Romhacking, Lex Talionis, Tactile, and SRPG Studio. An engine comparison post. (Which game creation engine will best suit your needs?)

Additional information about ROMHack

About Saves.
For the ability to rewind one turn, there is the AutoSave Patch.
In most cases, this patch is sufficient.

About Music
The m4a hq mixer now supports DPCM, so wave files are 1/3 the size.
This allows you to add a little bit of music, including vocals.

Here is a link to Kaitou Patch’s vocal collection.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SpNRBla4S-29KwvSEuGJZJy9CgISKBTn/view?usp=sharing

These vocals, sound room 1000, many battle animations,many magic animations, many BG, a vast story with 64 chapters, and a 1MB text scenario.
I have managed to implement these in a size of 32MB.
I think I’m competing to see what I can achieve in the 32MB range.

3 Likes

These are great followup posts! I’m taking notes and will add this when I have time tomorrow. SRPG is my most glaring knowledge deficit so in particular, any additions to that front will make it a lot more fleshed out than it currently is.

How can I display non-ASCII characters in Lex Talionis?
I found font data, but I thought it only considered LAT1.
If there is a multi-language metric in the evaluation criteria, I think Lex Talionis is a no-go.
With ROMHack, with my ShowUTF8 patch, it can display any language in the world, with some exceptions.

SRPG Studio would be no problem.
I am not sure about Tactile.

1 Like

I’m convinced this post is just a social experiment to find out how contrarian FE fans really are by measuring the increase in interest for FEXP after this post

5 Likes

I’ll give you my opinion in a nutshell.
I think it is simply a difference of opinion regarding the expansion of icons.
I will not quit expanding the icons, no matter what you say.
This is because I think it is more important to show how it is currently set up than how it looks.

I don’t think the emblem magic screen is easy to use, so I think this is a matter of personal preference.
I think this topic is probably sterile.

FEBuilderGBA is designed to have a UI that aims to get to all screens with two clicks.
ROMHack is strongly dependent on the ROM structure, so it is inevitably complex.
For example, it would be easy to understand the relationship between Item settings and MagicEffect.
Since this table is a 1:1 relationship, there is no need to set it up as a separate table.
However, it is unavoidable because of the way the ROM data structure is structured.

As for the text formatting, the reason is because vanilla is written that way.
I think vanilla is probably written in some kind of GUI editor as well.
I think the strongest possibility at this time is excel, though.

This is why it looks odd when viewed in text format.
I think the conversational text, which can be complex, should be viewed in the GUI, not in text format.

As for the patch screen, this is a result of going beyond the original plan.
It was initially created to make these patches that were being discovered at the time easily available.
https://dw.ngmansion.xyz/doku.php?id=data:パッチ

However, over the years, various and complex patches have been added to make it what it is today.
Sorting is possible, but the emphasis is on searching rather than sorting.
This is the same for the detailed menu.

The game has a lot of structs, so it’s only natural that the items get complicated.
So, search and find what you’re looking for.
The advantage of the non-ROMHack SRPG game engine is that it is not constrained by the structure of the game.
Therefore, you can create a screen that is easy for the user to set, and you can create a structure that fits the screen.
On the other hand, ROMHack is the opposite, you have to match the screen to the data structure of the structure in the game.
I think the biggest problem with the event engine of FEBuilderGBA is “branching”.
Since it is the same as ASM, the order of branches is reversed, and it takes a little time to understand.
Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to make this look like an if statement.
Regardless of the completely new syntax, existing syntax may not form the body of an if statement.
That’s why we recommend templates instead of writing branches yourself.

Sorting is available in a manner of speaking, but the emphasis is more on searching than on sorting.
The same goes for the detail menu.
Since there are so many structures in the game, it is inevitable that the items will be complex.
Therefore, we try to make it possible to search and reach the desired item.

The advantage of the SRPG game engine that is not ROMHack is that it is not constrained by the game structures.
This means that screens can be created in a way that is easy for the user to set up, and structures can be created to fit the screen.
ROMHack, on the other hand, does the opposite: the screen has no choice but to match the data structures of the structures in the game.

For capacity, there is rebuild.
Please use this to solve the fragmentation.
Since Kaitou has been able to create so much with a 32 MB limit, I think it is possible to create many other works as well.

One of the most common cases of full capacity recently is when a large number of animations are added.
This is the case where the capacity does not decrease much even after rebuild.

