VNDS

>>6
You deserve a +1 for a heartfelt response xD. Your post has totally made my day.

as far as I'd like to agree, due to the fact that some eroge are incredibly horrible when it comes to story, I think the general concept is that if it's a novel and it's visual (using text, images, sounds and whatnot) then it's a visual novel.
As you said that might not be the correct classification, but just to make life easier, let's just say they are the same, ok?

i think its kind of silly to argue that this isn't a vn simply because its different from FSN. its still a vn, it just emphasizes simulating a relationship. saying that that disqualifies it as a vn is simply ridiculous.

I think the important point is if it works in ht esame way as a visual novel and if it can be ported to VNDS successfully, I have no idea what the game is like but noone as of yet has brought up technical issues. Although personaly im fine with any VN so long as it has a decent story, I do get annoyed at how some VNs storys revolve around ero content. So from the term "Dating Sim" ium afraid that other than my common sense response I will not support this any further.

Well, also of importance is that in order to successfully port any of these to VNDS two major hurtles must be cleared.

1. There must be an English translation of the script available.
2. The person(s) intending to port the game must have access to a copy of the game.

And I'm not entirely sure what manner of file format images and sound files for any of these titles may be stored in with these titles either. So that could also wind up being a major issue I suppose.

From personnal play experience, I know that all of the NEC Inter Channel titles I've played, as well as the following titles, all play out like a standard VN.:
Bittersweet Fools
Kaze no Uta
White Illumination

Overdrive makes the best visual novel games! Like Kira Kira and eilsweiss or whateer it was.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Kaze-no-Uta-DreamCast-JP-IMPORT_W0QQitemZ350322526806QQcmdZViewItemQQptZVideo_Games_Games?hash=item5190d98a56

>>8

>I think the general concept is that if it's a novel and it's visual (using text, images, sounds and whatnot) then it's a visual novel.

Yes, but Tokimeki Memorial is no novel. It's not even a set of short stories. It's a game. Which you can actually lose. If you've driven yourself into a corner by making "bad" choices repeatedly, you cannot just escape a dead end by loading the last savestate and choosing the other option, like you could in a visual novel.

>>11

>I think the important point is if it works in ht esame way as a visual novel and if it can be ported to VNDS successfully, I have no idea what the game is like but noone as of yet has brought up technical issues.

And it would be extremely hard to port to the VNDS (even if you cut out all animation and stuff) because of its system providing constant choices to the player. Maybe not as hard as something like Sengoku Rance (which is no Visual Novel either), but definitely too hard for all reasonable attempts.

The next more reasonable try would be to port Welcome to Pia Carrot, which has a similiar system and got a full English translation lately. In fact, you should go and play it right now. It's great and it will surely take away from you the idea that DatingSims are Visual Novels. It will also very likely make you give up on any porting fantasies.

I'm not a fan of horror genre in the first place, but I do like all those titles. With that said, FSN definitely takes top place, the complex twists and plot in the story doesn't exist in Saya no Uta, and isn't developed well enough in Tsukihime....Well, to be fair, Tsukihime is Nasu's first work, and a four year gap took place before FSN materialized, so there's bound to be improvements...

I agree with Chass. I loved tsukihime, mainly the Akiha, Hisui and Kohaku routes, but it terms of graphical design, story developement, expectations and surprises it's by far overruled by FSN. I agree that some characters, like Kohaku, have a more sinister and well developed background story then some of the FSN girls, like Saber, but all in all FSN has a superior sotry. The whole truth about the Holy Grail War is by far more interesting, surprising and epic then SHIKI's or Roa's past and whatever.
As for Saya no Uta I still haven't played it yet, but based on the comments I think I should.
Sorry about any possible spoilers that I may have given. ^^'

Saya no uta was just.. Kinda weird and may I say 'fucked up' for me. The scene where he eats human flesh and finds it delicious was.. Well, just plain scary. Fsn was pretty good. A boy with a rather ridiculous ideal joins a war only few will know about and it provided lots of suspense and interesting routes. Heaven's feel's story was unnecessary though. I haven't played tsukihime yet but I'm sure it's heart wrenching as ppl say. #2, that's what it makes it stand out from the rest! It won't be valuable if there's too much of it. Happy ends are maybe considered boring but ur only looking at results. The conflicts between the start and ending is what makes most of a story. I personally like story with a bit of dark mood as it's more 'realistic' for ppl in this world.

