NovelStream: Revolutionary visual novel platform

[Deji]

I think it'd be fair to add another VN engine to the comparison chart, like Novelty, for example. (Bringing Novelty up just because I'm eagerly waiting for a non-beta release to toy with its WYSIWYG editor *-*)

I agree the table is kind of long and tl;dr, so I think It'd be good to have the most prominent "top features" on a smaller chart that and have a link to a more in depth comparison at the end of said table.

I think the idea of streaming is interesting. The integration with social networks, I personally don't like it (I'm completely allergic to Facebook), but I guess it'd be nice for the kind of people that has fb open all day and plays Farmville like crazy.

Good luck! I'm eager to see what you can do with it C:

[Spiky Caterpillar]

*holds up titlecard* Welcome to the clusterfuck!

It doesn't appear to work on Konqueror 4.4.4 (no Flash) and Iceweasel/Firefox 3.5.10 (GNU Flash player) - http://visualnoveldai.com/visualnovels/crescendo , http://visualnoveldai.com/node/add/visualnovel , and http://visualnoveldai.com/visualnovels/kotomine all give error messages instructing me to update Flash. Both browsers are stock versions from Debian's testing distribution (which tends to be more up-to-date than stable and less insanely crashy than unstable.) And it's my understanding that non-jailbroken iPad/iPhone devices do not support Flash at all. http://visualnoveldai.com/novelstream is a completely innavigable mess in Konqueror 4.4.4.

While I see nothing wrong with ragging on Zynga per se, I'll note that if you say 'Farmville sucks, our engine makes better games', people will want to use it to make BETTER FARMVILLES. If your engine can't do Farmville-like games, pointing out how much Zynga supposedly (AFAIK their accounting isn't public, and they've got a dodgy enough reputation that I wouldn't believe any public statements they made without independant confirmation ANYHOW) makes off Farmville is irrelevant.

How much of the game logic is in the server? At a minimum, anyone who plays the game to complete-unlock-everything status will wind up downloading a full copy of all clientside resources in the process, so unless the serverside logic contains things both critical to gameplay and difficult to replicate/deduce, the warezd00dz aren't likely to find it much harder to repackage than they do standalone games.

Ren'Py's had length count in the lint function for ages.

Font use in Ren'Py is better than in any web platform I've ever seen. To use a font in a game, I need a license to redistribute, and Ren'Py needs to be able to draw it. To use a font on a website, I need one of: a license to redistribute, the font to be preinstalled on the user's machine, or to turn all my text into images before transmission.

You're relying on licensed codecs for media distribution; do your licenses require that the initial media be produced using an approved encoder, or do you have the requisite encoder licenses to convert them yourself?

What's your intended revenue source? Direct sales? Some form of token/points system? Something else? How do the microtransactions work? How soon are you ready to take payments? What security measures are in place to protect against inadvertant purchases (say, triggered by a web accelerator or on-hover preview plugin following the 'buy' link?).

I'm pleased to see that there aren't any ads on the site. Are there any plans to add them on the future?

Who sets prices? The developer? NovelStream? I'm presuming that it'll be something along the lines of 'developer and NovelStream agree on retail price before release, any change requires both parties to consent'. How are discounts handled? Are there non-cash ways to get gameplay tokens (other than the viral thing?) Can developers turn off viral marketing features? (Not that I know yet if I'd want to, but if the viral system was causing spam or had an exploitable hole, I'd want to disable it.)

[Charuru]

Everyone thanks for your comments.
@papillon
You know, I don't know what I was thinking putting that guy's quote there. I just thought it sounded good. You're totally right of course, I don't know how the feature situation is, and I replaced it.

But anyway, you're mistaken on the purpose of that page, it's not the landing page or the sales page. It's the full features list. This is what you're supposed to compare your wish list to, and ask, does NovelStream do this or this or this? I think renpy does a lot of things fabulously, and I accentuated our differences. I wrote the list with the things that are important to me in mind. If there are features that are missing you can add it. It's a wiki.

You mentioned text speed, that's implemented but I turned it off at the moment because mobile safari hates it. I will reenable it soon with more graduated browser compatibility.

