this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Visual Novels
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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.
Ren'Py has been consistently good and open so it just became the standard now (much like KiriKiri and NScripter before it), we might very well see it be replaced eventually; but I don't think we're going to get a competitor real soon doubly so when considering it has made western visual novels viable thanks to it's great english documentation.
not professionally; but I do have quite a bit of knowledge and experience of poking at systems and hacking things together using whatever tools at my disposal, and when I started getting into visual novels (very much thanks to Fate) I wanted to know how it worked behind the scenes, I also had some technical knowledge at the time poking at Ren'Py a little; but that was of no help as Fate/Stay Night uses kirikiri and it's archives were unextractable with the tools I had (which is how I stumbled across AETools)
4 hours is really short from what I've come to realize and I can't imagine there are too many flags and branching paths to keep track of so it would be trivial compared to something like the original Tsukihime which has a script file of 4.5MiB (encoded in SHIFT_JIS so vim didn't even know how to display half the characters) which has 5 routes, a whole bunch of branching paths and flags it keeps track of, and way to many dead ends you'll run into without a guide because of a wrong choice you made half an hour ago and vndb lists it as 42 hours (those are some real fast readers).
I'd give it a shot with AETools first, unless it's on a custom engine for those games specifically or something used for like 5 games in total it should work.
The .xp3 files are just archives, they contain various files and what those are and where they are depends on the game, Fate/Stay Night: Réalta Nua Ultimate Edition (A community version of the game patched with all sorts of goodies from various releases) has files to load assets from the PSVita release which are stored in their own archive. You'll have to explore the extracted files yourself (I recommend doing so in whatever file manager you have as the AETools file preview sucks ass) you'll quickly find the file structure though as it is made to make sense. The big thing I learned is that this is a process of trial and error (largely the latter for me) and when your approach doesn't work out try a different angle and throw more stones at the window until you find the brick that breaks it.
Personally, I don't want to see Ren'Py replaced unless it's by a better free software project. I think it's good that a lot of VNs are being built on a free software engine today, and that the developer is able to make a living off doing development for it. It's even better that it's seeing adoption globally, not just in one region.
Fair enough. I'd say I'm much the same, but I probably don't poke as deeply as you. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with me! Honestly, I'm sure I would have never come across it on my own. Reverse engineering is something I'm interested in but is going to take me a while to get any good at. This might be an interesting place to start.
Yeah, those games aren't very complicated, and the routes are short. Or rather, they aren't really routes. You get some alternative dialogue for a scene and that's about it, at least for the earlier games. To be honest, I'm not a fan of VNs with a lot of routes. I'm mostly in it for the story, so I love Kinetic Novels like Higurashi and Umineko (though technically they're a challenge to the player, so there is a 'game'). I do want to play Tsukihime one day.
How do you even get SHIFT_JIS working in Vim/Neovim? Did you use an alternative editor? Or did you just install the SHIFT_JIS locale from Broken Dragon and run vim with
LC_ALL=ja_JP.sjis?I initially delayed responding to you so I could get around to trying this out, but I haven't gotten around to it. It's got files like VOICE, MGD, MSD, BGM, DATA, and SE. No file extensions. VNDB hasn't recorded the engine, so it doesn't seem like anyone knows. Maybe I'll find out.
I generally use LF as a file manager, haha. But Nautilus would do, I'm sure. Thanks for all this. This is a pretty interesting conversation, so I've recorded the relevant bits into a document somewhere in case I have need of them later.
really good VN, I loved it (especially the far side routes which isn't an unpopular opinion) it has it's rough edges, but if you can manage to look past those you get something truly amazing. I don't know if I mentioned it earlier but I do have this thread which goes over where you can start reading, a big thing to keep in mind though is that the translation for the original VN is very much one by fans for fans (even though it's been cleaned up quite a bit on the readtsukihi.me version) and that some things may not make a lot of sense due to how well the translation works and some things in the original VN (damn you SHIKI).
at the time I had emacs installed which would open the file; but that wasn't really a good option as I wanted to split the script into individual blocks using a rust program and decided the easiest route was convert from SHIFT_JIS to UTF-8 and replace
¥with\(it made sense to use the same byte)Hmm, at this point I'd look at the file headers using a hex editor to see if there are any magic bytes (readable as ascii text) and see if that gives me anything. maybe also see if there are any additional resources packed into the .exe file (you can open those with any archive manager or the
unzipcli tool) and see if there are any files that can help trace what engine it is or who made it. another thing you can try is to run the binary throughstringsto see if there is any text inside it (although I don't know how well this works on windows binaries) and finally (although this will be quite a bit harder) is to use something like Ghidra to look at the assembly and decompiled C code; but that'd be something you best keep as a last resort.No problem, it's refreshing to be able to talk about this with someone after spending hours of my time acquiring knowledge trying to extract sexy vampire sprites.
I've seen most of the various Fate anime series and all the Garden of Sinners films and I...wasn't a big fan of either of them. I thought the 6th Garden of Sinners film was pretty good, and definitely my favorite of the Anime in the nasuverse I've seen. But I still want to give Tsukihime a go, because I'm sure I'll like these stories more in visual novel form.
