So is MV worth using now?

[gregbaby]

I own MV, I got it upon release, I was all excited as the promise of android support was there. until I realised the functionality was non existant... After trying it out I realised the creators of MV decided Android support was a complete after thought despite tacking it on to the product specs for the engine (BAD FORM ON YOUR PART) and didn't want to develop it properly to work with currrent gen devices.

My question is WHAT makes MV better than VX Ace (and please dont say plugins , plugins are scripts and theres plenty of those available for VX Ace)....

-Resources for MV are lacking.
-Android support for MV is seriously lacking despite it being one of the big selling pint for the product.

Yet the crowds flocked to this new app because it's "new".

So please explain to me what is better about MV that I can't do in VX Ace?

Has it gotten better? Are there better tools now for Android developers or is it still a complete afterthought intended to drive sales?

 

[mlogan]

I've moved this thread to Product Discussion and Support. Please be sure to post your threads in the correct forum next time. Thank you.

Though, this might not be the right place either, in which case, another mod may move it.

 

[Kes]

Just as an aside, there is no evidence that support for Android was an afterthought, indeed there is evidence to the contrary, and your assertion that this is, therefore, "bad form" is misplaced.

 

[Andar]

There were some problems with 1.0 of MV that have been fixed for quite a while (like the memory leaks), but what made most of the people trying to export to android fail has nothing to do with either the MV engine or the export process.

The problem is that you need to keep the limits of android devices in your mind from the very beginning of the game development.
Android devices have limited capacities, and if you ignore that and create a game that needs the resources of a desktop computer, then that game will always fail on export to android.
And a lot of people have tried that and then claimed that it would be a failure of RMMV that the android devices are too weak to run their games.
And that is simply wrong.

 

[LTN Games]

I agree with Andar. You need to think of every little detail when creating a mobile game. Screen resolutions are different, max texture size is I believe 2048 and sound files need to be M4A I believe. Not only this, but mobile won't be able to handle large maps with a lot of events and it won't be able to handle every plugin out there. The fact is creating a game for mobile is entirely different than creating a game for desktop, same goes for websites.
Funny thing is, I tested Android deployment the moment MV was released, and everything work fine for me. So I believe your question, rather than can MV export to android, should be, is it easier than it was when it was first released. Simply put, it's not easy and if you want multi platform then the best bet will be to to create two of the same project, one for desktop and one for mobile.
As for your other questions, MV is far superior than VX Ace, not only does JavaScript help with that but the resolutions, tilesets, rendering speed and many new features, make VX Ace look like child's play.
In the end, a little bit of research and dedication will give you a working mobile version of your MV project.

 

[jkweath]

There were some problems with 1.0 of MV that have been fixed for quite a while (like the memory leaks), but what made most of the people trying to export to android fail has nothing to do with either the MV engine or the export process.

The problem is that you need to keep the limits of android devices in your mind from the very beginning of the game development.
Android devices have limited capacities, and if you ignore that and create a game that needs the resources of a desktop computer, then that game will always fail on export to android.
And a lot of people have tried that and then claimed that it would be a failure of RMMV that the android devices are too weak to run their games.
And that is simply wrong.

To be completely fair--in my experience, even blank sample projects with nothing but a small map and a simple test battle won't run smoothly on older devices such as my Galaxy S3 or low-end, but newer devices such as my Alcatel Pixi Theatre. And adding in any moving events at all, playing animations in battle scenes, etc. make it much, much worse.

This was very confusing to me when I first got interested in Android deployment, considering that my Galaxy S3 ran Doom and Destiny (a game which appeared to be made in VX Ace, yet was somehow ported to Android) and also Final Fantasy Dimensions (a SNES-style FF for mobile) perfectly fine at 60 FPS.

Honestly, I felt the same disappoint Gregbaby felt when I realized this. But I eventually got over it and focused on learning how to optimize MV deployments for mobile devices.

That being said-you're right in that the game developer really needs to take the mobile conversion into account. Phones with device specs around the Galaxy S5 can run RPGMV games fine provided the game is optimized properly. It's up to the gamedev to take this into account, not the software dev.

 

[Poryg]

True, android support is really troublesome. But you know, android is not the best place to enter anyway, since your games will get buried pretty much unnoticed. Steam at least has sales or notifications about product updates. It has greenlight, new games featuring and I don't know what more. Google play doesn't have anything what can compare to that.
Also, it's not only limitations of android devices as a whole... But also, each android device brand reacts differently. For example a simple purchase of the exact same device after I broke my first one disabled several features inside one game I won't mention. Then I moved to another tablet... And had problems with graphical rendering being too slow. A problem of Android 5.1, unsolvable one. Then I upgraded into Android 6.0 and some of the disabled features were reenabled. Nothing was done through any interference of the devs or intentionally in any way... It were just devices responding to the game differently. And that is what makes android support even more complicated.

