This is a work-in-progress fork of mkxp that is intended to run and alleviate the difficulty of porting games based on Pokemon Essentials. It's not necessarily intended to be a byte-for-byte copy of RGSS though, so non-standard extensions and optional enhancements can/will be written for fangame developers (you poor souls) to take advantage of.
Bindings provide the glue code for an interpreted language environment to run game scripts in. mkxp-z focuses on Ruby 1.8 and as such the mruby and null bindings are not included. The original MRI bindings remain for the time being, with the possible intent of working with >=1.9 to better support RGSS3. Please see the original README for more details.
Matz's Ruby Interpreter, also called CRuby, is the most widely deployed version of ruby. MRI 1.8.1 is what was used in RPG Maker XP, and 1.8.7 is what mkxp-z is written around (at least for now). 1.8.1 and 1.8.7 are for the most part identical, though there are a few differences that need to be ironed out before Essentials can be loaded.
* [My Ruby 1.8 fork](https://github.com/inori-z/ruby/tree/ruby_1_8_7), for Zlib, a Windows build that doesn't segfault, and any 1.8.1 compatibility stuff
meson will use pkg-config to locate the respective include/library paths. If you installed any dependencies into non-standard prefixes, make sure to set `-Dpkg_config_path` accordingly when configuring the build. If pkgconfig cannot find a dependency, meson will attempt to use CMake scripts instead (if CMake is installed), followed by system installations/macOS frameworks.
Midi support is enabled by default and requires fluidsynth to be present at runtime (not needed for building); if mkxp can't find it at runtime, midi playback is disabled. It looks for `libfluidsynth.so.1` on Linux, `libfluidsynth.dylib.1` on OSX and `fluidsynth.dll` on Windows, so make sure to have one of these in your link path. If you still need fluidsynth to be hard linked at buildtime, use `-Dshared_fluid=true`. When building fluidsynth yourself, you can disable almost all options (audio drivers etc.) as they are not used. Note that upstream fluidsynth has support for sharing soundfont data between synthesizers (mkxp uses multiple synths), so if your memory usage is very high, you might want to try compiling fluidsynth from git master.
By default, mkxp switches into the directory where its binary is contained and then starts reading the configuration and resolving relative paths. In case this is undesired (eg. when the binary is to be installed to a system global, read-only location), it can be turned off by adding `-Dworkdir_current=true` to meson's build arguments.
To auto detect the encoding of the game title in `Game.ini` and auto convert it to UTF-8, build with `-Dini_encoding=true`. Requires iconv implementation and libguess. If the encoding is wrongly detected, you can set the "titleLanguage" hint in mkxp.conf.
**MRI-Binding**: By default, meson will search for Ruby 1.8 libraries and includes within the system search path. This can be adjusted with `-Dcpp_args=-I[path]` for includes and `-Dcpp_link_args=-L[path]` for libraries. For newer Ruby versions, pkg-config will look for `ruby-X.Y.pc`, where `X` is the major version number and `Y` is the minor version number (e.g. `ruby-2.6.pc`). The version that will be searched for can be set with `-Dmri_version=X.Y` (`-Dmri_version=2.6` as an example).
These depend on the SDL auxiliary libraries. For maximum RGSS compliance, build SDL2_image with png/jpg support, and SDL_sound with oggvorbis/wav/mp3 support.
A few notes on compatibility differences compared to RMXP:
* If you use Paint.NET, images exported with an indexed color format will confuse poor SDL2. `#000000` (black) pixels will be mistaken for completely transparent ones when loaded in. Export in or convert your stuff to RGB instead.
* You will need to re-encode any audio files that OpenAL does not like (16-bit signed WAV works fine, 32-bit float WAV does not, for instance). The game will hitch while attempting to read unsupported formats.
* If you don't know where to even begin with fixing this stuff, ImageMagick is the go-to for images (`convert in.png PNG32:out.png` for converting to a new file, `mogrify -define png:format=png32 in.png` for converting in-place) and FFMPEG is the tool for... well, many things, but it will convert your audio (`ffmpeg -i in.wav out.wav`). You could take advantage of these commands to write scripts that can fix all your stuff for you instead of having to convert them all one-by-one with whatever GUI program you favor. Or you could just use the [crappy one I wrote which will still do the job](https://gist.github.com/inori-z/33c27340fe215814f1890e367e2cab52).
mkxp reads configuration data from the file "mkxp.conf". The format is ini-style. Do *not* use quotes around file paths (spaces won't break). Lines starting with '#' are comments. See 'mkxp.conf.sample' for a list of accepted entries.
All option entries can alternatively be specified as command line options. Any options that are not arrays (eg. RTP paths) specified as command line options will override entries in mkxp.conf. Note that you will have to wrap values containing spaces in quotes (unlike in mkxp.conf).
