RPG Reactor 0.98.5

0.98.5 brings battle choreography into the editor: build a battle arena from a map, position the party and enemies, and assemble attacks from editable steps. It also adds native lighting, map media surfaces, quests, expanded interface authoring, and a substantial MV/MZ compatibility and editor reliability pass.

Download the binaries on itch.io. GitHub provides the source release. Existing battles retain their battlebacks and existing action behavior until you explicitly opt into the new presentation.

Battle Rooms and visual Action Sequences

• Use a map as a battle arena. Troops can select Battle Room or a conventional battleback. Room Setup provides draggable formations, numeric placement, inherited map cameras, and per-troop camera overrides. The Troops preview displays the selected room and its formation live.
• Author choreography in its own database section. Action Sequences combines a step list, timeline, 2D/3D preview, movement, battler motions, sound, animations, camera cues, weapon presentation, and an impact cue. Add, duplicate, paste, drag to reorder, scrub, or play just one step.
• Start with a working punch. Unarmed Punch demonstrates running into range, striking, and returning home. Run to Target, Punch, and Return Home are reusable building blocks.
• Assign actions where they belong. Skills/items, weapon attacks, actor defaults, unarmed attacks, and enemy defaults have distinct assignments. Inherit and Use Existing Behavior preserve control over existing projects.
• Customize motion and effects visually. Model offsets, rotation and scale have sliders, precise values, arrows and rings. Animations have target placement/scale controls and optional completion waits. Sounds use the shared audio picker with independent wait settings.
• Stage the camera. Map camera inheritance supports isometric and third-person layouts; cinematic framing eases toward the acting battler, follows impact, and returns to the overview. Explicit camera cues take control when needed.
• Set party capacity in System 1. Max Battle Members determines the number of Battle Room party slots. Existing plugin limits remain in use until an explicit database override is set.
• Improve 3D enemy integration. Choose a 2D graphic or 3D model, see sharper thumbnails/previews, and keep battle markers and supported plugin UI aligned. Fixes cover stale battleback/battler requests, state-icon loading crashes, and inverted 3D ATB icons.

This is an initial presentation system. The PSYCHRONIC Battle Engine adapter preserves normal combat resolution. VE, YEP, VisuStella and LeTBS choreography still need dedicated adapters; their text sequences are not automatically imported. See battle authoring and compatibility limits.

Lighting, models and media

• Place and edit native map lights with a visual Lighting tool: point/spot/beam fixtures, ambient controls, flicker, pulse, compound fixtures and twelve presets. Event commands can control lights, and model effects can carry them.
• Lights illuminate 3D surfaces and the room floor, with budgeted shadow atlases for static geometry and moving characters. The 2D editor also previews model lighting, animation, media and attached effects with corrected depth and compositing.
• Media Surfaces has its own toolbar tool. Place images or videos directly on the map, including walls and ceilings, or use event commands. Move, rotate, scale, warp corners, duplicate, and undo. Shift-resizing preserves proportions; newly selected media uses its source aspect ratio instead of a forced widescreen rectangle.
• Author model eyes, mouth and lip points with precise controls. Speak 3D Dialogue plays voice with audio-driven lip movement and an adjustable mouth interior. Text remains in the normal message system; teeth and tongues require authored geometry.
• Optimize existing models as well as imports, inspect rendering cost, preserve skinned animation and authored parts, and use distance levels. Model animation/effect copy-paste and playback controls are expanded.
• Isometric movement follows screen direction; 3D click navigation respects ground/elevation. Animated GIF/APNG playback and map/model preview cleanup are improved.

Rendering changes reduce redundant work, keep more effects on the same GPU, cache lighting/shadows, and move suitable preparation work to workers. Results depend on scene and hardware; sustained 60 FPS on the integrated-GPU test workload remains open. See the performance report.

Quests, interfaces, audio and creator tools

• Quests database and runtime log: categories, objectives, visibility/completion rules, event commands and save-backed progress. Import definitions from VisuStella, Yanfly and GS. Reactor uses its own quest data file to avoid collisions with plugin-owned files. An on-map tracker and automatic reward grants are not implemented yet.
• Expanded UI authoring: editable Actor Panel contents, state/buff icons, variable-driven and circular gauges, Main Menu formation/custom-scene support, layer multi-selection and improved inspector/script editing.
• Map music sequences: arrange tracks, silence and layered randomized palettes. Add sound variants and pitch variation, including separate MP/TP recovery sound slots.
• Database improvements: multiple elements for skills/items, state descriptions, trait help, passive-state editing, clearer plugin parameters, and more consistent pickers and layouts.
• Playtest checkpoints resume recent battle/map-transfer checkpoints from the title screen. Forge Project Tools supports project-supplied HTML tools with constrained save operations. ReactorEvents exposes a read-only battle notification feed for plugins.

Compatibility, saving and polish

• Audit coverage across 11 existing 2D template projects, including fixes for fog/dust scrolling and opacity, vehicle visibility, picture-choice icons and lifecycle crashes, and plugin-specific battler facing.
• Additional MV compatibility for large plugin stacks, game-over/autosave fades, windows, animations, quest integrations, plugin-defined resolutions and battle behavior. Compatibility remains project/plugin dependent, not a blanket guarantee.
• BOM-aware map/JSON loading, safer writes in synced folders, preservation of unknown map fields, and fixes for sidecar copying, deletion, undo, failed writes and asynchronous project changes.
• Event placement persists correctly. OK commits newly created events; Save Project no longer overwrites a later 3D drag with a closed inspector's old elevation. Model changes stay in the event draft until Apply/OK.
• Map tools hand off input consistently. Media Surfaces, Events, Lighting, tiles and 3D-M release stale handlers and placement modes, with matching button highlights across map/renderer changes.
• More consistent database cards, tables, numeric controls and theme colors. New-system labels and help are translated across all 17 non-English locales, with live-language and RTL checks.

Validation at release preparation: 2,932 automated tests pass, supplemented by native editor/game checks, the 2D project corpus, 18-language layout coverage and a 14-theme audit. These checks cover documented scenarios; they do not establish every plugin combination or a full playthrough of every project.

Thanks to the community contributors and everyone reporting reproducible issues. This release includes integrated contributions across animated media, battle notifications/previews, state descriptions, Forge tools, plugin parameters and trait help.