Back to your original question though. What is the selling point of RMMV?
You are right, once you look inside it, it isn't all as awesome as it suggests. We can for example take a look at the trailer.
The games have a built-in mouse and touch support, but a poorly optimized one. You have to click in such an unintuitive way. And I didn't see anything handled through swiping of fingers, which would be handy in menus. There is also no mouse wheel up or down as page up and page down. And I think some more things can be found.
You can export the game to IOS and Android, but this brings troubles on its' own.
You can also export the game to HTML5, but there is no reason to do it because of slow loading times. I have already met a game made in RMMV on Kongregate and preloading one GB of data would take eternity (not to mention it would crash my browser).
The side view battle system has even less default features than RPG maker 2003 by default.
Beautiful graphics and RTP music is for the most part a mashup from previous RPG makers. It is hard to search for a novelty there.
Higher resolution causes lags when the resolution is too high even on more powerful machines.
Improved character generator has an unnecessarily complicated way of adding new generator parts.
So, we have one feature left... Javascript.
In RM VXAce you had no 3D support and ruby inside the rpg maker had huge limitations. Sure, you had pseudo 3D scripts, but the Ruby engine did not support 3D in any way, causing limitations and even lags. In RPG maker MV you have the whole potential of javascript at hand. You can implement even scripts that are completely from outside if you can. You have full support of 3D if you throw away PIXI and replace it with 3D rendering scripts. And last but not least, RMMV game is fully customizable if you know how. You can completely throw away the core scripts and recreate the engine as you wish.
This is exactly what it says it is. Easy enough for a child, powerful enough for a developer. However, if you aren't a developer, you won't need what RMMV can offer, just like you mentioned. If you are a developer, I would recommend a different engine anyway, because rpg maker mv is very inefficient in terms of cpu and memory management. But javascript is the thing that truly is special in RMMV... However, if you are good at javascript, it would be better to scrap RPG maker MV completely anyway instead of buying it, because you can program anywhere with javascript and buying RMMV due to javascript is a waste of money, since javascript itself is free.

So in the end the RPG maker MV actually has nothing to offer to compete with other engines if not inside, then definitely outside of the RM community. If you don't know too much about coding, older engines will make do. And if you do, well...
However... RPG maker MV still is in development and still has potential. So we can wait and see.

 

[Chaos17]

So please explain to me what is better about MV that I can't do in VX Ace?

1. Resolution is better
2. Performance is better specialy if don't know how to code to make everything smooth. The plugins just play way more nicier between them, so less compatibility problem than before.

Which bring up the Android support.
Don't go Android if you don't know how to code because most of the available plugins don't care about Android.

 

[nio kasgami]

what is better from Ace,

on a ovveral platform : No hidden classes, so no limitations other than not having access to the engine limits, but after this not a problem.


more performant on many side because it's rely on GPU instead of CPU. + it's cross platform with Javascript.

the downside of it is the logic is not the same javascript can be messy to deal with the loading of assets are different than Ace.

but honestly on many side MV is better than MV because it's has not the same limitations of Ace

 

[Poryg]

@nio kasgami Actually, it isn't nearly as hot with the GPU usage as it could be.
The game loads materials through javascript, not pixi. So CPU, not GPU.
The game draws tilemap with GPU, but then creates a bitmap from them. That is CPU.
Parallax background uses CPU.
Many overlay plugins use CPU. Not GPU.
Creating sprites is done through GPU, but the manipulation of Chars and events uses CPU.
Drawing text in the game is through bitmap too. So another CPU usage.
Menu background and menu scenes are pure CPU, which, due to how demanding the menu is, results in FPS drops from 60 to 5.
Of course I can't deny the use of the gpu. The game still uses PIXI renderer, PIXI scene and PIXI ticker at the very least. But not too much is built upon that to be fair.
It is also not exactly right that MV is more performant.
In fact it is very inefficient in terms of CPU power usage, because of all these one line functions which make it easy to program in, but the cost for that is inefficiency. I've seen many cases where experienced programmers throw away the core, because they want to build something more efficient. It is more work with it, but pays off to them in terms of a clean system.
Also, RPG maker MV renders always whole map. It is in PIXI's power to limit rendering to the screen only... Which would mean lots of saved cpu power. But well... RPG maker VXAce solves this through antilag scripts. But there are no antilag scripts for MV... And perhaps there never will, because it is difficult to build one in MV.
I agree with you though... There are no limitations in MV that were in VXAce. And given that you have full access to core scripts, you have full power over how the game will look.

