mkxp-z

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 (such as Discord integration) can/will be written for fangame developers (you poor souls) to take advantage of.

Prebuilt binaries

None yet!

Bindings

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.

MRI

Website: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

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.

This binding should support RGSS1, RGSS2 and RGSS3, though I've only tested it with RGSS1.

Dependencies / Building

• Boost.Unordered (headers only)
• Boost.Program_options
• libsigc++ 2.0
• PhysFS (latest hg)
• OpenAL
• SDL2*
• SDL2_image
• SDL2_ttf
• Ancurio's SDL_sound fork
• My Ruby 1.8 fork, for Zlib, a Windows build that doesn't segfault, and any 1.8.1 compatibility stuff
• vorbisfile
• pixman
• zlib (only ruby bindings)
• OpenGL header (alternatively GLES2 with -Dcpp_args=-DGLES2_HEADER)
• libiconv (on Windows, optional with INI_ENCODING)
• libguess (optional with INI_ENCODING)

(* For the F1 menu to work correctly under Linux/X11, you need latest hg + this patch)

mkxp-z employs the meson build system, so you'll need to install that beforehand.

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).

Supported image/audio formats

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.

To run mkxp, you should have a graphics card capable of at least OpenGL (ES) 2.0 with an up-to-date driver installed.

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.

Configuration

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).

The syntax is: --<option>=<value>

Example: ./mkxp --gameFolder="my game" --vsync=true --fixedFramerate=60

Midi music

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

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 (currently "Liberation Sans").

Win32API

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 yourself.

What doesn't work (yet)

• Win32API calls outside of Windows (Win32API is just an alias to the MiniFFI class, which does work with other operating systems, but you can obviously only load libraries made for the platform you're on)*
• Some Win32API calls don't play nicely with SDL. Building with the use_fakeapi option will attempt to fix this.
• rubyscreen.dll doesn't work, and Graphics.snap_to_bitmap is unconditionally overridden by the SpriteResizer script. This can't be worked around without modifying Ruby in ways I don't have any desire to. RGSS2 Graphics functions are bound in RGSS1 mode, so wrap the definition of the Win32API-based snap_to_bitmap in an if statement, or delete it. As another consequence of rubyscreen.dll not being compatible, screenshots also don't work -- but the Graphics module now has a screenshot method to compensate for this.
• The current implementation of load_data is case-sensitive. If you try to load Data/MapXXX, you will not find Data/mapXXX.
• 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.
• FileSystem::openRead is not compatible with absolute paths in Windows (this affects Bitmap.new or Audio.bgm_play, for instance, another reason why Win32API Graphics.snap_to_bitmap breaks).
• Movie playback
• wma audio files
• Creating Bitmaps with sizes greater than the OpenGL texture size limit (around 8192 on modern cards)^

* Once games can be played comfortably on Windows, I may try to have a 'fake' Win32API class written for other operating systems which intercepts and interprets some of the common calls that get used, a bit like what's already being done with the use_fakeapi option. SDL2 can handle a lot of the things that are performed with WinAPI.

^ 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. (This breaks SLLD after the professor's speech, Zeta after you leave the cave, but Pokemon Uranium seems to be fine as far as I've tested)

Nonstandard RGSS extensions

To alleviate possible porting of heavily Win32API reliant scripts, certain functionality that you won't find in the RGSS spec has been added. Currently this amounts to the following:

Input

• 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 functions, #mouse_x and #mouse_y to query the mouse pointer position relative to the game screen.

Graphics

• The Graphics module has two additional properties: fullscreen represents the current fullscreen mode (true = fullscreen, false = windowed), show_cursor hides the system cursor inside the game window when false.
• The Graphics module has one additional function: Graphics.screenshot(path) will save a screenshot to path in BMP format.

Commonly used Win32API routines will eventually have equivalent functions directly bound, like Graphics.screenshot for Win32API.new('rubyscreen.dll,'TakeScreenshot','p','i').

---

Building on Windows (MSYS+MinGW)

1. Install MSYS 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.

3. Install most of the dependencies you need with pacman:

pacman -S base-devel git mingw-w64-i686-{gcc,meson,cmake,openal,boost,SDL2,pixman,physfs,libsigc++,libvorbis,fluidsynth,libiconv,libguess} \
mingw-w64-i686-SDL2_{image,ttf}

4. Install the rest from source:

mkdir src; cd src
git clone https://github.com/Ancurio/SDL_Sound
git clone https://github.com/inori-z/ruby --single-branch --branch ruby_1_8_7

cd SDL_Sound && ./bootstrap
./configure --enable-{modplug,speex,flac}=no
make install -j`nproc`
cd ..

