Bug Reports, RPGMaker Trans v5 Progress and Other Stuff

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So, I've got to apologise to all of the people who have given me bug reports. I've been woefully slow in actually solving anything. The main reason for this is lack of time. My main job has been quite nuts as of late, which has left little time for RPGMaker Trans development and bug fixing - unlike a lot of other stuff I do, bug fixing needs big chunks of contiguous time, which has been something I've been lacking lately. I'd ask anyone who has reported a bug to hold on just a bit longer.

RPGMaker Trans V5 Progress

A good chunk of progress has been made on RPGMaker Trans V5. The current source code has a lot of features implemented, but not necessarily exposed. Here's a small list:

  • New file reading/writing framework to fix a lot of the old problems
  • New interprocess architecture, to improve speed on Windows
  • Writing RPGMaker game archives
  • Programmatic access to patches
  • More compressible patch export format for distribution
  • Refactoring code to make it easier for 3rd party tools to be developed

It may be the case that the command line version of V5 is available before the GUI version though. I'm still learning QTQuick, but would like to get V5 CLI out as soon as possible.

Other Stuff

As that last bullet point implies, I'm kind of hoping to get the core of RPGMaker Trans into a state where other people can develop tools. As part of that, I'm making a couple of tools which I'll be releasing at some point. These will be part demo projects, but they also have some pretty neat features.

  • Robotrans: A machine assisted translation tool. A lot of games will have some very formulaic text. For example, opening a treasure chest or the stat bonuses of equipment. Robotrans is capable of applying rules and replacements to the translated text to automatically derive some translations. And as the bits which are formulaic are also rather boring to translate, it should make translating much more interesting.
  • Arcknife: Yet another RPGMaker Archive extractor, utilising the RPGMaker Trans frameworks. However, it will have a couple of neat features. RPGMaker Trans's current extractor is actually pretty fast, due to it utilising all processor cores. The new version is much faster, and I anticipate Arcknife to be the fastest extractor available. It should also support RPGMaker MV, and not consume vast amounts of RAM to unpack stuff. Finally, for RPGMaker XP/VX/VX Ace, it will be able to create archives. Why would people want to create archives? Well, RPGMaker's archive utility is pretty slow. It'll also have a neat trick that can obfuscate archives and make them pretty difficult to unpack, for creators for whom this kind of thing appeals.

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