(December 31, 2012 to January 6, 2013)
Welcome dear readers to the latest issue of the Weekly Gazette! Here in the Gazette, we give you the news in brief of what occurred in the past week as well as provide any news happening in Save-Point itself
Official Area
Feedback and Suggestions
Currently, Save-Point's Twitter Page was found by Narzew to be empty and suggested that forum activities should be reported there. Samven agreed with him and added that someone be assigned a job to update or tweet the forum's news thinking that maybe DerVVulfman may be too occupied with the scripts that may be devouring his hours.
Meanwhile, Pherione wondered if the forum shop's Personalized Userank voucher was gone as his own personalized usergroup badge, 'Lord of the Last Dream' had vanished from his profile. DerVVulfman took a look at Pherione's account data and re-attached his Usergroup bar, thinking it may be related to the issues the forum had with the previous 'Registered' usergroup that was causing problems after the latest forum upgrade. But he also notes that it appears to be a one-time error as no other member with custom usergroup bars solst theirs.
Occasions
Something of a rarity happened this week. BIRTHDAYS! And not a couple or a few, but we start this year off with a lot of them, as you can probably tell as we celebrate the birthdays of qwertyvo, krootkinshaper, jameandy, fgfgfg, cbjackass, Darkbit, gros seins, takaminek1, Caldaron, Wiite, Daclopeda, masonhyla, darkriseur, joman159, rfoguinho, Shinxtails, infinity8, Komuru, com_ander, Blubber25, catacyst, dtear, kevinds, mrsmiley, NanikiHisao, hime-chii, pm2000, Jaberwocky and Rye on the first actual day of the year. After that, we shared the birthdays of horoscope gratuit, Victor Sant, BaKanda, blazeamber3 and later the birthdays of zerodin and Golden Silver had come and gone.
And please welcome RoseQuartz to our community. She's made herself familiar with RPGMaker XP having used it for around a year and has been working to develop a couple of games. However, its scripting that she wishes to learn. In keeping with that, she plans to attend college in a couple of years, with a major in game design on her mind. Her favorite games include the entire 'Legend of Zelda' line, 'Mario', a good number of the 'Tales of...' line along with some others.
General Chat
Once and a while, you may be away and lose track of your fellow forum members. Fortunately, it is an easy thing to know What's on the mind of the others within the community. With a comically misleading lolpic of a bug burying itself leading the way, the fact that her Wii hasn't arrived was on Olivia's mind. Following suit with a lolpic of a snow covered bear of his own, KasperKalamity described how he was pulled aside by police after buying cold medicine at the pharmacy, even demanding him to produce his identification. If you had encountered the devastation of losing your work when your program crashes when you hit the 'save' button, so too did MetalRenard tis week. However, such may become a thing of the past for him once he gets a new PC. Be that as it may, DerVVulfman advised him to keep his older computer for performance testing purposes. Later on, Taylor discovered a game that was using familiar Enterbrain RTP resources in a game not RPG, making him irritated. He posted a link which it seems DerVVufman followed. Upon seeing it, DerVVulfman replied that since it was made for the XBox 360, it could be developed with XNA technology in the same manner as Charlie Fleed's Hartacon Tactics. But Taylor was assured that the RTP license for the resources extended only towards game creation with Enterbrain products while the game he just found appeared to have been created without the use of any RPGMaker engine at all.
Sometimes you have to laugh when you see a Funny Picture whether posted within our forum or elsewhere on the net. Suchwas the case with Ace who found out that even trucks know the value of a penny.
Every once and a while, we need to take a break from our creative endeavors and sit back to enjoy some music. That was exactly what Ace was doing when he felt like sharing What he was listening to, some music from the the game "Assassin's Creed III". Likely to inspire, the piece he posted was entitled 'Fight".
Forum Games & Nonsense
After weeks of judging the entries in his 5 Minutes contest, greenraven came forward to announce that a winner has emerged and provided a link to the game, "Lets Get Naughty". As you can tell, the game is NSFW (Not Safe for Work), so play at own peril.
Games Development
Development Discussion
If you're curious what people are doing in their game-making projects, a good way to catch up with them is to read our topic that asks What's Up with these Rpg Making members. This week, Taylor just discovered the discomfort of spending hours looking for an error in some RGSS code only to find it was the result of a simple and easily overlooked mistyped operand. Having to spend hours for a bug so miniscule would cause anyone to run around screaming, as DerVVulfman apparently knows haivng one-line errors of his own.
Upcoming Projects
If you read our What's Up RMers thread, or view the Maps and Screenshots topic, you may have stumbled upon a project by Charlie Fleed that has been in the works for several months. However, this week he has chosen to create a highly detailed thread for his XNA game, Hartacon Tactics, an online RPG game that lets players challenge one another in online battles. Each player can create parties of heroes from various classes and can level them up as they fight and win points with which to upgrade. Played on a 2D isometric map, the battles our fought out in a tactical turn based environment with controls that let the player change both the camera angle and zoom. Charlie Fleed already had a version for RPGMaker XP, but now the XBox 360 becons to be released soon, and you can see youtube videos of the game in action. One newly added tool that is available for Hartacon Tactics is a Map Editor that lets people make and submit battlefield maps for review which may included with the game. Of course, Charlie Fleed was open to suggestions, which prompted MetalRenard to come up with thoughts such as exclusive custom art backgrounds, offer early beta copies for a nominal fee which grants him free bug-testing and possibly other ideas for the final release, or even let players have influence in the way the game's lore develops. But Charlie Fleed made mention that the game's premise is strictly focused on the arena combat, and there wouldn't be any story arc to follow. Even the store is impersonal with nary an NPC in the game. Such prompted kyonides to wonder why the game's features would be lacking in personable interactions as other games he has seen has NPCs that would react to the playser as if they were human. It wasn't that Charlie hadn't thought about it and in consideration, he's been rethinking about crafting a headquarters map of a sort. Still, he would like some support by way of people hitting 'like' on his project's Facebook Fanpage. MetalRenard and DerVVulfman didn't need an invitation since they already liked his page, which elated Charlie Fleed.
