MZ RTP evaluation

[coyotecraft]

• RTP Comparison: MV | MZ
• BGM: 89 | 48
• BGS: 29 | 29
• me: 27 | 27
• se: 355 | 345
• BattleBacks1: 76 | 51
• BattleBacks2: 78 | 50
• Characters: 46(files) | 45(files, MZ has more doors)
• Enemies: 105 | 105
• Faces: 15 | 15
• Parallaxes: 15 | 21
• Pictures: 0 | 120 (character busts)
• Sv_actors: 41 | 40
• Sv_enemies: 105 |105
• Tilesets: 31 | 31
• Titles: 22 | 20
• Titles2: 2 | 2

When they said MZ had the biggest resource library, I was calling bullshit. The only thing it has in excess is Character art. MV technically had that too but withheld for, preorder incentives I think.
MZ has notably fewer assets than MV's original release. Mostly lacking the modern/scifi assets. For the most part, MZ recreates almost everything from MV. I did notice a handful of tiles are just recolors of MV tiles. I seriously think we got an unfinished draft, or something. All the colors have been compressed and index. And I'm not 100% sure it was done intentionally.

Spoiler: Here's my initial evaluation of the resource material, in pictures, since it's hard to talk about otherwise.

VX Ace, MV, and MZ all have the same stupid tile arrangement. Instead of keeping all the lava tiles together, they have them grouped by types. Stairs with stairs. Damaged tiles with damaged tiles. For 3 editions now they've included duplicate floor tiles, I think one floor is suppose to be lightened some how. But it's not. And for 3 editions they've recreated it that way.
It's obvious once you group the tiles together. And you start noticing how incomplete the sets actually are.
This is stuff that jumps out at me, in no particular order.

I think a lot of the tiles look ugly and flat. Some of the autotiles don't tile seamlessly.

This isn't everything. But I can't spend all day pointing things out to express my disappointment.

The Music sounds more unified compared to MV, a welcomed improvement. It doesn't go from industrial to instrumental.
However something sounds off and wasn't like that in the Youtube preview. It's sounds kind of - I'm not good with audio terms - but i want to say tinny. Like an old tv set that somebody has twisted the Treble knob to high.
So that, plus the indexed colored graphics makes me think someone got carried away trying to compress everything.

 

[coyotecraft]

The monster designs are a little more practical this time around. What do I mean by "practical"? I'm looking at all the resources as a whole and judging the potential applications. For example MV had Baby Spirits, and colorful monsters, a demon jester crawling out of an angel. The question is, what can you do with it and where do you use it?

MZ has a lot of Demons, Devils, Demi-humans, Goblins. Practical everything is bi-peddle. Out of the 105 enemies, only 12 are on all fours(or more). This is both good and bad. The good thing about humanoids is that they can fit about any environment.
You can put them in snow, caves, deserts. They're kind of universal. MV had a lot of critters, but you didn't have a lot to work with for settings outside of forests and demon castles.

MZ has a lot of aquatic monsters. Instead of Elemental Spirits, this time they feature classical creatures: Salamander, Undine, Sylph, and Gnome. While Salamander and Undine are covered in their elements of fire and water. Sylph and Gnome are more plant and fungus than wind and earth. There is an Earth Knight at least.
I mentioned above that The Chinese "Modern/Scifi" Set has a Phoenix, but not the dragon, turtle, and tiger to complete the 4 directions. Not very feng shui of them.
I've also mention how there is no backgrounds to go with the Scifi machines, mafia, ect...You'll have to borrow from MV if you have it.

There are Gorilla & Monkey soldiers and an anaconda that would work for a jungle. The Scifi Overworld has Tropical looking islands to support it. But then again, there are no Jungle tiles.
Additionally, there are a number of Japanese themed monsters such as Oni and Kappas. However, your'll have to make do with some rudimentary housing. Strangely enough, one of the titlescreens is a Japanese village. However there aren't any tiles to go with it.

