Agent Otter Whiskers
kiwifarms.net
What Is RPG Maker 2003?
RPG Maker 2003 (originally RPG Tsukuru 2003) is a program made to create games of the RPG genre easily, without any programming knowledge. Its predecessors are 95 and 2000, both developed by a company named ASCII, 2003 was made by Enterbrain, however, who acquired the rights to the franchise. None of the 3 titles had been released outside of Japan until recently. Only fan translations existed back then but none of them were legally acknowledged.
Who Is Cherry?
David "Cherry" Trapp is a 22 years old Austrian who made a handful amazing hacks for RM2000/2003. He is also listed as one of the developers of the Official RPG Maker 2003. His website is at http://cherrytree.at/
How It All Began
Jasmin "Archeia" Toral, another person involved and invested in the RM community, petitioned Enterbrain to grant her permission to release an official version and approached Cherry to help with the localization . RM2003 was then released on 24 Apr, 2015.
Nobody can argue, this is a noble cause in itself. This is not where the problems stem from, however. Cherry did something other than localization. He edited the main functions of the program itself. More accurately, he hacked. That is right. According to him, the source code was lost by Enterbrain, so ultimately he was hired to hack. He tried to fix some issues and better integrate the program on newer Windows OS's (such as re-adding support for midi playback). Little did he know about the consequences...
Issues and Criticism
With Cherry's modifications came bugs which previously did not exist. A large amount of them only applied to the steam version (where they primarily released the program) due to Cherry's unfamiliarity with it. Many of them got fixed but some major ones remain.
Moreover, following the release of this official RM2003 people started asking questions regarding the legality of this one and the fan translations from over 10 years ago. You see, with the release of the official version, Enterbrain and all of its associates could finally claim how illegal the fan translations are and rightfully ban anyone bringing them up or posting games made using them. The new RM2003 did include a feature to convert older projects to legalize them, however, due to how fiercely Cherry and Archeia rubbed it in people's faces that only their RM2003 is legal, nobody paid attention to that, instead they got driven away or bewildered by their attitude.
The Major Issue
Although it only appeared to a few people, it was enough to know there is something seriously broken in the program. It is the way Cherry rewrote the full screen code. Instead of switching to 320*240, the resolution stays the same, something else resizes the display, in other words: it is a fake full screen. It uses GDI instead of DirectDraw the old one used. At first the F5 key only allowed to toggle Bilinear interpolation (which made the screen awfully blurry), then it was made possible to change between GDI and DirectDraw. The main problem is that it lags. Just slightly, not in a very noticeable way, but it is enough to cause eye strains. Cherry could not solve this.
In the end Cherry left without solving the issue and other bug reports have been ignored.
Why This Is a Scam
RPG Maker 2003 (originally RPG Tsukuru 2003) is a program made to create games of the RPG genre easily, without any programming knowledge. Its predecessors are 95 and 2000, both developed by a company named ASCII, 2003 was made by Enterbrain, however, who acquired the rights to the franchise. None of the 3 titles had been released outside of Japan until recently. Only fan translations existed back then but none of them were legally acknowledged.
Who Is Cherry?
David "Cherry" Trapp is a 22 years old Austrian who made a handful amazing hacks for RM2000/2003. He is also listed as one of the developers of the Official RPG Maker 2003. His website is at http://cherrytree.at/
How It All Began
Jasmin "Archeia" Toral, another person involved and invested in the RM community, petitioned Enterbrain to grant her permission to release an official version and approached Cherry to help with the localization . RM2003 was then released on 24 Apr, 2015.
Nobody can argue, this is a noble cause in itself. This is not where the problems stem from, however. Cherry did something other than localization. He edited the main functions of the program itself. More accurately, he hacked. That is right. According to him, the source code was lost by Enterbrain, so ultimately he was hired to hack. He tried to fix some issues and better integrate the program on newer Windows OS's (such as re-adding support for midi playback). Little did he know about the consequences...
Archeia said:
Cherry said:
source: My Boxed Universe interviewCherry said:
Issues and Criticism
With Cherry's modifications came bugs which previously did not exist. A large amount of them only applied to the steam version (where they primarily released the program) due to Cherry's unfamiliarity with it. Many of them got fixed but some major ones remain.
Moreover, following the release of this official RM2003 people started asking questions regarding the legality of this one and the fan translations from over 10 years ago. You see, with the release of the official version, Enterbrain and all of its associates could finally claim how illegal the fan translations are and rightfully ban anyone bringing them up or posting games made using them. The new RM2003 did include a feature to convert older projects to legalize them, however, due to how fiercely Cherry and Archeia rubbed it in people's faces that only their RM2003 is legal, nobody paid attention to that, instead they got driven away or bewildered by their attitude.
The Major Issue
Although it only appeared to a few people, it was enough to know there is something seriously broken in the program. It is the way Cherry rewrote the full screen code. Instead of switching to 320*240, the resolution stays the same, something else resizes the display, in other words: it is a fake full screen. It uses GDI instead of DirectDraw the old one used. At first the F5 key only allowed to toggle Bilinear interpolation (which made the screen awfully blurry), then it was made possible to change between GDI and DirectDraw. The main problem is that it lags. Just slightly, not in a very noticeable way, but it is enough to cause eye strains. Cherry could not solve this.
In the end Cherry left without solving the issue and other bug reports have been ignored.
Why This Is a Scam
- They lied to people. It isn't a complete makeover, it is a hack, a hack which costs $20.
- The program was released on 24 Apr, 2015 while the interview in which they state it is, in fact, a hack was posted on 30 Sept, 2015, half a year after the official release.
- Instead of offering help, they obnoxiously got defensive over every negative comment and told people off with the "don't buy if you don't like" attitude.
- Some of the major issues never got fixed, Cherry disappeared.
- The latest update (released 3 months ago) never made it to the forum store. It is still only available on steam.
