masamonkey

Well, the word 'manga' is derived from a term that loosely meant 'amusing pictures,' so there's nothing really inately japanese about the term itself any moreso than 'comic' would be inately english in regards to the boundaries of culture beyond semantics. Now at least a hundred years past the inception of either term in their original forms, our respective cultures have assigned several tertiary nuances and meanings to both. Several sinophiles among international otaku culture would wish to keep japanese comics -only- as being termed manga because they have some sort of distaste for western culture in any form, but in the meantime, the Prime Minister of Japan is offering awards to what he terms 'international manga' so I'll defer to his superior knowledge of the japanese language and culture. I get the feeling you're only arguing the base semantics due to a distaste and disdain for that form of entertainment, though. In regard to that, congratulations on the whole video game thing.

Please don't type in all caps, but to answer your question, if you made the game with a registered copy of RPG Maker XP it's totally legit. You can even sell a game that uses RTP data, though I believe you aren't able to distribute the RTP data yourself in a comercial project; the buyer may need to download the RTP themselves. Not 100% sure that you can't distribute RTP in a commercial work, I'm still looking into that, but you can definitely -utilize- any of it in a commercial game.

You can actually do all the graphics by hand if you can position them right and can manage the scaling. For sprites with a tablet, you can use a template one one layer and doodle up a new set on another. I just do everything by hand and scan it in though.

Hello, hello! Everyone's helpful even if it can be a little slow. Isn't, 'Improper english anyone?' a sentence fragment?

Oh, a little late, but hiya! Hahaha!

I hear about people selling their games a lot more than I hear about people making them freely available with the option of donations. A lot of webcomics and flash sites can make a lot of money this way, but do you think donations are a viable option for the RM game market? Please go into a little detail in replies. Do you consider them not high quality enough to pay anything for? Do you have any problems with paying for something you can get for free? Is there anything people do to ask for donations that really bugs you? I read in this month's GI about this company talking about the way big game publishers usually go about things and how they're thinking of trusting people a little more. The guy they were talking with said he actually contacted torrent sites and asked them to remove their games and the torrent people didn't mind; for most sites, that was the first time they'd been contacted with anything but legal threats. This company...I don't remember the names at all, hehe...any rate, they weren't going with any pain in the ass copy protection either because anything will get cracked anyway, so may as well save money and not make it harder on people actually buying the product. ...wow, I really went O/T in my own topic here... I dunno, anything offered on the internet tends to go a little further when it's offered for free or relies on the honour system. Usually the moment someone decides to put in copy protection on something or decides on a price, it's cracked on a warez site or at the least has a legion of people moaning about it. I just thought it might be interesting to see the opinions in this community or hear if anyone knows of any games that went the donation route.

I thought it was which does one prefer. My mistake. Which is best? No, one isn't better than the other and that's not even nitpicking the individual advantages of either in different areas. Everything comes down to personal preference and perception in all areas of life to some extent. We may as well be asking whether or not Mac is better than PC or rpgs vs. fps or RMXP vs. Game Maker or battle focused gameplay vs. quest focused gameplay or any other of these silly debates before even getting as specific as whether scripting or eventing might be intrinsically better than the other. That question has to make assumptions in all of those arguments to be valid. I mean no offense at all, I've just been getting really sick of the my app is better than your app fanboyism in regards to 3d art in other places, so I went on a little rant. My personal preferance is for eventing. As a visual artist, I work -much- better with being able to move my mouse around and click buttons and look at variables inside fields and select from menus, so it's just far easier for me to do it that way even though my options are limited to what my buttons do. I can see how people who prefer scripting can get annoyed with trying to hunt down event instances on maps and have to scroll through menus and all though, definitely. Like I said, I just like having that visual map and menu to look through rather than everything laid out in a script.

Most key generators simply work up a key that will open up the functionality in the software itself on your computer and it has nothing to do with actually registering the product. At any rate, it's a pretty simple process for them to see your game being sold, wonder if it's legal, check to see if purchase and registration records match up and then take some nominal legal action if they don't. On the subject of shareware, you could even press it and sell it on dvd or cd if you wanted and had the resources. The shareware portion of the deal is in the RTP content not being liscensed to be distributed by users, though you have liscense to utilize it in your games. So make whatever you want and distribute it anyhow you want as long as you aren't distributing any of the rtp content, including rtp scripts and plug-ins and other bric-a-brac yourself. The end user needs to download the RTP data themselves from enterbrain.

