Non-english visual novel engines?

[Sin]

I feel like I have a fairly good grasp on the english visual novel engines. That's quite easy since there aren't that many of them: Ren'py and Novelty. (Blade engine doesn't count because I think it's rubbish ).

But I know virtually nothing about what kind of engines the vn factories of the east are using.
Am I right to assume they're all script based or are there any Novelty equivalents?

I'd love it if someone could point me to popular non-english engines or information about them. (Or english ones too if you feel they deserve to be on the list).

[number473]

Well, Ren'Py isn't limited to English. Seehttp://renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/referen ... ing_Ren'Py.

Not sure if that's what you were looking for.

[sake-bento]

I know that KiriKiri is a fairly popular tool in Japanese circles. There's also NScripter, but that's pretty much fallen into disuse since it's not really supported or maintained anymore.

[PyTom]

Well, there are two popular open-source VN engines:

ONscripter - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONScripter
KiriKiri/KAG - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiriKiri

Both of these use text-based script languages.

From what I've seen back when I lurked on the translation forums, most of the commercial engines use a textual format, while some other engines seemed to use a bytecode based format.

This bytecode could have been generated by a graphical tool, but (with a few exceptions, like the floating frame director), I'd tend to doubt that. Text has a lot of compelling advantages when it comes to large-scale development.

Hm... IIRC, Enterbrain made a tool called Ren'Ai Maker a while back (2004ish?). It actually resembled Novelty quite a bit, insofar as it allowed one to pick from a library of images, lay them out using a GUI, and then insert text. (It was a lot less polished than any released Novelty I've seen.) I can't recall any major games written using this tool, but I'm not really an expert in this sort of thing.

[delta]

Apart from ONS (which is old, annoying and creaky, and only used by geriatric devs that wish these kids would keep off their lawn 7th Expansion) and KiriKiri2 (which is pretty similar to Ren'Py except that it's a DirectX application and its framework language is TJS, which is syntactically almost identical to JavaScript), most studios use proprietary inhouse engines. I have some experience with NSS, Nitro+' engine, and it's a script-based language that is rather similar to ONS' syntax, and RealLive, which Key uses. It's a bytecode format, but can be decompiled to a script-like format. Ethornell/Buriko is similar to that IIRC. And a couple of doujin studios just use Flash.

[Sin]

@number473: Well so is Novelty. I am just curious of other engines that I may not yet have come across.

@PyTom: I found some screenshots of Ren'ai maker and you're right, it does seem conceptually like Novelty, but constricted within an ugly framework of dialog boxes. I agree with you about the benefits of text, which is one of the reasons why Novelty is so heavily reliant on XML. That should make Novelty projects SVN/merge/diff-able.

I was expecting there to be more visual tools. Does any of these script-based engines at least come with an IDE?

[delta]

Powerpoint has an IDE.

Yeah, laugh all you want. Powerpoint has everything you need to make a VN.

[Showsni]

When I was at secondary school there was quite a craze for making cartoons in Powerpoint... You know, frame by frame, like stop motion. I guess there asn't that much you were technically allowed to do on the computers; it was that or play Gorillaz in qbasic and claim you were programming. Well, until someone got the Pokémon Blue ROM and a gameboy emulator onto the shared hard drive somehow...