So, I've got a new project going on, and that means...

Time to revisit the fabled Fields Of Doom!

Got my trusty bullwhip and some Valiums handy for yet another perilous quest fraught with danger and frustration.

Man, I can barely stand this field editor. It's just so difficult to use. Hours of time spent just getting coastlines looking decent and not all Chunkville like they usually look after being smoothed out for the first time. Hours spent designing hills and trying to get them not to look chunky and stupid. Hours of time spent working on one small area of a mountain range designing a pathway and some narrow ledges. Then I gotta match up the visual terrain with where the mountains are, and it's placing trees in the middle of my forest paths again... I think the only thing I've really mastered is submerging a town or dungeon's big ugly mound underneath the terrain.

But there's something new I noticed while designing a vista on a high mountain top that pretty much overlooks the whole field. I'm at the east side overlooking to the west, and hey!, where's that tree line I placed atop a mountain way off in the distance? Take a few steps forward, and... pop-up! Oh, there it is. Now to the RPG Maker 3 designers' credit, the stuff that's mysteriously invisible and then pops up is in the western "no go zone" outside the field, and my vantage point is pretty close to the east side of the "no go zone". So I'm looking at something that is very far away... very far away... very far away... (echo)

I didn't realize that there could be pop-up on a field. I guess I never noticed it on my previous four fields because they're so dense with so much stuff getting in the way. Forests on hills, castles, mountains. There also isn't much to see in the "no go zone" except large forested areas and mountains. A vast majority of the stuff on the field is in the middle areas. I suppose it's worth noting also that this new field has much higher mountainous elevations than I previously did, placing the vantage points for vistas at much higher altitude.

Anyway... Yeah, the Slowdown Beast has a new companion. The Pop-Up Monster!

Things that cause the Slowdown Beast to show up in dungeons...

- Too many tables on one floor, especially all or mostly in the same area. My custom-made libraries and dining halls always have slowdown, no matter how small I try to make them.

- Too much floor area on one floor, or floor plan is too complicated.

- And something new: the Mines graphical style. I was working on some cave levels, started with the Underground Cave style, then decided "Maybe it would be better with the Mines style." Maybe not. Exact same layout that didn't have slowdown in the Underground Cave style suddenly had some slowdown when changed to the Mines style. Strange. If a simple, small cave floor plan has slowdown, no wonder my mine layouts always had it in spades.

Every RM3 game I've ever played has had some form of slowdown. I would say that the best games try to limit the damage, as you're trying to do.

Good luck in your efforts!

Yeah, I can't stand slowdown. (beat up that Slowdown Beast!)

I kept trying with the first game, but some areas just refused to be rid of it.

Had more success with the second game; but again, a few areas are just slowdown magnets. My data usage for the second game was 99.9% at one time, but I removed a lot of deco to try to combat the Slowdown Beast. Sometimes it worked, other times not so much. Final data usage for it is at 98.something.

So far, the current project doesn't have any slowdown.

Thanks for your support!

I agree. Now I myself don't know enough about slowdown but if it is the case that excessive data usage is responsible then it adds the annoyance I have with the attitude that the closer you get to 100% the better the game is. I've always that thought based on my own programming experience that there is no need to get anywhere near 100% but admittedly my games aren't too field heavy. I think that RPGM3 at least for me offers a nice buffer between actual usage and 100% usage.

With "Warriors Of Altos", I tried to give players the most expansive gaming experience I could for the trouble of downloading it, installing it on the PS2, and playing it. I think everything worked out perfectly there. I was able to fit all the important stuff into a game file that clocks in at close to 100%, and just had to remove a small mini-game type thing to free up memory to finish it. "Raiders Of Lekunder" doesn't try as hard, clocking in at 80% with plenty of room for more features and stuff, but I was lazy in 2006, eager to have my first game finished, and didn't want to add another field so I could add more stuff to it.

My current project is a collection of small games; again, I'm gonna pack as many games into the file as I can. Four are planned. Two of them are finished. If current memory usage is indication of how much memory the other two will take up, I may have memory to spare and be able to pack in a couple more games (maybe as bonus unlockables).

The two games that are finished don't have any slowdown. The Slowdown Beast must be on vacation or something.

Oh, and as for overall data usage causing slowdown, I'd say no. Each town, building, dungeon floor, and field is a separate entity, unaffected by what happens in other areas. You could be in a dungeon where Floor 1 has no slowdown, then ascend a staircase to Floor 2 that has lots of slowdown. It really depends on what's going on in the local area, how big it is, how many events there are, and how much deco there is.

Oh, and I agree that "more" doesn't necessarily mean "better".

