RPG Maker MV 1.6.0 and GENE!

[bgillisp]

Also please remember there is NOTHING the company can do to make sure all plug-in authors actually update their plug-ins. The public Beta was out for 3 months, the authors had time to make the needed changes so plug-ins were fixed, so if they were not ready to go it is honestly their fault. Maybe you should all be asking them why we had like 6 whole people help us with the public beta instead, because if all the plug-in authors had helped with the Beta most of these issues would have never occurred.

 

[Dutch Power Creations]

Plugin creators do this for free in their own time without getting a real pay check so the company could be a little more nice about caring a bit more and making 1.6 more compatible and flexible then it is right now.

I do think people should give the company time to fix the bigger issues that crash the game like the problem I reported. Because as already said, I think 1.6 has some really great things in it! Keep it up!!

 

[Sharm]

Plugin creators do this for free in their own time without getting a real pay check so the company could be a little more nice about caring a bit more and making 1.6 more compatible and flexible then it is right now.

Okay, this sounds pretty and all, but what is it supposed to mean? More compatible means doing what, exactly? How do you want things to be more flexible?

Bgillisp isn't saying he's upset with the plug in creators, he's saying that instead of yelling at the people who made the new version for the broken plugins, which they have zero control over, they should take their complaints to the people who actually have the power to do something about it, and have since before this version came out. We have pages and pages of people yelling at poor Archeia to fix their plugins. Not something she has any ability to do. I don't think anyone should yell at anyone over this, and I don't think Bgillisp thinks so either, but if someone wants their plugins to work with this version, they should talk to the people who have the power to do something about it, the plugin creators.

The only thing that the people making updates can do to make this so that it doesn't break plugins is to not update. It's the unfortunate reality of programming, there's nothing anyone can do to change this. It's also why there is a public beta, so that the plugin creators can see what's changed and make fixes or workarounds to the things that have shifted around. I think I've heard that they sent out direct invitations to the beta to the big plugin writers, but I'm not 100% on that one. The thing that users can do to completely avoid broken plugins is to not upgrade right away, or not at all. The upgrades are, and always have been, completely optional. As rough as these sorts of transitions have always been, I'm glad that they do make these updates. I have personally benefited from them. I know that sometimes plug in creators have benefitted too. I've heard of times where something changing has opened up the possibility of a new feature that just couldn't be done before.

Something I'd just like to mention is that Degica isn't a big company. They can't send a team of programmers to fix the issues overnight like Microsoft can, I don't even know if they have more than one programmer working on the updates at all. They can't have a representative watching the forum and steam and facebook and twitter 24-7 to respond immediately when things blow up, Archeia is it, and she has other responsibilities and a life and needs to sleep sometimes. Bgillisp and I and the other mods are all unpaid volunteers who just love hanging out here and want to help out. We don't represent Degica, and we don't have any more power to fix the problems with this update than you do.

Now, there is another point in Bgillisp's post, and that there were only 6 beta testers. This was pointed at the people saying "How dare you put this out! It should be more polished!" It's as polished as those 6 beta testers could get it. Of course adding thousands of new users would pull up loads of issues from the woodwork. Of course there are bugs, I dare you to find a single non-binary program in the history of computers that doesn't have one. I'm not sure what anyone would suggest Degica should do to fix this low tester count. I bet if the suggestions were politely worded, Archeia would love to hear them. More testers would make everyone's lives easier.

Something else that I'd like to point out is there seems to be some sort of confusion about something key. Dutch Power Creations pointed out that plugin creators aren't getting paid to make plugins. I'd like to point out that Degica isn't getting paid to make updates. Not a single penny is being sent from the users to Degica to do this, updates don't translate to new sales, it doesn't get them youtube advertising revenue, it doesn't get them a ******* boost, it does nothing monetarily for Degica to work so hard at making an already sold product better for the people using it.

I am not saying that people aren't allowed to be upset that this update isn't working for them. But let's put everything in the right context before we start yelling and maybe we can all work together to fix it and make RM better instead, yes?

 

[Touchfuzzy]

Just to add: Most of the staff on this forum are not paid to be here. Lunarea, Archeia, and I are the only ones that are Degica employees. A lot of the staff here transitioned from an old fan forum that I was a major admin at before I was hired by Degica, and even more have been promoted to a place of responsibility from the community after were were established here.

To be perfectly honest, I understand frustration, but updates are going to break plugins. And we can't fix plugins. We're mostly asking for people to not be yelly. I don't now what all of you do for jobs, but I imagine that none of you would be happy to go in to listen to someone yell at you for hours about something that you can't even completely control

We are addressing the issues as well as we can. Bugs happen. (Do you know how many times I have fumed quietly at home when a Windows 10 update broke something). Plugin incompatibility is impossible to avoid. Plugin writers need to fix that, we can't.

