The Weekly Gazette 01-29-2023

[DerVVulfman]

(January 23 to January 29, 2023)

Welcome dear readers to the latest issue of the Weekly Gazette! Here in the Gazette, we give you the news in brief of what occurred in the past week as well as provide any news happening in Save-Point itself

Official Area

Feedback and Suggestions

Curious about AI art, kyonides wondered if the forum's rules should be updated related to the subject. DerVVulfman's response was that there was little that could be done as one may not reveal if any product was AI produced, or the legalities over such content established.

Occasions

Newly arrived in our community is kiyasu. She's been in the general community for a while working on content such as Star Shift Origins and a larger product made with VXAce. She was greeted by Remi-chan, DerVVulfman who holds much the same regard towards another visually gifted scripter's coding style, the ever comically cautious JayRay, kyonides the inquisitive, Kain Nobel and his tea set, and our Fox in the Music box who inquired... where's the Tea?

General Chat

This week's News of the World couldn't be any worse for President Biden as more confidential records were indeed found at his house. But after that, it was discovered that over one thousand eight hundred boxes of documents were sent to Biden's old University for safekeeping. And it may be that the President's son may have illegally used classified information for his business dealings. With the recent change of leadership in the US House of Representatives, Speaker McCarthy has removed certain individuals from their House committee positions, and have voted to restrict Biden's drain upon the Petroleum Reserves meant for emergency use. But of petroleum, it appears that California is not as Green Energy conscious as they pretend, receiving half of all oil pillaged from the Amazon rainforest. The official recognition of Taiwan as an independent state, the release of over 1,000 illegal aliens with criminal histories into the United States, stripping China of its permanent trade status, the protests that followed the death of Tyre Nichols, all of this and much more his this week's news.

For anyone who took RPG so seriously they played pen-and-paper classic fare, we are saddened at the passing of Peter L. Rice, one of the team that brought various fantasy adventures, and the author of a few novels set within the Renegade Legion gaming universe.

Tech Talk

Cybercrime is always prevalent in the News of the Cyber World, as it was revealed that two US agencies were hit by Cybercriminals using remote desktop tools. However, the FBI seized much of the infrustructure of HIVE ransomware, including two main servers operating in California. North Korea expands its hacker target list to include education, goverment and healthcare locations, and T-Mobile apparently had another breach, one that affects 37 million accounts.

Games Development

Development Discussion

A recent visit to discuss What's up among fellow RMers would let one see two new videos from Remi-chan's current WIP, Fantasia, the first depicting an entity who seeks retribution for the destruction of her labors while the second the poisoning of life from misdeeds and greed ages past.

Earlier this week, KasperKalamity posted one more shot of his RPGMaker XP town map within the Maps and screenshots thread before it was complete and revealed within Arbor's Eve. And JayRay reworked his cavern map within RPGMaker MV, showing it off while making it easier to see and navigate.

History hit the thread on Pretty Maps; Bad Design as lessons from SNES era Final Fantasy took stage given how condensed the maps had to be while still populated with NPCs that could hinder the player's movement. True enough, however kyonides brought up that the maps from Breath of Fire in that era were even more condensed and problematic.

In the middle of the week, kyonides posted a query if anyone received Peer pressured badly to switch engines?, the intent to find if such pressure was limited towards the RPGMaker line or if users of other game development engines received such coersion. Unfortunately, the thread was shortlived, though posting was certainly ongoing. Instead of its intent, it quickly devolved into arguments for and against individual game engines, and the thread itself became a battleground exemplifying attempts at making one's choice towards a single game development tool manditory. Eventually, the thread itself was locked by Kain Nobel, after pointing out that everyone involved had valid points, but that forcing their choices upon another should never be done.

Upcoming Projects

After long last, the fourth and final town for Arbor's Eve's first act has finally been finished. And revealed by Steam, KasperKalamity had spent over one-hundred and seventy hours on his labor. After releasing screenshots of the map, Steel Beast 6Beets was impressed over the makeover given to his map, and the other maps which he had also posted. KasperKalamity figures it will be some time before the game will be completed.