But on a site and forum about RPG Maker, a program that enables individuals to do whatever they want creatively with it, I would try my best to avoid labeling someone's game as "best" or someone else's as "worst", regardless of whatever reasons one might think of. It's RPG Maker. It's supposed to be fun for everyone, not a competition to see who can make the best game or whatever. Rather, I'd just let every game be what it is, without drawing comparisons. That's a big part of living in a creative vacuum. That's why one of my developer labels is "Vacuum Made Games". Because I create in a vacuum where my creations simply are what they are. They're not better or worse than anything else. They're just art.

That's why the tagline for "Plan Doubt Productions" is "Just havin' fun". That sums up what I've been doing with RPG Maker 3.

This is kind of off topic here, but... what isn't lately? I start talking about the Pop-Up Monster on a field, then we're talking about the Slowdown Beast and stuff... so hopefully this will be okay to talk about here.

As I work on my new project, I'm noticing a few things that I haven't seen before. Specifically, Mr. Death Condor takes forever to do his standard attack. He flaps his wings a lot and hovers a bit and gains altitude a bit, then finally decides to peck me on the nose. Why is this taking so long? What, is there a decision that needs to be made here? "Hmm, should I peck this guy on the nose or... do something else? I'd better hover and make it look like I'm doing something while I decide, or this guy might get bored while he's waiting for me to do something." Hey Mr. Death Condor! You're a monster who's trying to kill me. What's with the indecision? Just peck me on the nose and be done with it, dude!

During the time it takes this guy to make up his mind and peck me on the nose, I could take a walk, shave my head, and play a game of chess on my computer. Did he attack me yet? Crap, he's still thinking about it. Better get a book or a magazine or something.

I didn't notice this in my previous games because there Mr. Death Condor is sitting in one place and hitting me with lightning and stuff. The animations for his magic stuff are more quick and to the point.

So here Mr. Death Condor got changed so he tosses out lightning again. Hopefully he'll do that most of the time. He seems to during playtesting.

I like Mr. Goblin, Mr. Orc, and Mr. Bandit beacuse their standard attack animations don't take all day for them to do. Another guy I like is Mr. Cobra. Reasonably quick and to the point.

Another guy who I'm noticing takes a while is Mr. Karate Tree-Man. He takes a while to step up toward me and smack me upside the head. Hey dude! Just smack me and get it over with! Do you know how fast that kung fu stuff goes? You're taking up a karate kung fu stance for the battle, then you take a while to do the "hitting" part. I don't know, maybe it's supposed to be stylistic.

I just think that Enterbrain chose a poor development team to handle the battle system.

I think they dropped the ball across the board. We've got this difficult field assembly editor where a lot of things are pretty much hit-and-miss. Smoothing out a coastline, for example. Whole chunks of my coastline drop into the ocean, and the land that meets up with the water tends to be Chunkville. Chunky terrain. Bring the terrain back up and try again until I get lucky. I don't know, maybe I've been doing it wrong. The back of the box says something like "Create beautiful landscapes by simply drawing them in 2D and letting the software instantly turn them into fully landscaped worlds." Am I missing the "fill in elevation" button? Eh, it would probably do it chunky-style. Want something done right...?

Then there's hills, another thing that's hit-and-miss. Design a hill that ends up being too chunky in areas. Smooth it out too much and it'll really flatten out. Try some stuff and then try again until something finally works.

I like designing mountains and ledges and pathways that go all over the place because it's much more precise. When I go to playtest and look at what I did, I already have a good idea of what it's gonna look like. Occasionally a square that's just a bit too high or too low creeps its way into my design during the editing process, but it's easy to fix. Sometimes a mistake ends up enhancing the uneven, rocky feel of a cliff or a narrow ledge and I leave it in there. For the most part, though, it's more of an exact science than that other stuff.

Yet people tend to say that making fields quickly becomes their most favorite part of the game. Hmm, I wonder why. Maybe... because it's the most creative part of RPG Maker 3 where you can design something that's not gonna look like everyone else's game?

Now I don't want to design my town buildings one pixel at a time or even one square at a time, but... The entire town region is pixel-perfect flat, and there aren't enough buildings to choose from. Each town ends up looking pretty much like the other. I had to get a little creative with it and place buildings next to each other to form larger and more unique building shapes. Which brings me to another thing.

Placing buildings and stuff in a town is painfully imprecise. When I move my object, it drifts after I let go of the stick. I want my building to be at exactly 36.05 by 42.79 to create a specific visual effect of the buildings blending in seamlessly with each other. If it's off by one number in the x or y coordinate, it'll look stupid. So, drift it back and forth until I get lucky. I try to make very fine adjustments with the stick, but it's too sensitive to the sweeping "move it alllll the way over there" movements. This makes designing creative layouts more time consuming than it should be.

The dungeon editor is perhaps the best thing going on here. Easy to use, and the "time consuming" part can be the creative process of designing an interesting cavern or castle interior or whatever. But all the walls look alike, which brings me to...

