RGSS Improvements

[Lemur]

I know I'm not the only one thinking this, so it'd be nice to get a list down of features that'd be great to have in RGSS (4?) that would transition it to a much much more powerful system. Here's an outline and brief for each point I'll make.

• Open Source - By opening it, you allow other devs to help out with the core. 
• Allow other editors to open RM scripts - The built in editor can be a pain, and this can tie into the above.
• Enable Ruby Gems - This will allow for far faster extensibility, sharing of code, and libraries
• Allow for a testing system - This is what gives pro software a lot of its edge, they know when they break something
• YARD Docs for all - Document the core library in a standard format, also to do with open sourcing it.
• Use SQLite - This will give far more flexibility than the current data format for little more overheadAdd in something similar to ActiveRecord, and you have a monstrous powerset for use with relations and querying

[*]Enable Git support - Automatic versioning and an easy GUI interface would be very useful
[*]Write a Book - A definitive book would be useful to get people started

Open Source it

The argument will come up quickly that doing so lowers the financial viability of the product. Perhaps, but you can sell resources just as easily and really you don't even have to OS the entire thing. Just the scripting / game frontend and you've still given a huge amount of power to developers to quickly improve the product.

Allow other editors

The built in editor isn't very useful. You can't configure it, you can't macro, you can't do a lot of things. This can tie into open sourcing the STDLIB of RGSS and not putting them all in data files. Just use straight Ruby files, far easier to deal with in the long run too.

Enable Ruby Gems

If there were one thing that would make RM infinitely more powerful, this would be it. Along with RM, install a standard version of Ruby that's fully capable and just mention upgrades later. If you have gems, you've opened up a huge realm for sharing scripts through Rubygems, versioning, and lists of dependencies such as a Gemfile and Gemfile.lock. Most of the power's there, and it takes care of a lot of the issues of updating things. Really, this even takes care of the issues of having to change scripts to use them.

Allow for a Testing System

This ties back into the OS and Ruby Gems part, but having something like RSPEC would greatly improve the quality of code, especially if the STDLIB is fully tested. Being able to prove your code works, and test against changes, is invaluable.

YARD Docs for All

By documenting the STDLIB you have an entire HTML guide you can post which is most of the way to a book. The current PDF is inaccessible and cumbersome to wade through. You have to go through a lot of various sources just to find something.

Use SQLite

Again back to the concept of gems, by allowing RM to save to any Database you get a lot more power than binary files. Combine with something like ActiveRecord and you could do something like this:

player = Player.find_by(name: 'Arshes')player.damageplayer.items << Item.find_by(name: 'Sword of Truth') player.attack Monster.find(1) # slime?
Of course that's a simple example, but one of the things Rails did extremely well.

Enable Git

This ties in to the other parts. Adding git support to the scripts would be handy in saving your project elsewhere on Github if you'd like. This also ties into open source parts.

Write a Book

A good standard book would do the community a lot of good. I'd consider writing parts of one or just tutorials in general. The problem is that tutorials and blog articles always end up giving a cobblestone like approach where you never get the entire story of it in one place. You end up wading through several just to find what should be a simple thing.

 

[TheoAllen]

Open source

Is that mean so you can edit resolution, edit how the editor looks like, and how Sprite / Tilemap / other built-in classes are handled?

Allow other editor

There is Gemini RGSS script editor as an option

http://forum.chaos-project.com/index.php?topic=10420.0

Ruby Gems

I'm not familiar with gems thingy. Can you provide the example if we could use Gems, what you gonna do in RPG Maker? And how do you use the gems in RPG Maker? I mean, like a step to install?

 

[Lemur]

Open source as in allow the entire RGSS STDLIB to be on somewhere like Github officially.

Rubygems - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyGems

Bundler - http://bundler.io/

Consider this -

source "https://rubygems.org" gem 'active-battler', '1.0'gem 'tactical-battle-system', '~> 1.5'gem 'better-movements', '2.0'
and all you have to do is type bundle install and it'll resolve all the dependencies and make sure the versions of those gems work together. That's all it would take to get new scripts and features into your game. How much easier would that be?

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

Would that download the scripts into the project? And would that mean we will need to put all scripts in a centralized server or something?

 

[Galenmereth]

Yes, rubygems downloads the files for you, as well as their dependencies. And no, you can specify any source, so you wouldn't have to put your scripts in a centralized place. But since you probably make scripts because you want people to use them, it'd be a good idea anyway.

 

[Lemur]

Rubygems is already a centralized server, you just push your gem there and done. If you don't like that, you can specify a github source for the gem as well.

 

[Archeia]

There is no way Enterbrain would want RM to be Open source.

I do agree a lot with Gems though. Always wanted to have a custom UI add-on to RM default.

 

[Galenmereth]

We wouldn't want RM to be OS, just RGSS (or the major parts of it), so that scripting could be vastly improved.

 

[FenixFyreX]

Gem implementation for RPG Maker would be tricky; most features / scripts that apply to it that scripters around here write have configuration options that can be altered from within the script editor; this allows non-scripters to be able to edit things in the scripts without having to know Ruby as a whole.


Unless the next iteration of RPG Maker implemented a direct Gem to Editor system, this configuration idiom used by so many RPG Maker code developers would fall through.


Considering this, I think that the Gem to Editor system is plausible, given that each rpg maker centric gem has a special config file, and when the gem(s) are downloaded, the config files are placed in the editor, and the rest of the code in a source directory or perhaps a database.


