What can you do with RM?

[Rhaeami]

I think the thing I was most proud of was making an in-battle party swapping system using nothing but eventing.  I jury-rigged the Key Item Selection event to call up key items that had the names of my party members, then call them into battle, wrapping the whole thing in a complex series of if-loops and variable manipulation.  It took a few days to get working, but it turned out pretty nicely for a novice's work.  I'm almost sad that the game has it's own custom UI script for that, now... even though it looks a lot better than something I slapped together with events, I was pretty proud of the original system.  Can't get too sentimental about games though, they're made to be improved on!

 

[CzarSquid]

One, being able to finish a good game. There is nothing better to know that all the work you put into it was worth it in the end and getting messages to confirm it.
 
Two, I got a working day/night system in the events. It is something that will change as the player progresses through the game. The best part is when it switches from day tilesheet to the night tilesheet. This saves me from making double maps of each area. It's awesome when the music changes with it as well.

Spoiler

 

[Kaelan]

...That's it, folks, Kaelan wins; we can all pack up and go back to bed now...

(Okay, not quite that bad, but HOT DAMN that's sweet-looking!)

Not while it's still a demo. For now, all the people that have actually released something are way ahead of me 

 

[??????]

Not while it's still a demo. For now, all the people that have actually released something are way ahead of me 

Not necessarily.

Got another few questions about your system...

- How do your 'on map windows' work?  Are they real windows that are within scene map, some sprites within spriteset map etc?

- What resolution do you use?

- What FPS do you get on that resolution?

- What are you doing to get such a stable fps at such a high res?

The only thing I have found to make the map processing more stable with the high res dll was to literally remove all tiles from the map. I use region settings to determine the impassibility of objects. I tried various efficiency fixes and the like, but nothing really seemed effective enough.

 

[Kaelan]

• The HUD windows are just windows on the map. I instance all of the HUD classes both in Scene_Map and in my battle scene, which gives the illusion of seamless transition.
• I actually support multiple resolutions right now, and the UI will reposition itself based on relative screen position. My game currently supports: 1024x768, 1280x720, 1366x768 and 1440x900. On 1024x768 some of the menus are too big to draw completely, so I have a separate "lower resolution" UI that gets used in that case. The video I posted was recorded at 1366x768, which is the default resolution.
• The FPS is highly dependant on how good your PC actually is. On default settings, my super-old terribad laptop barely scrapes 10fps, my 5yr old desktop gets 45~60 depending on which area I'm in, and my brand new laptop I just bought to work away from home runs it at solid 60fps. If I turn the resolution down to 1024x768, my old laptop can run it at ~30fps. The main drive for supporting multiple resolutions for me is to try to allow everyone to get a decent frame rate for whatever quality PC they have.
• A ton of different things actually. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to squeeze out more performance from RM, given the existing limitations. I'm still not 100% satisfied with where it is, but I've definitely made good progress on this. Short summary of what's going on right now:My maps don't have any tiles. Everything is 100% parallaxed. I edited Spriteset_Map to never actually load any map data.
• I render as few parallax layers as possible in each map. I don't use any animated parallaxes. For things like water, I try to make areas more appear more alive with ambient SE and terrain-dependant footstep sound effects.
• I try to avoid having too many events doing non-trivial things on one map.
• I use SOURCE's Effectus script, with some small changes I've made to suit my game.
• I try to avoid or work around anything that has a significant performance impact, like using the Grey field when setting screen tones.
• The window class is slow and rendering large windows is bad. So whenever I need a large image with window functions, I use a 1x1 window with a resizable internal sprite and forward whatever calls I need to that sprite. Aside from that, I also tend to prefer several small windows over fewer larger windows.
• I usually don't use window frames, but whenever I need them and the window isn't very small, I'll render the window frame myself instead of letting RM do it to make it faster.
• Real-time text wrapping is slow in RM, so I pre-wrap all my text, store it in a file, then load it already wrapped in-game. I have a separate RM "text-wrapping tool" project that can take whatever text files I give it and spit out a wrapped version of it for whatever window dimensions they're supposed to fit in, so I don't have to do it manually every time I need to change a spell description or something like that.

I can't use region IDs for passability because I'm already using them to identify terrain type for footstep SEs. I just use the good old marking tiles individually in the tile editor. All my maps look something like this:

Spoiler