NovelStream doesn't have readback, but I'm working on it, should be in the next release. Rollback is not on the roadmap at the moment. We have options to restore state and alter old data. Please let me know the usecases for rollback and we can add that in.

How confident are you on the legal ramifications

regarding incest, hentai, etc.
This is designed from the beginning to have an excellent censorship mechanism. We'll be unveiling that shortly. We won't accept any illegal material.


@jack_norton We'll see how the automatic purchases work out in the real world. We don't know yet, but it's worth the experiment.

About IE, we'll ask people to install the Chrome Frame plugin. (It's a plugin that makes IE good.) It's a really simple plugin that everyone can install, I don't think there's any problem there.

And thank you for your kind words.

You also mentioned the point about customization. NovelStream allows a great deal of customization. What are you looking for that's not available?

@dstarsboy
You can easily make customized GUIs. The only thing that's constant is the bottom black menu. It's on the roadmap for the next few months to make that customizable as well.

Did you see this one:
http://visualnoveldai.com/visualnovels/ ... wild-night

I also think that VNs were unpopular because there's no major publisher support, because it's too hard to get access, ie you have to download, and secluded in various anime communities. We'll change this.

That's why we're so focused on the social aspect. About platform compatibility. I don't think the challenge is technical or in the minutiae of engine features, but in marketing, awareness, getting respect, etc. And I think that's our biggest selling point.

[papillon]

I don't actually expect you to implement rollback; rollback is HARD. I certainly didn't bother doing it in my own engine...

If you have readback at launch that'll probably be enough for baseline purposes. However, rollback is one of those key fancy RenPy features, so when comparisons are made it's likely to come up.

[PyTom]

I just want to add that making an engine, then going to the forum of a direct competitor engine to list a comparison table to promote yours and bash the others (despite if is effectively better), is in general not considered a good/smart move

Honestly, I think that it's perfectly fine to come here and post this. (In fact, if we start seeing games made with other engines, I'll open an "Other Engines" section.)

[Lessis]

Overall, not bad, very easy to use and jump right in to (unlike Ren'Py) but infinitely less flexible than Ren'Py. I've seen Ren'Py games of all sorts of GUIs and with hundreds of different embedded concepts (although only about 5% of it's users can make these types of games), most of the games on NovelStream look identical so far.

We're adding features everyday. The engine has already undergone two redesigns since its inception and I'm very proud of how far we've gotten thus far.

Feature comparison:

• Streaming versus download. This is a huge win for Ren'Py. I like being able to read when my internet connection is down. I like being able to make a backup. I like being able to store visual novels from different sources in the same directory. I like being able to show visual novels I played in my youth to my grandchildren, long after all current websites have long died off.
• Social networking features. All I saw was a "respects my privacy" feature for Ren'Py that was missing for NovelStream.
• The editor. I like plain text. I like being able to use my own editor. I like being able to, for example, run the game through my own spell checker. Most of all, I like having the game on my own local file system for revision control.
• The editor also isn't very good. Nested scroll bars, unintuitive interface, and at some point the interface just stopped responding.

1) Our core concept is streaming. However I think streaming as a concept is proven though, I rarely hear people demanding to watch Youtube or Hulu offline for example.
2) We are very good about privacy. You can share as much or as little as you want. If you do not want the social features, you do not have to enable them.
3) Plain text editor is available by clicking the "Script Interface" in the upper right hand corner of the editor. You will be able to store all your files in locally and import easily. In fact that's what I did. I certainly did not copy and paste 500 Crescendo segments.
4) Your criticism is noted and I am personally dedicated to making the editor more and more user-friendly, though dstarsboy said earlier that it was very easy to use. We're constantly improving it. What browser are you using?

Experience of trying to play Narcissu:

• Right-clicking brings up my browser menu.
• There's a menu at the bottom that appears and disappears seemingly at random. (Right-clicking seems to bring up that menu, but also brings up the browser menu. And when I click on the page to remove the browser menu, the story advances.)
• No way to step back when I accidentally advance the story without reading. Such as when clicking to remove the browser menu.
• Full screen mode isn't. I still see the browser border, and the windows task bar below that.