I sometimes see games that have imported more than 0x200 animations that are not even used.
It looks like they imported everything they found in the repositories anyway.
It’s like stuffing all the free tissues in your pocket and taking them home, or going to a buffet restaurant and eating until you throw up, no matter how much you can use them for free.
Complex animations waste a lot of space, and you’ll probably reach your capacity limit.
And you shouldn’t eat in a restaurant, throw up in the bathroom, and eat again, because it’s harder on your body than you expect.

People who do this will probably create huge zip files in other engines, importing large amounts of image and music data that they don’t even use.

The GBA has many limitations, but other than capacity, I think the biggest limitation is the lack of Internet access.
Since the GBA cannot physically use the Internet, emulators cannot use the Internet either.
Therefore, it is not possible to collect play reports or automatically update games with ROMs by themselves.
If a game is compatible with FEBuilderGBA’s WorkSupport, automatic updates and automatic feedback can be used if the user is playing the game using FEBuilderGBA.
The restriction that the game must be played using FEBuilderGBA is a bit of a pain, but it is a very useful feature, and I think that projects that do not yet support it should definitely use this feature.

https://dw.ngmansion.xyz/doku.php?id=en:guid:febuildergba:work_support

Also, if you are using a non-GBA engine, you should realize that the Internet is a powerful weapon not available on the GBA.
It would be good to collect user play data and statistics to improve the game and support automatic game updates.
It might also be a good idea to place hints in places where many players have died or are lost.
Just like FE does today.

8 Likes

Really great post. I’ve learned a lot about the engines I don’t use, especially Lex Talionis. I’m an SRPG Studio guy, so now I’ll talk your ear off about SRPG Studio things:

  • I’m sure YMMV as always with ease of use, but I had much less trouble getting into SRPG Studio than any other engine I tried, including FEBuilder and LT. No doubt those are no problem if your brain is massive, but for my money SRPG Studio has easily the lowest barrier to entry difficulty-wise. (There’s always the consideration of “want”, where if you really dedicate yourself to any one of these engines wholeheartedly then you will probably feel like it’s “the easy one”. Maybe projecting though.) Even if you don’t like what you get out of the box with the engine, adding plugins to change the game immensely is often as simple as dragging and dropping a JS file into the Plugin folder. And when you’re new to it, eventing is much easier to wrap your head around when it’s formatted the way it is in SRPG Studio compared to any of the other options listed here imo. (I’ve never used any of the RPG Makers, so I didn’t realize it’d even be familiar to users of those engines. Bonus!)
  • That being said, while we have several community-made tutorial series on YouTube for beginners, and there is official documentation for the engine, we definitely don’t have anything as in-depth and user-friendly for newbies as LT’s documentation. Common Lex W
  • Regarding community support, the SRPG Studio community is pretty insular. I find there isn’t a huge overlap in SRPG Studio users and fans of romhacks (which is kind of bizarre, but it is what it is). You’ll see SRPG project posts here on FEU occasionally, but most of us keep to the SRPG Studio circles. That being said, those circles ARE very active and extremely helpful. There are always people around to help you learn about the engine or troubleshoot eventing/programming issues, and more publicly-usable plugins are being made pretty much every week.
  • In your “Organizing Internal Assets” section, I like LT’s item menu visually, but I’m not sure what’s being shown in the video where you reorder the items. It looks exactly like how SRPG Studio does it. Is the appeal that the identifier is a string in LT (the item’s name) instead of a number like in SRPGS? Not talking shit just have no idea what the video is trying to show lol
  • SRPG Studio doesn’t have world maps built in, but they can be… “faked”… with or without plugins, and they can be edited as easily as other maps. I implemented a codeless, event-only world map for a oneoff project back in 2019, and I’m using a modified free exploration plugin to do it for my ongoing Gaiden fangame Seas of Novis.
  • I assume all the hype about those LT killer features is that they come baked into the engine, because for the most part SRPG Studio has user-made plugins for almost all of those features (like romhacking does). Fatigue, cooldown skills, Berwick turn order, free exploration, etc. Bonus EXP is even built in. The skill and item mixers are exceptions though, they sound AMAZING holy shit
  • Speaking of skills, depending on the skill they are a bit customizable in the engine itself, but more importantly all of the skill-related code is accessible and can be edited with a little JavaScript know-how. Otherwise, there are billions of custom skill plugins out there for whatever your needs are, and they are usually easy to tweak, even if you aren’t much of a programmer. And if you aren’t, JS is SO much easier to intuit than ASM for someone who knows neither.
  • SRPG Studio has the normal save types (with the number of available save slots being customizable, which I think is neat), but there are also several plugins that change it to add things like suspend saves, autosaves, ironman savescum prevention, and probably more I can’t remember.
  • I can’t speak for how AI editing works in the other engines, but SRPG Studio’s is pretty powerful. You can choose from a few intuitive behaviors, but you can also make multiple “pages” of behaviors that an AI will follow depending on any kind of condition you want. There are also plenty of plugins to make enemies smarter or play as a team better, or ones that just add unique patterns, or ones that let AI use all their tools like the player can (for example, a plugin that lets them use Canto).
  • SRPG Studio runs at 60fps (or 30fps, you can pick) and yeah the default (“RTP”) animations are really choppy. On the upside, MarkyJoe1990 made a fantastic plugin a while ago that interpolates running frames to make it look buttery-smooth. It’s not gonna make the animations as flashy as GBAFE, but it at least can start to compete. And with an artist on board, the animation editor is so powerful that you have the ability to make animations that do legitimately look great. (That’s just not gonna be the case for most people, unfortunately.)
  • All of the UI code in SRPG Studio is editable. It’s not the easiest thing to do, so I’m sure LT has the edge when it comes to ease of use, but if you know JavaScript then the world is really your oyster here:
Some custom UI examples

