Common problems are:

• default.ttf
• default.ttf
• data/default.ttf (NEW!)

Is there anyway to set a delay? a delay function would be useful...

like:
delay X
X being frames(easiest unit of measure to go by)?

Yes, just like that...

EG: In Narcissu, in the begginnig when the three consecutive images with the number of suicides are loaded, it goes too fast... It will be useful if the script can be written like this:

bgload img1
delay 30 '30 frames, half a second
bgload img2
delay 30
bgload img3
delay 30

alright, delays added

Is there support for slot 2 flashcards (like say the M3 Lite?)

'cause I can only get 2 black screens. I can reach the Flashcart's menu and try to load the vnds.ds file but it just leads to two black screens.

VNDS is in the root directory of the flashcart.

>>6
dldi?

Didn't wanna work, or I was doing it wrong.

Used Chism's patcher and the M3 Adapter SD patch (not Alt's or that Alt or whatever the other one was, guess I could try it).

If it doesn't work I'll just make due and eventually get a new flash cart whenever my M3Lite dies on me.

>>8
The Alt one also fails. Just gonna chalk it up to the M3Lite being incompatible (and ancient).

>>9
Apparently I have to run it in demo mode...(hit start instead of A). Well...alright then. It works, without a DLDI patch even.

>>10
Or run it with .ds.gba

The new timestamps, while awesome work weird. I just tried saving (time of save, 2:49 pm), and the timestamp shows 3:-11 pm.

Some signed/unsigned problem?

>>12
because I was going off the FAT timestamp, which I think tends to be very wrong(I had to do all sorts of math to the numbers to make it right)

>>12
saving timestamp in the .sav file now.
I thought of a way to do it without breaking backwards compatability

Music sometimes jump to volumes

>>15
known bug

>>15

I'm adding MP3 support for the music. Should be finished within a day or two.

something probably needs to be done about the damaged saves creation. It's starting to get silly with over 50% chance of the save being corrupted.

>>18
huh?
saves have yet to break in my experience

upload a corrupted save.

well, the first one is 2 steps ahead of the second one.
the second one is also at the very end of the script.

where are you in game when you save the first one?

Both were saved at the exact same location, during a choice whether I want to have ciel with glasses or not.

Because of the crashing I got a habit of making 2-3 saves at once, so that at least one of them will work right.

>>22
huh....I`ll look into it

>>22
seems that somewhere in save/loading, it says its 1 line farther than it actually is.

>>22
possibly fixed, maybe.

for some reasons, i unable to play any game with the vnds 1.2.5 and 1.2.6( the game just freeze at a certain screen).

>>26
download sound files again.

I should have put a check for that..

i already downloaded them but still they're still unplayable.

>>26

>the game just freeze at a certain screen).

what exactly?

Tsukihime: from the start to when you meet sensei, when you play this part normally, it'll freeze at " she'd angry if i call her Aoko". If I save somewhere in the middle and restart the program , I can pass that part but the game still freeze at random point. Sometime, the game can't change BGimg(the scripts still continue) and usually freeze after a few lines.

Nacissu: can't get pass the prologue, seem to have the same BGimg problem like Tsukihime.

while I don`t crash, I do encounter backgrounds not being drawn.

thats interesting, didn`t crash till I updated the script.

alright, figured it out.
turns out when anoNL did some changes, he set sfxbuf to constant size.

and I was trying to delete that.

I updated to the newest version and now the pictures in fate just won't work.
or is it just, that .pak-files are yet to be supported by the official releases?

>>34
I have no intention of supporting .pak files.

I hate the idea of loading the whole file into memory first.

plus its a ton of code to put in

>>35

It doesn't put the whole file in memory, just filename+offset pairs for the files. That shouldn't take more than 100KB when properly implemented.

theeeeeeeeeen I`ll resort to my other point

laziness.

the mp3 implementation is awesome, but it seems to somehow overload the engine. For example, if you watch mou ikkai, eventually one of the images will only show partially, then the music cuts off a second later. Also happens in tsukihime randomly, for me usually during ciel's lesson.