 

[HexMozart88]

Welp, I have both Ace and MV, and even though I prefer Ace, I'll admit MV does have its perks.

- Some event features have been fixed/improved upon
- Events are now visible in region mode
- Higher resolution
However, I really don't like the mobile aspect of it, 'cause the engine is far less powerful, resulting in much more lag. Plus, internet games seldom work properly. And yes, I agree. There are hardly any resources for MV, but that will change with time. It kind of depends on your priorities.

 

[Gemintronic]

My experience with other game making tools has taught me you can spend hundreds on pretty unfriendly export procedures. It seems only so much can be done before needing the customer to download Visual Studio and/or some Android SDK and hacking the exported project into them for the last step.

 

[metronome]

MV is not so much better than VXA for sure, but still, that doesn't mean MV is not better than VXA....
IMO:
What breaks MV is/was hype.
If only they didn't hype it too much back then....

 

[Gallia]

I have both VX Ace and MV, overall VX Ace was a bit easier to program, but i like MV more because there is an instant option for Side view battles (Classic Final Fantasy style) and i like it, also the generator is nice, the portraits looks prettier, other than that i have not noticed much, only that you have to use plugins to expand limitations (more weapons), overall it feels the same.

 

[djDarkX]

As others pointed out, I also own both. Hell, I own basically the whole line-up from 2000 all the way to MV and have worked with all of them, sans VX because is was poopy compared to Ace. Anyway, mobile works. Perhaps you are asking too much. Also, if you want it to work on older devices, better pull out your programming skills and start doing that since HTML5+Pixi.js were never really meant to work smoothly on older devices. It'd be like asking a game developer that just released something this year to make their game compatible with XP minimum hardware or even lower, which XP is honestly the most apt comparison here.

It can work smoothly on devices, but you need to trim the fat and think about the game running on a mobile device differently than it would on a computer. Ever play some of those 2D RPG's? Some use lesser frames, highly compressed and lower quality images and audio and so on. They also know their limits since Google is very strict about the app store. In fact, some people out there say there are games far bigger than 100MB on the app store and technically they are right. A good example is Final Fantasy 4. However, they get around the 100MB limitation by having you download the game data after installation. If an RM game had that, you could have games that packed on the pounds in terms of assets, but unless it's a stellar game, most people won't care and simply uninstall it.

Lack of assets? Ace had several years to gain assets, plus the community is constantly cycling through content creators and it could still use the VX and XP resources. So it had that as an advantage, plus the old Member+ service AND Restaff, which is all but gone now because people are busy. However, take a look in the resource store page. LOTS of resources to choose from! Don't want to pay? Then be patient. Willing to pay but can't get what you need? Hire an artist. There are plenty of options for you to choose from.

Now, Ace had some really nice things about it and honestly it was far faster and had some excellent scripts which MV can not use or they can't be ported over due to how the core scripts work to display everything (I'm looking at you, Center Text Alignment), but MV really is much better. Aside from mobile, you now have the option to have your game reach out to the three major operating systems, being Windows, Mac and Linux. HUGE step in the right direction to gain an even bigger audience.

So yeah, look at how much MV has improved upon Ace. It has its flaws, all programs do, but keep in mind that RM is a tool and the tool is only as good as the person wielding it.

 

[ChampX]

This is exactly what it says it is. Easy enough for a child, powerful enough for a developer. However, if you aren't a developer, you won't need what RMMV can offer, just like you mentioned. If you are a developer, I would recommend a different engine anyway, because rpg maker mv is very inefficient in terms of cpu and memory management. But javascript is the thing that truly is special in RMMV... However, if you are good at javascript, it would be better to scrap RPG maker MV completely anyway instead of buying it, because you can program anywhere with javascript and buying RMMV due to javascript is a waste of money, since javascript itself is free.

While you are not wrong, the reason I chose MV is because I can use the RPG engine as a starting point and modify it to my needs far faster and more efficiently than coding it from scratch in another engine such as Unity. I originally started doing that, but writing an entire 2D RPG engine was taking way too long and when I finally decided to switch over to MV, I turned about 4 months of work into a week which was fantastic as I was already busy as is with my day job as a developer working 10+ hour days. Yes other engines like Unity have more capability and flexibility to them, but you have to ask yourself if you actually need that extra capability and flexibility or if an engine like MV is "good enough" for your game needs. Time is my biggest factor and any developer will avoid reinventing the wheel wherever possible. Gameplay is what sells a game, not a tech demo. I have considered writing my current project in C++ using the SFML API, but aside from a learning experience, that would be a terrible terrible idea. If we really wanted to be efficient, we could write all our games in Assembly, but most developers would go crazy even attempting that (and probably wanna kill me for suggesting it to). Bottom line is, you have to weigh your options and decide what is the best fit for your game.

