MZ - Schala Z System Progress Blog (MZ Port of Moghunter's Chrono Engine)

I managed to find the solution to the problem, and this is where I learned about one of the stupidest things about RPG Maker MV and MZ. There is a drawText and a drawTextEx. The former only writes a string but can't use escape codes of any kind whether it's from JavaScript or RPG Maker itself, but the latter can and is mostly exclusive to message and choice boxes. That's just bizarre to me, why have two versions of the same thing when one of them is superior to the other, they both use the same Bitmap class, and make the superior one exclusive to one or two things?

But enough of me rambling about stupid stuff. The reason I'm mentioning the whole drawText thing to begin with is because the solution is related to it. I decided to try taking a trip to the TextPicture plugin that comes with every single MZ project and examined the code there, and it's there where I learned about drawTextEx and its benefits and downsides. So, I borrowed the code from that script, put it into the part where it shows the item list, and bingo! Now, I have a proper list, and I can even add the item icons as well!


I was initially worried that it may come with some sacrifices like the menu columns last month, but thankfully, it doesn't, and the changes are only exclusive to the list. So, that's a small but wirthy change done! :]

Oh man hope this project is going well, I've been following so many breadcrumb trails trying to see my options for an ABS system for MV and this looks super promising!!!

I hate to disappoint you but this is exclusive to MZ, and this project is more focused on the OG Chrono Engine's Chrono Trigger system, and I've been removing parts of the ABS code, so I'm sorry to say, this project may not be for you

My threads are all about the ABS mode in Chrono Engine. You can ask me any questions there (or make a new thread but I might not see it)
MV - MV + MZ : Make an Action Game! Chrono Engine Beginner Guide - On Map Tools and Battles!

(Schala Z System) June. 21 2025 - I'm back with action, baby

Well, it sure has been a while now, hasn't it? Heheh
Sorry for my hiatus on the project, I was dealing with college and art stuff. Today was my last day at college as I've finally presented my graduation project for the last time and I got a great grade there, and before that, my college was doing a lot of bullcrap moves that made the past two months way harder than it should be. All that combined and I had a really hard time finding time for the Schala Z System, and I'm happy to report that I'll be finally back in action as not only do I miss working on the project, but also, I am sick of staring at Godot's interface for a long time and I desperately need a breath of fresh air lol

As for what's next for this system, well, there's some of the other Chrono Engine plugins like the boss health meter that I want to implement, and I did have a few ideas, some of them I shared in the suggestions thread, but then there were stuff like having battle events where an enemy would change forms or something when their boss HP, or say the battle would stop midway, an event would happen, and then it would resume afterwards. I don't know if any of that is possible in the base Chrono Engine as the documentation for it is really poor, but I did hear that it wasn't doable before, and I bet that if it's possible, it requires a bunch of hoops and what not. But one thing at a time as they say :)

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I'll be sharing some links here for some certain stuff. If you have an idea or suggestion you want to give to the project, drop it at the Suggestions Thread here:
MZ - Schala Z Engine (Chrono Engine MZ) Suggestions Thread
And if you want to see me more active and doing art stuff (suggestive content warning), I do have a DeviantArt and a Bluesky page if you want to see me more active there :)

(Schala Z System) June. 25 2025 - My long attempt to port and mix some of the Cross Engine...

No, the title is not clickbait, this is what I spent my day trying to do. I did this mainly because I wanted to try and port the Altimit Movement plugin into the project, and I wanted the Altimit Movement because it's the only pixel movement one that works with how the Chrono Engine is designed... almost, every other plugin I tried either didn't work at all, or would completely break the battles as it would still let me move freely while battling.

I tried both the Chrono and Cross Engine demos, which both had the Altimit Movement plugin with them, and at least with the Cross Engine, it was... almost working fine. The battlers didn't move to the fighting positions, but it was at least functional. I then realized that the Cross Engine was an attempt to mix both the Chrono Engine AND the Altimit Movement.

