What do you think about the "other" VN engines?

[MaiMai]

Well, there's just three I know off of my head, those being NScripter, Blade, and Novelty. I'm sure there are others

[LVUER]

Kira Kira?

[Adorya]

What about Fire? This was supposed to be a big project with online play through web browser...

[papillon]

kirikiri and nscripter are mostly used by the japanese or translation projects, but it should be *possible* for someone english-speaking to use them. there was at least one browser-based idea, maybe more. I have a set of scripts to make it easier to do VN-style dialog in Game Maker, others have written their own, but that's not really a VN engine.

[Jake]

Wait, how many "other" VN engings are there anyway?

You know Cloud's post four above yours more or less answers your question?

You might want to check out this thread on different VN engines at The Teacup too: http://teacup.lunaen.com/index.php?topic=19.0

Of course, there could be millions of others that we don't know about, so the question is impossible to completely answer anyway. :P

[Gumaster]

ONScripter/NScripter were, i think, english/japanese versions of it...but I'm not too sure. They seem to be fairly simple.
KiriKiri on the other hand, seems to be able to do quite a bit, and I think there was a group working on translating it (or rather, they've already done so, and will release it when they finish their VN)

[sake-bento]

On the Japanese circuit, Kirikiri actually looks very nice and flexible. I've been playing through ZeroZigen's Koenchu, and there are timed mini quiz games and other fun things. And if you're wondering Mystery Parfait, is, in fact, translating Kirikiri. Last I checked they were about halfway done, but it seems to be functional. The only thing that turns me off from Kirikiri is basically the same complaint I have about any other engine: no Mac support. I've had a pretty steady stream of Mac users playing my games, and I'd hate to cut them off.

Fun fact: My second VN, Forget Me Not, was originally written in Blade Engine. I wrote Forget Me Not as a short story and wanted to turn it into a VN for some bizarre reason or another (I'm still not entirely sure), and a friend of mind said he'd heard about this thing called Blade Engine. He even purchased the pro version. I started writing in Blade Engine, and it was cool, and it did what I wanted it to. But then I kinda got stuck, so I searched for a tutorial and came upon Blue Lemma's page. I figured I'd give Ren'py a spin to see how I liked it, and Ripples was born. I liked using Ren'py a lot more, so I rewrote all of Forget Me Not in Ren'py before releasing it and I haven't looked back since.

[PyTom]

I find Novelty very interesting, just because Sin made very different design decisions that I did. When designing Ren'Py, I saw myself creating a language that was intended to create a fairly specific type of game. So I chose a metaphor that I thought was appropriate (movie scripts), tried to formalize it into a language, and that became Ren'Py. A textual representation seemed appropriate, since the way people make movies is generally to write a text version, and only then do they start adding graphics. Maybe because I have a background in programming language (by education and inclination), the thought of treating it differently never really entered my mind.

Novelty seems to treat a game more like a document, and so the end result is something like an enhanced version of powerpoint - or maybe the flash creator - optimized for visual novels. I'm not sure that I agree that what's going on is not programming, like is claimed on their website... but it certainly is a different representation then what Ren'Py uses.

The cross-platform nature of Ren'Py has been a blessing and a curse. It's a curse because there are bits of platform-specific functionality that I'd like to use, but I can't. On the other hand, it does mean that we're not leaving Mac and Linux users out in the cold... as a Linux user myself, I think that important.

I don't like ONscripter, largely because the language feels like it was optimized for much smaller computers than it was ever run on. It actually reminds me a bit of the CNC language, but the latter was meant to fit in 64kb roms.

I don't know much about kirikiri, but it seems reasonable to me.

[pkt]

It's always possible to code a vn in PHP, html, Javascript or some combination of web languages.

[Jake]

It's always possible to code a vn in PHP, html, Javascript or some combination of web languages.

Indeed. And another thing I saw Mikey suggest (I think on the Teacup forum, if I remember the name right this time) is to put a presentation together in the OpenOffice powerpoint-a-like (which I think is called 'Impress'?) and that has an export-to-flash option. With a template with a dialogue box in-place and judicious use of the duplicate-slide feature to avoid re-positioning sprites all the time, it would probably be pretty easy to put together simple (and presumably small) VNs...

[tpgames]

Why Ren'Py? Why learn and use a program that discriminates against other computer Users? If it doesn't work on Linux and Mac and PC, I'm not interested.

[azureXtwilight]

In fact it DOES work for linux, mac, and pc.

[Dusk2Dusk]

I messed around with Novelty a bit....didn't really like it >.>

I actually find Ren'Py to be easier to use .x.

[tigerkidde]

To be fair, rollback is a pretty difficult thing to code in, especially if you haven't been planning for it from the beginning, and even more especially if you're allowing game authors to write completely arbitrary scripts which change all manner of things.

Yes, I was astonished when I tried to port Heileen for XNA using C#. The hardest task was having a rollback, so hard that I didn't even implement it (well I also quit that project, but I remember was so difficult that I gave up on that).

I'm glad you brought this up. I've been pondering how this would be executed. If you come across a silver bullet / easier way to do it in C# with the XNA framework, I would love to hear it.

[jadacamilla]

Well, livemaker isn't bad(but its japanese and i've really done nothing to it except writing a story for it) rather, its never for english speaking users anyway.

On that accord, I'm not fluent to japanese and i'm not a programmer either but i'm hoping to make my own VN *searches the net...finds lemma then you know what's next*

Ren'py is much more easier i'd say.... I'm not a programmer myself*mentioned beforehand* but i've already mastered almost half of those python thingys and such in just a few hours. ^^

Ren'py is d best in my opinion.