Events and deco. No tapestries we can place on the walls. No curtains, no decorative flags, no bookcases, nothing that can be placed on a wall. Well, a sign can be embedded inside the wall so that the post doesn't show and it ends up looking pretty cool, but players are going to expect a sign to say something. It's pretty apparent that the designers of RPG Maker 3 think that dungeons should be boring, sterile-looking environments that serve one purpose: get in random encounters with monsters. Nothing else seemed to matter much. Place a bunch of tables to create a dining room or some sort of atmospheric effect in your castle, and you've just summoned the Slowdown Beast. I have to use tables in my bedrooms because there are no beds to use. A table, a potted plant in the corner, and a wooden door that leads to a one-square closet; that's supposed to be a bedroom. I don't know, maybe I could place boxes next to each other to form a wooden bed, but that's just begging for more slowdown.

What else is there to talk about? A gazillion different humans, then there's one male elf, one female elf, one male dwarf, and one female dwarf. I use archers as elves to give it some variety. Some of the monsters are just too ugly to be usable. Mr. Goblin is okay. Mr. Orc is okay. Most of the small ones are okay, I guess. But then we've got ugly demons, and a couple of the big models are large, ugly monstrosities. A huge demonic-looking craphead. And "Hellminion"? That's just... lovely. That's something I definitely want to see. Even the dragons aren't that great. And these ugly, eyesore monsters are in a game that's easy for children to use and it has three types of "Pastel Candies" you can put on a field, a Christmas Tree, a "Mega Cake"???... A wedding cake? A giant pumpkin? This thing clearly doesn't take itself too seriously. That's the vibe I get from it anyway. It's kinda "just for fun". Yet it has some very ugly creature visuals. I don't want to see those awful demons in a game.

Then there are so many important things that are not told to us, the average Joe user base who don't know much about game programming. Like, for example, the area-affect tool in the field editor has a couple different area affects for each size setting. If you shrink it down to its smallest size, or maybe a size or two above that, there's two versions of each size, and this turns out to be kind of important when smoothing out terrain. One size affects only the terrain inside the tool. The other affects the squares just outside the area-affect as well. Another example is monster AI, which I worked hard with and experimented with to get just a rudimentary understanding of how it behaves and how to get it to do something close to what I'd like it to do. An item's text description allows you to type in many lines but only displays five or so of them in-game. Your lengthy text descriptions will get cut off mid-word. I had to figure out how to get a story scene to fade in (place the next thing that happens 10 to 20 time indexes further down). There are probably other things I've had to experiment with as well, over the years, to try to get a handle on what the heck's going on. Other people have had similar problems with figuring out how some of the event codes work, like Val Condition Branches.

I don't know, maybe the strategy guide (sold separately) reveals everything.

How else did they drop the ball? You can't copy an event full of code. Like, for the repetitive stuff that's repetitive. I can copy an event's mode while editing one event, but if I want to do another event that's identical to it or nearly identical, I have to set it up from scratch. No subroutines. Like, so I'd only have to have a certain thing appear once, then every time I want it to do that thing just run the subroutine. Basic programming was infinitely more useful than what we get here. In Basic, you can have subroutines and global events that happen when conditions are met, and to do a global event you only have to type it in once.

When I'm working on a story scene and I've got it so that empty time indexes are used for fading in, fading out, and other stuff, if I make a change or remove something big from it, I've got lots of empty time indexes, which would translate into a big pause while the scene is playing in-game. I have to grab each key and move it one by one to fill in the gap, which is a time consuming process. How about an option to delete a time index. I could just delete the empty time indexes. While we're at it, an option to insert a time index would've been great. Then I wouldn't have to move everything below my insertion point down to make room for what I want to insert.

Hey, I just wrote a review of RPG Maker 3! All I have to do is dress it up a bit for general audiences and add in some things I like about it. Then I can post it at GameFAQs. The title for my review of RPG Maker 3 is slated to eventually be "The best of both worlds" because I think it's either the best thing to happen to the PS2 or the worst. I also think it's both. Wait, it can't be both! That's a paradox! Wait, the entire universe just ceased to--!

The fact you can't copy/paste anything is annoying, but hands-down the thing that puts me off the most from RPGM3 is the frustrating field map editor. If I ever make an RPGM3 game, it won't use field maps.

If we pool our resources...

I enjoy designing environments. Not so much everything else. I can design a decent field or two. Depends on how many fields you'd want to have. I wouldn't want to make a gazillion of them because of how difficult and time consuming it is just to get a half-way decent field up and running, then more time is spent tweaking small areas and fixing terrain problems I didn't notice before.

I could conceivably do a couple of them if given knowledge of which dungeons and towns are supposed to be on it so that I can fit them in with the terrain and make it look good.

If you just want to tell a story or interesting gameplay or something, I might be able to contribute in this way of providing a background for it.

