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Free Visual Novel Design Engine Released
Ayaka Hahn writes to tell us that they have just released a free game construction kit designed to make Visual Novels easy to construct. The "Blade Engine" was based on a professional Visual Novel engine being used in Japan with the hopes that it would spark greater interest in this medium in the west. From the press release: "In the West, there is a stereotype of: "Visual Novel = Dating Sim Game = Hentai", but that is wrong. Visual Novels CAN be Dating Sim games, Ren'ai games, Bishoujo games but also can be Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Adventure and Horror Fiction games, or anything that the user's creativity comes up with."
Although it's always nice to have more tools for software creation and/or building...these so called visual novels will probably be made by a bunch of idiots, and therefore will be worth less than the time it takes to read / play them...Perhaps these people's time would better be spent creating non-clonable goods instead of easily cloned, nonunique software? Only a few can create superior software products, and because software is copy-able there's no need for hordes of idiots to manufacture it...unlike traditional products, which require hordes of idiots to manufacture...
You're thinking of 'Graphic Novel' and no, that's not what this is. This is for making interactive novels. They call them games, but a LOT of the 'interactive novels' I've seen were only interactive in that you could click to go to the next scene.
There ARE a few good ones, they're just few and far between already. Making it easy for idiots to make their own won't improve things.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I might be missing something, but I found NO mention of the platforms this game format supports out of the box. The Buredo ("blade" in Japanese syllables) folks should mention it SOMEWHERE before people bother to download stuff.
The first sample story is a Windows EXE, but from the tutorial files I just browsed, it doesn't look like it would be particularly hard to make a Un*x/Linux/OSX version out of nothing more than perl-sdl or pygame. The story script is essentially a big text file and graphics and sound assets.
[
You read slashdot... You notice that the most recent article is about a choose your own adventure virtual book engine. What do you do now? (Make fun of hentai at the risk of being modded troll)(Give to the community a clever take on games in Japan) ...
You start to articulate how gay it is to play games that are dating sims, and poke fun at the pathetic losers who do it...
You take it, I don't want it...
This might be an interesting way to (user) document GUI appliactions. Take your screenshots and write your script.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
And that's yet another example of how Americans don't check what they type for grammatical errors.
I will try to ignore the whole "visual novel == hentai with tentacles" arguement. I play/read visual novels (or AVG as they are properly called) so I will be biased.
:) .
That having said, there was a pretty famous incident that involved GPL and a Japanese AVG game makers. Apparently the company used Xvid codecs for their animation clips for their popular games (ranked top 10 ero-game in 2005) without releasing the engine source code. When someone pointed out the GPL, the company promptly released the whole engine code (without the comments unforturnately). The engine was designed with win32 API in mind, btw. But it still counts as something
Off topic: I was amazed that a Japanese hentai game maker respects the GPL more than, say, SCO, a multi-million dollar company; Then again, comparing SCO to a hentai game company would not be fair- to the game company
Free Visual Novel Design Engine Released
You are in a Slashdot discussion about a dating sim engine. There is a summary and a link to TFA here.
> EXAMINE SELF
You are an average Slashdotter. Your karma is Normal.
> READ SUMMARY
"This program lets you design visual novels. Even though most people think that all visual novels are dating sims, that is not entirely correct."
> READ TFA
Really?
> NO
Thought so.
> WRITE POST
About what do you want to write?
> TEXT ADVENTURES
You write a funny little piece about text adventures that is just barely connected to the thread.
> POST
Unfortunatly for you the moderators are on some particularly bad crack today and your post ends up with a score of -5, Funny. Maybe you should have posted anonymously.
Your karma has been reduced to below zero. As people around you sense your negative karma they shun you, leaving all future posts unread. You are dead, as far as this community's concerned.
Your final score is 5. You must be new here.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Making it easy for idiots to make their own won't improve things.
Your comment was going well until that point. The Blade Engine is akin to blogging software for visual storytellers. Simplifying the process of creating AVGs will give an opportunity for people with good storytelling but poor programming skills to create interesting works. Sure, there will be a huge amount of crap, just like with blogs, but overall more is better. That's the whole raison d'etre of the internet.
Elitists are free to ignore self-published graphic novels, just as I'm sure there are plenty of people who read only "established" news sources on the web and don't bother with blogs of any kind, or in the real world plenty of people would never be caught dead reading a "zine,"which themselves multiplied after the advent of cheap photocopying and (later) DTP software.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
That's right! Visual novels can be can be Sci-Fi pron, Fantasy porn, Adventure porn and Horror Fiction porn!
