Silk-Dragon Part 1 - a VN in German - need help

[Der Tor]

A chinese girl who is a friend of mine wrote a totally beautifull story about her life, and how she grew up durring the cultural revolution, amidst terror and suppression while all the while still staying very cute herself.

She originally wanted to publish it as a book, but because of her unique style she allways got rejected because it seems that the publishers thought one can't make any money with that type of writing style (which is propably true).

But i allways thought it's a damned shame if nobody reads it, cause her style is just so cute and unique. And only now did i realize that it is absolutely PERFECT for a Visual Novel (-:

So that means all the text that will appear in the VN is allready 100% DONE (-:

The novel has 3 main parts, so i will propably also have to release it in 3 parts, otherwise it would be too long, i guess.

I am gonna try to attach it, so that all those who understand german can have a look at it.

Now the down side: I never did a Visual Novel before, and i don't know Jack, so i am gonna be greatfull for all advise and all help i can get.

The biggest issue is gonna be what the background should be. If one of you is willing to draw the backround, that would be great (no people just backround drawings). Otherwise i will go with backround photos. I would need a lot of backround shots depicting various scenes and places in China.

Maybe in the future one could also ad pictures of people like in Felix Gaijin or even speach (it will depend on wheather i get any volunteers for that or not).

So for now, read the story, tell me what you think, and how i should best approach it, since it really is very long, and naturally would have no viewer interaction, reading so much text on the bottom of a computer screen will propably get boring real fast, so i will have to do SOMETHING about that.

PS: I couldn't upload it. What extensions are allowed?

[Ivlivs]

Simple.

Change the file's extension to *.txt (but do not make it an actual *.txt file), then tell us which extension to change it back to.

[Der Tor]

ok. Here it is, and ya gotta change it to PDF:

[Der Tor]

okay.. here is the first problem i encountered... Ren'Py doesn't launch the program if it includes german Umlauts )-:

But Felix Gaijin had German Umlauts, so what do i have to do?

[Jake]

okay.. here is the first problem i encountered... Ren'Py doesn't launch the program if it includes german Umlauts )-:

But Felix Gaijin had German Umlauts, so what do i have to do?

I'm just guessing, but the umlauted characters you're using probably aren't in the standard ASCII set, so you'll probably need to use unicode strings to display them. I'm pretty sure this is the case for the 'ß', as well. Simply prefix the text with a 'u', e.g.

Code: Select all

    e u"I told you before, Jeremy, 'schöne' is not pronounced the same as 'shone'!"

[Der Tor]

well, i tried to write the umlauts directly into the rpy document and i also tried pasting them into the rpy document from a unicode-text-file, but in either case Ren'Py doesn't run the program if it contains the umlauts.

[Jake]

well, i tried to write the umlauts directly into the rpy document and i also tried pasting them into the rpy document from a unicode-text-file, but in either case Ren'Py doesn't run the program if it contains the umlauts.

Can you show us a line or two of code with an umlaut in? And does Ren'Py give any particular error when it falls over?

[PyTom]

What's the error message? If there's an umlaut in a character's name, you have to use a u at the start of the string to tell it to use unicode:

Code: Select all

init:
    $ dt = Character(u"Deathtöngue")

dt "Spéciàl chãrâctërs àré fíñê in Ren'py proper."

Annoyingly, my computer doesn't let me type Spin̈al Tap (I had to copy and paste that).

Another thing to check is that you're saving as UTF-8.

[Der Tor]

I don't get any error messeges. If there are Umlauts anywhere in the rpy file (doesn't have to be the names, just anywhere in the text) the program doesn't start at all (i press the launch button, nothin happens) while when i don't have umlauts in the text, it runs just fine.

Oh and i of course got all the umlauts right on my keyboard so i just type them in directly and i am running the german version of Win 98.

[Der Tor]

Umlauts problem solved (with PyTom's help). I am progressing nicely now. All i need now is as many asia-themed backround photos or backround drawings as i can get!

So please send me all you got and tell me any photo galleries with asian style backround images that i could use (for a free Kinetic Novel).

[monele]

When the launcher doesn't launch anything, try to check for some "error.txt" or some similar file in the main Ren'Py directory. I had that problem once.

[Der Tor]

ARGHH... now i get theese errors, what did i do wrong????


On line 7 of C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\renpy-6.3.2-full\renpy-6.3.2\Seidendrachen/game/script.rpy: expected statement.
Image chrysanthemum = "chrysanthemum.jpg"
^

On line 18 of C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\renpy-6.3.2-full\renpy-6.3.2\Seidendrachen/game/script.rpy: scene statement does not expect a block. Please check the indentation of the line after this one.
scene chrysanthemum
^

On line 26 of C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\renpy-6.3.2-full\renpy-6.3.2\Seidendrachen/game/script.rpy: scene statement does not expect a block. Please check the indentation of the line after this one.
scene black
^

On line 31 of C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\renpy-6.3.2-full\renpy-6.3.2\Seidendrachen/game/script.rpy: scene statement does not expect a block. Please check the indentation of the line after this one.
scene black
^

[monele]

I don't know if it counts but no caps for "image" ?

[Der Tor]

thanks. But i still get the last 3 errors

[PyTom]

Generally, this means that the line after the given one is indented, when it shouldn't be. We'd need to see your code to know for sure.