if it was just an event command.

This is actually true for a lot of things, there are way more advanced possibilities than what's there in the editor when you look at script calls. But also a lot more potential for things to go wrong.

That said, RPG Maker could use more than what it has by default. The editor could use more options for customization. And at the very least, there could be official plugins past what is included at launch.

 

[Tuomo L]

It's a bit unfair to compare to FF6 as it is the pinnacle of 16-bit RPG design with a budget many times bigger than that of RPG Maker. A more realistic comparision would be to compare RPG Maker to FF 4.

 

[Neil-Hamersly]

Hello.
This post may sound like a rant, but I just want to express my dissatisfaction with the product and explain why I decided not to buy it and go with a superior product instead. I don't think that anybody should care, but maybe someone wants to put it into salesforce

I remember using 2003 and XP quite a long time. When I recently felt the desire to spend my free time working on a toy RPG, I downloaded the trial. To my dismay, the software hasn't changed that much. It seems a bit brazen to rebrand the same editor I used 15 years ago and sell it as new. Now I don't mean to imply that nothing has changed, but the features that have been implemented are either details or the HTML runtime (not having that would have made the product irrelevant so in my view it doesn't illustrate the company's interest to improve it, which is what my whole rant is about).

The first problem is that the editor is as flexible as a slab of concrete. I don't expect it to be expandable a la Unity, but at least give me custom database records and event commands (the clunky plugin command is a makeshift solution at best). Why do I still have to put up with the text box system that can't handle word wrap, long text (without destructively converting them into multiple text box commands) or in-text choices a la ink, not to speak of variable references? Why can't I make events move via pathfinding, which has already been implemented for touch controls?
The so called database is a disgrace. It has barely changed, except for the very important 'notes' field. When I first read that peope use that to circumvent the editor's shortcomings (via plugins), I couldn't help but laugh. What is the editor good for if you can't change the specific game rules already baked in, character stats inspired by FF and similar games of old. Don't use hardcoded dialogs, allow users to add new fields to the database, like d&d attributes etc.

The second problem is that the default game is not good/fun. It obviously can be tuned to make fights meaningful and fun, but when I create a new project and start a battle test, it's among the worst the genre has to offer. Final Fantasy VI uses a similar system, is 26 years old and still much better than RPG Maker. That is quite an achievement considering how much game design has improved since then and tight game mechanics have displaced number pushing slugfests of old. I understand that nostalgia is a driving factor for many users (myself included), but the default should be enjoyable and guide users into the right direction when creating their own game design. Another pet peeve of mine is the bad UX. Of course JRPGs are infamous for their sprawling menus and I understand that RPG Maker has to honour that tradition of bad interaction design. But the battle system is arguably worse than many 90s SNES titles. It's basically text driven, so players have to read repetitive and sometimes verbose status messages to keep up. State is hardly communicated outside this window. That was fine in 2005, not today. There is often no discernible connection between the various elements on screen. Rather unimportant elements like character portrays have a tendency drown out the more important stuff like character stats. This is worsend by having portraits and stats clump together in one big blob of confusion (see fundamental design principles). The various colours used to display these stats might be considered pretty by some, but I will just call them meaningless and distracting. Important things should look important and they eye should have no difficulty finding them. Visual clarity should be the guiding principle in general, but especially when designing a UI for a fast paced battle system.

The third problem imho is the runtime and that it's arguably not written to be flexible and easy to adapt. Reading the window code reminded me a lot of the ruby counterpart from 15 years ago. Too much is hard coded, only what's in the editor is data driven. Why is the UI so rigid? The developers favour inheritance over composition and overall it didn't strike me as the kind of code that you want non-programmers/beginners to deal with (arguably the vast majority of your users). Also I'm personally offended to be exposed to ES5 without a warning, couldn't you have migrated to ES6 in the last few years or so? The documentation is lackluster, patchy and often not very descriptive (the language barrier probably doesn't help). I've seen a staff member providing a reference in a google spreadsheet! You know you can programmatically create documentations, right? I'm eternally grateful for the community member who provided a d.ts file, this should come with RPG Maker.

So that's it. RPG Maker had and has potential to be much more than it currently is, but on the other hand there are not many comparable products on the market so there's probably little incentive to change. There are vastly superior game engines, but those are also more difficult to use and there is no large community dedicated to making RPGs and hardly anything else. That's the dilemma I have. I would like to be part of this dedicated community, but I just can't bring myself to use the software it's centered around. If anybody reads this, thanks

does rpg maker mz do more things then VX Ace?

 

[TheoAllen]

does rpg maker mz do more things then VX Ace?

Short answer, yes.

 

[KaiserDragon]

I also agree that RPG Maker hasn't changed much over these many years. I also believe they were so close to a near perfect maker with RPG Maker XP. I believe if they merge the features of XP and VX Ace together would make an incredible RPG Maker. Especially with the following abilities:

1. Keep XP's animated autotiles the same. (Unlimited frames or at least allow for 8 frames)
2. Keep XP's tile format. (256w x unlimited height)
3. Keep VX Ace's four characters on playing field. (Like in Dragon Warrior III)
4. Keep VX Ace's Region definer.
5. Keep VX Ace's Icons.
6. Add 4 layer support.
7. Add Side-view battle support.
8. Add support for animated individual tiles. At least 8 frames. (Animated .GIF and/or Animated .PNG)
9. Allow smooth map transitions. (Particularly on larger world maps)

Again merge XP and VX Ace together keeping and adding in the above. This would make an incredible RPG Maker.

 

[TheoAllen]

256w x unlimited height

Unlimited height is a bad idea.
It will just make people lazy and just put all the tiles in a single file and in the process, put a heavy burden on the game. With modular A-E tiles, you load the tiles that you need without putting a burden on the game.