Discontinued Battle Plugins for ATB, CTB, and STB

bunnyroll

I’m sure many of you love the ATB, CTB, and STB battle systems. They are extremely popular plugins that received a lot of attention from me and they’ve changed gameplay for battles immensely. However, it’s because of those very reasons that it’s time for me to discontinue them. Before you panic and throw rotten tomatoes at me, please hear me out:

  • These battle systems were made to work with as much of RPG Maker MV’s default code as possible. However, this can’t all be possible because RPG Maker MV’s default battle system is a turn-based battle system. For the ATB and CTB battle systems, the turn-based functions would have to be exchanged in place of tick-based functions, which may or may not work well with other facets of the base code. And while STB is turn-based, there are still some features that cannot be used with it (for example, negative action speed which works with DTB) and forced actions (because they will override the current turn calculator). On top of that, the biggest thing that is prevent me from making this all work is the default code’s Window_BattleLog. For whatever reason, the move from RPG Maker VX Ace to RPG Maker MV shifted all the control in the code from the BattleManager to the Window_BattleLog. While the Battle Engine Core takes care of this and relays it back, any major changes to the battle system as a whole will still need to keep the BattleLog into consideration which means a lot more code is spent on workarounds than the actual engine itself.
  • Not all battle system features will work properly with new battle systems. Delay, for example, instants, cooldowns, troop events, forced actions, additional actions, common events, etc. They work to a degree but not perfectly. While I could fix some of the issues, usually fixing one will break something else on the default system, which just makes it not worth the time to fix especially with all these factors, combinations of plugins, skill settings, state settings, party settings, etc. that I can’t possibly account for as a single plugin developer. If a feature does not work, it’s not that I’m not aware of it, nor does it mean I can’t fix it, but at this point in time, there are over 100+ plugins to account for to make work with everything else. Due to the battle system having a really fickle code structure to begin with, it’s not viable to get everything on the same page unless I were to rewrite the entire default battle system’s code structure as a whole. But the problem with that is, it will kill compatibility with any non-YEP Library plugins.
  • Battle systems are too specialized and not generalized enough. Having the numbers myself, those using specialized battle systems are in a low number count, and they’re often mutually exclusive from each other (DTB vs ATB vs CTB vs STB). Focusing on one is just simply unfair to the other. It’d be better to focus on increasing the happiness of a group of people rather than just a subset. Therefore, I’ve made the decision that general plugins will be the focus that benefit a large spread of games rather than specialized battle system plugins that will benefit only a small set of games. This will extend past battle system plugins, too. My plugins from this point onward will be directed towards general use without specializing in niche uses. Likewise, this means my focus on bug fixes and whatnot will follow the same philosophy, too.

And so, take what you will out of those statements. I will keep the ATB, CTB, and STB plugins available for everybody to use. However, please understand that it is no longer in my intention to make updates/bugfixes for those said plugins anymore unless I, personally, feel the need to.