tymmur

I started wondering about what to write here and I came up with this: For any age group: nothing specific The reason is not that I wouldn't recommend VN reading. It's more if I should recommend something, age is not the primary factor. It's my impression that the difference between two random individuals of the same age is greater than the difference of one person when that person is in the different age groups mentioned here. Because of this, it's more like recommending against certain titles if people are too young, but the age will not tell what people will like.

If you ask me, studying abroad is overrated. I have seen some people spend a fortune on it without learning anything they couldn't have learned "at home". The issue is that you start by learning the basics, which you can more or less do anywhere. At the end of your university life (particularly if you aim higher than bachelor), your expertise has become so great that you can actually tell the difference between universities. At this point it would make sense to locate a university, which has specialized in something you can't learn "at home".

Then go search for a phone subscription. You can usually find something like "prepay 10 hours and get an additional 5 hours for free".

The Best Eroge Ever. It's all in the title and the best short VN I can think of. It's even a free download.

Looking through all the titles mentioned here (or the majority. There are a lot already), I can say one thing: the replies seems to be fairly subjective. While the majority are good looking, it seems that some people have managed to point out "the best" and then mention a title where I simply do not like the drawing style and consider it ugly. I will predict that as time passes, even more titles are mentioned (a number while writing this) and we will never agree. I think it's fine. People are diverse. That is what makes us human. However it makes it kind of pointless to talk about "the best" as it highly depends on who you ask.

Isn't this thread kind of pointless? The ones with the really interesting answers are those who aren't around to reply. Personally I'm doing great from a forum/VN perspective. Joined/(re)started the Musumaker translation project in 2011. It was a doomed project, which translated 15% in 4 years. Spreed has increased steadily, though this year by a lot. Last week set a new speed record at 1.1% for just one week. Looks like I will not end up looking like my avatar by the time the translation is done, even though it looked like that for years.

I would say MusumakerHD. At least it's a clear winner for me regarding hours spent on a VN However you should be aware that screenshots of the HD version seems to be quite rare. Google only found one, VNDB has none, the various shops (like DMM and getchu) has cheated and used screenshots from the old version. The demo is based on the old version. It's like the internet is trying to hide how much of a visual improvement the HD remake is. It's more than just higher resolution, though that in itself is naturally clearly visible.

I just remembered how the signature issue started. When Luna Translations died, I went to my account and instead of deleting, there was this "use signature" button. I figured I could just click that one and sure enough when I checked, my signature was gone. I didn't realize other people could see it and that I only removed it for myself.

When asking for the best MAD, there can only be one

My mom once told me that I should make sure I'm alone when I touch myself. I was confused about that, but then I realized she must have seen me earlier that day and I didn't realize and just continued. Considering the viewing angle she must have had, she must have been able to see my size and everything. As awkward as it was, it had nothing to do with VNs. I tried something like that as well. My mom woke me up in the afternoon/early night after I had apparently been asleep for a few hours. I instantly realized Musumaker was still running full screen and I screamed. She was then convinced she woke me up from a nightmare (she woke me up to one). Realizing what was on the screen was Suika in her room saying something innocent, I stopped screaming and agreed about the nightmare thing. I don't think she ever noticed what was on the screen. When I woke up, I thought it was a H scene for some reason, but I have no idea why. Maybe I just prepared for the worst. Another time I was browsing the net with my parents (or just mom?) and something weird happened in the background and suddenly I had a window in front with some topless 2D girls. My mom was "what is going on" and I just killed the window and said "apparently some prankster has hacked one of the servers we visited". She then went on about people misbehaving online and stuff. To this day I have no idea why my background script suddenly woke up and decided to tell the browser to open a new window in the foreground showing a random page from gelbooru, which I had never seen before. The script died that day because it wasn't even doing what it was supposed to do (which was... I forgot. It wasn't important).

I can't really make out the genre of this. Sure it's yuri and a ghost, but is it nukige or is there a deeper story to this? Would the story be worth reading if there aren't any H scenes or is the story just an excuse to add more H scenes? The prices are as follows: English: $10, or $15 when including OST. Both downloads. Japanese: free download, or just under $17 for boxed version including OST and shipping (presumably to Japan only) Yeah it's a low cost, but it's one of those rare cases where it's actually more expensive than the Japanese version. Add translation costs, possible license costs (free to download ≠ free to modify and sell), possible costs of uncensored CGs and I find it reasonable that the translated version is $10 more than the Japanese version. It's actually a low price when you start to consider fees involved with payment, server cost and all that as well. I can't really figure out if this thread is a friend telling me something I would like to know, or if it is some sort of concealed social media advertising. Either way thanks for the info. I completely missed this release and I certainly don't mind being informed about VNs like this.

Absolutely. Failing to report a bug is a case for IP (Internet Police) (it's not, but it is polite and helps getting things running smoothly)

Read again. I didn't say you should start to write a script to do that.

Obviously they count in different ways, yet they both state it to be the final count for the same day. By most definitions that's a bug. At some point somebody cared enough to write the feature. I report the issues I encounter and then I assume the people responsible for the software can figure out if it's worth fixing. I have tried people failing to report bugs to me because "he wrote the software. Surely he knows" or "I can live with it" and then it goes unnoticed for a while and it turns out to be a more severe issue than people expected. Just report the issues and let the people responsible for the software judge how important it is. They know the internals and are better suited to make such a judgment. For all I know it could be database corruption (unlikely, but not completely impossible). If my computer can affect how the server reads from the database, then that's a bug.

Looking at past leaders, the 5th of April will have the votes 11, 6, 3. Clicking on the 5th of April to get an overview of that day, the most voted people got 11, 10, 6, 6. Luckily they agree on who won the day, but that's about it. Nobody else has the same place on both pages.