Another reason why I wanted to port it into the Schala Z System was because I also realized that it had actual fixes related to some of MOG's plugins, I didn't want to implement them all right away as it would get daunting for me, but I figured if I can port the Cross Engine into the project, it would be a match made in heaven, I may even try to fix the problem of the battlers not getting into position.

And here's the thing: I needed the Cross Engine's code in order for this to work with me, because using the Altimit Movement on its own without any additional changes would result in the battlers spazzing out whenever a battle starts. I tried going for Math.floor on every possible spot that determined the battler's position, but no dice. So, for me, it's either that or ditch the Altimit Movement altogether.

As for the results, well, after a bunch of screwing around, get this: I initially got it to work with the battler positions but the caveat is that attacks and spells would miss entirely. Then I got it to work on porting the whole damn thing, just frankenstein the two together, and I did get it to work exactly how the Cross Engine demo worked, and normally I would be satisfied but it came with two problems:

1. The code itself looked really messy and unorganized.
2. The Schala Z System would need the Altimit Movement to even function.

So, I did my best to implement the Cross Engine's code with the Schala Z System's and made it check if the Altimit Movement was imported before it executed any of that, and at first it worked, but I must've screwed something up because now I'm getting errors that I've never seen before and have no idea what the problem is. Seriously, I got an error saying that a function called needWalkAround (or something like that) didn't exist but it did, so I have no idea what I did wrong.

It was hard for me to tell which of the code would help me and which ones wouldn't, as I only wanted to port the Altimit Movement optimizations and the QOL improvements for the base Chrono Engine. I'll try again at a different time, but now, I'm just tired. If anyone has any suggestions or advice for this, please let me know and I'll take it to consideration :thumbsup-right:

(Schala Z System) June. 26 2025 - Sorta fixed the Cross Engine and started porting other plugins

I decided this morning I'd do some simple stuff, I said I was going to do some owed art, but I wanted to get some stuff related to the project out of the way first.

Chief among them was fixing my mishaps yesterday with the Cross Engine. If you read the last post, I tried to fuse that and the Schala Z System and it sorta worked but it didn't pan out. I spent a good chunk of my time just undoing what I did yesterday. Got everything fixed, but now when the party members get in position to start a battle, they zip for a split second before going back to normal speed. I tried comparing the plugin's code to the Chrono Engine's to find the issue, but I'm not sure what I played with, but I'll get to it eventually. I may alter the Cross Engine a bit to work with the Schala Z System and remove some of the ABS stuff, but it's gonna be its separate plugin for now.

As for the other plugins, I started with three of them. The Enemy HP, the CharPoses (Character Poses), and the Boss HP plugins. Going in order, the Enemy HP plugin I was able to get it to work without much hassle, it was thankfully straightforward.

The Character Poses.... barely worked. It would "display" the different sprites based on the state, and by "display" I mean it wouldn't show the full sprite and just bits and piece of it as if it was corrupted. Not to mention, whenever it's on, I can't trigger any battles whatsoever no matter how hard I'd try.

The Boss HP plugin, while I haven't fully tested it yet as I have yet to make a boss enemy, I did fix an issue it had with Sprite_Base not being defined thanks to a trip at Fossil.

That's all I've got for now, if you have any suggestions or ideas to give me, feel free to share :]

What is the progress of the transplant? When can it be released for testing?

When exactly it will be released, I don't know for sure until I make sure that everything is ported and accounted for.

There's still stuff like the plugin parameters and translating the Portuguese text into English, and that's something I'll fully commit to and test once all the plugins I wanna use are ported and working without issues.

(Schala Z System) June. 27 2025 - Implemented Bosses w/Health Bars as well as some progress on some other plugins!