Tutorials

The Ruby Scripting by kyonides had him talk about how one can define the two major constructs of Ruby scripting, or C++ for those familiar, the module and class structures. And then brings up the open-ness of Ruby, its ability to alias (name substitution) of functions, and parent-child relationships between scripted class constructs.

For anyone who programs with Linux, the case of your code matters as the filesystem is case sensitive. But kyonides discovered and linked to an article by Collabora that discussed how to Use the Linux kernel's Case-insensitive feature in Ext4.

Meanwhile, kyonides posted the simple method how to calculate Distance and Absolute Value in basic coding.

Material Development

Tools

There were upgrades made recently to RPG Developer Bakin, updates towards repairing bugs in both the game engine, event systems, and the user interface. Meanwhile, upgrades were added such as new parameters for database damage and recovery values, Upon seeing one of the screenshots posted, kyonides inquired about the data formula used for a weapon shown, the formula actually determining attack damage based upon the attacker's, defender's and the weapon's own stats, allowed to be custom per weapon or attack.

Scripts Database

Feeling bored, kyonides created KSafePoint for RPG<aker XP, a script to generate a tent for saving your game like within many other games.

Based upon the work of Kayzee, kyonides crafted the F12 Fix fox RPGMaker VXAce, a system that detects the RESET error code to prevent game crashes.

And for all three of the Ruby-scripted editions of the RPGMaker line, a small scriptlet by the name of KOpenWeb to let you add your website's url to the title screen, and KSkillNeedsState which forces status affect restrictions upon skill use, were both made by kyonides this week.

Creativity Section

Art and Design

When you visit Remi-chan's Neato Arty thread thing!, you'll see a quick render depicting how she handles arguments. Being in a slightly sardonic mood, she also presented a short indicating her currently planned work schedule for her upcoming demo's release.

Literature Section

Samuel Clemens in Zurich. A tale of the inconceivable orated to a man of science renown. And a bottle of schnapps. This is what awaits for those who chooses to bury themselves into the tale, Goblin Gulch - The Curious Story of Milton, Nevada. A tale by JayRay, we are introduced to American Novelist Mark Twain as he seeks to tell his tale to the one person who may be able to explain how the strange events of a Mining Town had unfolded, Professor Albert Einstein.

Filmography

Not a tutorial or anything, but JayRay Stumbled across some Bakin videos, the first one showing that an NPC is able do actively dive underwater in a full three dimensional environment.

Special Projects

ReGaL (RPG Game Lab)

Screenies

A new thought came to DerVVulfman for a feature for the REGAL Application, the ability to use Sprite-based fonts, or pre-drawn letter graphics to use in place of standard fonts for the in-game texts. The benefit of such graphics were two-fold, that they render faster and could be more decorative in design. The suggestion brought up memories between he and Steel Beast 6Beets about RPGMaker 2000's use of similar font files while kyonides pondered if a feature could be created while JayRay considered if a feature to convert true-type fonts into sprite fonts could be created.

Well, that's it for this week.

"Doing nothing is very hard to do… you never know when you’re finished." - Leslie Nielsen (1926-2010)

PROSPECTIVE GAZETEERS!

If you are the creator of a thread in Save-Point, you have the option of sending/writing your own entry into the Gazette. The Gazette accepts write-in announcements (which will be doublechecked). Likewise, the Gazette would welcome other content such as a comic-strip series, ongoing story arc, or the like.

Just PM DerVVulfman with the submissions. Submissions must be in by 10pm EST.

[kyonides]

Happy  ramen bowl to Wulfo!

[kiyasu]

Oh, this is an interesting idea ^^ I like this. :D

[Remi-chan]

Happy Birthday Wulfy! May your cake be like 100x more glorious as my silly one was!