Awwww, Heaven's Feel wasn't unnecessary. I found it to be the best one. Regardless of story, I thought the fight scenes at least were the best out of the three routes.

Saya no Uta... I don't know. I played through one route then put it down. It was so freaky and messed up yet still made sense what was going on and why. I'll eventually finish it, but man was it weird.

Type moon doesn't like happy ends at all lol. Fsn is considered one of the best vn around still. Saya no uta was just eww to the end. Hm I think hf scenario was unnecessary too. The mc just gave up on his ideal for a single woman and decided to not care for anyone else! It didn't explain anything or had deep meaning cept the story is all around that sakura girl, who couldve just remained as extras. Plus, the fate scenario moved me along with that secret ending u unlock after seeing all ending, so seeing shiro killing saber seemed wrong for me! I would have liked to see a scenario involving fuji nee lol.

>>12
Zomg! SPOILERS xD! Augh people that haven't played don't read that post!! It will spoil things for you xD.

In Saya no Uta, the lab discovering scene blew me away. A lot of the other scenes were only scary by their use of twisted morals, but this scene was genuine psychological horror, and probably the reason why people call Saya no Uta "Lovecraftian" at times.

Tsukihime mainly stuck with me because of the music, the writing was a bit too shounen at times when it easily dissolved all the creepiness of the initial situation by your typical shounen speeches "girl from another world explains its rules to the protagonist". I hate these since they take away so much from the mystery, like when the new Star Wars trilogy decided to explain how the Force works (lol). Tsukihime is dark and creepy at a lot of times, but it could be much more if it hadn't these shounenesque explanations by all characters and on all topics. Also, the darkness went into some deeply melancholic direction, which I liked very much. The motif of young man coming to live in an old mansion full of beautiful women and mysteries is very old and maybe overused, but it was played very well, and I enjoyed these scenes more than the vampire hunting. While you can get used to the sprite art, the CGs are quite terrible.

FSN I have not played yet.

>>18
it could be worse, much worse... (thinkinging of footnail clippings)

OMG I was thinking of posting the idea of VNPSP as well today ! , 2 months have past..( i think ) since the last post here. ..
so i guess he got Footnail clippings , dammit...ANYONE make a good port of FSN PSP , or a better tutorial for onscripter , i just want FSN to be on p s p .......

>>22

>i just want FSN to be on p s p

Sorry to question you, but why?
The NDS-version has text that won't cover parts of the images and is very comfortable to read because of the black background. A single-screen device wouldn't have these features.

>>22
I didn`t even get those.

>>23
After the whole "hey free psp" thing wore out in my mind and I actually tried thinking about how to go about doing everything, I realized that it would have to be text on image. And on something with that small a resolution, it sounds really hard on the eyes.

It wouldn't be so bad - take a look at all these ONScripter screenshots from the japanese version of the build.

It looks awesome!

I'd kill for the VNDSx PSP port/version... :(

Maybe set-up a donation thingy?

I'd be more than glad to donate for a VNDS PSP version.

(420x272 isn't as small as people make it to be).

Anyone tried running it on the DS emulator on PSP?

Would the psp one have faster and more stable image loading and no pause before speech and etc..?

dam spam...

okay i found the ost...
and FINE ILL MAKE YOUR CG GALLERY.

but when i try and resize a ton of pictures (being 2.3k) at the same time the programs always freeze...

may just be my com though...

oh and also like some other guy asked DO I NEED THE DAY INDICATOR?