Today, I decided I would do something that's relatively straightforward, I implemented the Boss HP Meter plugin which, as the name suggests, makes a health bar for anything that's deemed a boss. It did give me some extra insight on how to make those things work and how they're implemented and done. So, I decided to mess around with them and make a quick boss to test things out. I also made some UI for the boss meter which... made me realize I didn't do the same for the normal enemies' health bar lol

As for the CharPoses, I made a thread asking about the issue I had, and AquaEcho suggested that I try porting the Cross Engine's code into the file to get it to work, I did start at a bit of that, but I also realized that I'm probably gonna need some help from Fossil as well as. Needless to say, it will be a while before I get the thing working, especially with the additions the Cross Engine makes.

Now, it wasn't just those plugins that I worked on, as while I was searching the web for some UI tutorials or plugins for RPG Maker MZ, I was made aware that Moghunter made a series of plugins for nearly every menu in the game. To be more specific: MOG_SceneMenu, MOG_SceneFile, MOG_SceneItem, MOG_SceneEquip, MOG_SceneSkill, and MOG_SceneStatus. Yes, those are their names lol

Other than the usual UI differences between MV and MZ I was able to fix, I can't get them to read any input unless I use the mouse, which is odd, but everything so far is working and it's............ yeah..... that lmao







And that's all I have for now. I'm almost done porting all the plugins I need, there's just the CharPoses one that's giving me a headache. I'll have to hopefully get things working with it.

(Schala Z System) June. 29 2025 - CharPoses is finnicky but I figured it out :)

So, I now got the CharPoses plugin to work, and as it turns out, the issue wasn't even in the code, but rather how the plugin itself is made and how it's actually made, and I feel like an idiot finding that out lol

The first issue I had was the plugin just treating the alternate condition sprites I ported from the base Chrono Engine as a big sprite sheet, but as I found out that was because the characters I was using was part of MZ's big sprite sheets, and the plugin is very articulate and precise with the sprite sheet's name and type, so that took me way longer than I'd like to admit.

The second issue I had was that whenever it was active, it wouldn't initiate a battle, and I spent hours banging my head trying to figure out what the problem could be, until by a complete random chance I changed its ordering, and it turns out that CharPoses needs to be above the Schala Z System/Chrono Engine otherwise the battles won't initiate. This is a first for me since this is the first time I ever knew that ordering was important when it came to the Chrono Engine, the Cross Engine didn't mention anything about the CharPoses' order, so I assumed it didn't matter. And you could blame me because I started with a pseudo-blank project and not just work from the Chrono Engine's demo, but, I had the Schala Z System above every other plugin I worked on and ran into no major issues with them in a completely different order and nothing was said about the plugins' ordering, so I had to learn that the hard way, which I'm not too mad about, I did want to start with a blank project to understand how everything worked exactly.

And with that, I have finished the basic porting of all the plugins I wanted to work on. Next up, it's gonna be all the plugin commands these plugins have for the ATB system, every single one of them and make them work with MZ's style. It's gonna be fun... I hope!

I may also draw my own assets for the tech demo I wanna make when I'm eventually done with the coding, because oh man, do I have some plans and ideas for that tech demo heh

(Schala Z System) June. 30 2025 - Beta Release Available!
I've translated the help description and implemented the Plugin Commands that were necessary, which thankfully wasn't that many. I then added the MOG_EventSensors on a whim because I forgot it was even a thing until the last minute. But, that's pretty much everything I did today.

Someone asked on this thread a few days ago if I will be releasing a beta version of the plugin so others can test it and report any issues I haven't found, so I figured since I did the main stuff I wanted to do, making a beta release would be a nice way to receive feedback on any issues I didn't know or see. So, here it is!

https://ameerashourdraws.itch.io/schala-z-system-beta


Now, don't think that this is anywhere close to a finished release. This series of plugins still have their issues which I've laid out in the ReadMe and the Itch.io page. So, best idea to follow them and keep them in mind. If you want to report any errors or add any suggestions, please put them in this thread below:
MZ - Schala Z Engine (Chrono Engine MZ) Suggestions Thread

(Schala Z System) July 11 2025 - A bit stumped at the moment

Haven't made much progress sadly on the project but that's because I'm just currently stumped on some things.