The Actors all look amazing. They're all sporting Blue and Gold for the most part. I think that was suppose to be a theme.
There is at least 1 dud though. Actor2_6, a female lancer, her front-view battler looks like she twisted too far and broke her spine.
I've already mentioned the missing actor battlers. That's something I'll aim to remedy myself.

 

[coyotecraft]

I finally got around to previewing the battle animations. Because it uses a particle engine the animations aren't identical. But the SE still play by frame numbers. I'm not sure if the particle burst generate at a precise timing or not, but it sounds a little off.
I know with the Earth_All animation the rocks are suppose to disappear with a Sand SE, but the timing is off by like 30 frames.

The animations are, again, recreations of previous makers. And it's kind dumb. Previously the effects were limited to the cell size of animation sheet. So the Water_All animation appeared as 3 waterfalls in a row. MZ + effekseer shouldn't have that limitation. But the Water_All animation in MZ is still 3 streams of water.
There's a lot of magic circle animations, but they're tilted on a different plane than what the battle backgrounds suggest. I can fix this in Effekseer but it's kind of annoying.

Here is some more things other people have found.

Scifi outside tileset has a number of issues. The food and shop stalls in MV had trays you could swap out with other tiles. MZ seemed to just mindlessly recreate tiles with no clue how they go together.
There are grass and dirt stairs but they don't match the other tiles. Pretty sure the Crimson Demonic earth should have stairs.
There's carpeted stairs that don't go with anything, I think I mentioned this before but I feel like I should also point out that this is suppose to be an "outside" set and carpets are generally interior things anyways.

The Zombie Dog has a line artifact in both the Frontview and SV versions. It's really only noticeable on dark background.

Some of the vehicles have an inconsistent bounce animation. Up and Down in one direction, but side to side in another direction.
This fancy canoe isn't really sitting in water, or have ripples like the other ships. I suppose it could be a magic flying thing for up in the clouds maybe? But in MV the corresponding vehicle is a log raft with a sail.

 

[coyotecraft]

I hate the crystals. They're an attractive shape at first glance. But animated they just, idk, change facet sizes slightly. Also the color is reduced so they have obvious banding.

The tilesets typically have a camp fire. A circle of stones or a pile of wood. And then you'd place a Flame character set on top of it.
MZ has a circle stone fire pit on the tilesets, but a squarish pyre characterset. It does, however, have an open flame in different sizes and positions that can go in fireplaces or on a fire pit.
It's good enough and not really something to complain about. But, still...

Here's just another example of the Titleset lunacy. It's not arranged with the Dungeon Generator in mind. Ace and MV had correspondence issues as well. But MZ takes it to a new level. No one is going to generate a dungeon with nothing but stairs!

 

[coyotecraft]

Thankfully the Japanese tkool forum is aware of some of the graphical issues and has started correcting them. Their revisions will probably be release for the English Version sometime in the future I expect.

One of the Desert Buildings had messed up corners.
The generator has an extra file for Male Hair #13 that gives the portrait long hair it shouldn't have. You just have to find and delete the file if you want to use that hairstyle properly.

Also, they're including a variation of Female clothing #23 without the hood.

 

[coyotecraft]

Today I noticed there's a difference between the bust art and full body art.
It wouldn't be noticeable to anyone using browsing the files with a photo viewer at 50%. I'm convincing myself that that is how the QA inspection went.
There's a lot of color banding, but on the portraits, I personally mind. Maybe because I focus more on the expression. Lol, that's a joke with porn artists, as long as key points look good then you can leave the extremities as featureless blobs.
It rubs me the wrong with with the tilesets though. The quality has been reduced for the worst.
But maybe these days it's negligible? Maybe not everyone will be playing in pixel perfect resolution? Idk...

 

[coyotecraft]

 

[coyotecraft]

I've been monitoring the tkool forums for updates.
The next fix is Actor 2_6 characterset, the walking up frame was missing her gold circlet.