I DLed the trial for VX a week ago and I thought I was just going insane. I couldn't believe some of the things that were taken out. map layers gone, screen rez down, limited tilesets, crummy old spritesets. It wasn't until I read this that I realized it really was all like that and not just me being completely inept. If something is so broken it makes you think you're #@%^ing up in real life, you should prolly stay away. 32-bit colour is kinda neat, but I don't see anything else it does even as well as xp. Some people like the graphics and claim them to be vastly superior to rmxp for some reason, but seriously, they're both outdated in that respect and will continue to be outdated until a couple other resolutions can be supported. Variable size sprites function is the -one- meaningful step in the right direction that the series has taken, but vx screwed that up by going back to the old spritesets.

Hey, welcome. Dumb questions give people something to do, so no problem.

Heya! Hope you enjoy working with it. Even if a lot of people are switching over to rmvx, everyone still knows their share of bits about rmxp.

Hello, I been gone a while, but: Name:Usually Aaron, Aron or Arn when I'm not thinking Sex:Male Age:Almost 30...I think it's 29 currently Zodiac:Ares Race:(other) Haha Height and Weight:6'0" and I dunno what weight Favourite:colour green Peircings: never got around to getting any, but I wouldn't mind a couple Tattoos:I'm waiting until I'm 30 Religion:Agnosticish non-practicing pagan Favourite _____:I don't have too many favourite anything...or rather I have way too many favourites of anything to prioritize *Movies:Casino, Blade Runner, Dark Crystal, Audition, Hard Boiled, Seven Samurai *Books:Roshomon, Ubik, Snowcrash, Nueromancer *Manga:Akira, Monster, Welcome to the N.H.K., Evangelion, Golgo 13, Ranma, Inuyasha, Black Jack, Stray Little Devil, Midori Days, Pheonix, Nightmare Inspector, Lone Wolf and Cub, Sakura Taisen, Sgt. Frog, xxx-holic.....jeez, I prolly read too much manga... Drinking:Very rarely Smoking:Not as much as I used to website: http://monkeynohito.deviantart.com/ P.S. Happy Birthday Formlesstree4!

Nice, we were talking about this sort of thing in xp discussion a while ago and weighing some size issues, so I'm really looking forward to the results. This might also be a nice expiriment in creating some episodic content that doesn't annihilate bandwidth. ;)

Ah, yes. That's about how I started trying to animate sprites in Flash, though you've done a couple more clever things than I came up with on my own. It could definately be done either in Flash or with screen capture and later editing. There are some screen capture progs that can capture to flash movie file format also, so a mix could be possible as well. The main draw of this sort of a presentation as opposed to a full game would be the file size and the lack of requirement to download an .EXE to run on your computer, which most casual internet users are fairly leery of. With this in mind, I don't see large file sizes for a movie as being a huge turn-off for many people when compared to the size of even episodic rpg maker games. Though it has to be admitted that smaller is always better with files any way. Whichever way it may be made, it started as an idea of ways that rpg maker could branch out into other avenues.

I hear a lot of arguments back and forth between Camtasia and its rival that I can't remember the name of off-hand. In the end, I feel it's impossible to actually get an unbiased opinion of the progs, so I've been looking about for affordable alternatives and ran accross an interesting prog that I (also) can't remember off-hand that had berry in the title I believe...*shrug* Horrible memory today... Yes, I'm pretty sceptical of huge file sizes myself, but with the low resolution RMXP runs at and the right options, I might be able to take those sizes down to something actually watchable to anyone without a T1. I'll just need to do some research on that front, I think. I have actually mucked around with Flash quite a bit before, trying to replicate the RPG sort of narrative and visuals, but ran into problems crafting just about everything...succeeding, but not without major hassle. Eventually, I resorted to animating the sprites by creating seperate animated gifs or other static images that would switch and move around the screen as needed by the character's actions. It works, but it's a mess and easily susceptable to little unintended blips and bumps. By the way, I found a cartoon along the same lines done wholy in Flash based off of Secret of Mana. http://www.manatheater.com/archives1.htm It looks good and has little Flash options and easter egg buttons like you mentioned. It'd be nice to do something like that, but more in the game style, with menus and the little GUI sort of stuff. -That's- what I'm really a little reserved about. Whether or not anyone would appreciate the replication of the gameplay visual rather than Secret of Mana Theater's more traditional animation storytelling. ED:I also keep forgetting how to insert proper links...

