Ultra Mode 7

[bblizzard]

I added the CHARACTERS_USE_FADE_Z option in v1.6.3 so this is where the performance issues started. I disabled it by default now.

Also, if somebody were to make a custom shader for sprites that includes tint/tone and blend color processing in the shader, it could be used independently from UM7 to fix the issue (kind of) globally.

 

[41728280]

In fact, I haven't paid much attention to the fade-in and fade-out changes of the horizon. Because I did not build the sky. I always want to see towns, villages and so on on the map
If it does not affect performance, then the visual effect is certainly better, if it is for performance. I can also give it up. Maybe it’s also a good choice to enable it on some maps that don’t use much decoration.

 

[Espilonarge]

If I could make a suggestion regarding fading characters/doodads.

Instead of making the plugin make a call every frame of vertical movement to change the coloration/fade of a character/doodad, there could be a setting in the plugin to adapt how much space it takes for a coloration/fade effect to happen to a character/doodad.

For example, having it set to 48 would make the coloration/fade of events/doodads to only happen once every tile space of the map instead of every "pixel" along a tile space. While this won't outright fix the performance drops (and the coloration/fade will look a little more "choppy" between color shades), it would at least help mitigate the majority of the performance problems caused by the changes.

 

[bblizzard]

Hm, maybe. You'd still get lag spikes so I don't think it's a good solution. I remember people complaining about those lag spikes that were caused by a typo in pixi-tilemap which then affected UM7. xD

 

[bblizzard]

So, I am not exactly sure why or how, but when you deploy a build with Yanfly's Grid-Free Doodads, it appears that a few classes are actually removed from the code. Due to this UM7 encounters an error and doesn't load the remaining compatibility code.

I'll fix everything (including some OcRam functionality) and post a new version later today.

EDIT: Done.

 

[41728280]

bblizzard, great!
Now it works almost perfectly, and the deployment is correct. The only regret is that the rectangular lights are not compatible.
Although I don't like flashlights very much (because I get dizzy when I turn frequently), it would be nice if it can be used for some door lights.
It doesn't matter anymore.

You provide several compatible lighting plug-ins, Khas lighting is the most customizable, and real-time shadows are cool. The function of this plug-in should be the most powerful at present. But it seems not very friendly to multi-layer parallax, and it conflicts with some of my plug-ins. And the author is no longer active, it is difficult to get support.

Terrax / Community lighting, I have only tried Community, this is an improvement of Terrax lighting, I think it should be similar.
It seems to lack follower lights, area and battlefield lights, because when I bind variables to time, my game performance will be greatly reduced. I am not sure what the reason is, it may also be due to some conflicts, so I did not continue to learn more . It has many detailed settings, such as offset, lighting direction, etc. And there are many code maintainers, and so it should have the greatest potential.

OcRam_Lights may be easier to use for novices like me, because it has a relatively complete time system. It's easier to manage the lights. And it supports multi-layer parallax,
It has some features that Community lights lack. And these are the functions I want to use. When I use it, I am surprised to find that the compatibility is very good with all my plug-ins (about 200, LOL, I am reducing them). There is not much conflict, so I decided to choose him.

Each of these lights has advantages and disadvantages. Thank you for providing so many options for using UM7 and all your excellent work! Cheers!

 

[bblizzard]

Yeah, that reworked Terrax community version, I haven't had time yet to sit down and see what I need to do to make it all work. But apart from that, making most other plugins work is relatively easy (except for OcRam_LIghts which had some issues as I previously mentioned).

Parallax plugins are tricky. Because of how the map is displayed in 3D, parallax in general is problematic to make it work properly. Unless there was either some custom system for a 3D sky-box or fine-tuned horizontal scrolling (like I did it in my game), there's no good way to make any of them work right so it looks good. :/

You should see my game, lol. I have 254 files in there and apart from an external audio-streaming plugin and zlib, I wrote all that code. xD It's 1.4MB and almost 40,000 lines of code (without the external stuff).

 

[41728280]

In fact, as early as a few months ago when I first came to the forum. I have seen your game by chance, and I really like your UI interface and gameplay. The interface is simple and beautiful, and the gameplay is very similar to a mobile game I was addicted to more than a year ago. So I downloaded it, but because my English is really bad, and the external translation software I use cannot translate the text in the game well. So I failed to persist in completing it. Still lying on my hard drive, lol

At that time, I had fallen in love with the UM7 mode and I was looking for how it was made. This is different from all the RM games I have played before. It is really amazing! I started to study this post not long ago and decided to use it to make my own game.
At present, except for a little basic knowledge, my programming knowledge is almost 0, so I can't learn anything from your code. . .

Then, I need to report a serious bug. I still use UM7's DEMO test.
After the game is saved, if you close the deployed game or reopen the game in test mode, an error will occur when reading the save.
Or F5 refreshes the game and reads the archive, it will also be wrong.
But do not close the game after saving, but choose to go back to the title, and then read the archive, there is no error

Error screenshot

 

[bblizzard]

I'll check it out. This is an odd error.

EDIT: Ok, found it and fixed it. v1.7.3 is up. However, I noticed a bug in OcRam_Lights. It seems that after loading the in-game time stopped. This happened even when I removed YEP and UM7 so it's definitely an issue with OcRam's plugins.

