Posted July 06, 2022 by QuentinWH
I decided to release this version early for multiple reasons. First of all, the official goal of adding hangout option to one npc is not in this update. I will release another, much smaller update before the end of this month which will have this option. I mainly wanted to release this update because it does away with the mandatory font instalation and fixes some other rather anoying problems. This is going to be quite a long post.
Let's explain the problem first. RPG maker XP is a very old engine. It does and can do everything I want it to, but there are some minor, very anoying things that bother me. Using custom fonts is one of them. Simply put, the game makes a list of fonts it uses the moment you start it up. It checks if these fonts exists and that's it. It doesn't install fonts, or loads them into memory, it just checks for them and uses them if they are installed. This list of fonts, as far as I know, can't be updated after the game started. There are multiple solutions to this problem and none of them are satisfactory. There is a launcher that makes two executables run at the same time to make custom fonts work without the user having to install them, there is another script that requires you to run the game twice (first time it installs the font and quits the game, second time works normaly). I could also just pack the game into a installer that would install both the game and the fonts, but I personaly don't like installing small games like this. The best solution is he memory font loader, which loads fonts in a folder into memory without installing them, which is what most games these days do. The problem is the font list that is built at the start of the game. So you run the game the first time and the font is not there. You run it again and suddenly the font is showing up. As far as I know, only way to trully fix this is to decompile or reverse engineer the exe running the game, which is way out of my league. Someone did exactly that, but the only link I found was on some old german forum with downloads disabled to guests and with new registrations turned off.
So I just said fuck it and decided to use default windows fonts, Cambria and Verdana. If I'm correct, windows from 7 and up have these fonts by default and RMXP games don't run on mac or linux out of the box anyway. So now the game should run without you having to do pretty much anything.
Only people running OS older than windows 7 or not running windows at all will face problems, and these can be fixed by simply instaling these fonts.
I'm aware that this is not a perfect solution. In the future, I will probably ditch normal fonts all together and just use some form of bitmap font, which should make the game run without problems for everyone. This should however make things bearable for most people for now.
I was kinda suprised how many people get filtered by the "chicken" at the start of the game. I have a simple solution to that. I added one line of unskipable dialogue that tells you to run away from everything you see at the start of the game. I also added a optional hint system. You can turn this on and off from the options menu. This will put question marks into several places around the world explaining certain mechanics and giving new players small hints. So if I see anyone complaining about the overpowered scavenger at the start of the game, then you have only your self to blame for not paying attention.
I also finished all sprites for the last age stage.
In the end, I decided to keep all weapons in the game and put them behind the character while removing the belts. Bad thing is it doesn't look as good as it did before. Good thing is that it keeps the outfits look clean and it saves me hours, maybe even days of work when I want to add new weapons or outfits.
I experimented with animated main menu. Changed the background music (www.youtube.com/embed/SsVMIe7QbJM). This is mostly just a experiment and not final. It also does change slightly after you finish the game for the first time. I would like to add more things like this in the future.
I also did a bunch of other smaller changes, fixes and additions.
Added weapon stat requirements into the buy menu so now you will know if you can't use certain weapon before you buy it. Only few weapons actualy have stat requirements for now, but I will be adding them to most weapons as time goes on.
Storing food recipes now also show without the "STORE:" word before them.
And more. Made one part of the initial dialogue not skippable, so you don't turn on tutorial accidentaly on your second playthrough, fixed some problems with fulscreen turning on and off in certain situations, fixed the broken fridge upgrade if you upgraded your safehouse to second level, and other things.
This is a pretty big update. Probably the biggest one yet if you consider all the changes I had to do to some pretty old systems. I'm sure there will be plenty of bugs. Most hopefuly minor. New font will break some text, some weapon sprites might be badly aligned or missing. If you find anything wrong, report it here. Can't fix it if I don't know about it.
Full changelog: