April 2025 Recap (Patreon)

Hi all, below you can see all of the updates Casper Gaming released in April 2025, in case you missed any of them. You can also get notifications when an update occurs in the Casper Gaming Discord or by following me on various social media.

New Releases

[CGMZ] Text To Speech - Convert text into speech, with the familiar TTS robot voice. This will allow you to create a robot-like character that can speak text in your game. Although, the main use for this is accessibility for players that may struggle to read lots of text. You can have commands spoken out loud for them, with more options coming to increase accessibility in future updates. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-text-to-126475124

[CGMZ] Battle Swaps - Choose one actor in battle and swap them for another actor who was not participating in battle. Allows your player to use even more strategy in their battle plans by swapping actors in and out as needed. This works with all of the built-in battle systems. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-battle-126903539

[BGM] Waters of the Pavillion - This is a track meant for a water area of the game, such as a town that is underwater or a water cave. It has a slight mysterious sound to it so could make the player feel like they need to be on guard for anything. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bgm-waters-of-125882942

Alpha Plugin Updates

[CGMZ] New Game Plus - This plugin was updated to add reset ranges for things like switches and variables, so you no longer have to put them in one at a time if you want to reset many in a row. It also added a custom JS parameter for when a new game occurs. It also can reset more custom [CGMZ] plugin data on new game, such as professions, crafting, colosseum, and more. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-new-game-98801926

[CGMZ] Dungeon Tools - This plugin was updated to add the rope sprite for the hookshot. Finally, you can see the rope attached to the hookshot for a more realistic graphic when the tool is used. This also added [CGMZ] Rumble and [CGMZ] Window Backgrounds integrations. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/55843413

[CGMZ] Pixi Filters - Some new filters were added, including the Alpha Filter, the Bloom Filter, and the Color Replace filter. You can use these to control the transparency of the game screen, show a more simplistic bloom effect than the advanced bloom filter, and change colors shown in your game to other colors (red -> blue, for example). Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43753620

[CGMZ] Options - This plugin now allows you to make your own custom options. You can also use a plugin command to get or set option values outside of the options scene, meaning you could completely event your options screen if you wanted via something like a picture menu plugin. Lastly, this plugin no longer displays the category window if only one category exists. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-options-121613771

[CGMZ] Gathering - You can now have a gathering time of 0 for instant gathering, which will skip the progress window entirely. Speaking of the progress window, lots of customization options for it were added including drawing the text over the bar, the bar height, offsets, and more. Some bugs with plantables were also fixed. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/59344299

[CGMZ] Conditional Choices - You can now have skill conditions for your choice windows. Additionally, you can configure the text code to set up conditions to be anything you want instead of needing to use <cgmzcc> which can be quite long in the tiny choice window. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/84645787

[CGMZ] Custom Vehicles - Many parts of this plugin have been converted to use the new Map and Location parameter types from RPG Maker MZ 1.9.0 update. This should make it much easier to use, as you no longer need to remember map ids, x, or y coordinates as you can instead point and click on a map ui just like the transfer player event command. It also added the option to not have a map link gamepad button, and a switch that turns ON or OFF if the player is in a vehicle. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/88512860

[CGMZ] Dice - You can now force the player to roll dice (no cancel out of the scene), for example if your cutscene requires the player to roll some dice and you don't want them to be able to cancel out of the scene. The player can now skip the roll animation with input. Window options for padding, opacity, tone, and skin were added. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-dice-112402426

[CGMZ] World Map - The world map can now show a coordinate system, for both the player's coordinates and the mouse cursor's coordinates. This can be used to help tell the player where to go without giving an exact location, so they can search the coordinates given to them. Some bugs with tint screen affecting the world map and map markers were fixed. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-world-map-109992307

[CGMZ] Player Movement - Access to movement abilities is now controlled by switches instead of internal flags that required plugin commands to change. This should be easier to use and increase compatibility with other plugins. The reverse movement ability can now automatically fade after so many movement actions have been taken. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-player-104204561

