RPGMaker Trans v4.1 Released and New Site

So, RPGMaker Trans v4.1 is released. The main thing here is that support for XP and VX Ace games is finally available in a non-beta release. Also, it turns out that version 3's VX support was pretty wonky, and this should be much improved now.

There's also a new site. This site unifies the old blog and the project website, which is handy for me (less stuff to update) and handy for anyone using it (more ability to ignore irrelevant things). The new site also brings documentation up-to-date, final adds proper documentation for the GUI, and comments are now powered by Disqus (which is a better solution than Blogger comments). What next for the old blog? Not sure. It might get updated with some stuff, but that seems unlikely. In any case, anyone subscribing to RSS etc should update their bookmarks.

What's next for RPGMaker Trans? Well, I still need to get DocStrings working in the Ruby Parser. I had thought that these were fairly obscure and people didn't use them much. However, when investigating a different bug, a handful of games did use docstrings... and so I should probably try to support them.

In addition, I'm looking at some pretty big changes to the backend of RPGMaker Trans. In defence of the current backend, it works pretty well on Linux, which is where I do my testing, and given that it reuses a core infrastructure in a lot of places, it was quick for me to implement. However, it doesn't work so well on Windows - this can be seen by the amount of lagginess in the interface.

It also turns out that due to the backend being slow, my prototype C-based unpacker can't go at full speed. So I'm looking to move some of the backend stuff to a threading solution rather than the current multiprocessing-based one. This should improve how the Windows builds feel to use, as well as addressing other issues (like the number of processes RPGMaker Trans spawns).

Finally, there's a very good case to allow bits of Ruby to be stored in a patch and then executed. This would allow customisation of the matchers/patchers that RPGMaker Trans is using. This is somewhat necessary due to the wide variety of custom scripts available - even in my demo game, there are problems because the standard method of selecting a portrait has been overridden. Allowing some code for customising the matchers/patchers would be able to fix this. While I'm on the subject of Ruby code, it may also be nice to be able to wholesale replace parts of the code. The main reason for this would be to do things like add a command to change the font used, but I'm unsure as to how I'd go about this.