RPG Maker MZ, Preview #2: Graphics, Mapping, Eventing!

[Dark_Ansem]

@Touchfuzzy question: is there any way now to actually establish when, during animations, multiple hits occur? Or are they all clumped at the same point when the animation finishes?

 

[Dalph]

Actor 1-4 (red haired girl) looks like she is from Overwatch, and Gale gives me Legend of Legaia vibes (I think it's the big bracelet he wears and his hair).

 

[Touchfuzzy]

Can I have some examples as to what use this would serve or what people would use this for? I've never tracked these things myself so I'm not sure what the point is, but it seems like I'm obviously missing something here. Thanks.

https://blog.rpgmakerweb.com/tutorials/tutorial-using-regionid-in-events/ Here is one example
https://blog.rpgmakerweb.com/tutorials/regionids-spike-traps/ here was another time I talked about it.

(Both are Ace tutorials, but they are still applicable)

 

[Aotaru]

If my english is well enough (i am german) it is part of a way to port the player to a last visited town, inn or the like in any fit circumstance.
Edit: Ok, why aren't all post visible when i reload the the Page, but appear when i post something despite being writen 15 minutes ago

 

[The Stranger]

I like how the characters shown on the first page seem to be just male and female variations of the same two characters. If I were to pick a favourite right now, I'd have to go with the pink haired girl. I think she looks pretty cool.

 

[Dark_Ansem]

Will he have greater control over battler sprites @Touchfuzzy ? Namely, to decide size and/or actual number of frames?

 

[JosephSeraph]

having a lot of fun playing with the characters from this RTP

 

[Lion Blade Soler]

I just realised the autotile cliffs have rounded corners!!!!

You are right! The autotiles for the cliffs do have rounded corners, which is another plus to the tilesets from MZ.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

Will he have greater control over battler sprites @Touchfuzzy ? Namely, to decide size and/or actual number of frames?

SV Battler sprites are handled the same as in MV.

 

[jonthefox]

@JosephSeraph HOW did you do that?! And where can I get that retrified version of the tiles?!!?!?

 

[JosephSeraph]

HOW did you do that?!

On GraphicsGale! XD
Planning on having some retro (24x24, NOT 16x16) assets for when MZ is out

though I don't have much more art for the MZ characters so i'll do some other makers for the time being, i'll make a thread for it later hahah

As for the tileset... I just whipped that up in 5 minutes! For you to achieve the same results just follow these steps:

-Open the image file
-Downscale to half size (24x24 tiles)
-index the color to a reduced palette, in my case I did color indexing in Pattern mode which gives it this pattern-y, almost 2k3FSM look.
-Upscale back to 48x48 then save and you're done!

It needs cleanup, though. I haven't cleaned it up in this image, which is why there's a lot of little issues. I'm thinking about making a 24p MV/MZ thread later, too. This method even works for Ace tiles and you can even port them to MV/Z this way, though instead of downscaling to half size you downscale to 2/3rds size (still 24x24)

I just need to see how i'll approach asset making for MZ. But I'm looking forward not only to what the plugin buddies will cook up, but also what us artists have in store teehee

 

[jonthefox]

@JosephSeraph take my money!! I'm going to try that method out later, thank you so much! I usually use GIMP, and I've only ever done indexing by reducing the number of colors, so that's the part that I'll need to figure out how to make happen.

 

[JosephSeraph]

take my money!!

i'm happy that i heard this thrice today and it's been long since i last heard that LMAOOOOOO i'm doing something right! XD

I've only ever done indexing by reducing the number of colors

That's sort of what indexing does! (not exactly; what it does is generate an array of IDs each assigned an R, G and B value, and then the image references color by ID rather than straight up writing the RGB value to each pixel making for a lighter picture... or that's what i think it does anyway)

The magic here is that indexing is algorhithmic! Or rather, when you press indexing on Gimp, the program uses an algorithm to prioritize which colors to keep or which colors to change / to make intermediate.
The Dither algorithm works on another level by deciding how to create new colors by mixing pixels within this premade palette. When your resolution is really big and your color count is small, this always results in massively improved color perception. when your resolution is small though, it becomes basically a stylistic difference and it's what makes these lil' grid patterns pop up.

Uh, anyway I don't really know what I'm talking about i just think i know what i'm talking about, be confident in your speech and you can make anyone believe the Earth is flat!


edit: um thanks for the motivation! gets me pumped XD

 

[jkweath]

@JosephSeraph I was the first one! Take my money first! TAKE IT, I SAY!

 

[aston00]

These are things that could have been worked into previous makers. But wheres the money in that? It just sucks that some features that are needed to make a decent game are kept away so a new maker can be sold with a feature or two that people want but didn't get in a previous maker. Layers and map size for a true open world rpg has always been the biggest issues. You get an idea then your motivated and dive in only to hit another hurdle that can't be worked out until.................the next maker yay. But I'm guessing the map size will still be an issue, but maybe we will get it in the next paid maker? does it make sense to tease us with a 250 x 250 map that cant be utilized? I have spent good money on custom things to make a real game but have to build the game of my dreams in ways I'm not happy with because I thought you could make an open-world game with a nice huge map size that was boasted about, but with no mention that u cant use it due to lag or other issues. just make small connected maps and alls well. No, not true.

