RPG Maker 2000 Events Addendum

Hey who wants to compare Don Miguel's translation of event commands after all?! This is a sort of followup to my previous post about RPG Maker 2000 eventing.

I'm sorry that this post may not render very nicely on smartphones. I've done my best to make things as clear as possible, but limited screen width is simply not going to get along with horizontally-dependant information.

To start off, things seem pretty fine. I'd actually consider the official "Change Faceset" here the weakest phrasing of the lot. The patched RM2k is most accurate to its actual function.

"Ability" is a poor definition of "Parameter", and even the patched exe didn't catch this.

We've got a mixed bag here. "Simulated Enemy Attack" is the best description of how it functions, though maybe not the best way it could be named. "Nickname" is not the best description of the extraneous data you can give to party members, "Title" is more accurate, especially with how it's used in VX-onwards.

End of page 1, honestly nothing too remarkable to say here.

Calling Get Player Location "Memory Place" is absolutely disastrous given the extreme utility this event function has. It's quite likely most of us finally understood how to use it only with RM2k3.

As an aside, that Transfer was called "Teleport" for the longest time is really interesting. I got pretty used to thinking of the function as Teleport, but this actually confuses it with another "Teleport" system — RM2k's probably widely neglected fast travel system. Did you know it has one?

Like how earlier official event localisations are very consistent about the use of "Change", here these events are so much cleaner in the official localisation. Everyone else's make it harder to parse at a glance.

I actually still think of "Screen Tone" as tone that I somehow forget it's called tint now.

The official localisation fumbles again here by using "Scroll Map" when it's more accurately scrolling the camera.

🎉

Like "Teleport", the term "Transparency" is also something inconsistently used in the various translations of RPG Maker. Unfortunately, despite "Show/Hide Player" being much clearer in its function as a title, it still uses Transparency to describe if it's on (hide player sprite) or off (show player sprite) within the function itself. Not to mention that within Set Move Route, Opacity is used to describe semi-transparency, but Transparency is used to describe semi-transparency in other locations, like Pictures and Terrain effects.

End of page 2!

Ohhhh my god. Enter Password. Absolutely incorrect. I vaguely remember people talking about this function and realising how it actually works. There must've been some confusion about "key" that resulted in that original name. Honestly even "Key Input Processing" isn't the best name for it, but at least it's more accurate.

"Change Chip" is pretty obtuse in a bad way too.

Here we are, the aforementioned other context of "Teleport". Teleport and Escape are two kinds of skills — Teleport is for creating fast-travel points, and Escape is for creating Escape Rope-esque dungeon escape locations.

As event functions, Teleport lets you add locations for teleporting to, one per map, while Escape records a single map location. Their distinct behaviours and applications also coincide with being able to independently disable them. Though you may notice, unlike other events, the official localisation failed to consistently name the toggle functions here.

I'm not sure many professional RPG Maker Touchers used these functions like... ever. Without the ability to run events around them, it's harder to manage any extra functions before and after the casting of these skills, though there does exist a setting to control a Switch after the warp.

Despite divorcing map movement from the term Teleport, Escape is still likely to cause some confusion. This Escape has nothing to do with escaping battles. I'm not sure the best solution to this without being extra wordy and calling them "multi-warp" and "single-warp" or something.

And there it is — "Clear Timer" and "Stop Parallel Events". They're both completely wrong! Clear Timer doesn't stop any timer, that's controlled by Control Timer! It erases the event, just as every translation understood since. And Stop Parallel Events doesn't stop other events, it stops the current one! Moreover, as we've established, End Event Processing doesn't even stop a Parallel Process or Auto Start, just that loop, starting it over from the beginning. And the patched version didn't fix this.

That such fundamental event functions were so badly translated for the original translation of RPG Maker 2000 must've been disastrous for people's ability to do more complex functions. I can only imagine someone trying to freeze a parallel process or timer from a secondary event and being confused as to why they weren't behaving as expected. This was the mid-00s too, so you had to hope someone knew what those functions were supposed to do on your local gamedev forum.

Perhaps we should be thankful that RPG Maker 2003 was generally more popular, for better or worse, such people were exposed to more accurate terminology.