;)
Simon
I couldn't figure out what this "visual novel engine" was from the summary so I thought I would RTFA for a change. After doing that I still wasn't clear about what kind of thing you could make with it. I downloaded one of the samples to see what they were talking about. For those of you like me who are out of the loop on this state of the art technology I offer you this 5 word summary: Zork with stills and sound.
How long did it take to make an "engine" to do this anyway? A whole day? two maybe? Lets see, a database with music samples, stills, and text, throw in some trivial branching, done. It seems to me that the only work in the first place was making the creative content, which, with this wonderful technology, is still the only work.
Also, once you know what they are talking about, saying this bit: "Visual Novels CAN be Dating Sim games, Ren'ai games, Bishoujo games but also can be Sci-Fi Blah Blah Blah..." is really moronic. It's like saying, "Did you know that when you buy magazines, they don't all have to be porn! There are also magazines about cars and computers, and hobbies like painting! Did you know that you can actually make a magazine about anything you want!?"
Is the whole point of this Blade engine just to establish some sort of standard? Because the problem it seems to be trying to solve just isn't that tough. I wouldn't pay money for it. Am I off the mark here? What am I not getting?
*cheerful, bland MIDI music starts playing*
;)
Noriko: *fades in* Brother! Brooootheeeer!
Noriko: *makes angry face* You are reading Slashdot again, aren't you?
Noriko: You spend too much time on the internet!
[Yes] [No] [Stick it in]
You: Hey, eight hours a day is not that much!
Noriko: Yes it is!
Noriko: *takes cheerful pose* I can't let you sit in front of the computer all day.
Noriko: Today we're going to do something together, no discussion.
Noriko: Do you have anything you want to do?
[Play a dating sim together] [Kill her] [Stick it in]
You: Your life is -5, Overrated!
Noriko: *makes scared face* What are you doing with that knife?
Noriko: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
*screen fades out*
GAME OVER
PS: I'm not trying to undermine my potential +5, Funny, but I don't want to write yet another post. When Wikipediaing for dating sim companies I noticed that according to the 'Pedia Leaf had to release the source code to some of their games under the GPL. Maybe that could be used for a free alternative to the program the TFA talks about? I gTranslated the corresponding page on Leaf's website (http://leaf dot aquaplus dot co dot jp/product/xvid.html - please spare their server if you don't intend to read the text) and it says something about how they distribute the source by email and/or CD. Maybe someone who speaks Japanese might want to get in touch with them...
(And don't tell my that the FOSS community has no need for this. We do things because we can, not because we need them
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Graphic novels, Visual novels... you know, these people must actually understand the difference between their, lets say, "limited" creations and what is traditionally referred to as a 'novel'. Otherwise, it seems, they would not insist quite so ardently on calling them 'novels'.
sic transit gloria mundi
Tentacle Rape Wizard
"You got your Hentai in my Harry Potter fanfiction!"
"You got your Harry Potter fanfiction in my Hentai!"
sic transit gloria mundi
They don't give you a choice as to whether or not you stick it in, only how long to delay it for. (Though they generally will give you a choice as to whose to stick it into, and occasionally a choice as to where to stick it in)
It is?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
On an American compiler, this evaluates to true, but on the binary the Japanese compiler made, this statement evaluates to false. Shame on you for writing non-portable code! Shame!
I thought this was a program that I could drag and drop plot, characters, etc., into, and it would write my novel for me. You're telling me it doesn't do that, and I have to still write all the words myself? Where's my Visual Studio 2005 Novel Edition?
No one will ever convince me that completely destroying the "signal to noise" ratio of a particular creative field is somehow a good thing. Why on earth is it "better" to have this gigantic, suffocating mass of mediocrity?
I see where you're coming from, but my feeling is that what's noise to me might be signal to others, and vice-versa. Beethoven took some of his great symphonic themes from "mediocre" musical ditties of his day. Cubism arose in part because European artists gained exposure to "mediocre" African art and took it in unforseen directions. Warhol made art from tin can logos. The important thing is being able to connect and have access to the ideas. From there, what you do with them is limited more by your own inner creative mojo than by overexposure to crap.
Insofar as noise is a problem on the internet, I find that it is due to advertising, not the fault of independent creative works, no matter how banal they may be. Of course YMMV, and I respect that.
(Now you've got me wondering if even advertising is unmitigated noise. Perhaps penis enlargement ads will one day be viewed as primitive art by some future civilization. My only consolation is that I'll be long dead by then.)
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.