Darbury

Seems to be Shoukansha: https://vndb.org/v7976

I've patched old Kirikiri games that had no data.xp3 before, so it is possible. (Technically, there is a data.xp3, but it's part of the executable, as you saw. If you hex edit the exe, you can see it sitting there at the end of the file with all the proper xp3 headers and everything.) Not enough to go on from your description so far, so here are some possible troubleshooting steps: Try altering just one of the PNGs instead to narrow down if the issue is with the whole xp3 or just your ks script. Check the text encoding of your ks script. With a game of that era, it likely needs to be saved out as Shift-JIS. What program are you using to generate your patch.xp3? Sometimes, a different tool just seems to work better on certain games. In addition to GARbro, you might want to explore KrkrExtract and kiririki. Is the game expecting an encrypted patch.xp3? If so, you may want to see if GARbro has that game's encryption as an option or use KrkrExtract to create a Universal Patch.

The .ks files are text files, just with a different extension. Open them in a text editor capable of handling alternate encodings such as Shift-JIS or UTF-16 (depending on the exact game). If you don't have one already, Atom and Visual Studio Code are both fine options.

Welcome to Fuwa, from one dad to another. Don't worry, we've got all kinds here... Ronald Reagan? The actor?! Then who was vice-president, Jerry Lewis?

What tool are you using for your extract? I'm assuming GARbro. Try using KrkrExtract instead. Just ran KrkrExtract on the trial version of your game and was able to get all the scripts, images, etc. out cleanly: ;マクロ//////////////////////////////////////// ; その夏最後の嵐の夜　ぼくは死んだ ;I died in the last stormy night in that summer. ; The TARHS Entertainment Presents ; 図書室のネバジスタ ; 統括・脚本　都志見文太 ; 河原に置かれた荷物、デジカメ。 ;原画・彩色　かずまこを ;流された靴と雨 ;音楽　鷹石忍　FROST ;背景　藍田望 ;制服・ロゴデザイン　もろずみすみとも ;河川敷 ; ;=========================================================** *op|&act0[0] ;オープニング @title name=&title_act0[0] ; ;クリック待ちを表示しない @iscript sf.showpagebreak = 0; @endscript ; ;フラグリセット @call storage=flgreset.ks ; ;履歴出力 @history output=true enabled=true etc etc etc

Welcome to Fuwa! You can absolutely do what you’re looking for in Ren’Py. Just use NVL mode: https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/nvl_mode.html It’s a little harder to customize than ADV mode (text and name tag at bottom), but still entirely doable.

Darbury presents Darbury’s Old Visual Novels for Old People Named Darbury Will anybody care about this TL other than me? Probably not. So let’s just agree to call it a micro-niche release, okay? Anyway, there’s this doujin VN called Hitokata. It’s old. Came out 20 years ago, in fact. A one-person labor of love released at the turn of the century. It’s also well-regarded in the Japanese freeware VN community. Start poking around people’s top 10 lists of free VNs and you’ll be surprised how often it turns up. I mean, not Narcissu often… but enough. Why? Nostalgia maybe. Back in the day, a 100% free VN that clocked in at 10+ hours was something of a rarity. And one that was sorta good? Doubly so. The game was also surprisingly influential, picking up the time-loop ball from YU-NO and running with it before that trope became a total cliche. Even now, you’ll often see Hitokata referenced in reviews and discussions of doujin VNs with timey-wimey narratives. Great. So what the hell is it about, Darbury? Glad you asked. Here’s a little write-up: Ancient demons, teenage angst, fresh fish… What more could you want, right? Hitokata never made it to the West for a variety of reasons: a graphically bare-bones first release; an over-reliance on repetition; and an odd mix of cornball humor and existential dread. (Plus, if I’m being honest, the narrative can be slightly clunky at times.) It was popular enough in Japan, however, to merit a commercial remake for mobile — first for feature phones, then Android/iOS. And with that came a whole new generation of fans. A very stupid localization Everyone had a COVID hobby to keep them sane over the past year, and working on Hitokata was one of mine. It started as a simple translation of the NScripter original, but when I was done, I was visited by a series of increasingly stupid thoughts: Stupid Thought #1: Hey, this VN isn’t very pretty. Maybe I can just add the backgrounds from the mobile release. Stupid Thought #2: Heyy, now that I’ve added the backgrounds, it probably won’t be much more work to add the sprites. Stupid Thought #3: Heyyy, now that I’ve added the sprites, it probably won’t be much more work to add the sounds and music. Stupid Thought #4: Heyyyy, now that I’ve added the sounds and music, it probably won’t be much more work to add the UI. Stupid Thought #5: Heyyyyy, now that I’ve added the UI, why don’t I just port this whole thing to Ponscripter. By the time the stupidity stopped, I’d more or less done a ground-up rebuild of the game. Whoops! On the bright side, it means there are now two distinct versions of the TL patch: Hitokata Classic, a straight TL of the original game; and Hitokata Enhanced, with all the added bells and whistles. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of an early screen to show how those two versions stack up. Screenshots: CLASSIC | ENHANCED So, if your name is Darbury and you like old doujin VNs, you can find more info on the patch here. (You're also incredibly handsome. Good on ya.) If you’re anyone else, just go play Musicus! already.

