How to set up EasyRPG Player for the Web
EasyRPG Player supports running games directly inside your web browser.
If you want to test it you can play with a Demo of our TestGame.
You may also try a real game (Ib).
How it works
Web requests are asynchronous. This means that all assets like pictures and music must be fetched asynchronously. When the Player wants to display a new graphic it will appear on the desktop versions (Windows, Linux, Android, …) immediately but on the web it will be invisible while the file is downloaded. Once the downloaded finishes it is replaced with the real image.
In contrast to images and music some files are important to continue execution. When a map file is pending the Player will halt until the file is downloaded. The first halt is while the Logo is displayed on startup, it downloads the database and the maptree here. Download of map files is blocking, too. But this is usually not noticeable because the download is executed while the fade out animation plays (it will stay black when the map downloading takes longer then this).
Hosting your own games
Hosting your own games is quite simple. Just follow these steps.
Deploying the Player on your server
For deploying of the EasyRPG Player any website works. There are already many EasyRPG Player powered games on popular gaming sites such as itch.io. Please refer to the documentation of your hoster how to deploy the files.
Download this archive and extract it on your server.
You will get the following files and folder:
- index.html
- index.wasm
- index.js
- games/
If you want to try it locally you need a HTTP server. Just opening the
index.html
in your browser will not work. If you don’t have a local
webserver the simplest way is installing Python and running python -m
http.server
. Then open http://localhost:8000/
in your browser and navigate
to your directory.
Deploying a game on your server
Because RPG Maker games refer to files without extension and querying the server
for every supported extension would be slow, you need to run a small tool to
generate a file called index.json
(containing a game file list index with
extensions) for every game before uploading. The tool is called gencache
.
You can get the tool here:
Place the gencache executable in a game working folder (the folder containing
RPG_RT.* files) to generate the index.json
. Move the gencache
executable
to the all game folders you want to upload and run gencache
again. Once
finished you can delete gencache
from any game folder to reduce the upload
size.
Your games are expected in subdirectories of the games
directory. The
default game executed is the one in games/default
. You can create further
games by just by putting them in subdirectories of the games
directory.
Now access the index.html
file and your default game should start. To play a
different game pass ?game=folder_name
as part of the URL (query string) to
your index file.
Troubleshooting
My spritesheets look corrupted
The web player has only a limited automatic engine detection. You must add
engine=rpg2k3e
to the query string of the URL to enforce spritesheet
support.
Special files
EasyRPG Player processes the following files on game startup. Just put them in
the game directory and rerun gencache
.
ExFont.png
The ExFont consists special symbols that can be used in message boxes. If your game uses a custom ExFont you can provide it here.
easyrpg.soundfont
If you are unhappy with the default MIDI acoustics (powered by FmMidi) you can alternatively provide a soundfont in SF2 format. Please use a small file. Some soundfonts have hundreds of megabytes in size.