*checks dev blog calendar
well i see there hasn't been an update in a while. i should make a post.
hello, [reborn player name here]!
has your game ever been slow?
well, no more, i say!
introducing, from whatever joke corporation i'm a part of this post,
18.3
"Wow, that 3 is really big!"™
this update contains none of what you've been waiting for (like, say, new content)
but it does contain stuff like zoom
and also a way to natively play reborn on a mac.
really.
no wine.
just mac.
native.
pictured above: native
those of you who keep a side eye on the progress bars will have noticed that nothing's really changed. and as far as new content is concerned, that is certainly true. ame's been focusing on starlight, and....well, you don't want me writing dialogue. that is not my thing. pls no thx. that doesn't mean i've been doing nothing all this time- it's just stuff that the progress bars don't really reflect.
so some backstory.
y'all might've seen a while back that there is a way to play reborn (and other essentials games) on android. this is not something i ever had expected to happen. i have been saying for a very long time "no. this is not a thing. you can not do this."
and then suddenly: "wow! this is a thing! you can do this!"
and that shit was smooth, too. like, it almost seemed to play the game better than the pc version.
after that, i was like "wow wtf how many other things have i been wrong about".
which brings us to mkxp. and this is going to be a little bit more abbreviated than i'd like because the forums ate my post. thanks forums!
mkxp is an open-source player of RPG Maker games. it's also really difficult to get to work. i like to think i'm pretty good with computers, but trying to build it from source code required a level of technical knowledge that i did not have.
but uranium has an mkxp port.
so i just... borrowed the exe from there.
and it almost worked!
after further struggles, i contacted the dev of the uranium port.
now, after three weeks (oh my god it's been three weeks) of hair pulling, we have a mac port.
it's been so long.
so the theme of 18.3 is performance. 18.2 had the AI updates; 18.3 will make the game go faster. i feel like everyone knows how sorely this is needed. if your hardware is even somewhat old, the game runs like ass. you know it. i know it. ame knows it. jan knows it.* everyone hates it.
the star feature of 18.3 is the inclusion of the all new Game-z.exe. this is reborn's mkxp build. if you saw my previous dev [shit]post, you've seen a short preview of an early version.
but it does so much more than that.
battles? smooth. speed up actually works there now. it's incredible.
maps? smooth. we got full framerate in spinel while it was raining. the maps aren't perfect but god they're so much better.
animations?
oh boy.
so, the animations in game-z were smooth, but because of some other issues we were having, a few internal changes made them lag hard.
so i took a peek in the code.
it turns out that essentials handles animations by loading the entire file and then picking a specific animation from that file.
the file is 10MB.
it loaded that for every animation.
whose idea was that.
this no longer happens. for both game and game-z. animations are now preloaded when you open up the game. that 1-2 seconds of lag that happens for every animation in battle? it happens once when you start, and never again.
it's incredible. best coding work i've ever done, and it was only five lines.
there is one other change: the game now uses one font. it is emerald. the game.exe fonts look downright awful on game-z.exe. instead of trying to find four new ones, we just have one, and it's what everything uses now.
there are a few things i need to finish up before an open beta: getting the linux port to also work, and seeing if there are any other ways to speed up / shift around load times. i am hoping to finish this up this week and will throw up another devblog post / forum thread when it happens.
Game.exe is the RMXP executable and is what 18.2 runs with. Game-z is the MKXP executable.
we're including both game.exe and game-z.exe in 18.3 (and likely e19) in the event that people run into weird errors with game-z. kinda like how people run into weird errors with game.exe anyway! this way, hopefully, at least one of them will work for everyone.
18.3 will also probably be the last mid-release update, with some minor changes to the release at best. i do not want to maintain two separate versions ever again. let my heart be free.
*jan makes rejuv. if you haven't played it and are wondering what to do while you wait for e19, go try it out
Edited by andracass
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