>>38

It appears to be the code for music and sound effects writing in the same memory. Trying to fix it now.

Is there some problem with image display? When I put an image and used the bgload call it never appears, but the same image, squished a bit and saved as thumbnail.png or icon.png displays perfectly fine on the choice screen. I ran it through all the programs described in the docs btw.

If the novel's title is too long, the text will overlap the thumbnail and be displayed as garbled mess.

And dunno if it's the sound file being a bit too large, but I set it to play infinitely, and yet it ends after one playthrough and never resumes. Converted into 4 bit 22050 mono ima adpcm, then turned that into raw imadpcm.

I stumbled onto those while trying to convert Nocturnal Illusions (though with no automation tools or even any graphic extractors so it'll take me around 10 years...)

Er, nevermind the images part. I ran them few more times through the converters and they finally started working. I forgot to convert the icon/thumbnail, maybe that's what caused it too. The other problems still persist though.

>Is there some problem with image display?

make sure its RGB and not palette. vndsX has support for that, but I find it easier to just tell you to convert it yourself, gimp does it quite easily.

> If the novel's title is too long, the text will overlap the thumbnail and be displayed as garbled mess.

shorten it

> And dunno if it's the sound file being a bit too large, but I set it to play infinitely, and yet it ends after one playthrough and never resumes. Converted into 4 bit 22050 mono ima adpcm, then turned that into raw imadpcm.

I hate sound programming, go away

>>41

You're right, sound-looping is broken.

Not all JPG and PNG images are supported. Interlaced JPGs don't work, and if you're using the "official" vnds release and not mine, PNG color formats other than 8bits/channel also fail to show up.

There's something called "Nocturnal Illusion Power Pack 1.0" by BaSFTech that can extract resources and decrypt/encrypt the scripts.

I've also written a program to extract the resource-files from MUG0.DAT. Dunno if you already did that, but if you want it I'll post it for you.

The reason I know all this is because I was trying to convert NI myself, but I put it on the back burner because I couldn't figure out the scripts/graphics formats.

>>42

lol, I should refresh the page before I post.

it was rgb all the time, I never tried to use palette on it. I tried it on both regular and vndsx, got similar result.

on vnds, the image appears but it's really dissorted. on vndsX nothing appears.

I need to learn refreshing too apparently.

>> There's something called "Nocturnal Illusion Power Pack 1.0" by BaSFTech that can extract resources and decrypt/encrypt the scripts.

yeah, I have it. gotten+decrypted some of the scripts, but I'd still need something that could mass extract the resources (too many of them) and ideally convert the images into some normal format. .g files aren't really something I can open.

>> I've also written a program to extract the resource-files from MUG0.DAT. Dunno if you already did that, but if you want it I'll post it for you.

sure thing. if it can extract everything at once it'd be great.

>>45
thats...really odd

>>46

extractor + source + extracted files:
http://www.mediafire.com/?mmeug5mm1im

Doesn't "decrypt" the script files though.

>>48
thanks. those will surely help.

I guess you don't know of a way to open the graphics though, so it's time to go back to cleaning screenshots.

so, while working on that port of Nocturnal Illusion (4 out of 600+ scripts converted, yay) I noticed there's some bug in saving.

I tried saving after multiple choices, and upon reloading it didn't load either the graphics or music. could it have something to do with the game's annoying tendency to show you a choice box every 5 minutes and jumping from script to script like mad?

also it seems when there are like 8-10 choices it bugs out and crashes. kinda annoying seeing as the move command requires around 11-12 choices to be able to reach all places on floor 2. I can work around it by dividing it into two pages and having like 7 choices on each page, but still kinda annoying bug.

also this one's random, but sometimes on loading instead of the mp3 you can hear something like a square wave, then one second later it turns into static and the engine crashes.

