mkxp is a project that seeks to provide a fully open source implementation of the Ruby Game Scripting System (RGSS) interface used in the popular game creation software "RPG Maker XP" (trademark by Enterbrain, Inc.), with focus on Linux. The goal is to be able to run games created with the above software natively without changing a single file.
Bindings provide the glue code for an interpreted language environment to run game scripts in. As of right now, they are compiled directly into the executable (however, the scripting language itself might not be). Currently there are three bindings:
Matz's Ruby Interpreter, also called CRuby, is the most widely deployed version of ruby. If you're interested in running games created with RPG Maker XP, this is the one you should go for. MRI 1.8 is what was used in RPG Maker XP, however, this binding is written against 2.0 (the latest version). For games utilizing only the default scripts provided by Enterbrain, this binding works quite well so far. Note that there are language and syntax differences between 1.8 and 2.0, so some user created scripts may not work correctly.
mruby is a new endeavor by Matz and others to create a more lightweight, spec-adhering, embeddable Ruby implementation. You can think of it as a Ruby version of Lua.
Due to heavy differences between mruby and MRI as well as lacking modules, running RPG Maker games with this binding will most likely not work correctly. It is provided as experimental code. You can eg. write your own ruby scripts and run them.
Some extensions to the standard classes/modules are provided taking the RPG Maker XP helpfile as a quasi "standard". These include Marshal, File, FileTest and Time.
**Important:** If you decide to use [mattn's oniguruma regexp gem](https://github.com/mattn/mruby-onig-regexp), don't forget to add `-lonig` to the linker flags to avoid ugly symbol overlaps with libc.
This binding only exists for testing purposes and does nothing (the engine quits immediately). It can be used to eg. run a minimal RGSS game loop directly in C++.
mkxp employs Qt's qmake build system, so you'll need to install that beforehand. After cloning mkxp, run one of the above qmake calls, or simply `qmake` to select the default binding (currently MRI), then `make`.
mkxp reads configuration data from the file "mkxp.conf" contained in the current directory. The format is ini-style. The "[General]" group may contain following entries:
As of right now, mkxp doesn't support midi files, so to use the default RTPs provided by Enterbrain you will have to convert all midi tracks (those in BGM and ME) to ogg or wav. Make sure that the file names match up, ie. "foobar.mid" should be converted to "foobar.ogg".
## 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, I 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").
## What doesn't work
* Audio formats other than ogg/wav (this might change in the future)
* Creating Bitmaps with sizes greater than the OpenGL texture size limit (around 8192 on modern cards)*
\* 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. It's 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 alleviate possible porting of heavily Win32API reliant scripts, I have added certain functionality that you won't find in the RGSS spec. 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 functions, `#mouse_x` and `#mouse_y` to query the mouse pointer position relative to the game window.
* 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`.
