EasyRPG for Sega Dreamcast (Alpha release)

[gameblabla]

Hello guys, given the fact EasyRPG can be made used to run other games, i thought it deserved its own thread !
EasyRPG is an open source RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine that was designed to run those games.
The RPG maker community is full of weird and quirky games that are worth playing.

About the Dreamcast port
This version is different from upstream in a few ways :
- Only English support (sorry ! It would not fit in RAM otherwise)
- Uses software rendering instead of PVR api. This results in less than optimal memory usage, VRAM is basically unused besides for final framebuffer.
- Memory limitations because of the above, everything has to fit into RAM. (the engine itself takes a big chunk also)
- No save support (either to VMU or SD card)
- The source code has been switched to C++23 and dropped dependencies like libfmt and span-lite. These changes are not really noticeable to the user but this does mean that they won't be merged by upstream (as confirmed to me by ghabry).

EasyRPG itself is quite inefficient and currently only supports 32bpp. Because of this, memory allocations are twice as larger than required.
The upside is that higher graphics fidelity can be achieved with the use of PNG but that's rarely used by actual games because the official player only supported 16-bits hicolor.

You can use it to make games for the Dreamcast ! All you have to do is put your game in "GAME" folder inside of the cdi and repack.
Though currently saves are not supported so this may be a problem to you guys....


Download

EasyRPG with Ib game
https://github.com/gameblabla/EasyRPG_D ... es/tag/1.0

My source code is available here (check dreamcast branches):
https://github.com/gameblabla/Player
https://github.com/gameblabla/libclf

[Ian Micheal]

This is so cool and major release game creation and opening up a whole new thing for users How big are the save files we have to get saving working for an rpg

[gameblabla]

This is so cool and major release game creation and opening up a whole new thing for users How big are the save files we have to get saving working for an rpg

That was one of my goals as well, the fact there was a lack of easily accesible game engines on the Dreamcast for small 2D games like these.

The LSD save files are usually no bigger than 16kb. I did a test zip compress case, and they dropped down to about 2kb.

I was also thinking about VMU support but truthfully, i cannot really make good use of this without some kind of compromise...

[Falco Girgis]

Super excited for this project... I've loved watching it come together, and I'm looking forward to helping free you up some more RAM from KOS! lmao.

[Falco Girgis]

Wait, holy shit, you're actually using C++23 now!? Hell yeah, man! Everything in the stdlib, other than the weird namespace std bug you filed the other day should be good to go! Please let me know if it isn't!!!

[dubcity]

Wonderful! I will have to kick the tires with this one. DC needs more RPG's.

[NeoSnk]

Congratulations, this is amazing! I loved RPG maker back in the day, this is so cool!

[Ian Micheal]

Fore sure just need it to load an external bin to load back to this years christmas menu so i can make dc christmas game

[NeoSnk]

Man, I've been playing with it, and it is just amazing. I already converted some games. I just found problems with some musics (Musics with voice). I'll try to fix it and post for everyone. Congratulations for this ports, this is one of the most amazing things I've seen.

Edit: To fix the audio, just convert the wav to 11025 hz.

[NeoSnk]

Ok, so the first game I converted to DC is "Os Cavaleiros do Zodíaco: Os Guerreiros Deuses de Asgard" name in portuguese or "Saint Seiya" in japanese.

[youtubenew]https://www.youtube.com/shorts/myzxB4uSYbM[/youtubenew]

And here I did a tutorial explaining the process to convert it (It's in portuguese):



And here is the CDI: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i_IVvf ... sp=sharing

I'll try to take a look in the code to see if I'm able to make it save on the VMU, other than that, it is already working really well!!!