GOG, the DRM-free game store, is having a new year sale until February 5th. It includes discounts up to 90% off, and encompasses over 4600 games and 386 visual novels.

Here are some interesting picks:

• Eliza (50% off)
• Higurashi Hou Series (50% off), Dual Language; the first game is Free.
• Umineko Series (40% off) Question Arcs | Answer Arcs - this series is slow, but really good, and includes the original Japanese script.
• Baldr Sky (40% off)
• A Tavern For Tea (16% off), Dual Language
• A HERO AND A GARDEN (10% off), Dual Language: This is mostly an idle game, but it has a great story. Be sure to check out other games from npckc that aren't on sale right now too!
• eden * (50% off)

Yuri:

• The Expression Amrilato (50% off), Dual Language
• Flowers Series (40% off)
• The House in Fata Morgana (35% off), Dual Language

And there are plenty more on sale!

MangaGamer is having a sale for many of their games until January 31st, up to 60% off. This sale is also happening on Steam if you prefer to buy your games there.

Some notable dual-language titles:

• When They Cry 5 (Ciconia) Phase 1 is 40% off
• The Expression Amrilato (This game is good! Really good! Only 20% off, though)

Some big sales (these games are English-only):

• Kindred Spirits on the Rooftop Full Chorus is 50% off (Yuri)
• Trinoline is 50% off
• DearDrops is 50% off
• The Shadows of Pygmalion is 50% off (Yuri)
• Fashioning Little Miss Lonesome is 50% off (Otome game)

There are also some Drama CDs for sale.

This is an excerpt from a post on the Lutris Patreon page a few months ago:

The slow and consistent decrease of financial support

On a less positive note, I’d like to address the painful direction the Lutris Patreon (and financial support in general) is taking. The current earnings of the Lutris Patreon is about half of what it was in September 2020. This was a time before the Steam Deck when Lutris was far less complete than what it is today.

...

I fully understand that the current economic situation makes things harder for most to give to open source projects and can’t thank enough all of you who still make monthly donations! I’m slightly hopeful that the introduction of cloud saves in Lutris will change the direction the Patreon has taken. While self hosting your cloud saves with Nextcloud will be the default option, it will also be possible for $5 Patrons to host your saves on Lutris.net.

In any case, working full time on Lutris will soon come to an end since it is not sustainable and I will eventually run out of savings.

You can see a graph of financial support for Lutris on Patreon over time here: https://graphtreon.com/creator/lutris#

This is an excerpt from a post on the Lutris Patreon page a few months ago:

The slow and consistent decrease of financial support

On a less positive note, I’d like to address the painful direction the Lutris Patreon (and financial support in general) is taking. The current earnings of the Lutris Patreon is about half of what it was in September 2020. This was a time before the Steam Deck when Lutris was far less complete than what it is today.

...

I fully understand that the current economic situation makes things harder for most to give to open source projects and can’t thank enough all of you who still make monthly donations! I’m slightly hopeful that the introduction of cloud saves in Lutris will change the direction the Patreon has taken. While self hosting your cloud saves with Nextcloud will be the default option, it will also be possible for $5 Patrons to host your saves on Lutris.net.

In any case, working full time on Lutris will soon come to an end since it is not sustainable and I will eventually run out of savings.

You can see a graph of financial support for Lutris on Patreon over time here: https://graphtreon.com/creator/lutris#

Subarashiki Hibi (Wonderful Everyday in English) was released by Frontwing in 2017 following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It was released on Steam and JAST.

With one catch: the Steam release only includes the first chapter of seven.

In my experience, it takes about 6 hours to play the first chapter, and the other 6 chapters take another 54 hours to complete. Essentially, 90% of the game is missing. The reason the game was released on Steam in this incomplete state is due to the adult content present in the other chapters. Certain adult content is not allowed on Steam. Not that chapter 1 is free of adult content anyway...

So, Frontwing offers the other 90% of the game as a patch you need to manually apply to the Steam game. You need to find out about this patch's existence from this vague Steam announcement (the store page doesn't mention this at all). If you play through all the routes in chapter 1, there's nothing to suggest you haven't just played the entire game. You get a pretty end credits scene and you're kicked back to the title screen. Because every chapter has its own ending theme.

This announcement links to their Kickstarter Updates page. Because there are 58 updates on the page, you need to click "Load More" 3 times to find this page. It tells you that you then need to go to this special page to download the patch from JAST. If you clicked the link, you'll notice that it doesn't work anymore.

That's because the link was changed a year or so ago and doesn't redirect. The patch is now offered on this page. I did not discover this from any of Frontwing's announcements. I found this out from the comments section of a community guide on the Steam forums.

The instructions on the JAST page are wrong, too. It tells you to "Extract the patch files from the archive and run ".exe" file to install the patch." What you actually need to do is go to the game's Steam folder and replace all the .arc files with the ones from the patch folder.

I wouldn't say this is easy to find. Some people can't find it. It's scary to imagine how many people don't know this patch exists at all...

If you want to play Subahibi (it's a great game, seriously, play it), it makes sense to just buy it from JAST instead. They give you the entire game and it just works, no patching required. Though, fair warning that these releases are only in English (no Japanese option), and there's a lot of disturbing sexual content. The second chapter in particular has various kinds of disturbing sexual content. So much that I can't enumerate it all... The game is also very dark. But hey, it's a kamige, and I thought it was a good read...mostly in spite of that stuff.

