You don't even need to use the Steamworks SDK (see this FAQ), but it's there for you to enhance your game if you do.

That's basically it, but it will still take me a couple of months to even try to put my game there. There's a lot to do before that.
And I thought I would have way more limitations with RPG Maker than I actually have. Other than the resolution, I don't think there has been anything I really couldn't do until now.

RM uses such an odd resolution, doesn't it?  They didn't even go with the standard 640x480, it's something really weird like 534x400 or such.  Most modern graphics cards don't even support it natively and the game ends up being windowboxed.

Yes, even though you can change the resolution using scripts, there's a limit to that too.

I ended up decreasing the height of the window to get a 16:9 aspect ratio and then I stretched it to full screen, it doesn't look that bad.

There's a hacked DLL out there that removes the limitation and Enterbrain allow us to use it, but it hasn't been very widely tested yet.

Just broke the resolution limit.



It's running at 7 FPS though.

7 FPS, wow, that's bad for 720p on modern hardware with only 2D tile-based graphics.  My guess is RM is doing most, if not all of its rendering in software, so you end up taking a massive performance hit at high resolutions.

It certainly looks nice, though!

Even then, in Sphere under it's software driver, it never reaches 7fps on large maps. So something tells me that they are using an highly un-optimized high level language like Ruby to do the drawing entirely in software. I couldn't see C/C++ being that slow, unless their algorithms are just plain bad. (No tile caching, animation caching, viewport clipping etc.)

It's seems there's a bug in RPG Maker Vx Ace that, if you have a "common event" running, you have to put a sleep command on it or it can cause a serious FPS drop. That 7 FPS thing was probably because of that.
I also heard there's something wrong with their Bitmap implementation and that "writing text directly on the screen" is one of the slowest things in RM.

Anyway, I'll try a high resolution again later.

Having spent a bit of time in the RMN community, I've come to the conclusion that RM is just not well optimized. 99% of the effort in RM goes into marketing, the other 1% into the editor.

There really are reasons that I consider it a silly and unsophisticated engine.

Even then, in Sphere under it's software driver, it never reaches 7fps on large maps. So something tells me that they are using an highly un-optimized high level language like Ruby to do the drawing entirely in software. I couldn't see C/C++ being that slow, unless their algorithms are just plain bad. (No tile caching, animation caching, viewport clipping etc.)

It seems it is all in Ruby:
http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/34900-windows-81-downgrade/?p=345078