More thoughts about RPG Maker 3.

When dealing with random battles, there are two important questions we need to ask.

1. How often do they occur? Can I travel a decent distance without one popping up?
2. Can I get each battle over with quickly?

Random encounters are a classic case of quantity over quality. Always have been. Always will be. Since I'm investing so much time in them, I'm going to want to get each battle over with as quickly as possible so I can be on my way. I'm also not going to want to be pestered by one of those buggers every couple steps I take. To put this into simpler words: Don't waste my time. Keep it simple and keep it fun.

A third question that I don't consider to be as important:

3. How much leveling and stuff will I have to do to keep up?

I don't mind spending time leveling if the first two questions are appropriately answered. I'm a "power leveler" type of player, and the main reason why is the quantity over quality matter. Because there are so many battles to slosh through, I want to get each one over with, collect my experience and stuff, and be on my way as quickly as possible. One solution to this problem is to power level, where my characters become much stronger than those of an average player. Thus I'm able to knock down the monsters or whatever with a minimum of time wasted. While it does take time to power level, I feel it pays off. I'm investing for the future, to make inevitable encounters further down the road easier.

I've been playing Phantasy Star 2, which addresses those very important first two questions. I can travel a decent distance before a battle happens, and the presentation for the battles is quick and to the point. There's a brief flash, the battle screen comes up with battle music, my guys knock down the monsters, then press a button to advance through a couple quick dialogue boxes that show experience and money gained, then I'm back at the map to continue making progress. For an average encounter, all of this can happen in a matter of seconds. Maybe 5 seconds or a bit more per battle. A few things I've been noticing here....

1. The intro to the battle is perfectly done. It doesn't waste my time with some elaborate graphical effect or other time consuming effects.
2. The animations for characters and monsters attacking are all quick and to the point.
3. The text in dialogue boxes does not appear one letter at a time. The box is instantly filled with what I need to know.

This game scores major points because it doesn't waste my time.

Let's have a look at RPG Maker 3. Even when set on "Low", encounters happen way too frequently. But it get worse than that.

1. The screen does its swirling effect, then we're shown "Loading...", then we're shown a pan over the battlefield, then the monsters take up their opening poses and growl or whatever. "Roar! We're bad! You're goin' down!" By this time, 5 seconds have already passed. The battle hasn't even started yet.
2. The PCs take up their poses. "No, you're goin' down!" Then finally we see a zoom-in on the first guy who can make a move, and we can select something for him to do. Some actions are quick and to the point. Others waste my time.
3. As if the designers didn't have enough contempt for the audience already, magic attacks and magic stuff get interrupted by the thing "Loading..." the graphics or whatever for it. I guess it has to load the animations into memory from the disc. No, that's not true because it does the "Loading..." thing after the animation has already started playing. Well, whatever it's loading into memory, it interrupts the animation. Wouldn't it have been better to just load the stuff before you start playing the animation? I guess it only has to load the stuff into memory once, because if you use the same spell (or whatever) a second time, it doesn't get interrupted by the "Loading..." thing.
4. This process continues for each character who gets to move. Even in an encounter where my powerful mage casts an area-affect spell at the very beginning of the battle to instantly wipe out all the monsters, this game still wastes a good amount of my time.

Stop wasting my time! Stop it!

I think this process is okay for a game that has event-based encounters because you know that there are a finite number of them and (hopefully) they're not too annoying. But for any kind of random encounters, the process is going to be time consuming at best.

Epic fail.

Holy pizza slices, Fatman! Did I actually say that?

What perplexes me is that the game even HAS to take the time to load graphics and effects during battle. I'm not saying it's bad that it loads them during battle. Experiments with FF9 show that it has to load its effects during battle, too (open the disk cover and cast a spell and you'll see what I mean). But FF9 manages to do it quickly enough that you never actually see the load. Or maybe they just use the "I'm casting a spell" animation to cover up the load. Either way, it runs smoothly. The folks that did RPGM3's battle system had to have done something pretty terrible with the programming in order for them to have visible load times. I'm thankful I have the PS2 HDD to elliminate those load times, because RPGM3's battle system is slow enough as it is. Especially when using an item. I mean, is it really necessary to have the item float over your head and shine for SEVERAL SECONDS before it actually get used?

Yeah, just show us the item's name. I'm using Healing Herbs (or whatever). I get it! It's an item from my inventory. I know what it does. I don't need to see it.

Stop wasting my time! Stop it!

Not to mention that the game forces you to give each item a visual from its ridiculously limited library of visuals. I've got items I created too numerous to mention that can't be visually represented, yet I have to choose some sort of visual for it. The visuals I ended up using don't match the items in the slightest. So much for the creative spirit.

Hey, thanks dude! You're helping me to compile useful information to include in my eventual review of RPG Maker 3. It'll be a more complete in-depth review.