Here’s a detailed unit hover window I made a few years ago. (Plus an Objective window, which the vanilla engine doesn’t have, and a display for currently bound keys, which is a recent addition.)

Here’s a custom unit menu I made for Seas of Novis. And here is a unique menu I made to let you allocate stat points from the lion statues in that game.

Here’s some UI I made just a couple weeks ago that lets you rebind your controls in-game instead of having to edit game.ini like you used to have to. All of this is custom-made.

And this isn’t a UI demonstration so much as it’s just a display of the batshit insane potential of SRPG Studio when you know JavaScript.

(This was a game jam project titled “Bullet Hell SRPG”.)

Long story short, with the know-how you can make pretty much anything. It’s fantastic!

The Lex Talionis favoritism is clear and I completely respect that. Shill your favorites! Hell yes! I love it. It’s incredible that we have so many great options to make FE-style games nowadays. My high school self, struggling in vain to figure out Nightmare modules after school, would be giddy to have all these great options.

For all its limitations, SRPG Studio is easily my favorite for its power and ease of use. The amount of flexibility you get for the same price as Three Houses is a fantastic deal. (Or, on sale, a whole game engine for the cost of a meal + milkshake at Whataburger.) And, while it’s not really a big factor for me personally, the fact that SRPG Studio games could potentially be sold for real money IS an undeniable selling point. Just off the top of my head I can name nine SRPG Studio games on Steam or coming soon to Steam.

There are a few other downsides to SRPG Studio not discussed here that I think I’d be remiss to not at least mention.

Other downsides
  • SRPG Studio is not open source. Scripting does have incredible power, but when you dig far enough you WILL eventually find things you cannot do. The biggest example of this is the editor itself, which is entirely uncustomizable. (I know I’d definitely change some things about it if it were up to me.)
  • The engine is made by a Japanese developer and was machine-translated to English. Now, SapphireSoft is surprisingly responsive to the English-speaking community; some egregious mistranslations have been changed in updates thanks to user feedback, but there’s still always the chance of a confusing mistranslation hampering your development work. I’m sure there are plenty of odd translations that the community has taken for granted that could confuse a new user who hasn’t learned it the hard way yet. Plus, crucially, the official documentation is also machine-translated.
  • You could make entire games without realizing it, but some extremely useful editor features are hidden. Tools > Options contains several checkboxes that hide essential features such as: displaying the ID numbers next to data (probably why you thought it used Slot IDs instead of Number IDs); the Original Data tab, extremely important for certain plugins; stat increases per level for enemy units; and some more I’m sure I have forgotten were originally hidden behind multiple menus. These are easily corrected once you actually know what you’re looking for, but it’s definitely a pain if you’re new to the engine.
  • Windows-only, with no mobile ports, is pain. Agony even. I consider this to be SRPG Studio’s biggest flaw by far. If you could play SRPG Studio games on Android, hoo boy, what a 10/10 engine it’d be. At least games seem to work on Steam Deck with Proton GE, but I’m not gonna pretend this is anywhere near as cool as SRPGs in your palm would be. Tactile on Android would convince me to give that engine a serious shot. Until then romhacks stay winning
tldr
  • SRPG Studio: GOOD
  • Lex Talionis: GOOD
  • Tactile: GOOD
  • Romhacking: GOOD
  • FEXP: TECHNICALLY AN OPTION
But

we all know real ones use FEditor and Nightmare modules. Admit it.