Are you trying to use Irfan Viewer? Its a really great image viewer that can batch resize and convert images. I've never tried converting that many images at once, but it should be able to handle quite a bit.
Also, you don't have to resize all of the images, since there are quite a few menu type images (buttons and other things) that don't need to be used. I would suggest rendering all of the character sprites, since those by themselves take up 1650 and make the image resizing seem large. Once you render them, you can delete all of the outline images, bringing your pictures to convert to about 1400.
The day indicator is actually pretty easy to get. You can use two images plus the total number of days to make the day indicator. The only thing it requires is to get the image (probably a cut and pasted screenshot, since I can't remember seeing that image in the graphics, and yes I did actually look through most of those 2.3k images) and to maybe photoshop the screenshot to take out the day and then create overlays of all of the days to use as a foreground graphic. You just have to remember that you need an image before the screen highlights and while the screen highlights, the rest can be done with time, an image editor, and vnds xD.

sounds hard... how about I just include the date in the text??

hmm and also for foreground what are the usual x,y positions of the characters??

If I get the time to make the day indicator images, I'll hand them to you so you can use them, but for now I suppose you can just include the date in the text (you should probably do that regardless of the day indicator actually).

For the foreground positions, if you keep the original sizes of the characters and batch resize them, they should be able to fit the y positions as is, for the x positions, it should be roughly in 85 pixels for three characters (provided all the characters are within an 85 pixel width, note its the characters, not the size of the foreground image). From the images, there are varying widths, so you are going to have a varying number of X values, but if you set the values to variable strings, it should be easier to manage since each character can only have roughly three positions, though because each character has 2-3 different widths for their sprites, you will have to come up with different numbers.

The best I can give you are these formulae:
For One or Three Characters
(48)-(character width/2)=X for left position
(96)-(character width/2)=X for center position

zzzz the ost was missing a sound file and now im going to have to revise my entire script.. anyone know what the 21st sound file for to wanko kurasou is called??

oh and also ive decided to include that god dam cg gallery that CXBLACKCAT wanted...(dont tell him that it was easier than i thought)

oh and also the sound effects like rain falling and pencils and stuff is missing because its once again encoded in .wady. does anyone mind if they become non existent in the game??

one more thing. Ive decided to include the original opening animation as a bonus. (not compulsory to watch as in main menu you choose ORIGINAL OPENING)

decided to post a beta of what I have SOOOOOOON!

The missing song is a revised version of the full ending song to be roughly 2 and a half minutes long instead of nearly 5 minutes. Both songs start out exactly the same and there isn't really much of a difference between the two songs (I believe it swaps to the second verse earlier and that is it). So actually, you don't have to revise squat -_-"...Also, the 21st song is the full ending song, the 20th is the shortened version.

I don't need to know that it was easier than you though xD (if it was beyond the scope of VNDS and I hadn't done it myself before, then I wouldn't have said anything).

For the sound effects, attempt looking for replacement sound effects that are similar to those although probably leave that for last, since that is a horrible thing to try and do without a reference.

I planned on placing the original opening animation as a bonus until I remembered the problem with size as well as frame speed.
To play the opening to even match the song is 30 fps I believe, which would mean making the VNDS system play 3700+ images in space of the two minutes would take a screen changing of roughly 2 frames wait time by using delay (and that is if everything was perfect without loading time). Most likely, if you place those images in the demo, the demo will take longer to load than FSN just to play (and that is pretty damn long) and the images will desync with the music. possibly trying with delay 1 would sort of work, but then vnds might just freeze from the super rapid swapping and loading (I believe some of my IDAT errors might be because of this, and I'm not even swapping ten images yet). If you still want to try it, feel free though (taking out some images is a possibility, but to spend so much time on the opening seems almost pointless).

