Narcosis

Just use the MCP-HC, which should be built-in the CCCP, if I remember correctly. I don't use CCCP personally, because I'm more used to K-Lite, but both of them have Media Player Classic Home Cinema onboard. Or at least, it's an optional choice within the download packs. Don't use any other media players, they suck. Period. VLC is horrible. WMP is shit as well and should be avoided at all costs. There's no point in using anything besides MPC-HC, especially if you're sitting beside your own PC.

CCCP is a collection of codecs built specially in mind with anime. Or at least, that's what their creators say, since in reality it does not differ that much from any other codec packs, like K-Lite Codec Pack. The only difference is that it is pre-configured to work from the very start, once it's installed and the whole installation process is simplified; perfect for newbies or technologically impaired people, in other words. You don't need to "use" codec packs. They will work in the background once required - when you'll be either opening the movie and/or audio files which require CCCP codecs to run (such as AVC/MPEG4 .mkv video files).

I'm not even sure how can you find some subforum burried somewhere on the website useful for newcomers. If chosing a single good thread out of the bunch of those we already have is too hard for the staff, I don't see any possibility for these forums to get any better than the way they currently are. If anything, things will only get more messy and cluttered as more users will join and start posting the same exact questions. Don't start a thread. Just pin the one you have. It does not matter if others who wrote similiar threads will feel "insulted", or whether you particullary don't find it useful yourself. A pinned, well-written thread is a lot better than thousands of threads in some sort of a dedicated subforum. It also makes much easier for the rest of users, since they can later add to it/readjust a pinned thread, not to even mention forwarding those looking for easily approachable information. Don't force them to bury through the forums to get to the knowledge they seek, it's repulsing and definately won't bring you new users; if anything they will find the forums "messy" and won't ever come back. Remember, the point of general recommendations is not for letting people to discuss them; it's to guide and help the newcomers/people interested with a particular topic in mind. Best pinned threads are usually either closed or havily moderated - it is a lot easier to manage them this way than a whole subforum of people asking for the same exact thing. Subforum is a very bad way of dealing with such issue, since after a while you will get more and more of those "ask/recommend" threads and they will often overlap and repeat, over and over again. It will bloat and clutter the forum DB and in time, make the ehole subforum a complete, unusable mess. The only reedemable thing in subforum is the fact it is indeed the "easiest" way to deal with the issue - a path of least effort, or so to speak.

The joke's on you. We're talking about nakige, not nukige and that's a difference.

If you're too lazy to even choose and pin a proper thread (single, best one; not X threads), then write a proper guideline for the new users and learn them to use search functions properly. Make it BOLD, and force them to read the guideline before joining/making an account so they understand we all value knowledge and reliable people. You guys are so useless, it makes me want to go all tsun on you. ə_ə

If you watched Clannad, you should stick with Key to the end and watch both Kanon and Air as well. They are all based on the very same outline and can make you cry for days.

Cross Channel does not need to make any sense, storywise.

The other issue is with people being way too lazy to use a search function, instead asking the same exact question for the XXXth time and those writing the reccomendation threads being too lazy to tag them properly, making them a lot more harder (or actually impossible) to find (and mostly useless). Staff should pick the least biased topic, pin it up and add proper tags. It will be much more helpful than any worthless discussions whether something should be done, or not. Mods should know well what stuff they need to do by themselves, instead being asked to.

Just as I thought. The game might not require installation, but you need to unpack it from the archive first. Without that, you're loading everything into the memory and it's a one time thing - system won't be able to access any external data that's associated with it; saving games won't be possible either.

Yes and yes. You're correct. As for the last question - you don't need to change the system language to japanese, only the locale. There's nothing bad in asking people for help. I'd wish more people would actually be able to do it the way you do. It would make things easier for everyone.

Run the game in a compatibility mode and with administrative rights. That should solve the issue.

You'd be actually surprised how normal and open-minded most of them are, especially when compared to other average people.