>>50

>I tried saving after multiple choices, and upon reloading it didn't load either the graphics or music. could it have something to do with the game's annoying tendency to show you a choice box every 5 minutes and jumping from script to script like mad?

Jumping from script to script shouldn't be a problem. I don't know what causes your problems though. I've never had anything like that happening.

>also it seems when there are like 8-10 choices it bugs out and crashes. kinda annoying seeing as the move command requires around 11-12 choices to be able to reach all places on floor 2. I can work around it by dividing it into two pages and having like 7 choices on each page, but still kinda annoying bug.

There's a maximum of 10 options/choice. More wouldn't be able to fit on the screen without scrolling. I'm afraid you'll have to split them up.

I once had 10 options, but after 8 they stopped appearing correctly (just numbers without text) and the engine crashed a second later or so.

Skipping seems to cause some weird glitches btw. The stop music/sound effects doesn't work right (music goes into 1 second long loops), it also ignores @ symbols and leaves them by the text line.

Been wondering, would it be somehow possible to use some sort of string variables within a choose? I'll need those for the move command, since the hero initially doesn't know what any of the rooms is until he visits it, which triggers the name change for each location.

If I were to use multiple ifs to change the entire choose at once, it'd make the move script become humongous, since I'd need to make stuff like
if room1vis==1
if room2vis==1

if room3vis==0 

etc
for any possible configuration, for all 3 maps.

weeaboo.nl

>>54
v1.3.1 should have string variable support.

once I get string conditionals working.
stuff like text words $variable words already works fine, and having it in choice/jump shouldn`t be much harder.

the savefile converter in the newest release doesn't seem to want to convert global.sav (for narcissu in this case), and if there's even one unconverted savefile vnds crashes, which should be probably fixed too.

also perhaps it should store what kind of music/sound effect is playing and what pictures are displayed during the save. as it is now, if i save after a choice and the music still plays, it won't after a reload and after several choices in quick succession it forgets what image was being displayed too.

>the savefile converter in the newest release doesn't seem to want to convert global.sav (for narcissu in this case), and if there's even one unconverted savefile vnds crashes, which should be probably fixed too.

I noticed this, use the web converter.

>also perhaps it should store what kind of music/sound effect is playing and what pictures are displayed during the save. as it is now, if i save after a choice and the music still plays, it won't after a reload and after several choices in quick succession it forgets what image was being displayed too.

this is actually a good idea, it would make restoring the save state easier code-wise as well.

I`ll work on it.

The web converter works fine with the actual saves but when trying narcissu's global.sav it just gives me a browser window as white as my sister's bedsheet.

>>60
theres not much in the global.sav for narcissu, just skip through the parts you read with R+Y

>>60

The new novel manager also converts save files for you (all of them at once + global.sav):

http://www.weeaboo.nl/article/fate/NovelManager-1.1.jar

Hi! I've downloaded v137 and the leatest versions of Tsukihime, OMGWTFOTL and Anon's Nice Day, but I see a little problem. When there should be a full screen of newlines it only gives me enough for a half screen.(Approx 6-7 lines less.) It's not that big problem, but sometimes it's annoying. Is it because my machine is a Phat or it's this way with everyone? Is there any solution?

screen full of newlines?

you see, in Unix based OSes like Linux, there is no command for clearing the screen so they use as many newlines(a single character representing a new line) as many rows there are, thus pushng up the previwous text out of the display creating the illusion of clearing the screen. And because NDS programs use the standard C++ they use the same method for text entry and clearing.

vnds 1.4.2 has this bug:
after you choose to play a game and exit it then click on "About" you'll get an Guru Meditation Error!

what should i set debuglevel to to remove all of the messages in the vein of "can't find sound file:XYZ"

>>67
1.4.0 shows "file not found" stuff on the warning level
1.4.1 shows "file not found" between verbose and warning
Updating your vnds to the newest version should hide "file not found" warnings by default.

serio,
I'm current working on NI port, but I'm stuck with the graphics format.
One thing I noticed is, the scenes are 640x400, which, for 8BPP image even, means 250KB whereas the largest image is ~50KB. I think they're compressed, maybe huffman, or LZ77, not sure.