Thanks for the links. I had a look on Mandarake and amazon.co.jp and...yeah, those prices are steep for a 25-year old game. I hope Type Moon sells the original again sometime, but it seems unlikely considering they've remade it for the Switch, not including the original game with it. Maybe it'll eventually get an anniversary release with all the versions like Subahibi did.
I'll be playing the game in Japanese when I do get around to it, so I'm not concerned about translation quality.
Thank you for sharing this with me! I'll keep it in mind for when I go poking around the Sonohana files, and other games.
A noble cause.
I haven't read the KnK novels so I can't speak for them, but in Fate/Stay Night there's an awful lot of inner monologue that got cut because it doesn't really fit the anime format, Shirou's actions make sense when it's there; but when it isn't it feels like he's downright stupid rather than chase an ideal he's hold so high thanks to Kiritsugu.
Not a lot of people like it, it has quite a tonal shift from what the rest of the series it but it fits closer to what Nasu does in other works like Mahoutsukai no Yoru. The VNs tend to highlight the slice of life aspects of the series more than the anime and coupled with their writing style it seems to work best in Tsukihime where all these aspects flow together to form one coherent whole.
I don't think they ever will, Type Moon has tried to distance themselves from some aspects of their earlier works and those shine very brightly in the original. I haven't read the remake yet so I can't say how things hold up there; but I've heard people say that it's a thing on it's own because of the changes made.
When you do, make sure to look for all the extra stuff along with the Plus Disc, it might be hard to find but there's a lot of stuff that's interesting but untranslated and never shared with the english audience (I have yet to check it out myself actually).
Glad to see someone agrees
I remember being very bored by the second season of UBW but also kind of liking it. I've seen the original Fate series (yes, yes I know), the UBW series, the UBW movie, and Fate/Zero. I think I liked UBW the most.
I actually meant the 5th movie, haha, sorry! But the 6th movie is my second favorite, and I remember very little about the other ones. I've been wanting to read Mahoutsukai no Yoru for a long time, ever since I saw the cover. I like Slice of Life stuff a lot!
That's a crying shame. I wish more companies preserved their work for future audiences, though if they don't want it preserved, I can understand why, haha. Even if I don't agree with it.
Will do!
If you haven't already go watch the Heaven's feel trilogy or read the route in the VN (I do think it's coded so you'd have to finish Fate and UBW first though).
Mahoyo is mostly slice of life and it's done pretty well, it has the occasional action but the majority of it is about Aoko (she has a brief appearance in Tsukihime) and you get a really good intro to the magic of the Nasuverse (Fate also tries to do that; but after the second explainer from Rin you've kind of had it) Tsukihime isn't going to spend it's time infodumping (except a couple scenes near the end of the Arcueid and Ciel routes) and you're just expected to know things like KnK. I recently finished the Mahoyo VN (thanks to the re-release actually offering an english translation even if it has a couple issues (although I've read worse)) and it's pretty banger even if the slice of life scenes didn't entertain me all that much (although they are used really well to build the characters and their relationships). It is a pretty short VN though (at least compared to the other Nasuverse works) and definitely worth a read.
I don't know what engine it uses though as it's hidden behind the switch executable; but I suspect they're using some form of kirikiri as it is very similar to Fate/Stay Night.
It is a shame, especially with Tsukihime where the far side routes are currently only available through the original game with the remake coming™. Although I have heard that there is some interest in a proper translation if they were to do a PC release (and let's hope it won't take them another 10 years to do so). That said I am looking forward to the scrapped Satsuki route which would no doubt be a complete banger (at least from what I've been able to gather with the content from the original and what we see on the Plus Disc)
I don't watch that much anime anymore, but I will definitely give the Fate VN a go. I've been curious about Heaven's Feel for a looong time.
Okay, you've kind of sold me on Mahoyo as my first Nasuverse VN. That sounds right up my alley, and it's a bonus that it's short, haha. That's not something you can say about most of Nasu's games. I keep seeing this game pop up everywhere on VN sites! Maybe I'll have to give in soon and buy it.
I do hope there's a PC release for either the remake or the original, since that would make acquiring it much easier for me. I do own a Switch, but I don't really want to play VNs on it... But it's good that there are reasons to be excited about the remake.
I'm not gonna stop you, I've had my fair sare of fun with it and the beauty of the nasuverse is that you can start anywhere and still have enough context to figure out what's happening (except when they start pulling out magic, that shit still hurts my brain). Personally I prefer the longer format of Tsukihime as it is used really well to build up your knowledge across routes and throw new things at you at a reasonable pace (fate does the same, but I find the execution of it done better in Tsuki)
if you can get your hands on the NSP file (which you can do by dumping it using a modded switch) Yuzu should run it just fine and you can read it that way, it's how I read Mahoyo and it's come a long way performance wise that I managed to do it on a 2015 toshiba satellite. I would recommend using some sort of controller (if you're on Linux you can use pretty much whatever you have on hand) I tried using keyboard mappings and it isn't really that great even after setting them up as best as I can.
I usually prefer longer visual novels, but I'm looking for shorter ones at the moment. I want to see more of what's out there rather than spending months on a single work, even if that's fun too. I mean, one of my first visual novels was Umineko, lol...
Thanks for the tips regarding emulation! I might find them handy one day when I tackle the Tsukihime console release(s). I've never really done emulation before, although I do know a little about it.