Lantis wrote: Impressive? It looks bloody amazing. Seriously, if only RM1 had that kind of power.
Thanks. 
The Nimol video (the one with the tower) was just a concept test to see if I could do a simple pseudo-3D animation for the city. The tower in the center was just a place-holder. I wanted to use the RTP to build the tower, houses, buildings, trees, people, everything, and place them inside and outside the walls - sort of like a pop-up book (I can't think of the actual industry-term right now, it's been a while.  ).
The idea was to be able to do a seamless transition from the game to one or more pseudo-3D cutscenes. Image you're playing the 2D game, approach the city gate for the first time, and have the camera pan up and zoom out to reveal the full extent of the city (similar to the concept video). That's something you have never seen in any RPG Maker game before. ^_^
I was planning a big epic-battle scene for Death of Feros, which took place inside and outside the walls of Nimol. As you moved throughout the battle, your area transitions would be interspersed with P3D cut-scenes which would show tens of thousands of animated RTP character sprites battling each other with magic (fireballs, walls of light, lighting, etc). You would see the walls of Nimol assaulted, blown up, repaired (with magic) - not to mention people assaulted, blown up, and repaired (though not repaired as well as the walls). Thanks to the low resolution of RMXP (and depth-of-field), big battles like that should be doable, since I wouldn't have to show very much detail except for close-ups.
In video, it's possible to animate the sprites in ways that are not possible in RMXP. You can have characters jump, leaping toward an enemy, go flying upward when they're hit with a fireball (leaving a trail of flames as they soar through the sky), show smoke and particle effects, blow off soldier's heads, pierce them with spears of ice, animate spurts of blood when they're wounded, and all sorts of wonderful things that you just can't do with "Move one tile right, then one tile left, then one tile up...".
Then there were temple scenes with rivers of light and energy flowing up the walls, the magical construction of buildings, dramatic battle and death scenes, and an epic battle scene flashback which showed the terrible extent of the main villain's true power (you know the moon Beos in the vid? Let's just say it didn't fracture on it's own accord).
There were lots of interesting visuals I wanted to include that you could never see in any other RPG Maker game. Like the fracturing of the moon Beos. That happens pretty early in Death of Feros, so it's not much of a spoiler. But there are a few really cool things that I can't reveal.  I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to making these games, but I'm better safe than sorry.
Actually, a lot of the visual/technical stuff I thought up for these games was inspired by the old 2D/3D RPGs (mainly FF). They would use 2D backgrounds with 3D elements and animations. I can't pull off their techniques very well myself, but I can use them for inspiration.
With all the custom visuals I wanted to do, the game would end up being like 20 GB or more.
It's really too bad that RMXP doesn't natively support video, and you have to use some kind of work-around. If they ever do another PC RPGM, I really hope it includes video cut-scene support. That's the feature that I want most of all.
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The faster render speeds ought to help me if/when I decide to start working on new videos.
