Best RPGM development software

[Fate]

RPG maker was my youth and I grew up making games on the early models.

Over the next year or two, I am going to be coming back and actually developing my own game with real detail now I have the capabilities to hire.

I’m doing abit of research and since I last used RPG maker XP there has been a number of new revisions of the series.

As it stands I anticipate using XP as the engine, however, I would like to do some research on the others.

From the recently involved community, can anyone recommend the more newer editions and tell me if and why they’re better than XP?

Regards

 

[ZenVirZan]

XP is my favourite, but its age really shows. If you're able, I'd suggest attempting to move XP's tileset functionality over to MV, because XPs engine is really slow and super limited. Having no resolution options (the worst fullscreen experience ever), no native mouse or full keyboard input, minimal hardware acceleration and an ancient version of Ruby made all my enthusiasm die off when there are so many better programs to use.

That said, I'm more interested in the technical side of things than storytelling etc, so depending on your priorities this may or may not be an issue. The fullscreen issues bother me a lot when playing other RMXP games though.

 

[BizarreMonkey]

MV only falls short of XP in that it does not have completely unlimited layers, and it does suffer a little from square-game syndrome, something that can easily be corrected by handrawing maps like I do or being clever with tiles and shift mapping. The music, which is one of the other big XP features, is about as good if not better depending on your tastes of genre. MV has a nice refreshingly good rtp ost after the shit show of VX, and VX Ace wasn't much better.

A big selling point in MV beyond the optimization, the ability to easily adjust resoution and tilesize, and more- is that there are now several tools to help you out if like some, you are not an artist, these include an extensive character-set generator, with faces to match. Battlebacks are back and more beautiful than ever, with the Mix and match functionality introduced in Ace. There's also a lot of updates that keep happening, and often times these updates will include new assets, be they graphics, sound effects, music or plugins, which is what we call scripts now.

For instance, in the recent 1.6.1 update, we got some cool free parallaxes with it. I've already been having fun with them.

Forgive me on the second one, I haven't finished the map yet. Most of the art in this game is custom, here's a good example of a game that uses mostly just the RTP.
https://bizarremonkey.itch.io/terra
Sorry if this seems like a big plug, I'm purely showing what I do with it so you may be motivated to give MV a go.

 

[Fate]

Thank you both for your detailed responses. I will definitely be looking into MV as resolution was a big issue for me previously too.