It actually happened! :D

Degica has now, by order of KADOKAWA GAMES/Enterbrain and in cooperation with me, finally released an official English version of RPG Maker 2003 on Steam.

At this point I would like to give a big thanks to Archeia who put a lot of sweat and blood into this translation as well.

Link on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/362870/
Price: $19.99, currently $16.99

It should also be available on rpgmakerweb directly.

This finally officially allows creating commercial games with RPG Maker 2003 (after a registration). Fortunately, the license also doesn’t have any clause preventing modifications, e.g. through the use of patches. However, the reverse engineering itself is still prohibited. EDIT: This may be incorrect. Please wait for an official statement and remember that I do not represent any of the companies involved.

There is also an official English RTP. Although it has the same content as the existing inofficial one, it has different filenames; but no worries, you can have both RTPs installed alongside each other.

This version is 1.10, which has been a bit tweaked and tuned by us:
* The fullscreen work properly, also on newer devices.
* The event editor was changed a lot:
** Its look and labels have been aligned with RMVXA – with colors and partly more information in the list than previously.
** It has a horizontal scrollbar, can copy events as text and loads large events faster.
** It’s possible to copy event all commands between battle events and map/common events (although it will show a warning, because they still can’t be modified while being in the “wrong” place).
* The help file now also works on Windows Vista/7/8.
* Maps can’t get lost that easily anymore when a PC Cleaner is used.
* Multiple instances can be opened at the same time, and you can create direct shortcuts to projects in Windows Explorer.
* Battles go faster.
* You have 1000 pictures, 100 labels and 9999 switches/variables/etc.
* Picture commands also work while a message is displayed.
* The fonts are now directly integrated into the engine and don’t need to be installed by the player.

A full changelog is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sXlXZIXdjxVq5gh_lPFuFLMbMRzZe4BKPpRI13ZD2Qc/edit?usp=sharing

Unfortunately the source code was lost over time. Therefore, it was a bit difficult to implement the real “killer features”. Also, I originally planned to include all the bugfixes from DynRPG as well, and I wanted to integrate the CommonThisEventPatch, but there was not enough time. There will be updates, though.

Best wishes,
Cherry

PS: Screenshot of the event editor:
img