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/
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 the query string to your index file. The query string is added after the URL
of your website. For example, if you host the web player at https://easyrpg.org/play/, then the URL with the query string is https://easyrpg.org/play/?game=ib.
Testing locally
If you want to try it locally, you need an HTTP server. Just opening the index.html
in your browser will not work. If you do not have a local web server the simplest solution is to install Python.
Then open a command line window in the directory where the index.html file is located and run the
command python -m http.server.
Then open http://localhost:8000 in your web browser and your game will start.
Configuring language (encoding) and engine
The Web Player has limited automatic encoding and engine detection. Refer to the Player Manual for available settings.
You can set the options (without -- as part of the query string in the URL. Some game-related
options can be configured in EasyRPG.ini.
For example, to make a Japanese game run on RPG Maker 2003 English Edition pass
?engine=rpg2k3e&encoding=932 as the query string. The first component of the query string is separated from the
URL by a question mark (?). All other components are delimited by an
ampersand (&).
Alternatively, add to EasyRPG.ini:
[Game] Engine=rpg2k3
And to RPG_RT.ini:
[EasyRPG] Encoding=932
Yes, you need to edit two files here for historical reasons.
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.