RPGMaker Trans Roadmap

EDIT: All dates in that were in this roadmap are now wrong, so I removed them. XP/VX support will be more involved than I thought, and will likely involve creation of an editor GUI program. The GUI version is likely to happen before the speedy version, and is also likely to happen soon.

So, as there were... well, no contributions on future direction... here's the plan and some expected deadline dates. Note that the roadmap is of course subject to change, and extra releases will be made in case of bugs etc.

RPGMaker Trans v1.91-s

• Not a true new version, so no new version bump
• Debut of RPGMaker Trans utilities - RPGMaker Trans will be split into two parts, a small "core program" and a large "utilities pack" which doesn't change as much. RPGMaker 2000 game translation will be possible without the utilities pack, but will be much faster with it. The planned RPGMaker XP/VX support will require the utilities pack
• Utilities pack contains pypy for speed ups.
• Remove some unnecessary code paths for some other speed ups. Probably won't make too much difference, but every little helps.

RPGMaker Trans v1.95

• Add a wxWidgets based GUI
• Add a developer CLI mode - for people building utilities on top of RPGMaker Trans

RPGMaker Trans v2.00

• RPGMaker XP+VX support!
• RPGMaker Trans patch format v3, to cope with XP/VX support
• Utilities pack update to support XP/VX games.

RPGMaker Trans v2.1

• Automatic machine translation support (hopeful translators: ATLAS, Google Translate)
• Possible Utilities pack update to support ATLAS translations

Other

• Google Apps based online translation/collaboration software 

CPython and PyPy: Small and Slow or Big and Fast

This is a heads up for all interested parties.

Presently, RPGMaker Trans is built on CPython, or the bog standard Python distribution. The reason for this is that when I was writing it, CPython was the only Python distribution which had all the Python 2.7 language features in it, and I wanted to use some of them.

Now the situation has changed; PyPy is now fully 2.7 compliant. Playing around with running the source through PyPy I can get substantial speedups - at least on my machine. Given that RPGMaker Trans is a slow program I'm thinking it may be a good idea to look at taking advantage of these speedups.

There's two slight problems I've got at the moment: the first is that PyPy doesn't support freezing - that is creating a special EXE file to run. There's a few ways around this - I'm leaning towards making a basic loader program that launches things. Heck, it might even be a good time to add a proper GUI and proper CLI if I go down that route. The second issue is download size; PyPy is a big binary - something like 27MB. So... perhaps a two version system (small download size but slow, and big download size but fast)?

And for reference, the RPGMaker XP code I'm working on does benefit substantially from PyPy - to the extent that it is a lot more usable. It really may be necessary to switch to a PyPy based system because of this.

If there are any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them. In fact, I'd really welcome some feedback on where people stand on the small download size and slow or big download size and fast part!

Tweaking the blog...

Well, a few tweaks to the blog. First off, ads have disappeared. Why? Well, three reasons: the first is that by the browser stats, I guess about 70% of people who view this blog have ad blocking. The second is that the majority of ads I get seem to be about enterprise patch management, and that's not exactly anything that people here want. The third is that really, I don't get too much traffic anyway. Those factors mean that obtaining any support for this project via ads is not really feasible.

So my new strategem is to recommend people to download RPGMaker Trans via Easy-Share. The reason for Easy-Share is that all other file hosts pay moneys based on the size of file to be downloaded, and RPGMaker Trans is too small to qualify for any payouts. Easy-Share doesn't take file size into consideration, and so provides a lot more revenue. I suppose I could pad the files or something... but that seems like a bad idea really...

Note that I'm specifically not recommending people to take out premium memberships with Easy-share - unless you really want to. Doing so isn't a way of supporting me however.

But yeah, it'd be nice if everyone could download via Easy-share. I appreciate that for some people it's not possible, and for others they just prefer a different file host, but if everyone downloaded via Easy-Share I'd have gotten $10. Not much, but enough for me to put a donation to some of the 3rd party software that made RPGMaker Trans possible.

EDIT: And now Easy-Share do penalise smaller files. I'd still prefer people to download from them, as the penalties aren't as much as the other hosts, but still annoying.

RPGMaker Trans v1.91

Huzzah! A new version, though this is strictly a bugfix version.

Bugs quashed:

1. Added an undocumented event code that some games use: Thanks to a bug report, I now know that at least one game uses an undocumented event code, E71A. I have no idea what it does, but it's existence was causing the script parser to trip up and die. In any case it's been added to my list of event codes, and the game in question now dumps an extra megabyte of text (or there abouts).
2. Converting RPGMaker Trans format 1.0 to 2.0 should now work properly: Specifically, the LMU files will not import correctly. I don't think anyone actually had a problem with this...
3. Don't dump null strings: Strings which are just a null character are now no longer dumped.

Anyways, have fun with it people.