1. Can you say what browser you're using. It does not do this in my browsers. We'll get that fixed for you right away.
2. The menu appears on the cover page, but disappears when going to the first page. Right clicking will bring up the menu again. It should not bring up the browser menu. You can also bring up the menu by hovering near the bottom edge. This mimics the behavior of many Japanese engines.
3. Sorry for this, but that feature is coming!
4. You can get fullscreen mode by pressing F11. Then press the fullscreen button. Browsers do not allow websites to change the fullscreen status of users unfortunately. You would have to manually press F11. Also Charuru forgot to mention that we'll be releasing a reader for all the major platforms as well, and that will get around all browser problems and the like.

There's also as much vendor lock-in as Ren'py has vendor lock-in.

I'd argue it's also fairly easy to pirate NovelStream games. It took me all of a minute to find the script for Crescendo. The script had the full URL to the images inside it. (I can post the URLs if given permission, but I think it's more polite not to.) This is using the Developer Tools built in to my copy of Chrome, without any special programming. In general, DRM is an impossible proposition.

Actually you can see all the images right here:
http://visualnoveldai.com/galleries

The image assets cannot be hidden, and the script must be read somehow. But I'd argue that what you're seeing is only a tiny part of Crescendo and that pirating the entire game is not practical. Also, who's going to read the source? You also need to recreate the engine, which is difficult as well.

[Counter Arts]

First impressions: It feels like comparing Windows Movie Maker to Adobe Premier. It's good for beginners and standard Visual Novels.

I've actually been around a lot of webapp/iPhone based developers because I went to the Velocity mobile/web/digital media Incubator program at the University of Waterloo. (You can even see Fading Hearts on the project page.) I was thinking of the exact same thing that this team is doing about 2 years ago. Especially with all the big speakers talking about web/iphone/facebook apps. (Apple, Google, other web companies on social media)

The reason why I didn't go that path because the barriers of entry are too low if new competitors appears. I was the sole person on the "exec" team and there's no way I could out-muscle anybody else in tech-features. Even with a community of Social Media people I don't think I can use that without a lot of help. This was just me thinking as a business.

Looks like I was right in this. In general... the air that the people who make the two browser based engines brings feels a lot like the same indie people who develop browser based apps in general.

[papillon]

However I think streaming as a concept is proven though, I rarely hear people demanding to watch Youtube or Hulu offline for example.

... you are aware that there are many programs created entirely to rip and download content from streaming sites so that people can watch at their leisure?

I'm not saying that streaming isn't a valid concept, just that "people don't want to watch youtube offline!" is clearly not true. Some people do, some don't. That's not a bad thing; it means that the existence of streaming doesn't destroy downloadables, or vice versa.

[Charuru]

OK, let me continue making responses and adding onto what Lessis said.

First of all PyTom, thank you for your gracious response. I was impressed by how well you treated me when I first came onto this forum 2 years ago posting about this project.

For the delivery concept field, you list "Download from a website." for Ren'Py. That's incorrect - downloading from a website is just one way to distribute a Ren'Py game. With Ren'Py, you can hand someone a cd, or even sell it at comic market.

I changed it to distribute a file vs streaming. I think that's general enough, because you can also hand someone a cd with NovelStream activation, or download an app with NovelStream activation.

Has the chrome web store opened up yet? Or is this prospective?

It's not open AFAIK, but to me this means Google's thinking on the same page.

Several of the features, like "Integrated Database", "Share Doujins", etc are non-Sequiturs. It would be like dinging NovelStream because it can't read email.

I think an integrated database is essential to the visual novel / NovelStream experience. It's because of how well the VN integrates with the database (of VNs) that enables a smooth, friction free reading experience. You don't get that anywhere else.

Share Doujins is along those same lines too, I think it enhances a specific vn's community quite a bit, and helps out with the viral marketing. I think it's enough for the reader to decide whether or not these are valuable features that would enhance their visual novel.

I think it's pretty unfair to claim that Ren'Py is lacking support for "Collaboration". Katawa Shoujo, for example, has a 17 person staff. In fact, I'd claim that Ren'Py's support for collaboration is better, as we can use standard version control tools like Subversion, Bazaar, Git, and Mercurial. While it's true Ren'Py is lacking "Integrated Version Control", it does give people that want it access to these world-class version control systems.