So can you tell me how exactly did you got that image with VNDS?

I'm now certain that .g files are compressed. The first 2 bytes of the file is the width of the image, and latter 2 bytes are height. Most files start with 02 80 01 90 hex sequence, which is 640 400 in decimal. And yet they have different file sizes.

DS has huffman, rle, lzss, yet the headers of .G files just don't match with .G files ---how on earth did VNDS displayed it, I want to know!

As for the "encrypted" scripts, all you need to do is to subtract 1 from each character in the input script. All characters are discplaced by 1, making "YOU" -> "ZPV"

I think he mentioned in post >>49 that he is extracting the graphics by taking screenshots.

>As for the "encrypted" scripts

lol

I can see that.

I'm talking about what he actually did to get the glitchy picture in >>45

Correction to the "encryption" BTW: You should subtract 1 from the first byte, then add to the second byte, then subtract from third, and so on, alternating the sign.

Please keep trying, for the sake of Nocturnal Illusion. This game left an extremely heavy impression on me when I played it as a kid. I loved it even more than I loved True Love. More people deserve to witness such quality.

I second >>75. Don't know why, but NI left a mark. I even learned to play the main theme on a piano.

People have even written novels based on it, and not just the Japanese:

http://www.amazon.com/Nocturnal-Illusion-Jack-Bushell/dp/1591134862/

>>77

Damn, too bad it's out of stock everywhere.

Maybe the PDFs are still for sale... I just sent a mail to the author. Yes, I'm actually going to pay money for a fanfic. That's how much I liked NI.

Didn't he even plan to make it a trilogy? I wonder what made him stop...

Maybe you should check this site:
http://www.angelfire.com/alt2/nocturnal0/

"In 2006 the Nocturnal Illusion trilogy was finished and I have to say that even then I wasn't satisfied that the story was complete. I just didn't feel as if I was doing justice to those whose lives were involved and so I undertook the enormous task of beginning all over again. Early in 2008 the final drafting of Nocturnal Illusion was at last entirely completed. I finally feel that the story has ended. And that is the problem. Isn't it? After months of debating I have decided not to publish this novel."

This only increased my current confusion. How many versions and volumes exist? Which were actually printed and which are still available for digital purchase?

This is as good as place as any to put this.
You forgot to update the download link to OMGWTFOTL-sound.

Did you know that there was a 2CD re-make of this game, released in 1998, only in Japan?

http://www.otakuism.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5901&sid=391d963e220180ebb1bf90a7a3b51963

My understanding is that the only part published in paper was an early draft in 2004, then came the 2006 trilogy in PDF, which was rewritten in 2008, and that's the version available today.

>>84
Oh wow, I wonder if I am the only one preferring the DOS-graphics. Does anyone know whether they are identical with the original PC98-ones?

Nope. See the link above

To me, it looks like they just took the DOS graphics and enlarged them applying some smoothing filter.

>>88
To me they also look like they enhanced the color depth, but the 'smoothing' you describe seems to be the major point. I personally dislike modern smoothness. In anime, the grade of shadow detail is known as a primary indicator of artistic quality. But due to tradition or something, even current computer-aided anime productions still use a fixed set of two or three or four colors to create 'shadow grades' instead of applying the ultra-smooth computerized brightness progression we see in current day eroge. Old PC-98 (the high-res ones) or DOS games tend to have a more grainy kind of shadowing (probably due to the low number of available colors), one that naturally enhances the contrast between the various stages from highlight to darkness and therefore looks very similiar to the techniques used in anime.

In my eyes this makes the image look more plastic than all these new automatic shadowing-techniques in eroge-CGs that create more life-like shadow distribution with extremely smooth transitions from bright to dark.

But this has to be just my sense of aesthetics, since actually the new methods ought to be superior.

>>I'm talking about what he actually did to get the glitchy picture in >>45

i don't remember, but i think it was way back when there were no alpha channels supported or maybe the whole png optimizer did it.