Ah, right. Sorry about the confusion. I was meaning to set up a 'scene' in rpg maker and then use video screen capture to record the sequences as they play out 'in-game.' Short example: I set up an event in RM where a dialog takes place between two characters. One is accusing the other character of stealing something, let's say. Now I switch on the video screen capture and jump into play mode. I walk character A over to character B and they speak. After this sequence, I go into the inventory screen and flip down to the item in question, maybe it has a funny description...then if I set up a switch I could talk to character B again, situation is resolved in comedic fashion, har har. After that I can take the captured footage as a movie file and edit it, say knocking out the title and game load, maybe stringing out the pause on the inventory item for dramatic effect or speeding up some of the menu navigation so as not to distract people. with a video capture prog that supports it, I could even turn it into a flash file and do a lot more with the editing, maybe add a button or two so the viewer could click on that tree over there while the action is going on and a picture could pop up or whichever. At any rate, I'd end up with a movie file or a flash cartoon containing the sort of stuff that goes on in an RPG Maker game. It's sort of a roundabout way to animate a facsimile game and what, but a lot of simple effects in rpg maker can be a major pain in flash; moving water tiles in the background for instance. Also, animating sprites can get very herky jerky with an annoying amount of seperate frame sequences to keep track of.

For a while, I've been mulling over the idea of using rpg maker xp or whichever as the basis for an episodic web cartoon. Basically, I'd yank sequences set up in rpg maker and edit them into an animation like Red vs. Blue, but still maintain the whole game console feel (speech boxes, battle menus, etc.) It would be a nice examination into the narative abilities of video games in general in bite sized chunks you could watch at the office. My main question, though, is whether or not anyone would even be remotely interested in watching something like this. I can watch a thousand of these sequences play out in my favourite rpgs and be thoroughly entertained, but I'm sorta odd. Secondly, a project like this would be pretty art-heavy, but the workload would be a little easier to manage with needed material only being required in small chunks per episode. Then again, for some people, that might be a longer commitment than they'd rather dedicate to a project rather than something that requires the work in a big load and never again. What are your thoughts?

I'm waiting for an official release on a demo, so this is just based on Enterbrain press, but here's my two cents: Hand-drawn art being my strong suit as well as being one of a growing number of people using a widescreen monitor, I'd have to say I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the 'amazing' screen resolution that VX is supporting. If it were variable to projects, or even better, user defined in-game, I'd pick up VX in a heartbeat, but I already have enough trouble scaling graphics down to fit 640x480. On the whole, it looks to me like VX is scaling back a lot of features to, ironically, satisfy some nitpicky fan nags while ignoring the ability to actually create better end results. It's nice to see Enterbrain listening to people, but I really expected some graphics pushing meat out of the release. For as much cash as they're asking, this should jump out and sock me in the face like XP did when I saw what a graphical improvement it was. ED: Ack, I mixed up my resolutions!

Hello, I'm (obviously) new to the site and thought I'd say salutations or what. I've been messing about with one Rpg maker version or another for a few years now with not much of anything to show for it, but hopefully I can slap something together some day or other or be part of something slapped together. One of the main things to be learned about game making is that coming up with an end product on the level of your version is going to involve another person or so (plus a little bit of distillation of that vision, hehe.) Check out some of my art at http://monkeynohito.deviantart.com/ A lot of recent images are from a project I was working on until recently. I've decided to try and turn the idea into a webcomic and for a game either go with a less daunting concept or get together working with other people.