social.noyu.me

rpg maker xp is free-to-own on steam rn and the whole thing takes up less than half as much space on your hard drive as a single godot "export template". what that means is: this entire tool and all its example content is smaller than a minimal godot game with no content can be!

i suspect it's similar for unity these days but can't easily check.

this isn't a complaint about software bloat, anything below 100MB feels "lightweight" these days, but it is interesting.

oh my god it comes with a .chm (windows html help) file 🥺

i don't want to fetishise the past but. okay well maybe we should, a detailed manual being in a tiny file on your disk in a standard format that has an excellent built-in reader, that was great. i'll take this over a pdf or online-only help any day.

all the background music tracks are just midi files <3

035-Dungeon01.mid from RPG Maker XP sounds really beautiful on my Roland SC-7 😭

for some reason, every single BGM included with this software is titled "Clipping" in the MIDI metadata

‪this is pretty close to how it sounds normally! RPG Maker XP uses the DirectMusic synth which uses the same soundfont as Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth (derived from Roland GS modules), but isn't so goddamn dry because it actually has reverb and chorus (like Roland GS modules do)‬

@hikari yay...

@hikari I wrote a ton of midi tracks about 20 years ago for RMXP and RM2K.

They weren't "good" but as I got better my standards got higher and as a result I haven't written anything in ages because I'm not good enough to meet my own standards

@hikari I miss guides composed entirely of ASCII art and plain text

@hikari Want to know something cursed? Ultrasound cardiology software made by a certain US multinational defaults to exporting diagnoses as CHM files.

@jernej__s what on earth

@hikari According to one of their techs, they wanted a solution where they could have a single file with rich text, tables and images, which would be readable anywhere, and 25 years ago CHM files seemed like the perfect solution, since the viewer was already installed on practically every Windows install, and the resulting files were small.

@jernej__s reasonable!

@hikari I loved .chm files. They opened so much snappier than a full browser, back in the day.

@hikari flashbacks to implementing brainfuck in it.. well, an approximation of bf at least

with an actual actor representing the instruction pointer

@hikari I like that I can choose to have it either for free or for £1.88 because I already own MV.

Steam bundles work weirdly sonetimes.