On RPGMaker MV
So, there's a lot of buzz going around about RPGMaker MV, the new thing from Enterbrain. I've got to preface this with saying that there's a lot of unknowns about RPGMaker MV, so I can't really say at the moment if it will be supported. I'd certainly like too, so here's a breakdown of the things I need to find out before I can say if it's possible.
- How are games packed? Due to the requirement of running on multiple disparate systems (Windows/Mac/iOS/Android) and the fact that JavaScript is the scripting language, I'm actually guessing that RPGMaker MV is some kind of HTML5 export engine. In this case, I don't think the game would be packed, or at least not in a complex manner. However, that's entirely speculation.
- How are events serialised? In Ruby based engines, events were serialised as Marshalled Ruby objects, which is not a particularly great way of doing things (Marshall formats are universally not recommended for this kind of use, for a number of reasons). I'm hopeful that RPGMaker MV will use JSON, and not some obscure binary format, but we shall see.
- Scripts? Javascript is probably much easier for me to handle than Ruby ever was; there's a handful of Python Javascript tokenisers around, so I'll be looking at those to see if I can use one of them. Alternatively, there are a lot of C Javascript tokenisers, and I should be able to interface to one of those with CFFI. Still, something that needs work.
- Quality of Scripts? This is a big one. Javascript is normally handled in a very forgiving way with regard to syntax errors etc. Given that I've seen some absolute travesties in Ruby based games (e.g. unnamed scripts), I'm a little concerned with the quality of scripts that will be produced by the amateur coders who typically use RPGMaker; if the scripts aren't fully correct, it will cause issues for parsing them. And that would be highly annoying.
Before promising anything as to supporting RPGMaker MV or when, I'd like to get some info on these factors. So I wouldn't be too hopeful that RPGMaker MV support will be a quick fix. At the very least, it's adapting RPGMaker Trans for a completely different engine, and so is much more like the jump from 2k to VX. And that took years. While I've got a little more time now, I'm not that hopeful because I'm still only a one-man team on this.
Anyone up for helping when it comes out?
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