[CGMZ] Message System - Your text can now run custom JavaScript, so you can print out anything as long as you can convert it into a string via JS. This comes with both a basic eval text code for simple things like $dataItems[1].name and a more advanced eval text code for multi-line javascript which also supports text codes within the string return. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/86064608

Beta Plugin Updates

[CGMZ] Shop Command Window - This plugin entered the Beta stage of development this month! New to this version is the addition of hotkeys for commands in the shop scene. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cgmz-shop-window-113710886

[CGMZ] Text Codes Everywhere - This plugin entered the Beta stage of development this month! New to this version is the addition of the option to only use the default text code style and ignore text codes to access the other text code styles available. Some other optimizations were also made, which can be of great benefit as drawing text with text codes is actually pretty intensive. Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/66640328

Free Plugin Updates

[CGMZ] Core - The monthly Core update added utility functions to help parse TTS parameters, some more URL opening options, and hotkeys for scenes. These features will start being used in future [CGMZ] plugins, so it is recommended you keep the core plugin updated. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/core/

[CGMZ] Crafting - This plugin got a small bug fix update for sound effects not playing in some cases. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/crafting/

[CGMZ] Toast Manager - The update for this plugin added the option to align toasts to the left or right of the screen, instead of only in the center. You can fine-tune this with the new x offset setting as well. The plugin had a bug fixed where the second line of text toasts would copy the alignment of the first line. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/toastmanager/

[CGMZ] Holidays - You can now have a variable that keeps track of how many hours the holiday has been active for, in case you want to event certain things by the hour during your holiday events. The plugin also had some parameters converted to make them easier to set up. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/holidays/

[CGMZ] Title System - This plugin now does not fade out if only one map in the title sequence exists. Also, if there are no eligible maps to use for the title system, instead of crashing the plugin will now use the first title map even if the global data criteria are not met. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/titlesystem/

[CGMZ] Save File - You can now easily hide actor levels on the save file screen, for example if your game does not use them. Window background, padding, opacity, tone, and skin options have been added. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/savefile/

[CGMZ] Difficulty - Add buy and sell modifiers to your difficulty, to make things cheaper or more expensive in shops. You can also track the hardest or easiest difficult the player selected throughout their playthrough. Some additional customization options were added to the difficulty scene. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/difficulty/

[CGMZ] Changelog - You can now control the width of the changelog window. Another option to control the amount of blank space between changelog entries was also added. Images can come from any folder, instead of being required to be in the pictures folder. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/changelog/

[CGMZ] Credits - You can now control the amount of blank space between credit entries, and the credits window title will no longer draw if it is empty which allows you to not have a window title if you do not want one. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/credits/

[CGMZ] Skill Conditions - Technically a new plugin, but really just a split of the skill condition functionality out of [CGMZ] Item Conditions and into a more appropriately named plugin. You can restrict where skills are used, such as by map, troop, or with switches and variables. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/skillconditions/

[CGMZ] Item Conditions - Skill conditions were moved out of this plugin and into their own plugin to help people figure out what the plugin does by its name alone. Also added were switch and variable conditions. Link: https://www.caspergaming.com/plugins/cgmz/itemconditions/

Other

The Casper Gaming Wiki has had a lot of information added to it. The vast majority of plugins are now covered, so if you need help or want to preview how a plugin works before buying it, you should be able to do so in almost all cases. You can view the wiki here: https://caspergaming.miraheze.org/wiki/CGMZ_Plugins

The poll for the next small [CGMZ] plugin has finished and the winner was:

Inn Shop - A simple selectable window shop interface for different rooms at an inn. Make your inns more unique than just paying some gold to rest and recover everything. With this plugin you could do things like have a standard room that only recovers HP, a suite that recovers all, etc. You would still need to event your inn, this plugin would just provide a better selectable interface than the choice window.

Thanks to all who voted and suggested plugin ideas for the poll!

Want to have your voice heard? You can vote in the poll for the next BGM still, which ends in 2 days: https://www.patreon.com/posts/poll-next-bgm-127690500

Thanks for being a part of the Casper Gaming community 😁 Happy RPG Making!