# when you install ruby, some extensions might not want to build.
# You probably don’t particularly need any, so you can just delete
# any problematic ones if you like:

rm -rf ruby/ext/{tk,win32ole,openssl}

# and try building again afterwards. Or you can try to fix whatever
# the problem is (missing libraries, usually). Hey, do whatever you need to
# do, Capp’n.

cd ruby && autoconf
./configure --enable-shared --disable-install-doc
make -j`nproc` && make install
cd ..

# `make install` runs a ruby script which apparently does not comply
# with MSYS’s unix paths, so everything Ruby installs will go to the 
# root of your drive. You have to move the resulting `mingw32` 
# folder to the msys64 root yourself.

5. Build mkxp-z:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/inori-z/mkxp-z
cd mkxp-z

# Ruby 1.8 doesn’t support pkg-config (Might add it in, since this
# is a bit annoying) so you have to set include and link paths yourself.
# for mingw32, includes will be at /mingw32/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mingw32

meson build -Druby_lib=msvcrt-ruby18 -Duse_fakeapi=true \
-Dcpp_args=-I/mingw32/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mingw32

cd build
ninja

You'll find your stuff under your MSYS home directory. You can also type explorer . in the shell to take a shortcut to the results.

Building on macOS (homebrew)

1. Install Homebrew.

2. Get most of your dependencies from Homebrew:

brew install meson cmake automake autoconf sdl2 sdl2_{image,ttf} \
boost pixman physfs libsigc++ libvorbis fluidsynth pkgconfig

3. Build the rest from source:

mkdir ~/src; cd ~/src
git clone https://github.com/Ancurio/SDL_Sound
git clone https://github.com/inori-z/ruby --single-branch --branch ruby_1_8_7

cd SDL_Sound && ./bootstrap
./configure
make install -j`nproc`
cd ..

# when you install ruby, some extensions might not want to build.
# You probably don’t particularly need any, so you can just delete
# any problematic ones if you like:

rm -rf ruby/ext/tk

# and try building again afterwards. Or you can try to fix whatever
# the problem is (missing libraries, usually). Hey, do whatever you
# need to do, Capp’n.

cd ruby && autoconf

# We're putting our build of ruby in its own prefix. macOS already
# includes Ruby (at least until 10.16 or so), and you really do
# not want to have any conflicts with it

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/opt/mkxp-ruby --enable-shared --disable-install-doc
make -j`nproc` && make install
cd ..

4. Build mkxp-z:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/inori-z/mkxp-z
cd mkxp-z

# Ruby 1.8 doesn’t support pkg-config (Might add it in, since this
# is a bit annoying) so you have to set include and link paths yourself.
# the header folder that Ruby 1.8 creates for macOS includes a version 
# number (i.e. `x86_64-darwin18.7.0`), and is going to be located under
# `/usr/local/opt/mkxp-ruby/lib/ruby/1.8`.

# You will also need to link to `/usr/local/opt/mkxp-ruby/lib`, and tell
# meson where your pkgconfig path is (`/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig`).

meson build -Dpkg_config_path=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig \
-Dcpp_args=-I/usr/local/opt/mkxp-ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/x86_64-darwin18.7.0 \
-Dcpp_link_args=-L/usr/local/opt/mkxp-ruby/lib

cd build
ninja

Your results will be in ~/src/mkxp-z/build . You can type open ~/src/mkxp-z/build to get there quickly.

Building on Linux (Ubuntu Disco)

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?

1. Open your terminal and make sure your apt cache and packages are up to date with sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade

2. Get most of the dependencies from apt:

sudo apt install build-essential git bison cmake meson autoconf libtool \
pkg-config xxd libsdl2* libvorbisfile3 libvorbis-dev libpixman-1* \
libboost-program-options1.65* libopenal1*  libopenal-dev zlib1g* \
fluidsynth libfluidsynth-dev libsigc++-2.0* libogg-dev

3. Build the rest from source:

mkdir ~/src; cd ~/src

# pkgconfig won't detect PhysFS unless you build it yourself,
# so...

git clone https://github.com/criptych/physfs
cd physfs
mkdir build; cd build
cmake ..
make -j`nproc`
sudo make install
cd ../..

# Now we can do the other stuff:

git clone https://github.com/Ancurio/SDL_Sound
git clone https://github.com/inori-z/ruby --single-branch --branch ruby_1_8_7

cd SDL_Sound && ./bootstrap
./configure
make -j`nproc`
sudo make install
cd ..

cd ruby && autoconf
./configure --enable-shared --disable-install-doc
make -j`nproc`
sudo make install
cd ..

4. Build mkxp-z:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/inori-z/mkxp-z
cd mkxp-z

# Ruby 1.8 doesn’t support pkg-config (Might add it in, since this
# is a bit annoying) so you have to set include and link paths yourself.
# in this case, includes will be found at `/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux`.

meson build -Dcpp_args=-I/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux

cd build
ninja

See your results with nautilus ~/src/mkxp-z/build.