Hey first of all thank you so much for providing this great place for everyone, and helping the VN community.
The two of you are totally right of course, any streaming, server hosted service has the issue of control for the readers. Well first just let me say that what I was saying was referring to my expected audience here of VN creators, and you're totally right just speaking from a reader's perspective, but from a publisher's perspective it's a totally different issue. I'll get to this in my reply to Jake.
As far as talking about cloud hosting in general, there are now thousands of companies who is advocating the principle and many large markets have sprung up behind this idea.
There's the Appstore, Google Marketplace, the Amazon Kindlestore, everything on Facebook, everything on any MMO, Xbox Live, Youtube, Hulu, etc.
I'm confident that consumers will recognize this as the path of the future.
@Jake
I don't see how you can say something like this without realizing that this is unfair:
You're using the most sunshine scenario for one side and the most catastrophic scenario for the other side. This is not a remotely okay assessment.The difference is that if BMT Micro goes under and I need to find a new payment processor and product host service, then I can do that quickly, upload the exact same product and quite plausibly be selling to customers again within a day; I could even stick a PayPal button up on my site to cover the interim. If NovelStream goes under I need to port my VN to a new engine before I can sell it again; it's quite a big difference in time and effort (and thus, ultimately, money).
If I'm really unlucky and something like that happens right when interest in my product is taking off, then this difference between less-than-a-day and probably-more-like-a-week-or-two could make all the difference to my profits.
If your hard drive fails and you didn't store up to date backups you could potentially lose customer credentials and you might not be able to put up another website rapidly. If you screw up your security you can potentially leak customer information, if your payment processor finds out you're selling adult works then they can ban you and take your hundreds of your money. Like-wise, you can be losing thousands of dollars over months if your website design is not up to the standard of your VN. You might get too much traffic for your host to handle, or your host could go out of business and would you really be able to switch hosts that rapidly? If you talk about those risks, then it can be a balanced comparison.
If you want to make an equal weight analogy to what you said, you can say that NovelStream can mess up their payments and take less than a day to fix it.
You're treating this part so casually, like it's a cake walk. Naturally if you treat this as an after thought you'll get that result from your sales as well.Sure, I have to get the product into the customer's hands myself by some other means
See with NovelStream you won't need weeks or months of man hours to test, . You can get a great output extremely quickly. But jokes aside, 1. you can always convert, and 2. if something happens to us we'll give away all our code (actually I suspect I should have said this a lot earlier). I actually think this is standard practice for a lot of web 2.0 companies now.Ren'Py engine into which I have invested weeks or months of man-hours writing scripts and testing for - isn't going to pack up and leave me one day.
On Rollback:
okay,
Right, there's nothing more written.(As it goes, is that VN supposed to end very abruptly when Anthy turns to look at the protagonist? Because it didn't seem like an end, but I couldn't get past that point...)
Right, there's definitely a trade off. But if I have 10 pages of script it makes a definite difference to me whether I have to fill it in with ;s or with ;scene. I guess you just have to make an assumption about who's experience will be more common.People remember words a lot more easily, in my experience.
I'm also a programmer, and I adore strings, but when you're writing a story it makes more sense to treat the text as main and code as 'other'.(Whether it's preferrable to quotes is a matter of preference; again, from a programming background, I personally far prefer quotes around my VN script dialogue. I also write.)
As for character choice, we immediately dismissed all characters that need 'shift'. Also, people frequently use / to mean and/or, and can cause other conflicts. Having ; at the beginning of the clause is actually not allowed in English, though I can't say for sure for other languages, and it's also the most easily accessible using standard typing on the keyboard, so that's why.
Also thanks for your advice on abuse and everything else, and just thank you in general for your feedback.
Hey Strum,
Yes we have the voice files, what we don't have is the script that references the voices. If you know how to reverse engineer those files, I would be extremely grateful.
On the Utena thing, oh sorry, it's this one: http://visualnoveldai.com/visualnovels/ ... wild-night
On options: Yes we'll be adding more options. Though as the case may be probably not all of those you listed will be present at initial release though.