I went through links posted here, and then though links there and so on. Eventually I came across this thread started by "Guest", but other people refer to the thread starter as "Aaeru". Sure looks like the account is history. The thread is interesting too. Never heard about it before. For the record MangaGamer released DC3 3 years and 10 months after this thread, making the wait longer than the 2-3 years people estimated.

I know it's a joke, but at one point I actually decided to make a translation project open source. I'm not ashamed and since it's actually an interesting story I will share it. Musumaker was released on the 19th of December 2008 (disc only). On the 25th, somebody on HongFire published extraction tools and a translation started (that was quick). People just uploaded the files as attachments on the forum. I showed up in 2011, downloaded all the scripts and wrote a script to convert them into a format the VN engine could understand. This allowed the text to show up ingame, something nobody had accomplished so far. However it turned out that the project was nearly dead and only one translator was left. Fearing that the translation project would die completely, I ended up putting all the scripts on a git server and made it public. Software development has a tendency to attract people by simply sharing the source code, be an interesting project and be at a visible location. I figured translators could show up in the same way. Well that didn't happen. Some people showed up, but never really accomplished anything useful. I added a script to make a progress report, which would then always be in a specific file on the server. People could then see the progress without asking. In 2015 the focus changed from just keeping the project alive to quality. The whole translation was re-translated to improve quality and a 15% patch was released. This did create some hype, but it didn't turn into new translators. Late 2015 we moved from HongFire to Fuwa because HongFire is not the place to be if you want to translate a VN. Besides HongFire seemed to be past its prime at the time. That didn't help regarding recruiting more translators. Early 2016: merge with Luna Translations and worked moved to Majo Koi Nikki. The target quality for Musumaker suddenly became the same as MKN. May 2016: Musumaker HD remake was released. When I had to move the translation from one engine to another, I decided to start over and use the workflow used in Luna. This required a new file format (partly due to the new engine as well) and as such it made sense to use a new git repository. This time it became closed source. Status today (2.5 years after the 15% patch): more than 50% translated, 1.1% translated during the last week. Quality is higher than ever and around new year 2017-2018 recruits started coming in. In the end I will actually not recommend using open source for a translation. However there is no question that the translation of Musumaker, which has now lasted almost a decade would have been long dead due to inactivity had it not been due to having a public display/proof that it was alive. In fact the translation has done a number of things I would not recommend doing due to high risk of low quality, but in this case it was needed and the end result will not suffer from it.

I never really used it, but from how I understand it, it is text hooking and can display the text in an overlay window. You can then write your own line (translated) and it will be stored on the disk/server?. Each time a new line is encountered, it will look up to see if there is a translation for the Japanese line in question. If there is, then it will be displayed. Work long enough on this and you will get a fully translated VN, but the text will be in some sort of popup window, not in the VN itself. Also if two lines happen to be 100% the same, the translation will have to be 100% the same. In short: you can translate without messing with file extraction, but the display quality of the result will not be as good as if you did work on the script files. I think it can also be used for machine translations, but I'm not sure. It's certainly not recommended to use those.

Don't know/can't remember There is the option to use Visual Novel Reader as well. It's a better reading experience if the script is extracted, changed to English and then injected back into the VN, but considering that you have problems doing that and high quality is not your primary goal, it just might be the thing for you.

I'm not happy with xp3/ks files. I never used that specific format much and it always end up problematic. However I can't remember ever having given up completely. Do you use Japanese locale? Usually Japanese VNs use CodePage 932 (aka shift-jis), not ANSI or unicode. For any format, you should split the code and the text or you will end up doing precisely what you just said: delete or modify code and make the game crash. I can remember I once saw an application, which can split the text and code as well as put them together again. The problem is now I can't find it. The only thing I can think of is write my own in perl script and then generate some sort of txt file, which can safely be edited and then another script (or same with different argument) to merge text and code. It shouldn't take too long, but I will need an example file because I can't remember the format precise enough to do it from memory.

Since you had some luck with bruteforce, you know by now that you need to find a series of bytes, which you XOR with the file contents. You don't have to know what that means (it's on the individual bit level). All you need to know is that it requires some sort of password and odds are that it's the same for all files. Doesn't brute force tell you which key it used to extract? Just copy paste that as the key to use with other files and it should work. There are other approaches as well, but why divert from something you apparently got to work already?

This is actually a much harder question than first meets the eyes. What makes a good VN seems incompatible with wanting to be the protagonist. In fact some slice of life nukige would be surprisingly attractive. However not only would that be a boring answer, the idea of mindless sex doesn't appeal to me. After some thinking I realized the answer is to go all out and think of which world setting could be interesting. Utawarerumono or Kamidori would actually be interesting.

Fun facts about this thread: Originally intended to be posted on the 1st, but I got posting backwards that day It's genuinely my first thread To the best of my knowledge, information in the first post is actually true despite being intended for the first of April This thread made me realize my outdated signature. When asking around why nobody told me, everybody said they thought it was intentional nostalgia I noticed the Leaderboard for the first time because this thread apparently made me win yesterday I had way more fun writing and reading this thread than I expected Nobody will ever read this because of a post 404 issue EDIT: this is my 404th post. It spoils the joke a bit to point it out, but I didn't freeze my account to preserve the number. That would have prevented the weekly progress report for Musumaker.

What can I say? Big hands writes big posts and big hands means big.... something

Insert generic welcome message as response to generic greeting. Now I wonder how such a passion can be used in the VN community. Usually translation projects will use whatever audio comes with the VN and not touch anything and as such has no need for knowledge in this area. However people writing their own VNs from scratch might benefit from a person with an interest and knowledge in that area.