Some questions about RPG Maker by humbird0

[MirceaKitsune]

So I recently played Pokemon Hentai. Frigging awesome game, loved (nearly) everything about it! But I have a few questions, which were seemingly left completely unanswered. Not about the Pokemon Hentai game specifically, but about the engine and the art it uses, hence why I'm making a new thread for this.

The game is based on an original engine by humbird0, which is seemingly intended for anyone who wants to create their own game. The engine includes an editor, which I haven't been able to run but saw a video of. It seems to be very well designed, overall a surprisingly simple yet efficient RPG toolkit. It also comes with the art from Pokemon Hentai, which is of very good quality itself. Since I'm a game developer, I'm considering using it to create a game of my own sometime! But there are a lot of issues I need an answer for first, which includes the following:

- First of all, what license is the engine and code? This is not specified anywhere at all... neither the games using it, neither the Pokemon Hentai thread. Is it considered an open-sourced project, or a proprietary tool that humbird0 simply released for free? If it's the first option, is it or can it be placed under a precise license... like GPL or BSD or Apache or another? I always wish to know these things before I work with any software.

- Next obvious question is, what's the license for all the art? The tilesets, the sprites, the sounds, the music, everything else. From what I read, they were donated to the project by artists from the LOK community, but a clear license was never specified. Since people have apparently made their own games with them, this is even more unusual. If they are free, this is typically CC-BY-SOMETHING.

- Will there be a Linux version of the engine? Yes... I know it's written in Flash so it should be cross-platform, but apparently this is not the case: The sfw versions don't work for me in Firefox, I get broken menus or just a blank screen. For this reason I had to run Game.exe and GameEditor.exe on Wine... the first works fine but the second crashes immediately. It would be nice if either Linux binaries could be included as well, or the flash version could be made to work directly. Anyone know if either might happen?

- Is there any change of seeing a HTML5 / JavaScript port of the engine? I ask this often when it comes to Flash games, both because Flash is proprietary and because it's nearing its end while JS is taking over. The engine doesn't seem to use advanced Flash features like skeletal animations, everything it has is doable in JavaScript. I heard that there are several Flash to JS converters... so if humbird0 doesn't mind people porting it, maybe someone has or could try running the engine through one? This would make it easier to use and more reliable at least for me.

[Souleon]

Commenting cuz I'm curious about this myself now and have yet to find a subscribe option for threads.

[ValturNaa]

Same, also wondering if Humbird0 will ever make it possible to create and modify the actions of pokemon moves and the hard-coded items and equipment inside the editor. Being able to edit these three things (beyond changing the descriptions and price tags) would make this engine one of the most powerful pokemon engines out there.

[humbird0]

The engine includes an editor, which I haven't been able to run but saw a video of. It seems to be very well designed, overall a surprisingly simple yet efficient RPG toolkit.

The design was inspired by RPG Maker 2000. After using that program for almost a decade, I had a pretty good grasp of which scripting commands I actually used, and was able to make something more streamlined.
I also noticed that a very large amount of 2D games use a similar structure:
- Tile based maps
- Sprites spawning in various places on those maps
Since a level editor doesn't really need to know anything about the behavior of a game or its sprites, it's possible to create a generalized editor for many different 2D game engines. And since Flash files have the ability to load other flash files within them, it's possible for the editor to load game-specific editors for that game's sprites on the fly when needed, without having to modify the basic editor itself.
The "RPG Maker" is actually 2 editors. The general level editor, and an editor for "rpgSprite" sprites. The general editor doesn't know anything at all about what an "RPG" is, but the "rpgSprite" editor handles the creation of script data.

- First of all, what license is the engine and code? This is not specified anywhere at all... neither the games using it, neither the Pokemon Hentai thread. Is it considered an open-sourced project, or a proprietary tool that humbird0 simply released for free? If it's the first option, is it or can it be placed under a precise license... like GPL or BSD or Apache or another? I always wish to know these things before I work with any software.

I never really gave any thought to licenses since I barely know anything about that subject.
I just made the game for fun, and I include editors with all my games as a matter of principle, because it always annoyed me while growing up in the 1990's, how rare level-editors were.

So basically, I don't care what anybody does or makes with the editor or the game engines.
I wouldn't even care if you made money off of any games you made.
The editor could be included, but it doesn't have to be, nor does credit need to be given for the game engine or editor.
Just don't try to forbid anybody from using these things.
And it'd be nice not to take credit for creating the level-editor, because that would obviously be lying.
I also don't care if you create your own editor based on the design and ideas used in this one.
Good ideas exist in order to be used.