 

[coyotecraft]

Next fix is a duplicate window frame. One is suppose to have window shutters.
These are all very small, very minor updates. I don't think they'll be reordering the tilesets, creating new sets, or any major revisions. My guess is that whoever made the tilesets was a temp hire. But they have to be aware of many of the faults. Right? *nervous laugh*

The japanese forums aren't super active. I attempted to post, using google translate, questioning the completeness of the tilesets. Along with a screenshot, drawing attention to designs in battlebacks. The topic I was posting in was for resource consolation.
Other people have been questioning things like the doors. There's cloth doors in 3 subtle shades. But none of them match the tent tiles or anything else. So the question is, where were we suppose to use it?
There's this big chimney tile. But it's a weird chimney. Not something you'd see on an ordinary house. Imo it looks more like a big urn. The description says chimney. But the text descriptions is wrong in other places, so it could be wrong.

 

[coyotecraft]

MZ hasn't updated in a while. I like to imagine they're licking their wounds in shame. But I don't think they're even paying attention.
So after about a month and a half after release, there are tons of edits now that try to remedy MZ's falures. I haven't seen anyone touch the scifi sets.
The problem is, even if one person does color correction to make it less of an eyesore, there's still other issues, like palette arrangements. And just, stuff like this

How do you even make mistakes like this?

 

[coyotecraft]

I just wasted my friday night editing MZ cliffs to be seamless.
First of all, the cliffs in question are a near duplicate of the autotiles. So why they included them at all, I have no idea!
Second of all, the reason the cliffs weren't tiling was because it was actually missing a row, which I didn't notice until afterwards.
Missing row could be acquired by drawing a wall with the autotile yay-high and shift-clicking to get what's not included on the palette sheet.

So I didn't need to edit anything at all.

Edit: Here's another one for tonight.
The Character generator models sport the perfect golden blonde hair color. BUT you can't actually select it because it forces you to use some washed out color gradient instead.

 

[coyotecraft]

Did I not mention the snow tiles here? Must have been another topic somewhere else.
The snow tile is just white. The trees have snow covered leaves, but no snow or frost around their base to make it blend in.
The snow-dirt path autotile has obvious seams. There is 1 alternative snow tile that has a little tiny spec of grey values, which make me think that the solid white tiles might not have been solid white to begin with, but lost most of it's color values due to some image compression post production. I use "post" loosely.

 

[coyotecraft]

I should stop doing this to myself.
Starting off. The plowed dirt Garden tiles are duplicated. Part of the tiles should be offset like in MV

There's a middle tile for the inside bridge that doesn't tile. Not sure why there's a bridge "inside" anyways.


A few post back I noticed some shingles were upside down. Now that I'm looking at editing the tiles myself I can see their process was just to mirror a tile vertically with some light and shadow overlay.
This is problematic because if you have protruding walls it's really obvious how the pattern flows across it. I think it's important that the wall autotiles have a trim or pillars to help distinguish depth.
I have designs to fix this because I don't think MZ will be. MV had a few tiles that were the same way.
It's one of those things where once you see it you can't unsee it.

I'm also starting to wonder how much of this is old stock even. I noticed this while browsing some other blogs that edit RM material. I thought, "Oh that's cute. They put MZ's God of Light on the flag". But then I was like "wait. No, this from MV's RTP...and it's unedited. was he always there?!"

 

[coyotecraft]

The 1.1.1 version update this month replaced a handful of battlers that had like 1 pixel cropped off the side. I never caught that.
They fixed a few more character generator parts. But still, many more problems remain.
They fixed a few ground autotiles. But still, many more problems remain.
They fixed a character sprite with a missing eye patch strap in one directional frame. And I'm asking myself, who is spotting these small details but not the more obvious stuff? I'm sure if they just took an hour to play around in it they'd find issues.

A member on the Japanese forum took the time to post multiple screenshots of different autotiles and circled the same issue in all of them. This shouldn't be necessary. But I get the impression if you just circle 1 thing, they'd approach it with tunnel vision and fix just that 1 tile.

 

[coyotecraft]

On the Japanese forum they released more changes to the RTP, but you have to download it from their forum. WHY? I don't know. But they're addressing issues that were specifically pointed out on those forums.

