What's on your mind?

[kyonides]

People started criticizing Enterbrain and Kadokawa for their dubious decisions and their desperation to port their maker to other platforms no matter how popular older versions of their maker might be nowadays. Well, there was once a comment a forumer made on another site that pretended to be a smartass by telling people like me that Degica was a company or agency not a person, it was not something that I'd ever ask, but who cares? It doesn't matter if it took one person or thousands to make the same stupid choice, it can't make it look any brighter no matter how much makeup they wanna apply on it.

When they develop XP, VX and VX Ace, they didn't really need to make too many updates to make their engine work or include a decent amount of features. Even if we add all of them as count them as a single product, I still think it wouldn't require a major change in the product version because most changes were cosmetic except for dungeon and character making options. I wouldn't consider script modular behavior an actual reason to approve such a pseudo major version update. Plus their default battle system always sucked. Even changes to their DSL, namely RGSS, were minimal from a systemwide point of view. Learning how to adapt a XP specific script to VX isn't hard, Ace might look like a headache, but nuisances are kind of easy to overcome when you learn where to expect them to show up.

You don't believe me? Then take a look at my KUnits related scripts plus the adaptation of Gem Roulette, they'll prove my point for sure. Even if you say that something doesn't really look like it was adapted to Enterbrain's hired scripter's style, I tell you this: you don't really have to mimic his style at all. You might need to respect specific things like using default $global variables and some classes default methods, but that never means you can do things some other way if you really need or want to break out of the sandbox for any specific reason you may have. If it works and even better if it doesn't break other functions game developers might still need (like a working battlesystem or a looping map), nobody has the right to tell you otherwise. (Exceptions might be the excessive creation of new $global variables or CONSTANTS in the Object class.)

One of the great things XP had, even if it lacked some good features found in VX Ace, was the need to make scripters think beyond the maker's default features. Really you could still change or replace most scripts in a new project with those you prefer and they will work there if you keep a minimal set of default scripts. Of course events might become a nightmare if you change the Interpreter class recklessly, but you could still change some ways other features work like including any sort of temporary events that were never imagined by Enterbrain's developers. Obviously script compatibility can't be ignored, once you include some script in your game project you might end up excluding another one for common features or methods that get overwritten, but you can't expect a script written in 2010 to open new ways to do stuff that only another one crafted in 2015 suddenly showed us they were possible. You'd need to combine hundreds of people's viewpoints, styles and creativity, still, it doesn't matter if you can choose to include these or pick some other scripts at will after testing them. XP throught Ace got tested scripts that people now if they work or not or why they didn't and throw at people possible ideas on how to let new scripters handle such situations. There are free implementations of XP's game executable and probably VX's as well you could take a look at now, I know there's one that will make it possible to run it on Linux (I've been there many times already) and its website said there was a version for OSX as well! (if I remember clearly...)