It takes a lot more than just a synopsis and a bunch of written scripts, or perhaps concepts to start making a game. Amateur projects tend to have issues mainly because the lead creators, who will be in charge of the whole project and it's team are often either way too ignorant, or don't have enough actual starting knowledge to begin properly. First endavours should always be very simple and unless you already worked as a professional (meaning you have some ammount of knowledge and skill regarding the field of your work - be it programming, writing, art or music/sfx), there's no chance you will ever create anything highly polished straight from the very start. Your work will be shit and that's actually how it's supposed to be - even though it won't look anywhere near like the "project of your dreams", it will be yours, it will get finished and might not even be as bad as you'd expected it to be in the beggining - people may even like it. Commited devs, who are skilled enough to pull most of the work by themselves have the highest chances of actually finishing something as amateurs/begginers. A lot of people expects that others will hapilly jump into the work with them and do that for free. In fact, it does happen, but VERY, VERY RARELY. In most cases no one will ever want to work with you seriously and even if you will find someone motivated as you, you can't expect anything exceptional out of them, because only other amateurs will be willing to give such work a spin, as they are mostly looking for experience and won't expect any payment in most cases; professionals are out of the question. In the end, everything revolves around money. If you're willing to spend it on the development (in other words, do it in a legitimate "business" way), you can even hire those professionals (as long as payment will be satisfying), but projects of low overall quality have a very weak chance to garner their attention (they have their own standards as well and often need to keep them; they won't work for amateurs in most cases). In overall, that's the same as simply buying out studios and making them work for you. Art and music remain very important factors in visual novel development. In best case, you will have an artist who's willing to work from the very beggining to the end and keep the overall artstyle consistent. Same goes for the music, although there's a bit more freedom available in it. Getting those two things perfectly is extremely difficult for begginers. Developers who tend to be artists have the highest chance of pulling it off properly; otherwise, it's hard to expect the artwork to be both of high quality and consistency with your own concepts. The best idea to start is to write a short GVD (game vision document) where you simply put a short synopsis of the game along with any major features/points the game will have; Imagine you're trying to sell your game as a product - what things does it have, that would make it special/stand out among other visual novels? Is it a deep, involving storyline? If so, is it branched? Does it have beautiful character designs/graphics? Lots of event cg's? Does the storytelling method involve the text to appear in a typical fashion, or is it somehow different? Maybe your game has some additional gameplay elements mixed in? Simulation, or strategy perhaps? It's a bit more harder in case of visual novels, since they are all about the same thing - conveying a story to the reader - but that's the best part as well, since it actually makes things a lot easier to manage. To sum up, if you're really serious about it, treat it with equal respect. Game designing isn't some sort of a child's play. If you're commited enough, you might actually get somewhere in the near future; otherwise it's best to stop wasting your time on daydreaming as it will only lead you to nowhere. It's much more complicated on the other side, but let's just say this remains a bare minimum for anyone, who wants to make visual novels: Being at least a writer with a bunch of published/finished works or scripts; it's much easier to create and plan a visual novel from scratch, when someone already has a finished manuscript, or at least a first draft of it. Being a productive artist with some sort of a project summary and finished concept art - character assets, event cg's, backgrounds, etc. bonus points for someone who's willing to take the lead, or work on the whole art department by itself (though it can become a real burden in overtime, especially when the project tends to grow much bigger than expected). Some sort of funding. It's not necesarilly needed and higly dependable on the overall scope of the project; small "dojin" projects are capable to get finished without any sort of funding. The lead creator/designer must be a reliable person with a broad range of different talents and at least minimum knowledge on game design and team management; it's not even a joke, if you want to actually finish something and do it in an "acceptable" ammount of time. It will take you years otherwise and you will have a very huge chance of failing. TL&DR: Don't even try to dream about making vn's, unless you're prepared.

Right now we're basically experiencing a flood of handheld devices. With our current technological progress, such electronics became increasingly cheaper and more easily available; market is full of really inexpensive and powerful e-book readers nowadays. Some of the more independent models are already sporting an android onboard, which only increases their capabilities and soon we might even expect full color e-ink displays. E-ink has one major drawback - since it's responsiveness is incredibly slow, it can't display animations but if you'd consider the fact that most vn's only sport single draw static scenes, it would be possible to create or display vn's on e-ink handheld devices. On the other hand, they have ridiculously low power consumption and can work for days or even weeks on a single battery charging.