The changes include a Scifi Sliding door character set. The 2nd frame opens wider, and in the 3rd frame the right side was missing. Imo, I think the spacing in the second frame was fine. A crack then a zip, if you can imagine that. It had a different motion to it and timing to it I think. Not that it really matters because it's not like there are any good tileset to use those doors with anyways.

They fixed a lilypad autotile, on Dungeon A1.
Added a Shadow to a pool autotile in Inside A1.
Fixed the water tile in Outside A1 so it tiles more seamlessly, There's a screenshot of what it looked like before in my very first post here.
I open the new and old files as layers together using the blending mode "difference", to highlight changes.
They didn't document the change, but they also fixed a line in the brick pool floor.
I used that trick to spot the changes to Outside A4, the gold wall tiles. Just 2 pixels different.
I'm sure these changes will be made available on Steam soon. Hopefully with more fixes.

They have not fix the Snow Forest tiles on Outside A4 yet. So that's frustrating. Someone reported it a while back on the English Rpgmakerweb forums, and a mod there was like "It's not technically a bug and doesn't follow our posting guideline, but I'll allow it"
I don't know if I should thank them or mock them.

 

[coyotecraft]

This is a pretty minor thing. But the corner railing shadow is a bit too long. It's also a solid shadow, but maybe should be gapped.
I know this topic is for just the graphics, but there is a passage issue with the default tileset setting. And it's annoying that the shadow pen tool doesn't show up on tiles with a STAR passage.

 

[coyotecraft]

I haven't said much about the non-graphic assets.

Most of the Sound Effects are recycled from previous editions. Although, compressed I think. Which makes them sound like they're playing through a tin can.
I don't expect them to make a new "door" sound for every new maker. But as a matter of practicality, it would help if file names were more descriptive like Door - wood, Door - Metal, Door - Rusty. Door - Slam.

MZ, like MV and VX Ace, have a frog sfx. But a frog character sprite hasn't been included in the RTP since RMXP.

 

[coyotecraft]

The 1.3.0 update changed Outside_A1 sheet again. They added transparency to the bubbling autotile so it can be used on different water surfaces without color or seam issues.

 

[coyotecraft]

I'm still convinced that the MZ tiles were unfinished. I keep pointing out the castle resources with the gold trim that we see on the world map and battle background.
Now on the Outside Tileset I believe "Castle" and "Fort" are mislabeled. I guess I can forgive someone for making that mistake because the general shape of them is similar to MV's castle and fort. But god, don't it make it hard to talk about? The "fort" castle is missing the gold trim and spires. The spires on the "Castle" fort are green and don't match what you see on the world map. The rounded towers have bottom tiles that are meant to sit on top of the wall autotiles. In MV these tiles include turret connection, but they're missing in MZ. The "fort" castle has unclean edges anyways. The rounded "castle" fort bricks are a different size than the flat walls.
What's always bugged me is the lack of windows, doors, and gates. Every RPG Maker has this problem. If they include doors they don't give them a proper frame.

Edit:
Ok. I'm an idiot. I see now how the towers are suppose to connect to the corners of the walls. The lack of turrets just makes it not obvious.
But that just means these rounded towers are connecting differently in the back than they are in the front.

coincidentally, none of the sample maps even use these connections. They're a clusterfuck of ugly.

 

[coyotecraft]

Wow, has it really been a year? Other than a few tileset changes, the RTP is still full of problems and everytime I open MZ I swear I find something new.
Most recently, I found the barred arch door/gate characterset has a line of pixels bleeding over from another frame. To be honest I don't think I would notice it ordinarily but I happened to place the door on the solid white snowtiles that made it plain to see.

But the door charactersets have other design issues. Like they come in 3 subtle shades. Why? I think they were color samples that got left in. Meanwhile there's a white door that doesn't go with any of the tiles I've see. Which makes me wonder if it was really meant to be white or if it was just left uncolored.
And then, none of them have a doorframe, which isn't unique to MZ. That's been an eyesore in every RPG Maker.