This is easily the worst experience I've ever had on Steam. Are there other strange Steam releases like this where you need to scour the web for the rest of the game? I want to know! Or, conversely, has a Steam release actually been better than a GOG/JAST/MangaGamer store release?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/432866

This feature proposal from the VNDB beta has made it into the live site! We can now start tagging VNs known to have DRM:

Alrighty, still not really polished or finished yet, but it doesn't look like the main data model or guidelines will change much so I've pushed it live now.

If you want to filter for DRM-free visual novel releases, you can do that now.

I consider this mission accomplished. \o/

The wording "Digital Restrictions Management" was almost snuck into the guidelines proposal, and unfortunately I can't claim to have had anything to do with that :)

The official guidelines are available here. Interestingly, the final wording is:

Some releases have DRM (Digital Rights Management or, more accurately, Restrictions Management)

Now for the fun part: documenting which releases are encumbered with DRM. If you know one of the VNs you've purchased has DRM or is DRM-free, please help by editing the VNDB releases entry to reflect this!

Hopefully, we'll all be able to make more informed purchasing decisions now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/432866

This feature proposal from the VNDB beta has made it into the live site! We can now start tagging VNs known to have DRM:

Alrighty, still not really polished or finished yet, but it doesn't look like the main data model or guidelines will change much so I've pushed it live now.

If you want to filter for DRM-free visual novel releases, you can do that now.

I consider this mission accomplished. \o/

The wording "Digital Restrictions Management" was almost snuck into the guidelines proposal, and unfortunately I can't claim to have had anything to do with that :)

The official guidelines are available here. Interestingly, the final wording is:

Some releases have DRM (Digital Rights Management or, more accurately, Restrictions Management)

Now for the fun part: documenting which releases are encumbered with DRM. If you know one of the VNs you've purchased has DRM or is DRM-free, please help by editing the VNDB releases entry to reflect this!

Hopefully, we'll all be able to make more informed purchasing decisions now.

This feature proposal from the VNDB beta has made it into the live site! We can now start tagging VNs known to have DRM:

Alrighty, still not really polished or finished yet, but it doesn't look like the main data model or guidelines will change much so I've pushed it live now.

If you want to filter for DRM-free visual novel releases, you can do that now.

I consider this mission accomplished. \o/

The wording "Digital Restrictions Management" was almost snuck into the guidelines proposal, and unfortunately I can't claim to have had anything to do with that :)

The official guidelines are available here. Interestingly, the final wording is:

Some releases have DRM (Digital Rights Management or, more accurately, Restrictions Management)

Now for the fun part: documenting which releases are encumbered with DRM. If you know one of the VNs you've purchased has DRM or is DRM-free, please help by editing the VNDB releases entry to reflect this!

Hopefully, we'll all be able to make more informed purchasing decisions now.

Yorhel added preliminary DRM support to the VNDB beta site on September 12th, 2023.

The goal of this beta - aside from some testing - is to pre-seed the list of DRM types. So go ahead and add and edit DRM types and figure out how to best name and document them. While I can easily transfer the list of DRM types to the main site when it goes live, I'll probably not transfer the DRM info added to releases, so don't go overboard with that yet.

List of all known DRM types: https://beta.vndb.org/r/drm

If you've encountered a type of DRM that isn't listed here, please add it! However, don't bother with documenting which releases are encumbered with DRM just yet, as this data won't make it over to the real site.

This feature has been in Beta for three weeks and it seems pretty close to releasing. Outstanding issues:

• It's possible to search releases by DRM type, but not yet by DRM property
• Guidelines & documentation (some progress has been made, but it's not done yet).

We will support HEVC playback via Media Foundation transform (MFT).

HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.

HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users' computer

For now, I'd like to only enable HEVC for the media engine playback, but keep the HEVC default off on the MFT. Because the media engine is an experimental feature, which is off by default, it's fine to enable HEVC for that.

HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.

What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?

These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity. We felt this pain at Google, so we started Project IDX, an experimental new initiative aimed at bringing your entire full-stack, multiplatform app development workflow to the cloud.

Project IDX gets you into your dev workflow in no time, backed by the security and scalability of Google Cloud.

Project IDX lets you preview your full-stack, multiplatform apps as your users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.

As a Vim fanatic, I can't say I'll ever feel comfortable working in a browser, but some parts of IDX seem interesting. I wonder what the implications are for proprietary code.

I do think it solves an interesting problem where you're working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don't want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.

It reminds me vaguely of Shells.

There are over 1,000 games tagged "Visual Novel" for sale on Steam until August 14th.

Here are some notable dual-language titles:

• Muv-Luv & Muv-Luv Alternative are more than 50% off. Both games are dual-language.
• Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0 are 60% off.
• Aokana is 50% off.
• The House in Fata Morgana is 35% off.

Localization-only releases (i.e. they don't include the original Japanese script):

• Wonderful Everyday (AKA Subahibi) is 40% off. Remember to get the patch for the other 90% of the game afterward though, as the publisher provides it separately to the Steam purchase.
• Baldr Sky is 60% off.
• CLANNAD is 70% off.

There are plenty of other great games here, too. It's a huge sale. I recommend Muv-Luv.