>>Oh wow, I wonder if I am the only one preferring the DOS-graphics. Does anyone know whether they are identical with the original PC98-ones?

identical. they just retraced/vectored the originals.

if it was possible to get this game, i think using its graphics would be a better idea. i mean, the dos ones need to be resized, and in the process they get pretty blurry and very blocky since they need to be resized to 63%, which makes the gradient shading look awful.

the new game on the other hand has upgraded shading, so even after it's resized to ds's scale there won't be any real broken pixels.

I would rather assume that originals are the ones used in 98 version. Those graphics were reduced/simplified for the 256 color English game.

Wouldnt it be better to create a backend to read the assembled scripts directly, rather than rewriting the entire game? The game already ships with very simple flag driven logic that can easily be emulated by such an backend.

If the backend was nicely crafted it could also be extended to support other classics which works pretty much the same way. This easily goes for MayClub, Season of the Sakura, Runaway City and Three sisters.

well, i got the remade game with voices and all in case anyone still cares and would want to give it a try to reverse engineer it to get the graphics from it or something.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=8ee0d19615d42e5cab1eab3e9fa335cab159863a049ada17

the 7 part archive with moonspeak filenames has 2 iso files for it.

>>94
I guess I'm late with this... Anyway...
With Grapholic you can dig in the renewal's files, and extract them. ( working download with plugins: http://www.densetsu.com/download.php?show=grapholic )

The files on the two iso and what they contain:
BGW: contains the background music.
GRP: contains the graphic files. (background, event pictures, etc.) Also it seems there are some new (minor) CG event pictures in the renewal version.
OTHERS: contains three cursor, but it seems pointless, as those cursors are also stored elsewhere.
SE: Sound effects. Duh...
SNR: I guess these are the script files.
V1 and V2: Voice files. (Note: in all case just drag&drop the wav files instead of trying to make the program extract it for you.) The V1 and V2 files on the first disk ISO are dummy files, so don't bother extracting them.

I hope I helped with this.

penis

I see you guys are discussing Nocturnal Illusion. Well, I've begun porting it to VNDS (just begun, really), and got curious if any of you has already got far into the process or wanna help me...

I don't think anyone actually went anywhere with it (most of the stuff that actually went anywhere are already posted up as links...though I dunno if they are still working links)

Well.... I've actually just ported the storm part today (the first 5 minutes of gameplay)... Kinda learn while doing it, but I'll try and make at least half of the game till august...

Man... been a long time since I've played this one. It would be cool to play on the DS after all this time.

This is just to let you guys know how it's going...
I had some problems this week with the script, but now I've managed to get on with extracting it and the images...

Great work so far!
Now that we have captchas I'm going too lurk here more often again. Nice to see people are still working. Maybe I'll buy an DSiLL just for the awesomeness of VNDS! But then again my card probably wouldn't support it.

>>96

>Also it seems there are some new (minor) CG event pictures in the renewal version.

Hopefully these new pictures don't mean that there are new, untranslated events. I'd like to see them in the VNDS port.

>>100

>I'll try and make at least half of the game till august...

Is this guess still appropriate? Please post if you encounter any problems, I'm sure someone will help. Thanks again for picking up this classic!

I added it to the VNDS wiki. What percentage would you guess for current progress?

>>106
Regarding the new CG event pictures: from what I seen (by going trough the extracted stuff from the renewal), these are not for any new events but for the existing ones. Like during the eating with Maya, or the drinking with Kusayama.

(Also... I read (...'played'...) NI a long time ago, so I don't remember Kusayama having an ending (escaping from the mansion with him) - because in that case there's a few (not so important) new thing in renewal)

lol at escaping the mansion with Kusayama. Sounds more like a small joke for the fans, I don't think you need to incorporate or translate that if it doesn't turn up after extracting the scripts from the English release (I don't remember him having an ending or any positive flag-like events besides the drinking scene, either).