mnakamura

I had no idea on RLVM and Anise. Hmm, now I'm getting it where Asenheim project took their supported titles

Thanks again! I had no idea that such a project existed. By any chance, could you enlighten me if you know any other such projects (i.e. custom VMs for 3rd party novels)?

It's all about Pareto principle, as always 80% of work done in 20% of time, and now to get it actually working flawlessly one needs to spend 5x for time Thanks for the hints on sound files. I'll try it now. Now that's a determination one doesn't encounter often nowadays By any chance, can I persuade you somehow to release the sources of your conversion script? If you do, I'll be able to do yet another converter to .story format and everyone could play your Divi-Dead conversion, with all the bells and whistles?

Thanks for your patch! But I honestly don't think it's a good idea to write about every patch on Fuwanovels I read my mail and get these requests, no problems.

Wow, thanks for the suggestion! Your Divi-Dead reversing looks really cool What have you used it for? You have done a port / remake of an engine or what?

Hey, @Scorp I've spent a couple of hours on it yesterday (mostly figuring out where to get it and what ancient OS would I need to run it), here's what I've got as a disassembly of the first scene: http://pastebin.com/V7gvbCka Nothing too bad, given that the engine is very dated and seems to lack most of fancy animations, transitions, etc. It seems that even sprites support is very simple - I haven't yet encountered a situation with 2 sprites on screen. There would be a problem with sounds and music streams, as they are in cryptic beginning-of-00s format - that, in turn, probably would need reversing sound stream compression algorithms (most likely there's some kind of in-house lossy compression implementation). Also, I've started to read the story, and, honestly, all this pseudo-horror stuff is a major turnoff for me. It's not like I'm gonna read it myself If anyone cares to see the demo, PM me.

What engine does it run? Could you check?

I'm not really sure that it would be easy to do in a browser-based VN engine. Probably the best I can is memorizing a screenshot into clipboard - then you'll have to insert it somewhere. It's probably OK to send it via web-based messengers, but I can think no other use - i.e. it would be fairly hard to write it to a normal local file, upload from local disk to attach it somewhere, etc, etc. OTOH, if that would be a public server, probably one can just serve ready-made images from it - forum-embeddable, all that glory

There are lots of them, that's for granted. However, if I check out the top, it's mostly RPGs with minor VN element (Monmusu, Sengoku Rance, Kamidori), no pure VNs. Given that I haven't even heard the names of ~70% of the top50 list by popularity, I honestly don't even know which to start checking. Any advices on popular VNs with maps on relatively widespread engines like krkr2, BGI, Ren'py?

Indeed, it is illegal to post links to copyrighted content on this forum according to the rules. Katawa Shoujo is CC-NC-BY-ND, which is "no derivatives". I don't know if porting without change of contents would be considered derivative, but probably that's not a safe idea too. Actually, it's a good idea to find something free to make a distributable demo of. "The Question" might be a good idea, I'll need to check. There is no single "central" place for discussions (yet?), I discuss stuff with each team personally in a way they want it. That's forums, imageboards, e-mails, etc. Recently, Github project sprung up, that might be that "central" place you're looking for. Yeah, I'm aware of that. However, I want this functionality to be portable and useful too, i.e. so it could work on devices without a mouse / touch screen like consoles. So we should be extra careful implementing it. And, yeah, we still need a VN that has map. I haven't found a good example yet. Any ideas? "Real math" is not a problem (actually, it's not a problem with majority of engines I've seen), as well as "random" function in Mikan engine. But, yeah, it's exactly the point to keep Mikan engine high-level, without going GameMaker / Flash / Unity3D way.

Good point, added it as well. Thanks.

Hmm, a nice roundup. That should be possible, why not. I'll try to find it and take a look in a few days.

Thanks for your reply! I just wonder how that should work: because usually when you press Ctrl+LShift, you might press "Ctrl" first and that will fast forward what you have *not* seen yet. Actually, I have a bit of grudge against using "Ctrl" to skip (and basically for *anything* beside being what it intended to be - a modifier). Do you people *really* use it that way and never had a problems with Ctrl being pressed accidentally totally ruining your place in novel?

Totally forgot about this one, thanks!

I thought I should post an update on what's going on: The name was chosen - it's going to be "Mikan engine". Thanks, Scorp! Open source project was published at https://github.com/mnakamura1337/mikan_engine Feel free to join and contribute! Noratoto converter + porting scripts are publishted at https://github.com/mnakamura1337/noratoto_port If you own Noratoto, you can convert it to .story format yourself by running these scripts If you don't, well, it never hurts to ask around Currently I'm working on better support for BGI engine with never (subroutine-based) scripts.

Hi fellow VN fans, Working on Mikan engine, I've been wondering what default keybinding do you find most intuitive / comfortable? I mean keybindings for actions like: "Next" / "Go" (obviously, the main button for a visual novel that one spends 99% of time stomping on) Hide UI / text window (probably the second most used, when one wants to take a closer and better look at that juicy CG) History (probably the third, when one just misclicked or just wants to re-read some of previously said stuff) Load Save Quickload Quicksave Settings dialog Exit to title Exit game Toggle fullscreen / windowed Fast forward to previous choice / next choice One step backward Skip, toggle skipping already seen, etc Replay current voice fragment Toggle autoread ... Something else? What are keybindings that you find most annoying and definitely should not be used?

