WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

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muggy8
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#76 Post by muggy8 »

Hay man you are totally my hero and i love you so much (no homo). I've been working on a VN engine for my VN (which I want to be web based) for like a long time but it never was as polished as yours. I'm currently rewriting my VN in your engine. Hopefully it turns out similar to how it originally is or maybe even better. probably much better than what i originally thought it would look like.

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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#77 Post by CheeryMoya »

C7N wrote:(Thanks to CheeryMoya for the idea!)
Ah, sorry for disappearing over there :C I'll be coming back to my WebStory game after NaNo ends! And sorry for being such an idiot at XML I keep telling myself to look at a tutorial but ehhhhh

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planktheory
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#78 Post by planktheory »

C7N,

You're an incredible human being! Thanks for your continued work on this engine. I've been looking forward to being able to developing more with your engine. Alas, I'm taking 20 credits this semester and my classes feel like I'm working two full-time jobs again.

I had a question about the video asset, and wonder what formats will be supported, then it sparked my curiousity as to whether or not .swf files are something that can be used in the current build.

I really like where you are taking this engine! Keep up the amazing work.

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C7N
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#79 Post by C7N »

@muggy8 & @planktheory:

Thanks!

@planktheory:
Good to know you are still alive and kicking. I wondered whether you had abandoned your VN because you haven't posted on your blog for some time.

As for your question: Currently there is no video asset. It is planned for the next release. It will not support SWF. SWF stands for Shockwave Flash, so it's something that requires the Flash plugin and therefore does not work on mobile devices. That's why I don't have any plans to support it. But if what you want to show really is only video then you can convert SWF files to other video formats and use these instead. The HTML5 video formats are H.264 and WebM. The cool guys (Firefox, Chrome) use the free and open WebM and Theora codecs and the *insert long list of not-so-nice words here* guys (Apple, Microsoft) only support H.264, which is a patented format, where the patent is held by a group consisting of - surprise surprise - Apple and Microsoft. So you basically have to supply both WebM and H.264 versions because - like in the case of audio - Apple and MS try forcing their proprietary shit down your throat. (Sorry for the strong words...)


@CheeryMoya:

No problem. I don't really know what kind of tutorials about XML you might mean. There is not much to know about it.
WebStory Engine - Visual Novel Engine For The Web:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =4&t=16722

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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#80 Post by planktheory »

I definitely will be updating my blog soon and to start pushing forward with new skills at hand.

I only ask because I've been working in flash for one of my classes and the ability to swap out instances in a movie clip would make things handy by having one .swf file that contains all the various clothing/expressions/animations would reduce the number of assets required to load. Also, if it were vector based, would reduce the size and scaling would be a non-issue. But you're right, and since it is a proprietary system that it doesn't work in the spirit of all things opensource.

I'll have to take a peek to see what WebM entails and which of my animation software exports with it. Not that I should be planning so far ahead of myself to be thinking of animating... Have to remember to take out smaller bites.

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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#81 Post by sheetcakeghost »

You just earned yourself another tester, and one that is especially deficient when it comes to coding. If there are bugs to be found, trust me, I will stumble over them.

I have been wanting to make web based VNs for quite some time now. It's a market just full of crummy flash porn and facebook style "energy" games. So long as those things make money we're gonna have to rely on indie developers to unsaturate the medium.

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C7N
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#82 Post by C7N »

@Serenity Frost:
By reading your post I realized that I just declined your request to join the forums... in the rules thread I said that you should write something meaningful in the box so I can see you are not a bot. Please try again.
WebStory Engine - Visual Novel Engine For The Web:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =4&t=16722

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sheetcakeghost
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#83 Post by sheetcakeghost »

Did you? I haven't gone back to check yet. I'll get on that. Sorry I sounded like a bot. d:

EDIT: Oh, it's telling me I'm already registered. I bet it's because I signed on with my googleID.

EDIT2: Since it was telling me that my username was in use (by me) I went ahead and registered a version with an underscore. Hopefully this should all be nice and sufficient.

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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#84 Post by Sabotage »

I'm glad for this engine. Although.. I can't seem to download it through the site :( I wonder what's wrong?

Also, sorry for the noob question, but are people required to download files if they want to read the VN? Being a browser-based game, I thought it would eliminate the need to download stuff and access the visuals on browser (a read-through of the past posts inform me that users would still need to download assets..). Is that correct? I just need to clarify that hehe. If that's the case, is there a way to eliminate this step (like hosting the assets somewhere online; like Dropbox, as someone mentioned)? Again, this is just for clarification. I just want to know if I understood correctly. Please do inform me if I'm wrong. I have no background on programming or web developing.

But anyway, this really does sound promising! I hope I get to try it out soon.

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C7N
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#85 Post by C7N »

Hi Sabotage!

Did you use this link to download? http://webstoryengine.org/_media/websto ... ne-0.3.zip
Works for me...

No, no one is required to download anything on their own to play the games. What the users meant was that data is still being transfered to your computer, but it happens automatically in the background like on other websites.
WebStory Engine - Visual Novel Engine For The Web:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =4&t=16722

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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#86 Post by Sabotage »

Yeah, I got the download to work now, thanks! Although I'm having a hard time getting the program to start to be honest. I went by the WSE forum to check on the steps and the troubleshooting.. But getting Python to start on itself is proving to be quite a challenge haha!

Thanks for answering my question, though. It makes me want to learn WSE more.. If I could just get it to work hahaha.

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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#87 Post by netravelr »

Hey! I really like the idea of using XML to do VN creation and you do have a cool system working. I'm thinking of writing a dialogue converter (just the dialogue, not image declarations) for RenPy to WebStory, as long as I can get the game to work mechanically the same way as it does here, which will require me to use variables and conditionals, which I see the pages for but no examples whatsoever. Do you think it'd be possible to show me an example of an if statement within WebStory? Is it possible to use a scale9grid image for the GUI?

Sorry for the block of text, but this is really awesome. Cheers!
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#88 Post by leon »

I started converting a Ren'Py game, so instead of rewriting everything because oh so I'm lazy I made this simple converter.

To use it create an empty game.xml in the game directory and copy this file to it, then start the game. Note that it is very basic and will only convert the most basic lines in the script (variables, comments etc. will need to be fixed by hand).
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webstory.rpy
(1015 Bytes) Downloaded 175 times

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C7N
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#89 Post by C7N »

@netravelr:

There's no if statement. There's only a condition you can set on commands directly:

Code: Select all

<break ifvar="should_it_break" ifvalue="true" />
or

Code: Select all

<break ifvar="user_name" ifnot="C7N" />
I thought about introducing a "real" if using JavaScript code for the conditions, but it would make converting from Ren'Py much more difficult, I guess.

scale9grid? Never even heard of that, so: no, not possible, I guess.

@leon:

Nice, gonna try that soon!
WebStory Engine - Visual Novel Engine For The Web:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =4&t=16722

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C7N
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Re: WebStory Engine - A Visual Novel Engine for the Web

#90 Post by C7N »

I released version 0.3.1 today, which is a maintenance release. It fixes a bug in the savegame system:

Savegames made with 0.3.0 should still work with 0.3.1 so updating should be hassle-free for your users.

Download: http://webstoryengine.org/downloads
Changelog: http://webstoryengine.org/changelog
WebStory Engine - Visual Novel Engine For The Web:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =4&t=16722

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