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.

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".

I've played around with AIRNovel some in the past — I was taking a peek at Shin'ainaru Kodoku to Kunou e — and it's not too bad, all things considered. The development tools are all freely available at https://famibee.web.fc2.com/intro/home.htm. Extracting the assets from a game was pretty easy, but decrypting them without the key is where I got stuck. (It partially encrypts each file with a RC4 cipher, so you need to know both the key and the encryption length offset. Or something very technical sounding like that.)

So hey! This eventually became a thing. Two things, actually. Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? / The Girl in the Glass: Short horror-tinged VN that's part medical drama, part psychological thriller, part murder-mystery. https://www.thejulysociety.com/projects/the-girl-in-the-glass The End of the Summer: Very short VN about the disappearance of a family's pet cat... among other things. https://www.thejulysociety.com/projects/the-end-of-the-summer Ended up ditching KiriKiri entirely for these and just rebuilt from the ground up in Ren'Py. The originals haven't been officially available for years now, so the engine switch makes some amount of sense. Super old, super doujin, and I'm super okay with that.

Yeah, I got a bad batch of gas station sushi and ended up in a medically induced coma for the past four years. Just woke up this morning. Anything interesting happen while I was out? Can’t wait to finally see how Game of Thrones ends... @NSAID: I totally get the low/no budget dilemma. Been there, done that, got the off-brand t-shirt. Maybe just tack it on your v2.0 to-do list?

Welcome to Fuwa! Always glad to see creators putting new material out there. One friendly suggestion: have a native English reader go through your script. While I haven't played the full VN yet, your Steam screenshots have enough anguished English in them ("I look at the both of my hands", "despite the sky is still shrouded") that it might easily dissuade someone from downloading/playing the game. You've clearly put a lot of work into this, so it's worth the extra effort to make sure that readers can fully immerse themselves in the world you've created.

Yeah, probably so. I was hoping to keep everything clean and simple, but I forgot this is 2020. Clean and simple's not on the menu.

One step forward, two steps back. I ended up having to laboriously hex edit assets out of the .EXE one file at a time, rather than as the usual nice-n-tidy XP3 package. So now I have media and scripts. (One step forward!) But once I look at the file manifest, I discover that the old KiriKiri game in question doesn't seem to have an Initialize.tjs file, which means it lacks the standard structure to even accept patches to begin with. (One step back!) And moreover, making hex edit revisions to the file doesn't seem to work either, since changing even a single byte results in KiriKiri throwing an "Uncompression failed" error on launch. (Another step back!) Looks like this one goes on the back burner for a while. Because you know what's easier than wrestling with old KiriKiri games? Scotch. Scotch is easier. Especially on Fridays. This message brought to you by the National Council on Scotch.

My work here is done. Shut 'er down, boys!

Hey all! I'm dealing with a particularly tricky asset extraction for a very old, very short KiriKiri-based VN, and was hoping someone might be able to shed some light on it. As is sometimes the case with these old KiriKiri games, there are no separate .XP3 files; they're embedded right into the .EXE. I've used KrkrExtract to handle extraction on titles like this before. But this time, it just silently fails. Digging into the hex code, I see the author has obfuscated/compressed the .EXE using a command line tool called UPX (Ultimate Packer for eXecutables). Great ! I grab that and successfully unpack the .EXE. Progress! But nope, KrkrExtract still silently fails. Okay, then how about manual .XP3 extraction via hex editor, which is something I've had to do once or twice? I know the signature string I'm looking for (58 50 33 0D 0A 20 0A 1A 8B 67 01), but unlike in most cases, I only find the first part (58 50 33 -- i.e. "XP3"). The rest is an unfamiliar set of values. I manually extract the data anyway and give it a whirl, but it doesn't function like a proper .XP3 file. So no luck there. So is the embedded .XP3 encrypted? I guess anything is possible, but I'm thinking probably not, since I can see bits and pieces of plaintext script here and there via the hex editor. I'm temporarily stumped. Any other approaches I'm not thinking of here? Should I just beat it like a piñata until all the delicious assets fall out? Is that how computers work?

Nice blog post! And for what it's worth, I've grown somewhat more tolerant of ellipses over the years. Have they worn me down? ...Maybe. I suppose the key is using them with intentionality, and not as a typographical shrug that takes the place of finishing a thought or properly punctuating a sentence. To your point, it's hard for an ellipsis to do the important work of demarcating time when those same three dots are also being employed in a dozen other pointless odd-jobs throughout the text.

Atom is another good choice as a text editor for Kirikiri projects. Cross-platform, plus there's syntax highlighting available for .ks and .tjs files. Super handy when you're staring at a wall of code.

Sango's route is universally considered (by me) to be the worst of the lot, with way too much forced drama/psychobabble. So take heart! It can only get better from here.