I like your suggestions, I just have a veeeeeery difficult time seeing Enterbrain release the source to any of their programs. Especially their newest one.

 

[Archeia]

I was under the impression they didn't want RGSS to be open is because it's going to be easily exploited (RM is mainly used by 'kids') and they needed to hide some functions. RGSS has online capabilities so it's not farfetched to say, "Oh here is my big ass module!" Setup to copy your resources and upload it in some account. Or just put a virus under the guise of a CBS. (I downloaded one before ;^; )

 

[nio kasgami]

seriously this cool to have better coding but we have to think about the kid who use that?

RM is designate for be simple and fun to use 

the way you describe that make me think about Unity where yes the coding is powerfull but damn this scary  and hard to code 

I will prefer to have some hidden rgss part and only have the necessary who make me more easy to work with it instead of a big bunch of code and I get scare to manipulate it 

 

[Lemur]

That's part of the point is that the current paradigm of modifying scripts is broken. There are better ways to achieve the same functionality that forces cleaner code. Railties, config/name.yml files, and other solutions are already much better suited for it. Speaking of which, a folder system would be nice.

The thing is is that none of this would detract from what kids would be able to do with it. It would give a lot more power on the backend that many would never touch except for scripters.

 

[??????]

Your points are excellent, I literally cannot think of another to add.

I do however think it extremely unlikely that Enterbrain will release any source to any RM product. Realistically - if you investigate around enough you will notice there are many 'similar' products more in line with your suggestions - such as Gosu and StarRuby.

One could assume that 'Enterbrains Product' is just a 'slightly' more advanced version of those Gem's. And obviously if if is, and they released the source - there would suddenly be FREE products that do exactly what rpg maker does - Enterbrain no longer has a unique product and sales stop. :/

Again though, I think that having source code (even for just the scripting side of things - no need for source code for the editor) would be immensely useful. It would also allow for a much more powerful 'game creation environment' without Enterbrain having to pay for it. <- that to me is a reason for them to do it

 

[FenixFyreX]

I would go as far as to say, forget releasing the source. If anything, I'd like the C API to be exposed, so we can efficiently recreate the source (such as Tilemap, Bitmap, etc) if we wanted. Hiding the C Api and disabling the loading of Ruby extensions has already been worked around, so hiding it won't work anymore, anyway.


The model of RPG Maker's internal workings is too tightly knitted and ignores the main idea that Ruby exudes: duck typing; the ability to pass in an object that has a variable 'width', 'weight', and 'pixel_data' shouldn't be restricted to just RM's Bitmap class, but any class that has those three variables.


It's things like this that make RPG Maker so restrictive; not being able to use your own custon classes, or 'overload' the default functionality.


And may, I have to definitely agree with Point 2. I use my own modified version of the Gemini Editor. I cannot stand using RPG Maker's default code editor; my monitor resolution is very large and being able to zoom in on code and scroll left or right is important to me. Plus, it lacks any decent syntactical and / or useful functionality...

 

[Tsukihime]

I do however think it extremely unlikely that Enterbrain will release any source to any RM product. Realistically - if you investigate around enough you will notice there are many 'similar' products more in line with your suggestions - such as Gosu and StarRuby.

How are they similar to RPG Maker? They're just libraries.

 

[Galenmereth]

I use my own editor too (Sublime Text 3) together with my "plugin scripts" (really just a good framework for loading a bunch of external files in specified orders with subfolders and so on), because doing any extensive coding in the internal editor is a nightmare. Not to mention incompatible with version control which is an absolute must.

 

[??????]

@Tsuki - They are similar in being 'game creation' tools using Ruby.

 

[verheffen]

Your points are excellent, I literally cannot think of another to add.

I do however think it extremely unlikely that Enterbrain will release any source to any RM product. Realistically - if you investigate around enough you will notice there are many 'similar' products more in line with your suggestions - such as Gosu and StarRuby.

One could assume that 'Enterbrains Product' is just a 'slightly' more advanced version of those Gem's. And obviously if if is, and they released the source - there would suddenly be FREE products that do exactly what rpg maker does - Enterbrain no longer has a unique product and sales stop. :/

Again though, I think that having source code (even for just the scripting side of things - no need for source code for the editor) would be immensely useful. It would also allow for a much more powerful 'game creation environment' without Enterbrain having to pay for it. <- that to me is a reason for them to do it

I do agree with this. There are other game creation tools for ruby. I could probably say much about Gosu with Chingu. They are great and easy.

 

[FenixFyreX]

They (the libraries mentioned in the last few posts) are great and relatively easy, but they only cater to programmers, or someone who has regular access to a programmer's help / time / work, whereas RPG Maker has a UI, a map and database editor, etc. Yes, it restricts what you can do with the system, but technically, you could just wipe the Script Database clean and start from scratch with just the internals, and that is how RGSS (not RPG Maker) is similar to StarRuby / Gosu / ray / others.

 

[Lemur]

If I really wanted to be cheeky I could just make an engine based off of Rails for database management and have it make Javascript games via AngularJS. Call it Spirit Tracks for laughs (before Nintendo gets pissy.)

When I say Open Source, I mean the RGSS end. Get them out of binary files and into editable folders like any sane configuration. That alone would be a huge plus, especially if it reads through directories.