First of all, amazing work! I discovered EasyRPG while looking for an engine to do a small hobby game and it completely reignited my love of RPGM2K3, which was one of my first experiences with game dev when I was still a kid. The possibility of webplay just sold me on the project immediately.
Now, one of the most frustrating limitations of RPGMaker is that enemies and backgrounds can’t be animated. This is specially ugly when you consider that the player battlers can be, so it looks very weird.
My question is, considering the webplayer is not a limited oldschool .exe, could I somehow edit the source easily to accept .gifs on enemy battlers and backgrounds? Or some other way to animate those elements?
And in the same vein, a way to use player battlers of different sizes?
Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks again for all the hard work. Hopefully I’ll find something to help out with RTP replacement and give back.
the Player is also available as an oldschool exe file. The web player is basicly the sourcecode recompiled for the web, no web 2.0 technology (javascript libs) is used at all.
Making such changes is probably not as easy as you think. GIFs are not supported and the Player is written in C++ which is a quite complicated language if you only used scripting languages (JS, Python, …) before or don’t have any programming knowledge at all.
Aw, that’s very unfortunate. I was hoping, since I didn’t have to download anything to play on the web, that it was loading resources directly into the browser in a way that putting an animated .gif on the resource folder would just “work”.
I guess my question would be: Would it be harder than doing a custom battle system?
Indeed I know nothing of C++, but my understanding from the little research I’ve done is that if it was an .avi instead of a .gif it would be easier? I can live without transparency in favor of animation.
I would really like to avoid eventing too much if possible, specially because for the HTML player I imagine there would be many compatibility issues to test out, and also because it’s just so much “reinventing the wheel” when the whole purpose of using a maker is to not worry about systems haha
The web player was created by emscripten. This is some “magic”, which can compile C++ into Javascript code and your browser can execute this. This is basicly the same as using a compiler to convert C++ into an exe. The EXE contains machine code that the CPU of your computer can understand and the JS created is “asm.js” which is “machine code” that the JS-Interpreter of your browser can understand. Same technology, different target.
Neither of them will work in EasyRPG, not supported (AVI is planned because RPG Maker 2000 supports movie playback, but we don’t support this yet)
It would have exactly the same bugs as EasyRPG for Windows, so nothing to worry here
Because you know nothing about C++: Very likely, you will need at least a few weeks to understand the basics of it on the other hand custom battle systems are lots of work to write, too.
Don’t want to move you away from EasyRPG… but do you know about RPG Maker MV? Thats the latest official version of RPG Maker. It uses Javascript and runs in the browser. Is maybe currently better suitable for you because our engine has currently nothing to offer to allow simple customization like the things you suggested without C++ knowledge .
We plan to extend the Player someday with new functionality (not provided by RPG2k) and finish our editor but this is still under development. We are just a small team which does this all in our freetime, therefore everything takes much longer then in a company with full-time workers.
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