This error shouldn’t affect anything in TURBU other than project imports, so if you already have 0.9.3 and you’re not importing any projects, you probably don’t need to re-download and reinstall it.

Fixed issues:

• Using the Teleport command editor could lock up the program
• Using the Change System BGM editor could cause program errors in certain cases
• The Change Default Transitions editor was listed in the command editor list as “Change System Skin” by mistake
• Panning position for sound effects was not being calculated correctly with the new Disharmony interface
• The global script editor was showing the start condition as empty for all scripts
• In certain cases, the Sprite and Portrait Selectors and the tile palette on the main window were not drawing correctly

These have all been fixed.  There’s also a possible application error when certain forms containing a rendering context (such as the Sprite or Portrait Selector windows) have another window dragged or switched in front of them and then try to change their displayed image.  This is due to an issue inside the SDL graphics library that I don’t have time to track down at the moment.  If you see this error, you can simply close and reopen the window and it should be fixed.  I’ll try to get around to fixing it sometime soon.

Also, if I’ve done this right you shouldn’t really notice any difference, but I’ve replaced a lot of the SDL code for drawing the map with the first phase of an experimental new renderer I’m working on.  By making use of knowledge that’s available to the sprite engine but that SDL isn’t designed to account for, and by using some more modern OpenGL techniques than SDL employs, I was able to double the frame rate when torture-testing the map engine on a large world map.  I’ve got some more ideas for improving it, but that will come later.

Some of the stuff I used requires OpenGL 2.0, which wasn’t a requirement before, but that really shouldn’t be a problem.  Any new computer sold since 2005 or so should support it just fine.

I’ve fixed everything I’ve come across, and I think I’ve got all of them now, but I can’t be 100% sure until I’ve finished all the event editors.  What I do know is that I’ve run some very large and complex scripts from big projects through the whole process, and tweaked things to the point that they all produce valid code now.  The script engine isn’t quite ready for this release, but it should be in the next one.

So here’s what *is* in this release:

• A ton of tweaks and fixes to the script system.
• Several performance improvements, especially at startup.  A large project with lots of tilesets used to take several seconds to load.  That’s been dramatically reduced now, as has the time it takes to open a map with lots of scripts on it.
• The sound system has been replaced by a new one based on Disharmony, a fan-made replacement for RPG Maker’s sound system.  I’ve worked with the author to add in support for tracked music, and I’m planning on adding some script commands in the future to allow game makers to access Disharmony’s extended features directly.  (Right now Disharmony has ways to use some special audio effects, but since it’s not built into RPG Maker, it has to use weird hacks and workarounds to get at them.)
• Editors have been added for several new script commands, including the teleport group.
• A bug introduced in the last version that keeps you from being able to place a hero on the map in Run mode has been fixed.

That’s all for now.  Hopefully the next update will be out quicker than the last one.  I’ve just gotta get a couple details worked out in the script compiler and then it should be ready, and I can start incorporating the script engine code from my early POC into TURBU, and it’ll start feeling like a real game engine.

I’ve been torture-testing the script compiler by generating very large scripts from projects that use a lot of scripting and seeing how it handles them.  It’s not ready to see daylight just yet, but the scripting system will definitely be in the next update.  For now, though, there will be a few more event editors, some bugfixes, and an all new music/sound system.

The current system is based on SDL_Mixer, and it has a lot of problems because of limitations in the way SDL_Mixer is designed.  I can’t talk about the new one quite yet, because it’s based on someone else’s code that isn’t quite ready for release, but it will be able to do everything RPG Maker’s audio player can do, plus a few new features.  The problems that the current version is having with MIDIs and MP3s will be gone, and there will be proper support for Tempo and Balance changes for all audio formats.

As soon as the new player code is ready, I’ll get the next release set up.  And I’m expecting that later this week…

The obvious way to handle this is to have the script engine itself take care of moving. So I had the project importer translate the numbers into words, and you’d end up with something that looks like this: “Up; Left; Left; Left; Down; Down;”

Then I took a look at the move scripts it was creating, and some of them were huge!  For particularly long movements, they could get up to 500 characters or more.  That makes the script difficult to read and difficult to understand, especially at a glance.  For example, how many times is the character going to move left when the following event command gets run?

If you have to count one by one, it’s too complicated.  So I reworked the move script generation code.  When this gets processed, the output will look like “Up; Right(2); Up(2); Left(13); Down(2);”  Any command that doesn’t already require parameters can take an optional number parameter that describes how many times to repeat it.  This should make long move scripts a lot easier to understand.

There’s one problem.  MP3s won’t play right.  There are some pretty serious compatibility problems with the MP3 library I’m using, problems I can’t fix.  I’ve reported the issues to the maintainer and he said he’ll look at them pretty soon, but until they get fixed, I’ve disabled MP3 support in TURBU to prevent crashes and memory corruption errors.  Hopefully I’ll be able to re-enable it soon.  But the other music types are all working fine, so go ahead and grab the installer from the Downloads page.