 

[41728280]

Yes, OcRam_Time_System has this BUG, which will cause the time to stop when manually saving and reading the archive. He hasn't fixed it yet, but I have found a solution a few days ago and provided this solution in his post, hoping to help those in need.
Everything seems to be normal now. There is a small bug. In the current game, if you choose to return to the title and start a new game, the new game will inherit the light data, etc. This new game data seems to have some Confused.
But this can be solved by restarting and starting a new game. It is not yet known whether there will be other effects.
Thanks bblizzard for multiple fixes!

 

[bblizzard]

Yeah, OcRam has to fix those things on his/her end. xD

 

[KaYsEr]

I just tried 1.7.3 and this time OcRam still works after deployment, unfortunately the framerate issue when moving vertically is still here, maybe a bit better than last time because I remember it was kind of a slideshow and now it’s more like.. Golden Eye 64?^_^?

To make sure it's not caused by the combination of UM7 and OcRam I went back to Community Lighting but same problem. Now back with 1.6.0 and everything runs fine as usual.

(Well, Mode7 maps are always a bit more demanding than normal RM maps but it's fine on a good machine.)

Would be so cool to have better performances now that everything else is pretty much fine, do you think there’s room for improvement there or UM7 reached some kind of “RMMV glass ceiling”?

You should see my game, lol. I have 254 files in there and apart from an external audio-streaming plugin and zlib, I wrote all that code. xD It's 1.4MB and almost 40,000 lines of code (without the external stuff).

You crazy (in a good way) man!
(C'mon, a little bit more and your code wouldn't symbolically fit on a floppy disk!)

 

[Kaelan]

Unfortunately MV's design on how to use overlay colors is flawed. :/ Rather than running the color mixing in the shader on the GPU, MV actually redraws the sprite's texture into a temporary texture every time the blend color or the color tone has been changed. :/ This makes it effectively impossible for me to do any optimization on that part.

If you don't mind introducing additional dependencies on your plugin, you could fix this by using a PIXI filter that does the color blending, instead of calling sprite.prototype.setBlendColor.

That's how I highlight objects in the Knight Editor, I'm just applying extra filters to the currently selected doodad sprites.

The only minor snag is I don't think any of the default filters do exactly what MV's blend color function does, so you'd have to write a new one. It shouldn't be that much work though, looking at the source code for something similar, like the PIXI adjustment filter.

 

[bblizzard]

Yeah, I'm using custom shaders and filters in my own game as well. But I think this should be a separate plugin that fixes the issue globally in the actual sprite render shader rather than via filters.

Filters have a big disadvantage that requires them to render stuff to a render target which is then used as a texture. This causes issues with blending colors and transparency. e.g. In my game I changed some stuff with map layers and the background parallax at one point. Screen/Additive/Multiply-blended characters would be rendered just fine on the map, but when rendering on the transparent portions of the map (where the parallax would be behind the map), the blending wasn't applied properly. This is because the map layers and characters were rendered onto a texture and then that texture was rendered as one piece which couldn't reapply the blending properly on just the characters that were floating off-map over the parallax.
Obviously I had to change how the layer filters were applied to fix the problem. ._.

@KaYsEr If you turn off CHARACTERS_USE_FADE_Z, it will stop lagging. xD

I mean *technically* I could write that plugin. <_< I'm just lazy.
But I can already see it happening: I will need ever-changing blend colors for my own game and to mitigate the performance issues, I will implement the shader for my own game. And since I already did this at that point, I will probably make a separate version for public release. <_<;;;

 

[Jennavieve]

This plugin is so cool! I prefer the look of this method over MV3D. I'd love to try it out but I don't use MV. Do you have any plans of porting it to MZ?

 

[bblizzard]

Oh, I just noticed I never posted this here.

They changed the low-level tiling code in MZ so it's a bit of work to make an MZ version and I'm not sure yet if I will ever make one. I'm mostly still waiting for MZ to go on a heavy sale before I buy and try it out. xD

 

[Marquise*]

When MZ will be stable, I'm certain Mode 7 will be the sweetest dessert. ^^

 

[KaYsEr]

Forgot to show you this @bblizzard

Everything works really well!
Honestly, I don't know what more MZ could possibly add (a bit more performances for weak devices maybe, but I heard it’s actually worse, that’s not reassuring), it's pretty much MV bundled with some built-in functionalities/plugins (a good thing for new comers and beginners then, so it makes sense from a marketing pov) and you can edit your MV game using the MZ editor anyway, so you can enjoy the QoL bonuses from the MZ editor while technically using the MV core.

The main difference is the battle animation thing, you’d still need to go back to MV to edit them if you use MZ to create your (MV at core) game, but if you’re using MZ you already need an external software to create your battle animations anyway.

(That particle-system on MZ apparently makes slowdowns on some machines, again, from feedbacks I heard recently.)

Here, instead of a particle-animation software, it would be RMMV being used to edit the frame-based animations like before. Or you can use a particle-animation plugin on MV too.
It’s not important which version (RM MVZ) we use, especially considering the editors themselves are interchangeable when it comes to actually work on our games. At the end of the day, it will be impossible to tell the difference when it comes to the games, there’s no "generation leap" (so to speak) between those 2 RM.. pretty much the same tech after all.

 

[bblizzard]

Oh dang, that looks really good! I'm glad you're using my tech to its fullest potential.

 

[SigmaSuccour]

Just dropping in to share. Super happy this plugin exists, with so much features.