When I released the beta some time ago (you can check it out here if you want to help out or give it a shot), I got a suggestion saying that some of the tool event comments aren't working properly, the one they pointed out was the one that rotates the tool sprite to the direction the actor is facing. This was a new one since the majority of the event comments I used from the techs (which were just 90% of the techs from the demo) worked just fine, so it was nice to know that there's a problem there that I should fix.

But I dunno if I'm missing something or if I'm just flat out stupid, but I looked everywhere to solve that problem but I couldn't find the solution. I determined where the problem was, the function that rotates the sprite isn't being used when that tool comment is used, and right now I'm thinking of maybe outright calling the function when the tool comment is used as that wasn't the case in the vanilla plugin, but I ain't sure how well that will go.

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And on a slightly different topic, that's really my biggest issue with the Chrono Engine and why I started with a blank project instead of just working from the sample project like everyone else does, the plugin is barely documented.

There isn't much of a reliable way to understand how this plugin works or what does what exactly aside from the plugin's help section. Plus, the plugin doesn't have much helpful comments that would tell you what each part of the code does exactly, and lots of times there are just some lone variables with no clear indication what they're for that, I swear, I still don't know what most of these do.

I am planning on doing whatever I can to fix this hurdle by adding more comments and making the code easier to read, and maybe make a PDF explaining how to use the plugin in full to remedy that, but it won't be happening for a while until I get everything here done, which yes, I will be using my findings I've documented here as a reference for all of them.

(Schala Z System) July 26 2025 - Development Resumed and Menu Plugin Tinkering

After a quick two-week break from working on this thing, I'm happy to say that I'm back and development has resumed! Needed to unwind a bit and do some other stuff like owed art, and now that that's done, I started work again yesterday!

I finally finished porting the menu plugins to MZ, fixing the errors I encountered with them. Figured I'd start with something small to get myself back at the groove again. And yeah, so far, everything's working great! :)

I even started at designing my own menus for the project for the heck of it and to also fit the resolution my project's using, and... can you tell that I was inspired by Chrono Cross and that I'm still working at it? Lol

I still have a lot of drawing and designing to do, including new character portraits for the MZ characters (Yes, I'm planning on using them).

As for what's next in development, I still haven't figured out how to fix the tool animation rotation thing, and I've found a bug in the new Force Damage Plugin Command when trying to use it, so there's that. I'm also gonna be trying to double check that I got every possible thing ported and optimize for MZ, and also try to see if there's any bugs I missed.

If you want to help, I do have the project uploaded as a beta on Itch.io, so feel free to try it and help me out. Every little bit helps!
Schala Z System Beta by AmeerAshourDraws

(Schala Z System) July 28 2025 - Replaced the number pictures with actual text
I have yet another small one thing done, and that's purely because I'll be on vacation for the next two days. This time, I did something I've been wanting to do since the very beginning of development. I've always wanted to replace the picture numbers with actual text because while I find the picture numbers to give a sense of style, the over usage and reliance of it in everything that has numbers isn't something I'd say a viable option, that's just gonna cause more steps to set up and it may be hard for anyone who wants to simply get it up and running. So, that's what I did today!

I do have the OG picture number code commented out so I can implement an option for anyone who wants to use them, but by default, the basic text option is gonna be used. I even added a quirk to the HP numbers where it changes color depending on how much HP is there! And here's a glimmer of the results (ignore the NaN in the battle HUD, it's supposed to be the actor's TP number, but for some reason it isn't reading it. Gonna try to fix that as well).

(Schala Z System) August 27 2025 - Almost done, but with some small bad news

Well, this month was all over the place for me lol
Yeah, I didn't give up on the project, I just had a lot of stuff happening during the month that it was hard for me to find time for almost anything. It's been a wild ride, but I haven't given up on the project. I still have the plan to share this to SAGE.

You read the title, so I'll get this out of the small bad news out of the way. You may remember that there are two bugs that I was fighting with, the "tool_angle_animation" tool comment, and the MZ version of the "force_damage" plugin command. I wasn't really able to get it to work.

