Rmvx

Looks like they actually started to pay attention to all of the people who simply can't do graphics/coding the way they're 'expected' to do.

- All of the tiles are going to behave in the same way as the standard water/grass does now? That's actually a good thing, though it might be tougher to design a tileset file now. Making something like a roof should be a bit easier, though it does make the graphics 'simpler'.

- Charsets are back, for whatever reason - guess they're treating everything as a library instead of just individual resources now. Assuming that they stick with that design, I wonder how the new tilesets are going to work?

- Facesets are back. I've rarely used those since they're tough to draw, but obviously they're very nice to see in a game. I'm not entirely sure why they actually took that out in RMXP.

- Built-in expressions? Guess you can set a 'mood' of some sort, with an expression bubble / faceset to match. A bit useless, but the whole point of an RPG is character development so I can see what they're trying to do here.

- Simplified battle system. Lowers the barrier of entry to having your own charset, since you don't need a battle charset as well, but I do hope that the side-battle view is still an option.

- Vehicles return! I didn't realize at the time that they were trying to remove the concept of a 'world map', but apparently that was the design philosophy for RMXP.

- Looks like a typical SNES/Genesis era RPG.. again. 1-tile characters and all. Again, lowers the entry barrier, and I imagine that the tilesets can be set to 2-tile characters if desired.. though that might mess around with the expression system.

- The database looks fairly normal, fewer tabs in VX (13) compared to 2003 (17 tabs). It looks like the tile passability is built into the normal map functions (based on the screenshot, anyway) - I imagine Terrain is handled the same way. If it's all a front-side battle system, I guess you wouldn't need Animations 2, either.

I don't see anything new in the database. It looks like the standard stuff - right down to the common event tab. With any luck it'll be easy enough to get into again. (I wonder if it'll support 2003->VX, or if it'll just be XP->VX. I guess the better question is "Will it actually import anything at all?")