Dev fixed a gamebreaking bug in a scene for the dlsite version , that same bug existed in the KG version and what did kg do?
They went and removed pretty much half the scene when they could have asked the dev for his updated script instead.
Its not the dev duty to forward them fixes you know, but rather KG duty to make sure they are working with the latest version.
I can even point that the KG version of ideology is literally missing 3 npcs. And no they are not missing because of "steam rules", they are just normal npcs with normal convos.
Well in general and as you said KG is about content changes, not actual game play changes. They appear to hire contractors to work on a particular project and return results. So you get various levels of quality. If you look at
Summer Memories, the devs pushed out a reasonable version to begin with and the few bug fixes didn't affect content.
Someone mentioned emiliana as well earlier...
They decided to convert the images and look how it ended.
Most people know that rpgmaker MV doesnt play well with actual animations but KG had to ignore the facts and do it anyway.
The end result is a mess of broken animations than even when someone went to their discord and told them how to make it work he got ignored.
So I have some particular interest in this, since I did figure out how to make RPGMaker MV (MZ uses newer versions of underlying frameworks and may not have this problem) work with VP8 and VP9 videos.
The issue was not with animation, nor does RPGMaker have issues with animation in general. You can see that clearly with
Town of Passion,
Mira and the Mysteries of Alchemy and
Summer Memories.
So let me go into a little detail here. RPGMaker MV and MZ both use Node Webkit JS and PixiJS as a framework to play the actual game. What this means is instead of writing c/c++/java/etc. your really working with a webpage and javascript. There's good and bad with this, games are easier to pull apart/debug if you know what you're doing and performance can be hit or miss, but they work cross platform out of the box and can generally be easily translated to iOS/Android.
What RPGMaker MV and the version of Chromium in nwjs v0.12 does have trouble with is VP8 video. For those who are not aware, VP8 offers better quality, compression and lower CPU usage than MP4 videos, so it is a key area you may want to target when looking at how to shrink the size of a game. Heck since KG wasn't making the videos, it may be that they were provided VP8 videos by White Moor, and had to integrate them. I'm not making the assumption that the contractor converted the video, as there are other reasonable explanations.
The contractor put in the videos, and then likely noticed a problem. Generally these are not high level coders, but instead focus on translation. Unless you go digging it isn't immediately clear why VP8 videos don't play well, or even how to fix it. It turns out there are a number of defects at play here, some in PixiJS (the thing that renders images using WebGL) and some in Chromium. Effectively, the API callback to say a video is finished is broken in PixiJS 4 for VP8/VP9 video. At the same time, the Chromium packaged with RPGMaker games intermittently refuses to play videos, instead rendering a black box.
If you replace PixiJS and the NodeJS framework (then update the core to handle the new version of PixiJS) the videos play properly and end properly; however, this was likely far beyond the capabilities of the contractor, who is paid not hourly but by each game they finish. So in the game there's a set of action that result in an intro video, a loop which the user performs an action to move forward, and then a finish video. Since the call back is broken the contractor decided to make people perform an action after the intro and finish videos as that would solve the problem in the easiest and most cost effective (from their perspective) way possible.
What
Silentce realized was, instead of relying on the callback or user to click things, they simply could delay until the video was done based on video time. This sidesteps the intro/loop/finish video problem but doesn't fix the black box issue. He informed KG on their discord and they did make a change, but obviously the person doing it (likely the original contractor) didn't understand it, so instead of timing each video and putting in the correct delay they put in the same delay for everything. (I on the other hand focused on bringing in a new PixiJS and nwjs. This increased the game size, but I offset that by better compression on the videos and audio.)
Oh and while I've focused on VP8, it should be noted on average VP9 videos are half the size of a VP8 video with no loss of quality. This means it is faster to load into RAM and makes games using this more responsive in general.
Now I'm not defending KG here, I'm trying to add perspective. They have structured their business in such a way that makes it easy to release a lower quality game. It relies on the code from the original publisher and frankly that is crap in a lot of cases. Releasing a game with a game breaking defect should not be OK, nor is expecting glorified translators who's coding is limited to writing javascript to be able to pull in changes. RPGMaker in particular makes pulling in changes tough as the image names (which need to be converted to ASCII for compatibility reasons) is often mixed with game execution. There is not a good abstraction layer or even division between assets/content and code.
