Thursday, 22 December 2011

Current state of things...

This is just a post to say "I'm not dead". True, I've been working on RPGMaker Trans a lot slower than usual, but I'm not dead. So, with that, here's a little breakdown on what's been going on:

1: Bugfixes

I've found the cause of the bug involving the GUI build and non-ASCII directory names; a bugfix for this should be out soon. There also seems to be a more obscure bug floating around regarding conflicts with existing Python installs - I'm not sure what's going on there, and can't reproduce it. There may be an attempt to fix this, but I'm not sure.

2: Improvements

I've got to say: most of the parsing engine that's presently in use is pretty old code - and a lot of it is from when I was trying to figure out the RPGMaker 2k format. Whilst it's quite easy to work with from the reverse engineering point of view, as I'm sure everyone will have noticed, it isn't fast. I'm presently working on a new parser which is much, much faster - though only about 70% complete so far. It will also need a new rebuilder as well, but this should be fairly straightforward to make once the new parser is done. So expect a speed up in the near future.

3: XP/VX support

The big one, really. I'm still working on memory usage with this; there's some complex issues with regard to how Windows handles pipes (poorly) and Ruby 1.8s memory model (bad). Net result is that when I tried my current build of XP support on Windows, I used all 6GBs of memory before it blew up. I'm working on a new system which should solve the memory issue. So support for newer games is still on the menu, but will take a while.