That said, I never used Ace, though I have used 2003 and XP as a teenager and one reason I never went past XP was because of how limiting RPG Maker was compared to other options and Ruby (especially RGSS) isn't really that transferable of a language skill within the game industry. JavaScript, however, is a very transferable skill so even if MV is your first game engine and JavaScript is your first language, you using JavaScript won't be a total waste of time. If you decide to use another engine like Unity or an HTML5 API like Phaser, your JavaScript skills will be transferable and if you branch outside game development but still wish to be a developer, JavaScript is a very widely used language out there. MV's main selling point is for developers -- JavaScript developers or users of plugins written by JavaScript developers. If writing code is of zero interest, you can probably get by with any RM out there.

Just my 2 cents and why I think MV is totally worth it.

 

[FleshToDust]

you guys have no idea how good you have it with rpg maker. I was learning c# with unity trying to make a basic rpg. I had to learn how to write the walking grid movement, make a "!" appear over head when near an interactable object, make the inventory system, the database, battle system, everything. then I find rpg maker and find out all this stuff is already done for you! Man... This is great. rpg maker is awesome.

 

[bgillisp]

you guys have no idea how good you have it with rpg maker. I was learning c# with unity trying to make a basic rpg. I had to learn how to write the walking grid movement, make a "!" appear over head when near an interactable object, make the inventory system, the database, battle system, everything. then I find rpg maker and find out all this stuff is already done for you! Man... This is great. rpg maker is awesome.

Seconded. I tried to write my own game engine back in high school in my free time (I had to wait 2 hours for my parents to pick me up after school, so I used that time to code). After 2+ years of development, I had the entire engine working...in ASCII. Yes, that means this was how 'state-of-the-art' the battle system was (Ignore the fact the lines aren't equal length, in actual development I used a grid to make them line up):

######################################
#.........................................1.......................................................#
#.............2.....3............................FF.................F........................#
#...................................................4...................5F......................#
#.............................6.................FF..............................F..............#

Well, you get the idea. It used numbers to show which party member was which (1 - 6 were party members), and letters for monsters, using the first letter of the name of the monster. And that was after 2 years of programming. Problem is, this was 1996 when games used VGA graphics and were on Windows 95. So I had just made a game for 1981 in 1996.

So yes, you have it real good right now compared to that.

 

[FleshToDust]

Well, you get the idea. It used numbers to show which party member was which (1 - 6 were party members), and letters for monsters, using the first letter of the name of the monster. And that was after 2 years of programming. Problem is, this was 1996 when games used VGA graphics and were on Windows 95. So I had just made a game for 1981 in 1996.

So yes, you have it real good right now compared to that.

wow that sounds brutal! I'm so glad something like rpg maker exists. I think a lot of people that say "use x engine instead" don't really understand rpg maker and why it's so great. on top of that, rpg's are one of the most complex and time consuming genres to make.
using another engine, you just couldn't do what you can in rpg maker in an efficient amount of time. and it has all the rpg basics you need and if you want to alter something you can always alter the code yourself. I was overwhelmed when I first saw just what this engine can do and how much of the legwork was already done for you. and javascript, a common language? amazing.

 

[ChampX]

@bgillisp

I would not want to write an entire game using ASCII. Props to you. When I was in high school, we had decent game engines to work with as engines like RPG Maker (XP and I think VX was new) and Game Maker (6 and 7) were picking up, but I was constantly told in order to be a professional I have to learn C++ with DirectX (or OpenGL) because its what professionals use, which was true at that moment in time. The indie scene was also nowhere as big yet as it is now. I'm still in awe at all the options we have now in the indie scene compared to 10 to 15 years ago. We have it real good now compared to even then. Hardware is also so much more advanced now that we can generally get away with using garbage collected languages, avoid talking directly with the hardware, and not need to hyper optimize almost every last thing due to limitations.

@FleshToDust

I think generally people who say use x game engine instead because it has more power and potential are people who think better tech always means a better game and ignore every other factor. Its also common in the sense "if pros use x game engine you should to" but aren't aware of any potential pitfalls to using such engines. A tool is just a tool and you have to decide what tool is best for your game requirements and needs. There is never a one size fits all (though Unity is attempting to work toward that).