4 Likes

I plan to ultimately make Roguelike Emblem. Since I am making a roguelike, variety is key. The more items and things you can obtain, the better.

The problem is, when you want to add lots of stuff to Tactile, or a Romhack, if you designate Slots 1-30 for Swords, 31-60 for axes, etc, but later find you actually need 35 slots for the swords, you either have to plop those extra five swords at the end of the array, or do a massive, annoying reorganization effort to get them up with the other 30 swords.

You could also designate 100 swords, 100 axes, etc. But then you’ll have a bunch of empty slots you have to scroll past every time, and that can be irritating in its own way. And what if you still underestimated the number of items? What if you actually end up with 113 swords? You have the same issue all over again.

In LT, you can just… drag things around. It’s easy to organize. The same is true of Buildfiles, because Buildfiles may use numbered slots, but they use macros and abbreviations more often.

Now, what I learned from people who use SRPG is actually that it’s identical to LT in this regard. You CAN just drag and reorganize stuff, which is great! I’ll be updating the OP with that info, among all the other changes. I’m just waiting until I have free time before I return to modifying the OP.

Thanks for the useful post! I’ve given it a good long read and it will greatly assist me moving forward. SRPG actually looks pretty great!

1 Like

Is it possible to use that fancy map editor and then export to an easily useable filetype like .tmx? I bet lots of people (me included) would download LT just for that, even if ultimately for another engine.

Unfortunately, no. It exports to a .png. You could in theory use that PNG with FEMapCreator’s image import function but… in that case you might as well generate your map with FEMC.

Edit:

If you have the portraits, giveth them and Mag shalt deposit unto thee a blessing.

1 Like

I think the problem with SRPG Studio, aside from the graphics, is that the text conversations are hard to read.
The conversational text displayed over three columns is quite difficult to read.
I think it is probably the size of the font and the spacing of the messages.

Players have to move their eyes wide to enjoy it.
I think this is the reason why I quit games made with SRPG Studio halfway through.

GBA FE is especially well done in this regard, and the position at which the speech balloons appear is generally constant.
The text is also easy to read since it is made for a low resolution of 320x240.
FE on the NES and GC also displays dialogue in three tiers, either at the top and bottom of the screen or on the screen, like SRPG Studio, but I never thought this one was that difficult to read.
Perhaps it is the size of the font or the position in which it is displayed.

Conversely, I think that when writing a scenario, we should try to minimize the burden on the player.
I think players read text from top to bottom and left to right, so we should try to avoid viewpoint movements that contradict this.
I also think that font size should be considered, if it can be changed.

On the contrary, what I think is best done with SRPG Studio is the use of java script for scripting.
I think this was a very good choice.
It is the most widely used programming language in the world.

2 Likes

I agree with this. I think Vestaria Saga I may have also soured people on this subject, because it was made on an older version of SRPG Studio. Later versions have an option to darken textboxes that are not the current speaker, which makes games much, much more readable than you may expect. (VS1 also has a lot of dialogue, so if a player has an issue with the readability, they will have to suffer through that problem for a long time.)

Still, using all three of the conversation boxes at once is a choice by the creator, not a limitation of the game engine. “Grey Heritage: Faded Vision” uses only one dialogue window and it looks very elegant, as you can see in the screenshots on its Steam page.

Dialogue being difficult to read is a reflection on the game’s creator, not the engine.

3 Likes

I think using only one of the text boxes is a very good choice.

Your appraisal is correct. LT’s multilingual support is severely lacking insofar as it simply doesn’t exist. This is something that will need to be corrected in the future.

I would like to draw more attention to talk of file sizes. When it comes to size, I don’t think that GBA can be beaten. Both Tactile and LT suffer from filesize bloat. I would expect SRPG Studio to suffer from the same problem, but I’m less familiar.

On an adjacent topic, I would point out that LT is not optimized for performance, although I’m hoping to make improvements to that in coming months. I don’t know what the situation is with Tactile and SRPG Studio, but I would expect the latter, being a professional tool, to be acceptably performant. I doubt that you can physically buy a machine in 2022 that can’t run most games from all 3, but at the fringe it may be something to keep in mind.

Of course, GBA has no equal in this regard.

