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:

• gencache for Windows
• gencache for Linux
• gencache for macOS

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.