Ok, just wanted to give a sneak peek at "customized" UI that more or less follows UI of original VN, Noratoto in this example. That's the BG effect (blur) + sprite + a character talking: Blurred BG + CG + face avatar: And, yeah, that is, by the way, and unannounced yet exclusive English translation

I've seen lots of VNs with horrible interfaces. For example, I really *hate* default krkr2 keybinding with Ctrl = skip everything as fast as possible. One occassional Ctrl combination (like Ctrl+C to copy) that went to the wrong window - and you've skipped like half of chapter you've never read so far. There's a nice thread nearby where people discuss what's good and bad with UIs. I really look forward that a vision of an ideal UI would crystallize there. To be honest, right now I have a special off-screen button to maintain precise control over "next line" invocation I hope to come down to some customizable behavior here: i.e. a list of checkboxes like "a mouse click anywhere", "a mouse click on text window", "Space", "Enter", etc, etc. Saving can be implemented in 2 different ways: Saving state in localStorage - thus you'll be able to load it only on the save device/browser you've played the novel so far. Saving state to some central remote server - it would obviously require internet connection and registering/logging in to it, but once you have that, you have access to all your savegames from all the devices you want. This way one can start reading a novel from home PC, continue to read it (loading the same state from a server) on the go using one's Android device / iPad, and continue to read it on a PC at school/work.

Actually, what I wanted to demonstrate is the ability to run VNs originally using various engines. Otoboku uses Caramelbox engine, for instance. I believe that UI implementations (I'm talking about both text window and settings/save/load/etc dialogue) should be modular and pluggable into engine. If one wants to run a given VN with its original UI - here you go. If one wants, for example, to run Otoboku with UI from, say, Nekopara - here you go too, shouldn't be a problem. As for me, UI of the majority of VNs have been a major pain in the ass for me: it's counter-intuitive, doesn't allow certain things, etc, etc. Full screen is not actually a problem even right now: you just set to to "stretch to full window" and press F11 - and voila, you have a full screen VN. I have lots of settings planned, like sound volume levels, per-character settings, etc, etc - should be plenty for everyone. And, of course, we're talking about one "reference" settings UI: probably there would be more (like changing themes) and you could be choosing any you like. I'll post a screenshot of how Noratoto works, for example, with an UI that tries to match original game's UI. Yeah, for now for the player it's just opening a single HTML file in the browser. Or a given URL, if it's deployed somewhere on the web.

I thought I'll post some more screenshots to prove that my engine works with multiple donor engines. Here's Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru, AKA Otoboku. Sprites, normal dialogue lines, that like of stuff: And here's the very simple settings dialog so far:

It seems that I wasn't clear enough That's exactly what I'm doing: I'm getting to know "inner script opcodes" and translate them all into some higher-level format. For example, if you'd want to implement skipping of H scenes in a relatively low-level engine like krkr2 or BGI, most likely you'll end up registering some flag variable + doing conditional jumps in script to work around H scenes + add tons of settings UI code to allow user to switch this flag on and off. When you have a higher-level engine, you just have to mark up a scene as "H" - and engine takes care of skipping / warnings / blacking out CGs / etc in itself. So you only need to do it once in the engine, not in the script of every game. And marking up whole scene in some way is not that hard too - very frequently there are already some indications in original scripts like "_h" suffix in file names or something like that - a converter just needs to understand these marks and convert them into format's markup. That's exactly what's different between my project and VNDS (which markup is very close to NScript and thus, very low-level), interpreting krkr2 directly (like Android ports do, or like Tyranobuilder which is implemented very close to krkr2), etc.

For starters, it's not unusual to see people in Japan reading H manga on their way to work/school. Seen it a lot of times, nobody cares. That aside, that's exactly where having a controlled engine shines. There are plethora of options - you can just skip H scenes (saving bookmarks to read them later), you can disable graphics and just read the text, etc, etc.

It's a very gray legal area, that's exactly why I try to keep low-profile (and want to get people from other countries to help). Unfortunately, from ~10-12 titles I've tried with ChiiTrans / ChiiTrans Lite / AGTH / ITH / that kind of stuff, I've got only ~2 to work properly. But yeah, ChiiTrans is exactly where I've got the idea of MeCab parsing + fast dictionary lookups + multi-language.

Our mileage obvious varies. First of all, vast majority of modern (~2008+) games require some intervention because of obfuscation / encryption keys, slightly-non-standard xp3 files, etc, etc. One has to unpack / deobfuscate / repack xp3s first (and that frequently requires at least some basic reverse engineering skills) before at least attempting to run it using generic krkr2 implementation. Even if one overcomes that, many VNs fail somewhere around the title just because of some fancy DLL functionality such a yet-another-custom-crossfade or yet-another-video-file-playback-format. Of course, it's possible to find that place and remove the offending line(s), but, again, it's not that straightforward for your regular Joe. As for "doing better" - that's not what I have in mind. I don't want to make a better replica of krkr2 than it already is. I want extra functionality. I want better, customizable UI. I want to be able to read in 2 languages and improve my Japanese through it (yeah, I know of GoGoNippon and NekoPara, but that's all). And I want it for all games, not just krkr2

Point taken, thanks - both about a distinct app and a name. Not really. krkr2 nowadays is one of the most elusive, most intricate engines. It provides assembler-like capabilities to the developer, thus 95% of games I've seen for it develop its own complex system of macros / subroutines. On top of that, there are several proprietary enhancements which are hard to emulate, such as e-mote or Live2D. That said, it's not like I propose or have some miracle maker for krkr2 games. My krkr2 converter's lacks these features too.