worlddan: The reality is that the major market for RPG Maker (the program) is in Asia. Many people in Asia do not have the best computer--many don't even have access to a computer at all outside an Internet cafe. This is what makes the issue so difficult--Enterbrain is trying to make a program that has worldwide appeal which means--unfortunately--that they go with the lowest common denominator.
I'll happily confess to ignorance of this scenario, but I do find it tremendously difficult to believe that a significant percentage of users of a paid productivity program only use it in internet cafés. Unless of course those internet cafés cater to that audience specifically, and actually have RPG Maker licenses themselves, which your explanation suggests may in fact be the case.
worlddan: The point I am making is this: game players like high quality graphics but it isn't necessarily true that game designers do.
Game designers have to worry about issues like cost of production and computational overhead (computers with expensive cpus and large graphics cards). RPG Maker is targeting a narrow niche--not only in terms of who plays games made with the program but also in terms of who designs games with the program. That niche isn't for everyone.
Well, that was kind of my point. Options for
better graphics than static 16x16 or 32x32 tiles would not necessarily require neither expensive CPUs, nor large graphics cards. After all, it doesn't take much to be better than that, and that level of graphics was happily handled by common hardware 25 years ago. The only real reason I can see for suddenly needing better hardware would be if they started including 3D support, but I get the impression that that isn't what people are asking for.