If this opening you are talking about is some video thing, yeah, it doesn't work so well. I tried to make a basic video-like thing using delay and others and nothing really works.
The max speed VNDS seems to go for me when swapping out images is 1 per second.
Unless I missed a feature (very possible), there isn't any rapid-switch type stuff built in in any way. Which is fine for most visual novels...

Well, if you use the same method that I do, it takes quite a bit of setup. You have to get the first image as a background, and then the four-five subsequent frames are foreground each displaying with delay 1. The only reason this actually works is because of the background option to choose the fade speed (fade speed at 0 or 1). After the five-ish frames, you clear out the setimg with the seventh frame as a background, and repeat process. That is how I got both Hallucinate and the little bit of Planetarian to have a little bit of animating, but in both cases, there can be no interruptions and who knows how badly it might rip up the microSD's read/write cycles. It could be that it completely fries the microSD after a couple runs, but I don't exactly know enough about VNDS to know if that is a danger.

Technically, it could be possible, since the DS specs do have only 4mb of ram, meaning that we are pretty much using as much of it as we can, and it does need to get the new information somehow, so it might be burning read/write cycles (though it takes years for a normal usage SD to run down I think, but with the 3700+ images...who knows)

Ah, using the foreground for later frames is pretty genius. Yeah, I'm not sure about read-write cycles though, that's a pretty good point when you're swapping that many images. If it became common to use that, I bet it could be wearing them out pretty fast.

Though, I don't know the mechanics behind that kind of stuff at all.

Toanzz, so how is that porting coming along? Its been a while and a couple of people are probably waiting on seeing how your beta is going to be.

Yeah, I know, but since I'm here I might as well be there too. And I thought about the undo when I did the main page. I was thinking "wait, this had stuff before. oh right, undo!"

Maybe we need a second cleaning force for the board?

If at least he posted images of two-dimensional women, but this is disgusting. I agree that he is probably a single person laughing his ass off reading our posts. A spambot would probably flood with a much higher intensity. Isn't there a list of open proxies and stuff that can be perma-banned by default?

>>27
I wish we did have a second cleaning force for the board. I have no idea if it is possible or not though.
I actually agree with that statement o.0. If it were 2D women, we would all be way used to it (what are eroges for? lol). The only problems I find with it being a person means that
1) The guy must have the shittiest life since he has the time to post this stuff on a random site, where apart from this post, no one seems to actually pay attention.
2) Why post explicit material on a forum that occasionally ports explicit material anyways, woot for being a dumbass rebel...
3)...fuck it, I can't fathom the depths of ineptitude of the ignorant lower beings. Whether spambot or person, anyone who takes the time to do this or make the spambot has about as much brains as a caveperson since that is all they think about -_-".

I don't actually know who has powers over the board (I'm guessing the ones that made vnds xD) but there may be a list.

ban his ID and IP, or make a confirmation code to be able to reply in the event it IS a bot

If you don't mind uploading the files, I'd be happy to give it a shot even though I've only glanced at the commands used by VNDS.

Looks relatively easy to learn looking at the commands right now but if I encountered any stuff that broke horribly, I'm pretty sure posting here would be a good first step.

http://www.mediafire.com/?j5thwdno4id
Hope you do well on your first port xD. If you need any advice, feel free to ask.

Thanks, but the archive you uploaded seems to have a problem -- a large majority of the files are corrupted. I've tried it two times now(with winrar and 7zip), so either I'm continuously 'doing it wrong' or it's a problem with the archive itself.

I can confirm that something happened to that archive. I went ahead and downloaded it and tried to decompress it, and 7zip errored out on a whole lot of files.

It worked fine on my computer xD. Maybe mediafire can't take that large of an archive.
http://www.mediafire.com/?2rwk2dmtqjl
http://www.mediafire.com/?jzwhkzzxmzq
http://www.mediafire.com/?i4zzyyyc00j
http://www.mediafire.com/?ymrgem4zzon
Hopefully these will work (split it into parts with winrar). If not, I suppose I'll try uploading to other places like megaupload.

