Saturday, December 12, 2015

BGM Delay

I haven't had a lot of time to work on my games in the past couple of months - much of my free time has been taken up by my ongoing X-Files marathon (nearing its end now, though), and December is a busy, stressful time for me (bah humbug and all that). But I had a little time this weekend, and ended up figuring out how to record a video of me playing RPG Maker so as to demonstrate one of the enduring problems I have with the new MV program. I'll copy the video and the description I wrote up for it here, so you can see for yourself (I used a blank project just for this video):


BGM Delay - A demonstration of the problem I have in RPG Maker MV with BGMs (Background Music) taking several seconds to load each and every time they're played. MEs (Music Effects) and SEs (Sound Effects) as well as BGS (Background Sounds - not tested here) all play instantly, but not BGMs, which is true during map transfers and also when the game first loads the title screen. That multiple second delay is very annoying and frankly unacceptable in a professional product.

There's a little discussion (although not nearly enough, if you ask me) over on the RPG Maker Web Forums about this problem and potential fixes, but so far I haven't come across a satisfactory solution. Frankly, I'm surprised the program shipped with this little bug, although the fact that it did gives me little hope for a competent fix. I've read some theories that would explain it away as an inevitable symptom of the program having been designed to stream games on the fly in web browsers and/or on mobile devices.

In other words, just another sacrifice of advancing technology (and the trend towards mobile internet). I so wish I could go back to using the superior engine of RPG Maker VX Ace, but I just can't give up the cross-platform support and the side-view battle system. It's a frustrating quandary.