Aftermath

Well, Megaupload died. Everyone should know about it by now.

Problem though is that the cyberlockers are now running in fear. Filesonic is no longer offering any services - problem as they're one of my mirrors. Also uploaded.to is blocking the US - and whilst I don't use them, considering that blocking the US is probably a correct way to remove yourself from the jurisdiction of the FBI, I can see other cyberlockers following suit.

Now small rant upcoming (don't want to read, skip to the next paragraph): I think the US exceeded its jurisdiction (getting a German national arrested in New Zealand seems a little over reaching). However, it seems Kim Dotcom (probably - pending trial to establish facts) deserved it. By all accounts it does seem that Megaupload was not responding to requests by copyright holders to remove files, so he was (probably) one of the "bad guys" in the copyright debate. I'm definitely against piracy, as I am a content creator under other names, and if the reports are true on Megaupload then it probably deserved to be shutdown. But arresting a non-national in a foreign jurisdiction seems excessive. It isn't as if New Zealand doesn't have anti-piracy rules, and there shouldn't have been any problem in arresting and trialling him in either New Zealand or Germany.

Needless, regardless of any rants or whatever, everyone has to deal with the aftermath. It seems pretty likely that at some point in the future most cyberlockers will become unreliable (perhaps Mediafire/Rapidshare will stay above board, but the rest, I doubt it). Hence I'm looking to perhaps take RPGMaker Trans onto private hosting. The catch is that this costs money, and I'm pretty unwilling to actually spend money on distributing RPGMaker Trans. That said, private hosting would enable a few neat things to go ahead that up till now haven't been possible.

So I'm putting out a poll on if people would donate to the RPGMaker Trans project. If there's enough people backing me, I'll look to setting up a proper website for RPGMaker Trans and whatever other projects I make. I'm not looking for a huge amount of money - on low end VPS's the price would probably be about $50 a year to cover my costs. So basically, if I get say about 20-30 backers, there'll be a dedicated website. If not.... ah well. What could have been, I suppose.

Progress

And so the new speedy parser is done. Well, done enough that I can get useful performance data out of it. Technically, it needs integrating into the translation engine, but it works pretty well. Also LMU files, but that should be less than 20 minutes work once everything else is ready.

So, the summary of improvements: Much faster (10 times, at least), and now picks out "Change Hero Class Name" (thanks shadepariah for pointing this out and providing a sample of it). Also, (untested) should pick out if a face is being displayed on the dialog - this is useful for translators as a face decreases the amount of space available for text. Finally, the script parser should be much more robust than it was before.

Also note: as this parser uses a different internal representation, there won't be a release until a new serialiser has been written.

The rest of this post is a programming type post, for people interested in the intricacies of programming high performance Python. OK, a lot of this will also apply to many other languages, especially interpreted ones, but mainly Python. If you're interested, look after the break.

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.

Warning

It seems that some people are distributing prepatched copies of a certain game. I'm sure everyone involved knows who they are.

This is not allowed. There's a warning prominently displayed on RPGMaker Trans about this.

For all parties involved: Strike 1. 3 Strikes, and I'm afraid bad things will have to happen.

Edit (mk2):
Apologies to Anon4565636: Anon4565636 reposted a pretty offensive comment made on RPGMaker Trans elsewhere and I mistook it for his/her own post. The only thing I'm keeping from my original response though is an answer to the allegation that I am building a botnet (rest from previous response):

Finally, on the serious allegation of me trying to build a botnet: Not a chance. First off, RPGMaker Trans is written in Python - wrong language for a computer virus. Any competent reverse engineer should be able to verify that it is just a Python script packaged with cx_freeze - no funny business. Whenever I referred to "consequences" in the past, it was with reference to either Whitelists or Blacklists being implemented within RPGMaker Trans, but I decided against this as it would be unfair against the majority of legitimate users. At the moment though, consequences means more along the lines of "certain game developers are threatening to upload a 'prepatched' build with a virus in, to teach people who go against their wishes a lesson".

RPGMaker Trans v1.95 released

EDIT: v1.95a is now done and uploaded (delays due to file hosts being awkward). Sorry for any inconvenience.

Well, that was more problematic than it should have been.

Features

• Full GUI: No more text box
• ZIP patches changed: Now the folder inside the zip file is irrelevant; things should just work
• Log files always generated when crashing: If RPGMaker Trans crashes, it should correctly generate log files without entering debug mode.

However, there's a caveat: I had substantial difficulties in compiling RPGMaker Trans to an exe. In the end I changed from cx_freeze (which wasn't working) to bbfreeze to do this; however when I did so Norton Antivirus decided RPGMaker Trans was suspicious.


At present I don't have the time to find out how to fix cx_freeze - which is my goal in the long run. In the meantime, if your antivirus decides that RPGMaker Trans is suspicious, kindly ignore it; it's just responding to the way that RPGMaker Trans spawns multiple processes to utilise all available cores. If ignoring the AV isn't an option, I'm leaving the older version around for now so people can use that until this gets fixed.

I fixed the problem with my original build system; Norton doesn't seem to have a problem now, so the above is a non-issue.

And finally, the other caveat: Some patches that are floating around may not be detected by this version of RPGMaker Trans. This version looks for RPGMKTRANSPATCH files in Zips/folders etc. and some patches that are floating around don't have these. If this is the case for you, either try getting a new version of the patch or prod the person maintaining it.

Progress

So, it turns out that coding whilst on holiday is hard. Especially when your holiday isn't what most people would call a holiday... I would also like to register my hatred of mosquitos.

Anyways, progress so far is basically fixing those crazy error messages and a few GUI faults. It's pretty much ready to go, actually, and would be apart from the fact that the way the patcher is being used by Vkozyrev (comments here under the handle VK) effectively breaks version portability. Normally I'd tell him to fix things on his end, but the specific behaviour (that the directory inside a zipped patch needs to be the same name as the zip file) is not intuitive and really something of an oversight. Unfortunately, it gets worse with the new GUI.

Hence, I'm taking the opportunity to rewrite my ZIP file handler. Presently it's less than ideal (it actually extracts the zip, calls the normal handler, then deletes the folder when done), so the new one will (hopefully) just read stuff out of the ZIP. Anyways, the new ETA is before the end of the week.

Delayed: v1.95

I'm afraid I'm having some problems with getting RPGMaker Trans v1.95 out. My normal build system isn't working well, and compiling it by hand on Windows throws up some pretty crazy error messages.

Basically, it needs more time, and as I'm on a holiday from today I really don't know how much free time I'm going to get. I'll see what I can do (especially on the plane out there), and I'll be trying to get it out as soon as possible.

Sorry for anyone waiting on it, but you'll have to wait a little longer.