Once again, thanks for the upload. Working fine this time.

However, I have two questions related to how it runs on VNDS-
1-
Would you have advice or tips on how to remove that black box from around all the characters? That's probably the thing that is annoying me as of right now.
2-
I've converted all the voice files to .aac, but when I use 'sound /voices/etc/etc.aac 1' in VNDS, it doesn't seem to want to work. Although because it's sound I don't think I'll be too concerned about it until near the end.

There is no black box. The box is transparent ingame. Probably the original engine used some kind of black shade as a transparency color. VNDS uses another one. You will have to change the black to that VNDS color by using an image editing programm's pipette tool.

Thanks for the advice, I've edited all the files so they're transparent on VNDS now(although horribly edited). Took around two or three hours to get them all done, but oh well.

I've ported everything up to the first choice so far and have roughly 1/5 of the audio files plotted. That means I'm at approximately what, 20%?

>>93
Then your PC install is still broken.

>>94
Copy the "umineko" or "umineko-chiru" folder that was generated to "/vnds/novels/" on your flashcard.

I'm going to reinstall again then. I'll post the results again. Thank you for all of your help so far by the way.

I'm going to reinstall again then. I'll post the results again. Thank you for all of your help so far by the way.

I'm about ready to give up, I did another fresh reinstall from my disk, same error appears, I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I guess all I can really do is wait and hope someone posts a pre-converted batch of ep1-4, since nothing I've done seemed to fix the problem. If anyone would be kind enough to do that it would be greatly appreciated ._.

A valid Umineko-Chiru install should look like this
293 files, 1.91GB

Mines has all of that. Also, I played through episodes 1-5 flawlessly on my PC, leading me to believe that there is nothing wrong with my install :s. I replay specific parts daily, so I know currently that banquet-end of the golden witch function properly. So I'm really at a loss at this point :(

Okay, I finally sucessfully converted episodes 1-4 (yay me). Now on to Chiru lol.

there are problems with butterflies in ep 1 and 3 and ep3 crashes fairly often

also some problems with red text

i'll give more detailed informations when i get the time
(i have the exact lines where it crashes)+screeshots

Could someone upload just the converted scripts for EP1-4 and EP5 somewhere? Everything else converts just fine, but for some reason it won't convert the scripts won't, even though everything is in the correct directories.

>>103
it wouldnt be possible since picture are randomply named
Also ep3 is not working at all,and i'm slowed down due to university,sorry for the inconvenience

I'm assuming you mean "a link to download the newest version", since I'm not sure what you mean by list. If you click on the topic name, it'll give you all the posts in the thread and the links should be in there somewhere. Else, just get half of the files from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NT9BTTE8 and the other half from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QEKEOZ4T .

We should really make a new topic for the next version so people don't go downloading v0.02b or something outdated like that.

Sorry, but how complete is the vnds version? I've never played Clannad and I'm wondering how much of the experience is captured thus far.

>>100
In the best of times, the wiki is somewhat updated and spam is nonexistent and from the looks of it, a little under half has been completed, unless someone has continued working on it since the last update (which is very possible).

At the moment i'd guess we are around 55-60% complete going by scripts completed.

Great! I'm waiting for this port too XD

Thank you!
It's great!
Always look forward to!

test

at 70 percent yet? XD not rushing you guys!

Ano reporting for bugs?

1.The old times time slip bugs still remain there, i played kotomi route,so i decline all nagisa request, then when in middle of ryou fortune telling, i save then my nds fuc*ed up and it hang, so i restart the nds,then when i load, it has a scene where tomoya practice with nagisa,somehow it jumped to nagisa route, wierd huh?

2.when choosing tomoyo route,there is a time where sunohara want to borrow tomoyo's breast, but i decide to ignore him, but after that, it return to the scene where sunohara wanted to borrow tomoyo's breast again, then it become unlimited loop, i have no choice except to follow sunohara

3.somehow when i played it absurdly, until 22[?,i can't rememmber] th april bad end , there is one mis spelled script in middle of it, thou it not distubring , .