I make this point because as you can see from the editor and various other things, NovelStream is not totally aimed towards programmers. I want to make it easy for say, fanfiction writers to easily communicate, track status, get updates and blogs and pass information without having to learn a difficult set of tools.

You can also use Subversion, Git, etc with NovelStream. You can track changes on your version control server, and use an updating importer to sync a xml file with NovelStream. However I think having the live updating will allow teams to release much faster. In short, the collaboration we offer is really a step beyond.

There I'm just making the point that Ren'py is a good engine that will allow you to make a great visual novel, but it's not a full spectrum platform that helps you do easily.

I also fixed the feature list with your other comments, thanks.

Also Lessis address some of your other points as well, so refer to his post.

Also someone mentioned an FAQ. I'll work on that as well.

@Deji Thanks for your comments.

I think it'd be fair to add another VN engine to the comparison chart, like Novelty, for example. (Bringing Novelty up just because I'm eagerly waiting for a non-beta release to toy with its WYSIWYG editor *-*)

I don't know anything about that Engine, please feel free to edit the wiki though.

I agree the table is kind of long and tl;dr, so I think It'd be good to have the most prominent "top features" on a smaller chart that and have a link to a more in depth comparison at the end of said table.

That's what this page: NovelStream is for.

And thanks for your feedback. How do you think our editor compares to the Novelty Editor?

[sabata2]

In his defense, Youtube sites preload the videos to your temp directory. I'm not sure about Hulu but I've never heard of a Hulu ripper.

If you're computer savvy enough you can take just about anything from the net. But like our engine, his probably won't lose much even if someone that skilled came to take from him.

I'd cut the guy some slack.

[papillon]

In his defense, Youtube sites preload the videos to your temp directory. I'm not sure about Hulu but I've never heard of a Hulu ripper.

If you're computer savvy enough you can take just about anything from the net. But like our engine, his probably won't lose much even if someone that skilled came to take from him.

I'd cut the guy some slack.

The youtube/hulu thing had nothing at all to do with piracy, it was about people wanting to complete a download and play a game/video offline rather than deal with potential net hiccups streaming (as well as the potential for the online content to go away at some later time). I fail to see how saying "some people like streaming content, some people want to download" requires cutting someone slack?

And typing hulu downloader into google quickly shows that they do exist.

[Counter Arts]

In general I think VNs have a longer shelf-life when compared to a lot of video games in general. Now having that platform as something you can release a demo on is something that would be very interesting.

[PyTom]

There's also as much vendor lock-in as Ren'py has vendor lock-in.

This is incorrect in two ways.

The first is that Ren'Py is an open system, which means that anyone who wants to can choose to change it. What's more, if I was to vanish without a trace, every Ren'Py game would remain playable. Everyone with a copy of Ren'Py would still have that copy of Ren'Py, and could give that copy to someone else. There's no requirement that a central team support every game.

The second is that NovelStream locks people in to several choices that may not be optimal. In the open world, people are free to choose how their game is hosted, how to sell it, how to advertise it, and so on. NovelStream makes these decisions for a game developer.

But I'd argue that what you're seeing is only a tiny part of Crescendo and that pirating the entire game is not practical. Also, who's going to read the source? You also need to recreate the engine, which is difficult as well.

Writing a converter from NovelStream to any other engine would be trivial. Unless there's some sort of complexity to the format I'm not seeing, it's about a weekend's worth of work. (It would get more complicated if more of the logic was moved to the server side - but that isn't currently the case.)

Our intent was certainly not to incite, but to showcase our engine which we are very proud of.

Looking at it, it seems like a reasonable engine. I think that the hosted approach is a fundamentally wrong one, as it makes it too likely a game can be utterly wiped out of existence by a technical or business failure. But the engine itself seems okay, at first glance.

[Charuru]

@Spiky Caterpillar

*holds up titlecard* Welcome to the clusterfuck!

Hey thanks, and thank you for your well thought out response.