General Support
While messing around with RPGMaker VXAce, Samven wondered if a "leech seed" state be done like it could in PokeMon games. For those unfamiliar, it would be as if you could cast a leech spell on a target and the target would be inflicted with 'leech', whereby each turn the target would lose 10 points of health while you recover those same 10 health points. Only when the duration ends would the leeching stop. The thread that Samven gave his support topic was different until Iqus posted a youtube of a PokeMon game as he thought the description sounded too familiar, prompting him to change both the title and some of the description. Though he assumes coding would be eaiser, MetalRenard figured that an evented system could be created, though eventing with RPGMaker VXAce is highly limited. But kyonides remarked that one would need to make a very large evented systm that could cover every user of the skill and every victim, though event commands don't readily check to see of skill actually struck a target or not. However he did realize he made a similar script for RPGMaker XP, though there are serrious differences between the two gaming platforms preventing it from working with VX Ace. Curious about kyonides script, Iqus wondered if the RPGMaker XP script could be shared and thought someone interested may be inspired to attempt to convert it for RPGMaker VXAce.
In the time being, Iqus thought to put forth a Petition for a Multilanguage Script for RPGMaker XP that would be able to change the names and descriptions of the items in a project's database based on the language the player chooses when playing. He had seen a script that could read from an outside .txt file and thought that something similar could substitute the names of items such as potion or perfume could be replaced with their counterparts as needed. Kyonides wondered if it wouldn't be easier to make duplicate databases for items, armors and the like with their phrases pre-translated and ready for use while Ace considered the use of an installer that could unpack the proper .rxdata files based on the language chosen. DerVVulfman brought up that dialog in the game would need changing and suggested that a technique could be used to upload the dialog from .txt files too, but he also suggested that a technique could be used to encrypt the text files so no one would be able to break into them and cheat. However, Iqus planed merely to have the dialog for all available languages pre-readied in the games, so only a conditional variable would select the proper dialog text to show. In the meantime, Kyonides considered the idea that a script could assist by selecting the desired folder containing the data needed, which Iqus thought would work fine and appreciated all the quick responces to his request. Since then, kyonides worked on and released the beta version of a script that Iqus found worked just fine for him.
Material Development
Tools
An incompatability crashing error with CharGen Extended by DerVVulfman was found recently. Tzuridis discovered an issue with the RGSS system and Windows 7, but eventually discovered what he needed to do to get the system working and posted both the error and the solution. DerVVulfman, now a Windows 7 user, didn't encounter the issue himself but thanked Tzuridis and posted his solution to his topic's main post.
Scripts Database
Only recently posted, kyonides released version 1.1 of KSkillMax as the new upgrade lets you increase or decrease the skill limits of the heroes as needed.
But in responce to a query by Iqus, kyonides released the beta version of KyoLang, a script that can assist game developers in including multiple languages into their game projects.
Script Requests
Pia Carront is still having issues working with Goldaryn's Custom Resolution with Cogwheel's Pixel Movement, not really able to use anyone else's resolution system. There may be some incompatability issues with Goldaryn's system in Pia Carrot's demo as it also contains the F12 Crash fix by Zeriab and Selwyn's Cursor Script.
Resource Requests
Right now, DerVVulfman wondered if anyone Got Fish Charactersets for RPGMaker XP that they could share, whether it swims or flops around as if on dry land. He was also wondering if someone had a fishing net characterset that could be seen spread out in the water covering a nominal 32x32 tileset. Answering the call was ntzrmtthihu777 who found a set of graphics ripped from 'Breath of Fire 3' which he thought had the best fishing minigame he has ever played in an RPG. DerVVulfman was ecstatic and thanked him for the search and summarily closed his thread with his request fulfilled.
But that wasn't the only resource request that ntzrmtthihu777 answered as he visited both yamina-chan's thread asking for Final Fantasy Spirtes, specifically Zidane and Kuja, and UzumakiRasengan's request for Final Fantasy 9 Sprites. Though the requests were put forth over two years ago, ntzrmtthihu777 left them both a zip file of sprites Final Fantasy 7 to 10.
Creativity Section
Music and Audio
As we enter into 2013, a new song has been entered into MetalRenard's Music topic, a new original piece called "Don't Be Down" which is available on youtube.
Art and Design
It has been sometime since a new pic has been shown within Olivia's Sketchbook, so now gaze upon the newest portrait. Within now exists a young blond with short hair, hazel eyes and faint freckles on her cheeks.
Well, that's it for this week.
"If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" - Will Rogers (1879-1935)
PROSPECTIVE GAZETEERS!
If you are the creator of a thread in Save-Point, you have the option of sending/writing your own entry into the Gazette. The Gazette accepts write-in announcements (which will be doublechecked). Likewise, the Gazette would welcome other content such as a comic-strip series, ongoing story arc, or the like.
Just PM DerVVulfman with the submissions. Submissions must be in by 10pm EST.