We want to make RPG Maker better for everyone. Please state any issues politely.

 

[bgillisp]

@Sharm summed it up perfectly. We really should be bringing up the issues to those who can fix them. And as for the plug-in creators being unpaid, most of your big name creators have had patreons which brings in (last I heard) thousands per month for at least a year. So technically they are being paid...by you, the users.

BTW, my number of 6 was an off the cuff number to prove a point, not an exact statistic. But the point is the same, which is almost no one was willing to help with the public Beta when they had a chance, so all that could be done was to push out the update as at that point in time, the company had good faith that it worked based on what little reports they had. There was honestly nothing else that could be done.

As it is, just remember you are never obligated to update. There's a reason big name companies do not update their engines in the middle of development of a game. Back when WIndows 95 first came out, many companies still made DOS games, as they were well into development, and it was too expensive and time consuming to switch. Same thing happens when a new Unity version comes out. People don't switch just because it is too time consuming and will break too many things, so they stay with the old version until their game is done. Maybe we all need to take a page from the AAA companies, and if our projects are mid-development, not update? After all, they do just that, and if they feel it is too expensive and time consuming to be switching or upgrading engines mid-way, then why do we, as a small indy developer, think it will go better for us with our smaller teams?

 

[leenat40]

I do like the idea of GENE and I would love to use it eventually, but right now I heavily worked around the limitations of RPG Maker to make the cutscenes with a certain style, so I can't change it half way. Maybe next time! ^__^

 

[Parallax Panda]

I don't know if this is the spot, but I've found a bug that I'd like to report.

When creating a new event and choosing an image file from either "Tileset B" or "Tileset C" (instead of a sprite), the engine crashes. I tried it several times to be sure and it crashes every time. I hope this can be fixed in future updates. Cheers!

 

[fizzly]

I don't know if this is the spot, but I've found a bug that I'd like to report.

When creating a new event and choosing an image file from either "Tileset B" or "Tileset C" (instead of a sprite), the engine crashes. I tried it several times to be sure and it crashes every time. I hope this can be fixed in future updates. Cheers!

Yes, had the same. I was forced to downgrade to 1.5.

 

[Mike2]

Apparently the very worthwhile advice and information here isn't known by or reaching a significant number of customers who need to know. Solve this problem and it won't matter if some plugins break.

 

[Poryg]

@Mike2 The funniest thing is, in the index page of rmw forum, just like there's now the MV 1.6.0 and GENE picture instead, there was a picture stating explicitly that MV public beta 1.6.0 was out as well as MV school project participation invitation, which is now gone.
In the first post of MV 1.6.0 public beta it was also explicitly said that MV 1.6.0 was going to break a lot of plugins due to update of nw.js and in the first few pages there was a clarification that update to 1.6.0 is mostly beneficial to advanced developers.
The information was out there even with hyperlinks, since the pictures in index page are clickable hyperlinks. Just one click and they'd be in the forum thread. The thread itself was stickied in MV improvement boards. I guess nobody reads that either though.
By the way, how many people participated in MV school? The answer is the same. Not many. And MV school even has a dedicated forum section.
So I'd say the problem is not in spreading the information.

 

[pka4916]

People need to relax and take a step back.
It's mentioned already that they are working on yet, yet people keep complaining about the same issues.

As far rolling back. READ the 1ST POST!! it's clearly stated what to do for Steam and the Non Steam versions.
and replacing the html file in your project.

It's not the end of the world. 1.5.1 works great for now.

Edit: @Poryg pretty much posted the same as while I was typing this message, regarding the rollback and reading.

 

[sura_tc]

Aside from the tileset selection bug, I've yet to run into any significant issues with MV 1.6 itself.

Causes of my issues turned out to be from plugins.

 

[ChampX]

It basically was already said by others, but this problem is not exclusive to MV. Even big players like Unity have this problem to, possibly even worse. If you buy a plugin or extension off the asset store that was for Unity 4.5 and you were using Unity 4.5, it works and when Unity updated to 4.6 it may still work. However, when they updated to Unity 5, a lot of those plugins and extensions broke. The same happens when Unity went from 5.6 to 2017(basically Unity 6 essentially) recently. These are things developers BOUGHT and PAID MONEY for and now no longer work. At least with MV you didn't pay money for most (if any) of your plugins.

Regardless, as it already was said, don't just blindly update to a new version just for the sake of updating. Ideally, have your project in source control, commit any work you haven't to your local or remote branch so you have no pending changes, do the update on MV and your project, run a smoke test (basically a quick and dirty general test) to make sure nothing broke. If nothing broke, commit the update to source control. If something did break, either see if it is something you can fix yourself, or just undo the changes so you're back to the last good state of your project pre update and follow the steps posts here have said to rolling back MV.