Also, I’ve been working with a composer who’s writing a soundtrack to be distributed with the TURBU project.  It’s still under way, but the work’s pretty good so far.  I put a few of the songs up on the Downloads page as a preview.  They’re in .IT format, a musical format that’s particularly well-suited to videogames.  Windows Media Player doesn’t know how to play them, but Winamp does, and so does the TURBU editor.

On a related note, I added music support to the editor as part of this release!  There’s a music player window, similar to RPG Maker’s.  It supports volume, fade in and panning. No tempo adjustment yet; that’ll come in a future release.

I’ve also added support for RPG Maker’s .XYZ image format to the importer.  It’ll read and convert .XYZ files to .PNG as part of the import process.  And there are a lot more script command editors available now, covering the entire first page of commands from RM2K except for Set Variable, which is really complicated.  I’ll get to it once I’ve got proper support from the script engine.

One new thing I added was the concept of battle-specific global scripts.  I noticed when converting some projects that they would use up a huge amount of time and memory reading the monster party section of the database, in some cases even crashing the importer with Out Of Memory errors.  A bit of investigation discovered that a lot of projects have a lot of battle scripts for stuff like stealing or using special battle commands that end up being duplicated over and over in almost every party.  They can’t be put in the Common Events section because they use script commands that are specific to battles, and RPG Maker has no Battle Common Events, so they have to be duplicated instead.  So I wrote some code to scan the battle scripts for duplicates. When it finds duplicated scripts, it adds the script to a battle global script section and replaces the script page with a call to the global script.  This cuts down the complexity of the battle scripts pretty significantly, since in most projects, a small number of duplicates account for 80-90% of all battle scripts.

And, of course, there’s the database migration.  The project data is now stored in a Firebird database instead of the old project files.  This enables the editor to retrieve information very quickly, and to be able to change the formats of various data types without having to re-run the importer.  The editor is able to handle the database automatically; there’s no need to install or configure any sort of database server in order to make it work.  You may notice that the importer takes a lot longer to run than it used to, because it’s got to make sure to get everything, prepare it, and upload it all to the database.  But once that’s done, you shouldn’t need to do it again for any new release.

So, that’s the rundown on version 0.9.0.  Check it out, and of course please let me know if you run into any bugs.  Enjoy!

I’ve added a bunch of new Event Builder editors, plus music-playing capabilities, but probably the biggest change is to the project database.  I’m changing the storage mechanism from the old, built-in file format to a Firebird database.  (Don’t worry; you won’t need to set up a database server on your system or anything scary like that. Firebird’s got an “embedded mode” that can run a local database file without needing a server.)

This has several advantages.  First, the load time at the start of the program will be much faster, since I don’t have to read through the entire database file to find the stuff that the program needs, the way the current system does.  Second, since the database has several checks it can do to make sure your data is good, setting this up has helped me find and fix a bunch of bugs.  And third, the big one:

NO MORE RE-IMPORTS WITH EVERY NEW VERSION!

I know some of you have really big projects, and running the importer every time a new version comes out can be painful.  It had to be done to accommodate new data or new formats, but with a real database, changing the format can be done without wiping out and rebuilding all the data, so in the future when you get a new version and things have changed, it’ll go to open your project database, see that its format is outdated, and update it for you automatically.  This also means that you’ll be free to actually do some serious work with the TURBU editor, since you know your changes won’t be wiped out in the next release.

I’ve still got a few minor details to work out, but the new version should be up within a few days.

This means that you don’t have to sit and stare at a non-responsive user interface and wait for the entire project database to load into memory when you hit F8 or go to edit a map object; the editor will automatically take care of that in the background when you first open the project. Unfortunately, until the background loading is complete, you won’t be able to use the database or map object editors, but this will get you up and running faster overall, and it adds a progress bar at the bottom of the editor so you can see how far along it is.

I’ve made some changes to the import code and to the database, so previously imported projects are no longer valid and will need to be re-imported, but you probably expected that anyway by now, right?

Changes since 0.8.7:

• Moved project database loading to an automatic background task
• Fixed an import error when converting an event script containing a Full Heal command
• Added support for global event scripts in the database editor
• Added support for adding new lines to an event script
• Changed the project importer so that a successful import will automatically load the imported project into the editor
• Fixed script generation errors for integer variables, and for the Teleport, Change Experience, and Keyboard Input commands
• Fixed a bug on the Switch editor where sometimes all radio buttons could be deselected
• Added editor support for several new script commands
• Fixed a script conversion bug where the contents of the ELSE clause on conditional statements got put outside the ELSE clause (on the level above it) instead of inside
• Fixed a couple graphical problems related to resizing

More to come soon!