I mean kiririki.exe, a command-line utility for manipulating XP3 files. But as I said, I don't have a direct download link for you. Google around enough, though, and maybe you'll find it...

Welcome to Fuwa! I don't know all the details of your project, but here are some quick thoughts: KrkrExtract has always been a crapshoot for repacking. I tend to get the best results with kiririki (though it's hard to find a download of that these days) or GARbro. You're looking to make a patch, right? And not replace the data.xp3 file wholesale? If so, you'll probably want your final output to be a patch.xp3 file rather than a data.xp3. Don't try to replicate the file structure of the data folder in your XP3. Just keep your updated files loose in the patch folder and the engine will sort them out on launch. Hope this helps some. Good luck!

Yup, something in that direction could definitely work. And since you won't have to worry about contrast against arbitrary backgrounds, you can remove the outline and just go with a dark color for the nav text. (Unstroked text will almost always be more legible at small point sizes.)

This version, 100% — plus, like, 3% percent I had sitting around in my jacket pocket. It solves so many problems for you. It minimizes the impact of the dithered backgrounds while also giving them visual context. It keeps character sprites from sliding to the far, far edges of the canvas (or behind their own dialogue portraits). And it just looks rad. Restyle that Ren'py bottom nav with an 8-bit pixel font and you got yourself a winner.

Hi! Best of luck with your translation patch! Some thoughts below: Issue #1 The special characters aren't just bold, they're a different font entirely. (Your base font is serif; the special characters are sans-serif.) Most likely answer is that the English version of the game is using a custom font, which in Kirikiri is usually stored as .TFT files, and that font doesn't include accented characters. So whenever one of those shows up, the engine reverts to its default font. Possible solutions include: creating your own custom font containing the characters you need. (There's a font tool in the Kirikiri SDK.) tuning off the custom font in the config files and sticking with the game's default (which won't be nearly as pretty). asking the Académie Française to only use unaccented characters from now on. (YMMV) Issue #2 Haven't run into that exact situation before, but I'd start by doing a search of all your .ks scripts to see if those choice text strings are duplicated anywhere. I've worked with other Kirikiri scripts where that ended up being the case...

Welcome to the imperfect world of wrestling with file encodings. Actually, I'm sure it makes perfect sense to all the CS majors out there, but... Looking back on my project notes, seems like my workflow involved copy/pasting the original Shift-JIS source into a new TextEdit doc (yup, I'm on Mac) then re-saving it out from there as a UTF-16 LE file. Apparently TextEdit did the best job of keeping the BOM where it needed to be. Anyway, this is the part where you get to experiment and find a workflow that works best for you. Or bribe one of those fancy CS majors into explaining the "sensible" way of doing it...

Visual Studio Code and Atom are both fine cross-platform options. Down in the lower right of their editing windows, they'll show you the current encoding of a file and let you re-encode it before saving.

Was about to say the same thing. I've run into this problem as well, and saving as UTF-16 LE with BOM always fixed it. How to tell if you did it right? Crack open your UTF-16 LE .ks file in a hex editor. It should start with "FF FE".