Win32API exists in mkxp-z as both `Win32API.new` and `MiniFFI.new` (This class is available under macOS, linux and Windows and "Win32API" as a name makes no sense on the former two platforms). It functions nearly the same as Ruby 1.8's Win32API, for better or worse. The third and fourth arguments are now optional (if you just want a function that takes no arguments and returns nothing, for instance), and `new` will yield to blocks. Being simple as it is, it remains mostly as the lazy option/last resort to add C functions from shared libraries if you can't/don't want to build mkxp-z yourself.
mkxp-z provides limited support for some WinAPI functions that would normally break. While using Win32API isn't the most recommended course of action, it does make porting easier if you don't care whether it's used or not. Building with the `use_fakeapi` option enables this.
*`SetWindowLong`: Native SetWindowLong on Windows. Everywhere else, only supports switching between fullscreen/windowed modes and always returns `571`.
*`GetUserDefaultLangId`: Checks for JP, EN, FR, IT, DE, ES, KO, PT and ZH. Returns English (`0x09`) if the locale can't be determined. Doesn't handle sublanguages.
mkxp doesn't come with a soundfont by default, so you will have to supply it yourself (set its path in the config). Playback has been tested and should work reasonably well with all RTP assets.
You can use this public domain soundfont: [GMGSx.sf2](https://www.dropbox.com/s/qxdvoxxcexsvn43/GMGSx.sf2?dl=0)
## Fonts
In the RMXP version of RGSS, fonts are loaded directly from system specific search paths (meaning they must be installed to be available to games). Because this whole thing is a giant platform-dependent headache, Ancurio decided to implement the behavior Enterbrain thankfully added in VX Ace: loading fonts will automatically search a folder called "Fonts", which obeys the default searchpath behavior (ie. it can be located directly in the game folder, or an RTP).
If a requested font is not found, no error is generated. Instead, a built-in font is used. By default, this font is Liberation Sans. WenQuanYi MicroHei is used as the built-in font if the `cjk_fallback_font` option is used.
*`load_data` is slow. In fact, it's too slow to handle `pbResolveBitmap` firing a million times a second, so Graphics files can only be loaded from outside of the game's archive. You could remove that code if you want, but you'll lag if not using loose files. Very hard.
^ There is an exception to this, called *mega surface*. When a Bitmap bigger than the texture limit is created from a file, it is not stored in VRAM, but regular RAM. Its sole purpose is to be used as a tileset bitmap. Any other operation to it (besides blitting to a regular Bitmap) will result in an error.
To smooth over cross-platform compatibility, functionality that you won't find in the RGSS spec has been added. Currently this amounts to the following:
* The `Input.press?` family of functions accepts three additional button constants: `::MOUSELEFT`, `::MOUSEMIDDLE` and `::MOUSERIGHT` for the respective mouse buttons.
* The `Input` module has two additional property: `text_input` determines whether to accept text editing events. `clipboard` gets and sets the user's clipboard.
* The `Input` module has six additional functions, `#mouse_x` and `#mouse_y` to query the mouse pointer position relative to the game screen. `#pressex?`, `#triggerex?` and `#repeatex?` provide input states for raw key codes, which are provided in the form of [Microsoft Virtual-Key Codes](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/inputdev/virtual-key-codes). Only buttons which are also [tracked by SDL](https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_Scancode) are supported. `#gets` returns a UTF-8 string of any text that was input by the user since the last time `#gets` was called. The `text_input` property must be set to true for it to work.
* The `Graphics` module has three additional properties: `fullscreen` represents the current fullscreen mode (`true` = fullscreen, `false` = windowed), `show_cursor` hides the system cursor inside the game window when `false`. `scale` represents the current scale factor of the screen, and can be set from `0.5` to `2`.
* The `Graphics` module has two additional functions: `#screenshot(path)` will save a screenshot to `path` in BMP format. `#center` will move the window to the center of the screen.
* The `Bitmap` class has one additional property: `raw_data` gets and sets the raw pixel data of a Bitmap in the form of a string. The string must be the size of the bitmap's `width*height*4`. If it is not, no error is raised, but the Bitmap will not be updated.
*`data_directory` returns the assigned directory for saves and other data files.
*`set_window_title` sets the window's title.
*`raw_key_states` returns the raw state of MKXP's keystates in the form of a string.
*`mouse_in_window` returns whether the mouse is currently located within the window.
*`platform` returns the operating system MKXP is running on (e.g. `Windows`).
*`user_language` returns the user's current locale (e.g. `en_US`).
*`game_title` returns the game's title as set in its ini.
*`power_state` returns a hash with the system power state information. Its members are `:discharging` (Boolean), `:percent` (int/nil), and `:seconds` (int/nil)
1. Install [MSYS](https://www.msys2.org) and launch it. Run `pacman -Syu`, and close the console when it asks you to, then launch MSYS using the `MSYS MinGW 32-bit` shortcut that’s been added to your Start menu. Run `pacman -Su` this time.
2. Add `C:\msys64\mingw32\bin` to your PATH. Unless you want to try and build mkxp-z statically, this is important if you want to actually run the program you built. Don't forget to log out and back in.
> I'm assuming that if you're using anything other than Ubuntu, you're probably familiar enough with this sort of thing to not need instructions. In fact, you've probably built this thing already, haven't you?