 

[Archeia]

By work on previous makers, you mean completely rehauling the Editor and Base Code and then get under fire that plugins no longer work and create a version segregation where people argue what update of RPG Maker you should get and spread misinformation that it doesn't work on this version versus this one version when after so many posts ppl have proven it does??

 

[Wavelength]

@aston00 That is ridiculous. There's no middleware in the world that can do "everything you could possibly ever want to do in a game" without you customizing some of it yourself, because it would cause not only a horribly bloated interface but also crippling lag in the game itself. So the engine's makers have to decide what to include, what to leave out, and how to make it as easy as possible to extend the functionality yourself (using things like scripts and plugins in RPG Maker, or GameMaker Language in GameMaker Studio). And like Archeia said, while RPG Maker's devs do the best they can to work in a few essential, low-risk features into the editor after release, most things you would want would completely break peoples' existing games that they are working on, and would also break existing plugins that people in the community use. It's not about some kind of abstract greed like you're asserting. It's about real, hard decisions about what's feasible to include, and what would be problematic.

 

[K2loid]

@slimmmeiske2 this is for u

ERIC...YOU'RE SO GREY...??? Has he become a zombie after Ralph drained his Existence Energy??

I was afraid that that'd be the case, i really don't like him > _>

also, the only darker-skinned character being the evil / sketchy looking one? Color me surprised!
View attachment 149972
but i won't complain much about that lol. it's not like it isn't an rpg maker trope or anything. Complaining in this thread will do absolutely nothing other than create animosity XD
View attachment 149973
At least Erik was a breath of fresh air.

In light of greyness, I think this deserves a proper breakdown, because this is actually also a bugbear of mine. While it's timely to seriously consider race, this is years of :/ feelings. MV is absolutely the worst of it with the only real Dark person being the sexy belly dancer exotic elf woman And the only other overtly and unsubtly darker-skinned characters being the 2 Evildude villains And lest we forget, the generator literally makes creating dark-skinned OCs difficult because there's this hideous blotchy smear across their damn faces. I've tried my hand at my own facesets before; I know for a fact its because when the face was adjusted, through blurring or some unblended definition, there was zero regard for how it would look with a higher contrast with a rich base colour. Like no one even thought to test them to be sure? You just shipped it like that?


handheld has the best track record with DS's whopping 11 dark-skinned characters! 10 of which are heroic, and 8 of which look like Hero's Party members. There may even be 12 characters if you count the slight tint of Actor 12. Of course, they were all copy-pastes of each other; if you have 160 individual characters to work with, what's a little...6% of the cast. Oh. And every single one of them are white in their sprites. Oopsie!

Speaking of DLCs based on consoles, I know its a lot of characters, but FES was an improvement by have a huge and diverse cast of dark-skinned characters where - while there are some lily white sprites - has anyone who is a shade under tan show as dark-skinned in the sprites! And then also had an actually somewhat okay (if, once again, proportionally minuscule. Just, teensy weensy population) selection of roles for these characters, and then those sprites...are crudely x2 upscaled so you can't use them in anything that isn't a retro pack. Classy. At least it had the good sense to come with tilesets.

So, VX Ace championed the first non-peachy hero, with a tan character to compare him with on the same facesheet so you know for Realsies that he's definitely brown & not just Picrew Tanned, yet Eric's sprite - in an RTP that isn't a mass copy-paste of hueshifted assets, the main actor of VX Ace mind you - is literally also lily-white. It's not even corrected in the DLC pack.

I know that it's not official, but that skit video, Eric's putrid rotten flesh colour on top of all of that....

I think that this is such a consistent pattern contributes enough ill will to be at least something to think about with the new release. RPG Maker 95 being better about skin tones with their 2 caricature characters than a modern release with their heroes is seriously.....um. Even the very dark-skinned thieves in 2000 kept their rich skintone & "part of the hero's party" aesthetic through to the portrait redraws in 2003, and the sprites retained that info. A hell of a lot better than Sexy Exotic Belly Dancer (1).

I don't know if this is lack of communication (like MV's Actor2 having blond hair despite every single other piece of material featuring her having brown hair) or just yet another faction of people who believe sprites simply don't matter in a game despite it being the 1 thing the player will be staring at the entire duration, but...you know...

oopsiiieeee
[Fun data for people who love to be miserable; these are the 2 darkest characters of all 160 you get. Of the 11.5 characters who don't have light skin, 1.25% of the cast are actually dark. And they get those peachy sprites!]

Whew! That's a lot to chew, and I trimmed FES and skipped XP entirely. I feel like the granular details of all this & how we engage with it should be in its own thread, but to reduce the conversation as much as possible to MZ specifically;

1. Of the 120 characters [or 60 characters and their isekai counterparts?] is the racial makeup still this bleak?
2. Of the dark-skinned characters, do the sprites reflect the characters?
3. Is there even curly hair in the generator? Not even coily styles, any curls at all?

 

[Archeia]

@K2loid it's literally eyedropped from his color palette and there was a bright light across everyone's faces so that's probably why it looks like that? The coloring for everyone in that video is actually bright in general compared to my usual style so eh.

Sure let's go with that explanation. Eric's definitely exhausted since he has to make a video and draw all of the poses in 2 days while also having to handle tech issues and all that stuff.

 

[Mr. Detective]

That event route preview is a sure purchase for me!