Lemma Soft Forums

Hi,

okay, I'm not an expert on different data formats, but I had this workshop about Adobe CS6 last week and there was something very interesting in it, and I just want to throw it into the room. I don't know, if this will be even possible, but okay, let me explain.

The Workshop was about tabelt and app publishing with InDesign. As you may know, InDesign 6 has some new features especially made for ebooks. The thing is, there are different formats. Apple has it's own format, amazon as well. And the there is a third one: epub.
At the moment the general format for ebooks is called epub 2.0. It contains Pictures, graphics and text. But since last year, 2011, there was another format introduced. It is called epub 3.0. And Adobe supports this format. The special thing about epub 3.0 is able to display pictures, graphics and text, and in addition: An ebook in the epub 3.0 format is able to play videos, music, animations, to register interactive stuff you do with it and so on.

Atm there is no hardware that is able to read the format. But the guy leading the workshop ensured that this will change soon. He translated an epub 3.0 ebook for this years Book Fair in Frankfurt.

The thing is, with this format, an ebook is basically like a visual novel. Or at least very similar. Sound, Video, pictures, text, interactive stuff... and it would be great to play VNs on a tablet.

So my thought was, it would be great, if there was a way to publish the VN's of Ren'Py as epub 3.0 format. So a future tablet / ebook could read it. And I think VNs are just made for sth like a tablet pc or an ebook reader.

It's just an idea, but is there a way to do this, instead of making a windows, mac whatsoever version of your VN, you could make an epub out of it. By the way, the guy also told me, that everyone is allowed to use the epub 3.0 format. There is no licence or sth like that on it.

I hope you get what I mean with this. Vv'

(also this could make the playing VNs on smart phones a lot easier)

SiriWesen wrote:It's just an idea, but is there a way to do this, instead of making a windows, mac whatsoever version of your VN, you could make an epub out of it. By the way, the guy also told me, that everyone is allowed to use the epub 3.0 format. There is no licence or sth like that on it.

I think what you're saying is include epub 3 as another distribution format. If that's the case, then it may be possible, but it may have to wait a little while as I don't think anyone here is familiar enough with how it works to be able to modify ren'py to encode for the system.

If you meant replace win/mac/linux distributions with epub and just have that for evyerthing, I have nothing more to say to you than not everyone has a smart phone, and many many still use laptops and desktops. If this sounds presumptuous and even offensive, then perhaps you should look over your wording one more time:

SiriWesen wrote:...instead of making a windows, mac whatsoever version...

It's that first word. It's good you're suggesting Ren'Py support what could be a major new format, but really. "instead of" could be construed totally incorrectly. "As well as" would go down a lot better with people and not have incited this kind of reply from me.
Sorry if this offends, but I had to get it off my chest.

I'm almost certain Ren'Py wouldn't be able to do this in it's current state, I'd assume it'd take an entire re-write of the engine, since most of Ren'Pys functions would probably be lost when porting over to epub.
Then again, I know nothing about Ren'Pys development, so I could be wrong, that's just how I see it!

DANCUBE is right.

There might be a market for epub VNs, but I don't think that's something Ren'Py will pursue. Also - apart from being able to be sold as "books" in places like the kindle store, it isn't clear what epub VNs will give you that HTML VNs will not.