4 Likes

Alright, everyone. I have made a bunch of notes and will update the OP either tonight or tomorrow. Here is what I have jotted down; it has not been organized or cleaned up and these are my raw notes.

General

  • My credentials with each engine
  • Engine Issues section, stuff the engine or its output-games have issues doing or dealing with
  • Update the Resource Import section to mention spell animations
  • A section for multi-lingual support. So far all of the engines come up pretty short, but SRPG does seem to have more options than the others. FEBuilder does have pretty easily-editable translation files for the engine, and it has native Japanese/English support as well. Mention that SRPG Studio is the only non-native English option, leading to Engrishy-screens.
  • An in-chapter save option should be mentioned. Tactile has battle saves, GBA has savestates, SRPG has this https://i.imgur.com/PbLng14.png etc, and LT can allow you to make checkpoint saves too. There’s also an autosave patch for FEB so roms can have chapter saves without using savestates. (A more vanilla-friendly, less cheaty experience.)
  • Also SRPG has suspend saves, autosaves, ironman savescum prevention, and other such plugins.
  • Games made with LT and Tactile and SRPG can in theory connect to the internet for multiplayer shenanigans, auto-updates, whatever, but GBA roms cannot. All of the engines obviously have internet connectivity.

ROM Hacking

LT

Tactile

  • Tactile game sizes can get fucking nuts, Ryn had a 1.77 GB project via his FE8 remake (Definitely some major optimization issues there bud)
  • Tactile is not on apple devices, only android. It works alright on Linux but until Yeti switches to Monogame, a more modern XNA, Tactile will continue to have issues in non-windows environments.
  • Yeti is actually thinking about making a Skill Editor somewhat similar in implementation to LT’s. No ETA on this so it only remains in the realm of possibility for now.
  • ‘Tactile BEXP’ is actually just for FE7x only, so, not applicable for the public.
  • Killer Feature: The Unit Placer

FEXP

  • Remove FEXP from most sections, it’s just a joke option and it only serves to add pointless fluff.
  • Mention that FEXP is actually viable if and only if you are already a Ruby coder, then don’t mention it again.

SRPG Studio

  • Mention SRPG’s robust plugin system (FEB and Buildfiles have something similar, LT sort of does, Tactile does not) And that you can also get Plugins via the Steam Workshop and their Discord.
  • Halfbodies do exist in SRPG, see this tutorial https://imgur.io/a/O2ak1Ih and this one Tutorial - Character Illustrations in Talk Events | SRPG Studio Wiki | Fandom
  • GBAFE supports in SRPG Studio do exist https://imgur.io/a/O2ak1Ih and a FE9-style support system is possible https://i.imgur.com/1L2Wx8B.png
  • SRPG skills can be customized through the Custom option here https://i.imgur.com/4SfwmPf.png and many skills themselves have arbitrarily adjustable values by default which is better than FEBuilder’s options https://i.imgur.com/hGD4Par.png
  • There might be eye-blinking plugins for SRPG? And potentially mouth flap options as well. So the GBA talky-stuff is actually doable.
  • There are many tutorials for SRPG, but they aren’t as in-depth or as concise as what GBA and LT have. This is an issue for Tactile too. (Note: Need a ‘quality of tutorials’ section)
  • Many FE9-10 things I mentioned for FE9/10 and etc are in SRPG, as well as GBA.
  • SRPG does have customizable AI similar to LT, and it sounds pretty in-depth thought I’m not sure of the specifics. https://i.imgur.com/ONZar9R.png
  • SRPG’s games have editable UI but it’s not as ‘simple’ as in LT, and you have to use Javascript. It DOES sound a lot easier than editing the UI in GBA or Tactile though.
  • SRPG is not open source. The editor specifically cannot be changed or updated to improve its design, which could be a big negative, while LT’s is fully open-source.
  • SRPG has a bunch of hidden options by default. https://i.imgur.com/xIJofla.png
  • SRPG is windows-locked entirely, no mobile options at all, besides maybe the Steam Deck.
  • SRPG does actually use NIDs, identical to LT, so it’s easy to reorganize internally without breaking games. Great!
  • Free-roam is in SRPG as well, as evidenced by this project. Seas of Novis [v0.1.1]

This list isn’t actually complete and I’ll be adding more. I just wanted people to see that I’m carefully looking into all the points people have brought up, especially WRT SRPG Studio. It seems the engine is vastly deeper than I expected!