Prices are an important factor indeed, but people are also too used to treat games as goods of first necessity; Steam is much responsible for this kind of attitude with it's constant marketing schemes. A lot of people often own hundreds of titles of which they played a very small portion of. In case of visual novels, japanese market is also becoming heavily oversaturated, which makes it more difficult for developers to stay afloat and make a living. It seems we're drifting more and more towards the "consumptionist" kind of society where people are simply fixed on consuming as much goods as possible, because it's something you're supposed to do. Just like with indie games, I find the japanese dojin scene a possible savior, since they aren't as restricted as official devs; they have more possibilities to actually self-publish their own titles on the west or even focus on making multilingual titles right from the start. I kind of want to become a part of it in the near future, as well.

E-ink doesn't strain eyes, unlike LCD/TFT/Amoled based screens. You can read on them in the broad daylight and they don't eat battery almost at all. As for the usability, e-book readers seem to be perfectly fit for LN's. It's definately worth to get one, especially if you have a lot of things to read. E-books are actually very good for any sort of B/W graphics, including manga as long as you'll get a high quality E-ink display. I own a Full HD, led backlit Onyx and the quality of pictures is amazing.

He's going to work on Blue Uru. Unfortunately, without the support from Hideaki Anno. I'm not sure what to think of it. At least, that's what they confirmed so far.

Docking in progress~

I finally watched The Wings of Honnêamise two days ago. It's a real masterpiece. I heard there's a chance Gainax will finally finish that sequel in the upcoming years.

Eiyuu Senki lacks substance. Game doesn't take anything seriously enough to actually justify the history/strategy fans into buying it and at the same time, presence of the rather dull srpg elements will propably put off quite a bit people as well. In the end, you actually don't know who's the actual target audience. It is a joke of a game, to be honest, in all it's aspects. You can imagine, things would be completely different when they would really base the game on actual historical events, infuse those well designed characters with real personalities, make the gameplay more open and rebuild the srpg content to be much more difficult. But it's the japanese vn devs were talking about and they rarely do the research. It's better to remain silent in that case. I don't care if he's working with companies, or not. If that would be the case, the more silent he should remain. Claims without any sort of evidence are just rumours.

I'd wish Herkz would rather have solid proof for that kind of a claim; without it, he's just spreading rumours around. Eiyuu Senki is a fun game to play, but nothing special, to be honest. The writing is indeed rather poor and the whole premise in overall is nothing I'd expect from the former LW members, who made such excellent titles like Girlish Grimoire, Rondo Leaflet or Quartett!. The best part of the game is actually the art and designs from Oyari Ashito and to a lesser extent, gameplay reminiscent of Rance series. I am dissapointed with Tenco and already lost faith in Oyari as well; it seems the best days are already long gone and his own style and art quality actually dwindled down into typical, modern moeblob. Sad. I already wrote about my concerns regarding the Eiyuu Senki port in another thread.

I hope these are self-explanatory enough.

This won't impact almost anything at all. Jast is just one of many major studios and to be honest, they haven't been doing that well since a longer while. I bet - just as Clephas mentioned - that Science series make most of their current income and that makes them stay afloat with enough spare cash to experiment beyond that. Tenco is currently raiding on a wave of "decent" sales from Eiyuu Senki (which is preety much surprising). I don't even know why are they taking the risk, more over when LittleWitch failed in the past; either they are very shortsighted, or things are perhaps even worse than we are aware of - the current market oversaturation and lack of any decent views on the future is forcing them to seek a larger audience outside Japan. Unfortunately, they are doing it wrong as usual, since they should simply release the 18+ version along with an all ages version both for PC and consoles, not the other way around. PS3 isn't that popular on the west and games like Eiyuu Senki won't find much of an interest besides hardcore otakus; it basically shows their complete lack of market knowledge outside their country, since everything here is reversed and PC gaming makes the majority of gaming community in EU/NA. I couldn't care less about Fruitbat Factory, since it's a mediocre company ran by frenchies (no offense) and they should stick to releasing dojin games. I don't even know why Oyari decided to establish partnership exactly with them, but I guess it was propably because of some of the recognition FBF got, along with the fact there's not much of actual publishing studios available and interested in releasing japanese games on the west; either that, or Tenco is just desperate.

As mentioned above, people on the west got the wrong impression. A lot of non-otakus think that visual novels are or can be called dating sims, while they currently retain very little in common. Real dating sims are a dead genre; most of the confusion comes from the fact that a lot of visual novels incorporate dating sim elements, just like galge; it's not the same, though. Best modern example of a dating sim is Love+. Tokimeki Memorial was the game that started it all back in the past. Then, there's Pia Carrot series; they can be considered decent dating sims as well.