Just curious what the oldest game is that you’ve played, and whether you enjoyed it or not. I’m less interested in the technical experience, so you can use the original release date, even if you played a more modern implementation.
For me, Fate/stay night just barely beats Clannad, by a few months. Both were released in 2004, and both show their age a little bit (Clannad in its convoluted branching, Fate in its resolution options), but are perfectly playable. But of course both are super popular classics, so I wonder if you all had similar experiences with more obscure or older titles.
Mangagamer has native Linux builds for all the Higurashi games. But, another 07th Expansion game from 2016, TRianThology, used the NScripter engine, and I was able to get it to run natively using ONScripter. Is that what you’re describing?
I’m actually using the Windows builds through WINE so I can get Textractor to inject hooks into the games, but it’s nice to have native Linux builds.
By the way, if you want more stable window management, fullscreening, upscaling, etc., the Gamescope compositor is an easy way to achieve that. Lutris makes it easy to use it.
nice, spares me the effort of figuring that out.
Pretty much, I have ONScripter through the AUR (
onscripterandonscripter-en) which I can use to run these games.I had a quick look at that, is it for accessibility or are you just trying to get the text out for other reasons (if it’s the second I’ve had success using AETools on the Nscript.dat file).
I’m aware of gamescope; but I’m also aware that it’s basically a glorified hack to get something that plays along; generally I prefer if a game has builtin exclusive fullscreen as it still carries many advantages over using compositor hacks. (I haven’t really seen a good case not to use it besides the minor alt-tab annoyance)
Then we used precisely the same packages to achieve that. I don’t even remember where I heard about ONScripter and thought to use it. I couldn’t get it to run through WINE, so it was fortunate I figured that out.
I’m using visual novels as a method of learning Japanese. Textractor extracts the Japanese text from the game, copies it to my clipboard, and then Yomichan reads my clipboard and searches my installed dictionaries for the Japanese words in the sentence, which I can read to understand the unknown word(s). I might then use AnkiConnect to create an automatic flashcard in Anki using my dictionary in Yomichan for the word I just learned to review later.
When I was playing the Sonohana games, the only resolution available to me was 800x600, and fullscreening it was horribly broken in WINE. It would also often crash the game when I switched virtual desktops. Since using Gamescope, those issues disappeared. Hack or not, I’m a fan.
This is the exact reason I started using the AUR version as ONScripter’s exclusive fullscreen does not work in wine, I also played half of Tsukihime not realizing you could use
1,2, and3on your numpad to change the text speed or change the game volume or even use page more (which is a delight during certain scenes).It’s nice when it works, but looking back at TRianThology, I’ve realized that the Linux build of ONScripter kept finding the wrong color profile for png files, and so the game flashes green constantly. It’s pretty unplayable. I could only get it to work by running the Windows build of ONScripter through WINE. And yeah, this was the AUR version with the two patches.
And, unfortunately, the Sono Hana games don’t use the NScripter engine. I think they might use the KiriKiri2 engine?
could be depending on the period those games were released, KiriKiri is definitely an interesting beast as you can’t really interpret the KAG scripts directly as there are dozens of plugins that modify the things available in it due to the interpreter for it being written in TJS and that being interpreted by kirikiri. for F/SN I know of https://fatestaynight.vnovel.org/ but that uses an interpreter specifically written for it.
What I can say is that you should be able to extract the .xp3 archives with AETools (I don’t know why; but this single program is a godsend for extracting VN assets).
Another thing is KiriKiriSDL2 which is a port of KiriKiriZ to SDL2 with goals of supporting platforms such as linux and webassembly; but last I heard the project wasn’t ready for running games like Fate.
That’s pretty cool. I know next to nothing about engines (Ren’Py seems nice), so this was enlightening. I know a group rewrote several of the Sonohana games in Ren’Py while working on their translation so it would work cross-platform.
Is this what you’re referring to? It’s written in Pascal…! This is not promising:
Ren’Py is a really interesting beast as it aims to make things easier to develop for and is a really good cross-platform solution. It also is trivial to extract and modify and we can use the tools already on our system to do so, the downside to Ren’Py is that it is not nearly as flexible as kirikiri due to it’s nature (and it doesn’t need to be; most things are already baked in).
I do like the fact that they ported the game to Ren’Py and I appreciate their effort to rewrite the game’s script, there’s very few groups that will ever go through that effort just because of the amount of work involved.
yes, it’s a bit unsettling; but newer VN engines tend to use more common filetypes and AETools is written to deal with the older engines that just don’t have a lot of easily available tooling for them, especially on the extraction side. I haven’t seen any other extraction tools that work this well in wine and a lot of these older formats are archaic and tend to have very little in the way of documentation and even less in english (ONScripter only has this because of the VN translation community and KiriKiri has no good resources at all)
I’ve been seeing a lot of Ren’Py games lately. All the Ren’Py games I’ve played feel nice, so I have no complaints. I think the very first Ren’Py game I played was Save the Date, which I really liked. The most recent one was The Expression Amrilato, another release from MangaGamer which has a native Linux build. The main Ren’Py developer is actually being funded quite sustainably, which is good to see.
Are you a developer? You’ve got quite the encyclopedic knowledge on VN engines.
It’s a crazy amount of effort, I imagine. These games are pretty short, though (~4 hours?). I don’t know exactly why they rewrote it in Ren’Py. It might have been for a cross-platform release, or it might have been to make it smoother, or for all or none of those reasons.
These Sono Hana games don’t have .xp3 archives, but Dracu-Riot does, so I do own a KiriKiri game. The SonoHana games have MGD and MSD files. I don’t know if this page or any others on this site would be interesting to you at all.
I don’t know if this is something I can even approach right now. I wouldn’t know where to start. If I extract the .xp3 files with ae—then what? I admit this is all interesting at the very least.