tahu157

Better tutorials on hacking/repacking VN archive files, and decompiling/recompiling script files. That's easily the most esoteric thing I've ever tried to research. This is the best set of articles I can find: https://hackernoon.com/reverse-engineering-visual-novels-101-d0bc3bf7ab8 https://hackernoon.com/reverse-engineering-visual-novels-101-part-2-9258f547262a and even they assume /a lot/ of prerequisite knowledge that I just don't have, and they don't really explain the thought process behind figuring out how to pick these files apart.

The link to your homepage in the OP post returns a 404 but the one in the second post works. Weird.

The email I pasted arrived yesterday (the 31st), not today. It'd also be a pretty tasteless joke, which even SP, bad as they are, aren't know for.

For the last year or so the Narcissu team has been porting all of the games and side stories to Unity for what they believe will be the best possible version of the games. It's been taking forever though and a few weeks ago they held a poll for physical backers asking if we wanted to them to wait until the porting was finished to start producing the physical copies of the game, or just go ahead and ship out physical copies with the current, non-Unity version of the game. The poll came back with a pretty large majority voting to wait. However, they acknowledge that some people are probably sick of waiting at this point (it's been almost 4 years) and are offering refunds on the campaign through the month of April. From the email: The email doesn't really say whether or not everyone that backed can opt for a refund, but I would guess that only physical backers can actually get one. They sent Steam keys out like a year and a half (or more?) ago so digital-only backers have already received what they paid for. Not sure if anyone here backed physically and is interested in a refund, but I thought I'd make the post in case anyone does want one and didn't catch the email. Also, as far as I know this is the first time Sekai Project has voluntarily offered refunds for any of their campaigns. If I were to read into this move more deeply I'd probably say that this is Sekai Project indirectly admitting that they took on way too many projects way too fast.

Tick! Tack! and Really? Really! both have download editions but for some reason Shuffle! and Essence+ don't. At least not in Japanese (I know that it's on Steam in English). Is there any particular reason for that that anyone knows of? Is it some kind of license restriction?

@YomiPlays this program did in fact extract the files for you right?

Not sure honestly. I never had a .cst file to try to open so I guess I've never verified that it works for myself. If you can find a way to send me the file I can see if it works on my end.

@Shinya now that I read the instructions you pasted, I see that it doesn't say that you need to supply a string value (the name of the file you want to unpack) for the -e command like it does for all the other commands. Maybe try just inputting cst.exe -e /without/ anything else following it. With any luck the script is just meant to unpack any/all .cst files that are in the same folder as the exe.

I find myself trying not to choose popular characters as my favorite character from a series out of a (admittedly pointless and contrarian) desire to be unique in my taste in characters. A recent example would be 02 from Darling in the Franxx, who is a wildly popular character. I don’t want to say that she’s my favorite character because /everyone/ says that she is their favorite character.

Despite listing it as a possibility in the OP, I never really thought that this was an outright scam. I do think that the dev has run off with the money, but I don't think that was the plan from the start.

Think he’s in jail or something? Dead, even?

This EVN: https://vndb.org/v25179 was funded on Kickstarter in 2016. I wasn't a backer but I've been somewhat interested in the project since it was announced. The dev seems to have disappeared though. There have been no kickstarter updates since 2016. I checked their kickstarter profile and it turns out that they haven't actually logged into their account since 2016 either. And last but not least their domain name has expired: http://www.novellagaming.com I can't tell if this was a scam or an actual project that just ran out of steam. Either way, it kinda looks like the dev doesn't plan on delivering the VN anymore.

Legal issues with fuwa or no? Either way that sounds scary.

You've been gone so long that I low-key thought you were planning to ghost fuwanovel and let the domain name expire.

Pretty sure the fan-tl project was dropped well before the official release because they underestimated the difficulty of the VN.

Well, torrenting has a $125,000 price tag on my school network so I'll stick to DLsite for now lol

There was a time that I would sit on VNDB for a bit just pressing random visual novel looking for stuff that seemed interesting. I still do that a little bit but not as often. Some of them appeared several times during those safaris and stuck in my memory. They’ve basically become my to-read list for the foreseeable future. Due to my limited budget I’ve been reading in a cheapest to most expensive order.

Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior? https://github.com/morkt/GARbro/releases

There were definitely some trolls there. They got up over $86K there for a moment and ended only $300 in the green.

2 minutes to get $2K. At that point if I worked at Sol Press I’d just put in like $4K to make sure I got the rest of the money.

Jeez they're not even close. I wonder if this means the VN bubble is starting to pop.

No VNs section?

I use splashtop to read on my bed so eating is kind of on the not-do list. Maybe when I get a more comfortable desk setup I’ll be able to sit there and read, and then I’ll be able to snack.

Well, you inspired me to go looking again and I that found Light_DatExtract.exe from this repository will unpack those exec.dat files: https://github.com/regomne/chinesize/tree/master/Malie/exdieslib Just gotta figure out why you can't get into the archive in the first place. Worst case, you could open an issue on the Garbro github and let morkt know that some versions of Malie won't open.

Looks like you have Garbro already, which is good. For Malie engine vns, the scripts should be in data.dat>system>exec.dat. The bad news is that in addition to being housed in the archive file, the scripts are encrypted and I haven't ever been able to find a good way to edit them even though I have tried several times.