The pokemon game itself (levels, art, etc...) is intended to be cost-free and kind of open-source. Though it's much simpler for me to handle all the coding and level building, and let people contribute assets. I haven't really bothered uploading the source code because I don't want to spend the next 10 years of my life explaining how it all works. It's easier to just make stuff, and let people play with the level editor.

- Next obvious question is, what's the license for all the art? The tilesets, the sprites, the sounds, the music, everything else. From what I read, they were donated to the project by artists from the LOK community, but a clear license was never specified. Since people have apparently made their own games with them, this is even more unusual. If they are free, this is typically CC-BY-SOMETHING.

Well, the game uses a lot of borrowed assets from older games.
The tiles are mostly from the Gameboy Advance pokemon games, with some modifications here and there.
Many characters and interactive objects are sprite rips. Some of modified. And some are custom made.
The sound effects are all ripped from various old games.
The music mostly comes from obscure old SNES games.
The artwork is mostly custom drawn, though there are some placeholder pictures used for some cutscenes.
The game itself technically probably isn't even allowed to exist, like most fan art. But who-owns-what isn't really the point. It's a product of pure fandom, where the entire point is to create and enjoy something cool, simply because it's possible. So the very concept of licenses doesn't really make sense when it comes to the designed game itself.
But I'd assume that most of the contributing artists would only want their art used for this game or for their own use.
I haven't needed to ask each of them how they want their work used outside of this game. I only know that they're okay with it being used for this project, and that's all I really need to know. It's pretty much implied when they post it in that thread, there's no need to negotiate the details each time.

- Will there be a Linux version of the engine? Yes... I know it's written in Flash so it should be cross-platform, but apparently this is not the case: The swf versions don't work for me in Firefox, I get broken menus or just a blank screen. For this reason I had to run Game.exe and GameEditor.exe on Wine... the first works fine but the second crashes immediately. It would be nice if either Linux binaries could be included as well, or the flash version could be made to work directly. Anyone know if either might happen?

- Is there any change of seeing a HTML5 / JavaScript port of the engine? I ask this often when it comes to Flash games, both because Flash is proprietary and because it's nearing its end while JS is taking over. The engine doesn't seem to use advanced Flash features like skeletal animations, everything it has is doable in JavaScript. I heard that there are several Flash to JS converters... so if humbird0 doesn't mind people porting it, maybe someone has or could try running the engine through one? This would make it easier to use and more reliable at least for me.

The editor itself actually is programmed using Flash, and then converted into an EXE using version 2.5 of MDM Zinc (the only version that seems to work with my code)
Zinc adds functionality that Flash would not otherwise have, such as the ability to create text files, or read the contents of a folder.
It does work... but not very elegantly. This version of Zinc can probably compile a PowerPC Mac OS X binary. But I've never tested it.

One thing I might like to do someday is figure out how Adobe created Brackets. It's a website-editing tool created using JavaScript, but they somehow found a way to turn it into an EXE. Since Flash's ActionScript 2 programming language is basically a slightly modified version of JavaScript version 3, that would probably be the most comfortable environment for me.

Of course, I'd have to re-code the level editor from scratch since I wouldn't be able to use compiled Flash components, or MovieClips. I rely very heavily on movieClip-scoped variables for modular components. And the layers of Flash's timeline provide an outstanding way to visually organize and quickly jump between code with literally one mouse-click, while grouping all of that code within the current movieClip. The level files are XML-ish. But although Flash believes they're XML and can read and write them, they're not strictly 100% valid XML, so nothing else will parse them. (The levels contain nodes that are named using numbers, which isn't technically allowed)

The game engine relies pretty heavily on importing tiny external SWF files on-the-fly to add additional effects that the game engine itself is not aware of. It's sort of like a plugin system. If you look in the game's "swf" folder, you can see how many of these swf files there are. Heck, the game engine doesn't even have its own textboxes.

While it's certainly possible to convert the levels to another format, I would want levels from older games to be seamlessly compatible with newer versions of the editor.
HTML 5 is only barely starting to have anything resembling a MovieClip or a component via the ShadowDOM. But the main reason I use Flash is the Flash editor itself, and the amazing consistency of the Flash players. Flash has the exact same behavior and quirks no matter which browser it runs in. The one and only exception I've ever encountered is the default "_sans" font renders larger on linux operating systems, and even that issue can be avoided by importing the font into the SWF file.

I don't think most people realize how intricate my games actually are, on a programming level.
(Can you believe I just spent 4 hours writing all of this??)

[MirceaKitsune]

Thank you for your reply! It is nice to know this now And sorry I prompted you to write such a long post and got so curious about everything. Hopefully this will help everyone who has similar questions about the project.

[zirpcev]

Very insightful, thanks.

[humbird0]

I uploaded the Editor, all the Source Code, and Design Documents for this game on Archive.org
pokemon_hentai_flash_source_and_docs