With "tool_angle_animation", I tried everything I can think of, even calling the function that's supposed to rotate the animation directly into the console, but I can't get it to work. And what's strange is that it works flawlessly whenever I import the Chrono/Cross Engine project directly into MZ (which still uses MV's corescript, mind you), so my only conclusion is that this is a thing I probably can't fix due to how MZ handles animations and the changes in MZ's corescript that make it hard for me to fix it since MZ favors Effekseer animations more. So, my only option to fix the Plasma Wave problem is to make an animation for every angle, and call that needed animation based on the user's direction. Sounds finnicky and clunky, but that's my only option at this point.

As for "force_damage", I think this is also an MZ thing, but it looks more doable since I wsa able to get past the error I was facing but I still couldn't get it to work, I believe there may be a solution for it, but it's just more complicated for me to figure out. And I do believe it's an MZ thing because I made MZ plugin commands for the ATB type, battler direction and position, and the ability to escape, I think only the tool plugin commands are the ones that can't be done in the MZ style, at least, not in a direct and straight forward way. So, my only option here is to inform that and say that the tool plugin commands only work in the MV style.

Thankfully, these two aren't anything major that break the plugin in of itself since they have easy ways to remedy them, it's a shame I couldn't get them to work, but it's just how it is unfortunately right now. But thankfully, that's really all that remains for me with the plugin before its first actual release. There were extra stuff I wanted to implement, but I will get to them at a later time. For now, all that's left is to make the areas for the demo and make new sprites and artwork for the MZ characters, just to give it that MZ flare, and also because I want to use this as an excuse to make a proper game in RPG Maker rather than small simple projects heh

So, I'll be getting onto that soon enough!
Also, can somebody tell me if this is a common issue in MZ or not: MZ allows you to show the TP number of battlers in the main window, but it doesn't render the number or the meter, and when I tried to get the number visible in the battle hud, it just returns NaN for some reason lol

(Schala Z System) September 20 2025 - SAGE 2025 Demo is out!

I should've shared this yesterday, but yes, the first stable demo of the Schala Z System is available! It's been uploaded and approved for SAGE 2025! As of now, it's currently at version 0.1, there are some stuff and extra polish I wanted to make but couldn't due to time constraints and personal life stuff, but I've managed to get a stable working version of it!

As of now, there's two files that comes with the ZIP: the demo itself which has a fully hand-drawn area that uses the plugins, and the demo's project files containing all of the files and plugins used for the demo!

You can find them in either the SFGHQ page or on the Itch page! Enjoy the demo so far! Feedback is always welcome! ^^

Hey! Has been a while since I was active here... Just started a new project and as a chrono trigger fan I would love to use a similiar on map battle system. Guess Moghunters Chrono engine is the best to go, which leads me here! Your Engine makes me guess that Mog also isn't to active lately?

Seems like you are active at least! Great! What is the current state? Maybe updating your first post from time to time would help to get an better overview? What are the terms of use? Guess mog is fine with the port? Thanks for your work :)

Dang, it has been a while since I've been here heheh

As of now, I haven't done anything in the project after the SAGE 2025 demo, which is still available on my Itch.io and the SFGHQ page, which includes a demo of it and the source project. The link to this is a few post above this one.

The terms for this one is the same as MogHunter's, you can use it however you want, but at least give credit for the engine. I don't know when I'll continue working on this one, though, I'm kinda burned out at the moment after working on it for 7 months in between the other stuff I had to do at the time. But maybe I'll resume this one someday

Great! Thanks for letting me know. I will check out the demo.

Is there anything in comparison to mog hunters version which gave you trouble or would still need to be implemented? Basically any To do's you still had planned? ... So I already know where I would possibly run into a wall or need to expant the plugin myself.

Ofc just focused on the atb system! Never got while The chrono engine included two modes, made me hesitate to use it so I hope it might be a bit less overload for my brain if you only ported the atb ^^