Sharina's Screen-Saves

[DerVVulfman]

BUMP

to version 1.4

Alas, one more bump, but with two updates for effect.

First, some replacement engines for RPGMaker may incorporate their own 'snap to bitmap' method. Given that some replacements for RPGMaker XP's game.exe may have that method, Sharina's Screen-Saves now looks to detect the method before adding its own. So engines that already have 'snap to bitmap' will not have their versions overwritten.

Understandably, the script had been designed with RPGMaker XP and for RPGMaker XP. The addition of the snap-to-bitmap' may be seen by some as a patch to include a missing feature. However, one should not as the feature was neither missing nor removed; instead only later conceived for newer engines. Its addition is an enhancement, and that alone.

However, the snap-to-bitmap method will detect if the engine using this system has its own so-named variation, and disable itself if recognized.

Second, it came to my attention that some saves did not properly update and replace the map image. This is because of an innate feature within the cache system. When the cache system sees that a bitmap is re-loading an already existing file of the same name, the system ignores the bitmap in favor of the original. So recording atop the last game save may not have presented the updated map.

For this, the game saves now include the time stamp. When the temporary bitmap is created, the time stamp now becomes part of the filename and thus fixes this issue. For this, the time stamp must actively be created when the game is saved, and not just acquired from the file itself when being read. Recorded now within the saves, this prevents the unlikely chance that the time stamp may change by a mere second between image generation and the game actually being saved.

Insofar as being compatible with other savegame systems, I did state this at the very beginning:

The system also allows one to take advantage of two classic RPGMaker savegame scripts by RPG Advocate: the Unlimited Saves script which allows the game developer set how many save files may be recorded, and the Save Override script that brings up a prompt warning the player that an older save game would be erased in favor of the new.

It is not that the image-saving feature would interfere with other services, but is instead the script base of the RPG Advocate scripts. Both scripts are, in fact, save-game rewrites plain and simple. However, to allow larger space for the map images, indeed some methods did require rewrites for the number appearing and the refresh method of Window_SaveFile to allow the map to appear beneath the texts.