2 Likes

As an implementation, I think we could use the OS font to draw what is not in the existing fonts.
That would not be a very pretty font, but I think it is better than no font being rendered.

If it is configurable, I think if we can specify the ttf file name and font size, then the user can specify the rest on their own.
If that is not specified, I think we should just use the default font of the Windows OS and draw characters that are not in the game.

A number of free fonts are available for public use.
Among them are fonts for small displays.
For example, the misaki font is a free font available in 8x8 dot that implements all the common kanji characters of the Japanese language.

//misaki font 8x8 dot
https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm

//misaki font 8x12 dot
https://littlelimit.net/k8x12.htm

With the no-tofu project, google is releasing fonts for the world’s free character codes.

//google no-tofu

If we leave room for these fonts to be made available to users, they could be bundled with the game when it is distributed.
In that case, the file size would increase a bit, but I think that is unavoidable.

Since the game runs on a PC, I don’t think we need to worry about capacity, since it is not subject to the GBA’s 32 MB file constraint.
Because one hour of FHD video streaming on Youtube is more than 1 Gbyte of data.
Today, we are in the 21st century, when these streaming services are commonplace.
Data up to 1G would be considered small data.
So I don’t think you should worry too much about the capacity.

On the contrary, we should take advantage of capacity limits and always-on connections for our games.
In particular, I think automatic feedback is a very nice feature and I recommend that it be implemented.
Because most users do not send feedback.
Even if they did, they would only send elementary school-level reports such as “it was fun”.
It is rare for people to stream a game and send us detailed feedback or write and send us a detailed play report.
I think there is value in the ability to get detailed feedback without having to rely on those things.

1 Like

12 Games made with LT and Tactile and SRPG can in theory connect to the internet for multiplayer shenanigans, auto-updates, whatever, but GBA roms cannot. All of the engines obviously have internet connectivity.

About internet, I would like to add that it is not available on the GBA ROM, but it is possible if the game is played using FEBuilderGBA.
FEBuilderGBA uses the WorkSupport feature to automatically update games and provide automatic feedback.
Several games have already implemented this mechanism.
https://dw.ngmansion.xyz/doku.php?id=en:guid:febuildergba:work_support

NID

There is no NID on the GBA, but if you just want to change the order of items in the game, there is a patch I made.
This patch allows you to change the order of items in Supply in the game to whatever you want instead of ItemID.

NAME.en=Changed the sort condition of the item list of the supply
INFO.en=Change the sort condition when drawing the list of item list.\r\nVanilla was sorted by Item ID, but sorted in ascending order by the priority set in another table.\r\nIf the priorities are the same, sort by ItemID.\r\nIf the item IDs are the same, they will be sorted in order of durability.

In short, it is difficult to arrange them neatly in the editor, but if you want to arrange them neatly in the game, this can be achieved with a patch.

2 Likes

I half-updated the OP. Crossed off anything I mentioned, still have more work ahead.

re: game size, I’m guessing what Ryn meant by 1.77 GB was the entire size of the dev project folder. The dev folder for FE7x is comparable.
In terms of a build released to players, FE7x is currently around 80-100 MB depending on platform; 64MB of that is audio files, which is going to be the majority of game size for Tactile or LT, compared to GBA using sequenced music and audio.
The non-audio content and the game code combined are < 25MB.
I don’t have strong concerns over the difference between 32MB and 100MB, or even 200MB, on modern devices and internet connections, but it certainly could be an issue for some users.

1 Like

Some people don’t have home internet, so I would be wary of exceeding 200MB. I think it’s safe to assume DSL (384Kbps) speeds and that the average prospective player won’t want to exceed an hour in the library or whatever, so 200MB is about the limit.

Can LT or Tactile play MIDIs? It’d be super cool to be able to package a VirtualMIDISynth dependency or a MIDI player with .sf2 bundling to cut down on filesize heavily.

From what I’ve seen, a lot of people skipping out on these engines is from them being from a developing area and thus not having good internet. Only having to download a small UPS patch is a huge boon in such a case.

There’s also a large amount of players who only have mobile phones or otherwise would rather only play on their phones. Tactile is already expanding accessibility by having an (upcoming?) Android version, which is cool!

After reading this thread, I’m considering using LT until decomp is further along, but I also don’t want to learn Python. lol. it’s beginner friendly but the whitespace being used instead of terminators (brackets, semicolons, etc) makes my brain itchy.

Yeah I thought that 1.77gb size sounded bonkers. I’ll revise the numbers to what they were before.