Sorry for my bad english
eishun reporting, over and out. . .

Hmmm... I'm sure they've looked into it before so I guess it must either be way too hard or not worth it. But I could look into it, I do know c++, c#, and java (minuscule amount of assembly >_>). However, I can't get the dang program to compile on my computer, either in XP 32 or Win7 64. It aggravates me.

There's still the issue of it being untranslated, and although there's an "active" group translating it, it took them over 2 years just to do the first episode. It's highly unlikely we'll ever see it translated before we die.

So, who wants to develop a video implementation that supports the game's engine, all for one "average" game that's not even translated? VNDS project is pretty much dead in the first place.

>>12
xD Well actually its less about implementing video for the game now and more of implementing in general. I wouldn't say the VNDS project is dead exactly (it is open-source), we just need some more coders xD

Yeah, there have been a few times where I thought "well, no video or animated gif or even a fast picture changer, what can I do?" when I was writing my own. Adding things like this would also allow you to stick in the intros to many VN, such as Umineko.

Umineko has a pretty neat intro video.

Don't forget that Infantile Paralysiser (aka Moonlight) was able to make Moonshell and other amazing programs because he had possession of an actual Nintendo DS dev kit. Which is sadly why he vanished from the homebrew scene two years ago, legal pressure from Nintendo.

His final prgram DSMPlay offers the absolute best video and audio quality playback imaginable on the DS, utilizing MJPEG of all formats. But the size of DSM video files is ungodly. Literally a couple of MB per minute of video.

>>15
o.0 How could Moonlight have vanished, he/she just released Moonshell2.10 stable like last week.

O_O What!? I had no idea! All I knew was that he'd been forced by Nintendo to close his website back in late 2007 and relinquish the DS dev kit back to them. I had no idea he was still working on homebrew. What's the address of his new website!?

A couple of MB per minute isn't bad. Just means that the video is high quality, which considering the power of the DS, is pretty amazing.

I wonder, does anybody know anything about Bink video stuff? It seems to have pretty low filesizes and good sized videos for the DS (and lots of other stuff).

Ugh, yeah, wasn't thinking about the whole "it's a commercial product" thing. $6000 for a normal license on DS? Who knows how much it would be for something like this, considering it says to email them. Oh well.

On the flip side, if I ever become a member of a small/medium game group or something, their terms seem awesome. No royalties, one time payment to get their SDK per game, and apparently discounts for bulk and multi payments. Nice!

Use to use Bink Video Smacker as part of a process to convert and reduce certain format video files to play on the Dreamcast through DC_DivX.

>>136
Are you still considering to release the source code?

Yes I am but real life stuff is preventing me from dealing with a few final things before releasing. It will be out soon if I don't forget about it.

is there supposed to be no voices?

Yeah.

Converting the sound to aac is all well and good, but now everywhere it says "wav" in the script it says "aac" instead.

"She aaced at me" and so forth.

What you can do to quickly fix that is to use all replace to change "aac" to "wav" using anything (I prefer notepad++) and then use all replace again to change all ".wav" to ".aac" (note that the "." is there) and it will fix that right up.

it kept saying:
clear text
clear text
clear text
clear text
i was using 1.4.7 vnds

is it the vnds's fault? and this was with volvagia's new download when i clicked options

>>149
Go to weeaboo.nl and download VNDS version 1.4.9, since that is what supports the cleartext function (otherwise you will see that everywhere xD)

>>147
>>148
Actually if you replace " aac" with " wav" (note the space) you only need to do one replacement. I fixed it myself and put it on some file sharing site that I linked to in this thread. Don't know if it's still there. I can re-upload it if you want.

>>151
xD I remembered something like that and I looked back on this very thread and I found that I myself said that lol.
>>125
This was where I posted it xD