Remember how when Windows XP went to Windows Vista/7 and again for Windows 7 to 8/8.1/10, people wouldn't just quickly update because of compatibility issues? Its the same concept here.

 

[sura_tc]

Unity certainly has it worse because they run a highly paid asset store. You could spend hundreds and, during few years of development, it may not work in the end because Unity updates. Unless it's popular assets, they don't get updated as often as they should and a lot get abandoned after its initial release.

MV's plugins are mostly community based and devs are in general helpful (if you can contact them).

 

[Dutch Power Creations]

It's good to see that admins are involved in this subject.

@bgillisp @Sharm @Touchfuzzy

You all just elaborated on what I said and I totally understand and agree. It's hard with such a big user base to filter information and for Degica to get things done as they are not a huge company. That said, they are still a company and sold a product to people and give a medium like this forum for them to voice their feelings. This thread concludes (at least for me) into the customers wanting their plugins to have more compatibility with a new version. I don't have an answer on how to do this but I do have the suggestion that it should be thought over, what is the use of a new version if the sales are not going up but the current customers that you made it for can't use it because of errors popping up everywhere?

So with compatibility and flexibility, I mean that Degica should give themselves more time to reach out (more) to the plugin creators like Yanfly. If it is true that they received an invitation to cooperate then why did he release a youtube video stating 1.6 being a pain in the *** for his plugins and him instantly releasing fixes for it? Now, the current customers who all have made great games on lower versions with those plugins that would like to carry over their project to a better engine version get stuck because of this.

So yes, customers should relax a bit but degica (first) and the coders (2nd) should take more responsibility for the once paying them (if you count ******* as a real payment rather then a donation even when it is a lot of money). I wouldn't mind paying for a better version if I get guarantees my game will not error itself out. It's so messy now

 

[Kes]

@Dutch Power Creations I have to admit I'm slightly confused by your position.
On the one hand, your first paragraph seems to be saying that as there are no additional sales resulting from the update, Degica need to think hard about doing one at all as current customers can't use it. In other words, perhaps it should just have been left at 1.5.1

Your second paragraph draws attention to current customers wanting to upgrade to a better engine. But there wouldn't be a better engine if Degica had followed your implied suggestion.

As far as I can see, Degica did try to square that circle by stressing that existing users were not obliged to upgrade, and by making it very clear how to go back to the earlier version if the upgrade did not suit a user's particular game.

No one is forced to upgrade. So no one is forced to abandon any work because some plugins don't work with the upgrade. Users with affected plugins can carry on exactly as they were doing this time last week. They are no worse off than before the upgrade came out.

 

[Dutch Power Creations]

Exactly the thing that makes me fall in between, I already like 1.6 because it brings so much greatness to my game! And a game crashing bug... The dilemma that makes me scream for a fix or I am forced to go back to 1.5.1 which I rather not do.

So that's why I am saying a great job on 1.6 but fix stuff (one way or another) a.s.a.p. so I can enjoy the engine. It can't handle multiple animations anymore, it stresses the engine out, but on the other hand, it handles scenes much, MUCH better making it feel so smooth (except when the whole game begins to lag because of the animations and crashes in the end...) Hmmm... Did I say Dilemma?

I do have time on my side as I can still keep developing that's why I am saying; take your time Degica with processing all the feedback/information that you can use to fix some things and put out a better version when you think it is ready for testing.

 

[Mike2]

True confession: 1.6 came as a complete surprise to me. My first encounter with it was that cryptic message about needing to update something because of some kind of changes to Java Script.

I am just now realizing how useful this forum might be but honestly, my primary RPG maker info sources have been YouTube Tutorials, a couple of Discord Servers set up by Youtubers, and the websites of a few plugin designers. I'm sure there are many others like me.

 

[Biestmann]

True confession: 1.6 came as a complete surprise to me. My first encounter with it was that cryptic message about needing to update something because of some kind of changes to Java Script.

I am just now realizing how useful this forum might be but honestly, my primary RPG maker info sources have been YouTube Tutorials, a couple of Discord Servers set up by Youtubers, and the websites of a few plugin designers. I'm sure there are many others like me.

This forum is home to many prominent RPGMakers and plugin creators, and you will always find a helpful hand here. Use every platform at your disposal, and you will get the most out of everything. I am not sure what you are asking for otherwise.

That bug is due to YEP CoreEngine. Update it to 1.27 and that will fix it.

Thanks, I will see if that fixes the issue. Also, case in point.

 

[Pharonix]

Does Gene require 1.6.0 or is it compatible with 1.5.1?