It doesn't appear to work on Konqueror 4.4.4 (no Flash) and Iceweasel/Firefox 3.5.10 (GNU Flash player) - http://visualnoveldai.com/visualnovels/crescendo , http://visualnoveldai.com/node/add/visualnovel , and http://visualnoveldai.com/visualnovels/kotomine all give error messages instructing me to update Flash. Both browsers are stock versions from Debian's testing distribution (which tends to be more up-to-date than stable and less insanely crashy than unstable.) And it's my understanding that non-jailbroken iPad/iPhone devices do not support Flash at all. http://visualnoveldai.com/novelstream is a completely innavigable mess in Konqueror 4.4.4.

Sorry about the problems in regards to Flash. I guess you version of flash doesn't validate with what I need. You can try using the Linux version of Chrome (which should, I think, not require Flash), but it will be a while before I can work on Konqueror support.

Mobile uses HTML5 and has no need for Flash. Actually mobile devices will be getting a reader app that can give a more native experience. Coming soon.

While I see nothing wrong with ragging on Zynga per se, I'll note that if you say 'Farmville sucks, our engine makes better games', people will want to use it to make BETTER FARMVILLES. If your engine can't do Farmville-like games, pointing out how much Zynga supposedly (AFAIK their accounting isn't public, and they've got a dodgy enough reputation that I wouldn't believe any public statements they made without independant confirmation ANYHOW) makes off Farmville is irrelevant.

It CAN make Farmville. I think. I'm not a huge fan of that so not completely sure, but I think so. Also the point of interest is Social, and that's what I was really focusing on. Zynga employed great social strategies to promote their stuff, and these are things that Visual Novels should learn from, and which NovelStream is targeting.

How much of the game logic is in the server? At a minimum, anyone who plays the game to complete-unlock-everything status will wind up downloading a full copy of all clientside resources in the process, so unless the serverside logic contains things both critical to gameplay and difficult to replicate/deduce, the warezd00dz aren't likely to find it much harder to repackage than they do standalone games.

There's quite a lot of server side logic. I disagree that it's not much harder, no it is much harder. If you're good enough of a hacker of course nothing's impossible, but it's much harder.

Ren'Py's had length count in the lint function for ages.

OK, well though that's not quite what I mean.

Font use in Ren'Py is better than in any web platform I've ever seen. To use a font in a game, I need a license to redistribute, and Ren'Py needs to be able to draw it. To use a font on a website, I need one of: a license to redistribute, the font to be preinstalled on the user's machine, or to turn all my text into images before transmission.

This is not true. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

You're relying on licensed codecs for media distribution; do your licenses require that the initial media be produced using an approved encoder, or do you have the requisite encoder licenses to convert them yourself?

Yes you should use a legal encoder. ATM we do not handle any encoding. We might in the future.

What's your intended revenue source? Direct sales? Some form of token/points system?

Yep we take 30% of sales.

How do the microtransactions work?

We'll have points that people can buy in chunks in order to purchase micro stuff.

How soon are you ready to take payments?

At the end of summer.

What security measures are in place to protect against inadvertant purchases (say, triggered by a web accelerator or on-hover preview plugin following the 'buy' link?).

A refund. If it turns out that that's a bigger problem than originally thought we'll rethink this.

I'm pleased to see that there aren't any ads on the site. Are there any plans to add them on the future?

Nope.

Who sets prices? The developer? NovelStream? I'm presuming that it'll be something along the lines of 'developer and NovelStream agree on retail price before release, any change requires both parties to consent'. How are discounts handled? Are there non-cash ways to get gameplay tokens (other than the viral thing?) Can developers turn off viral marketing features? (Not that I know yet if I'd want to, but if the viral system was causing spam or had an exploitable hole, I'd want to disable it.)

The developers control all the keys, decide pricing, etc. We intend to be hands-off about this. After we start accepting payments, we'll roll out various programs you can participate in. I believe they'll be opt-in. The developer can decide whether or not to accept things like 'dais' which you get for good posting as coupons for VNs. Microtransactions will of course involve tokens.

For discounts these are all tied to account profile. Readers can earn discounts by doing various things in the community, trading in achievements, and writers can choose to accept them or not. Writers can also give out personal discounts to various people. If you have more ideas please post them and they we can talk about them.

Thanks for all the great questions.

[Topagae]

Farmville is it's own engine. I don't think your engine can, or should replicate the technology.