tymmur

I disagree. If they really would make the protagonist the same as the target reader, they would have made the protagonist a 40 year old virgin, who has no idea about how to approach women. I did some thinking about the overused school theme and I came to the conclusion that it is because everybody went to school. Everybody can relate to how it is to attend school and it is a place where the genders encounter each other. We will likely never see a VN where the protagonist is an adult educated forklift operator, who works in a storage facility and has little or no contact with women. Maybe it would appeal to forklift drivers, but the vast majority of VN readers would have problems relate to the issues of the protagonist. I couldn't agree more. A VN is the perfect medium to tell a story at a slow pace where it has time to provide all the details. Anime tend to skip fast past lots of details and when the whole screen is "animated", you never know if some background detail will matter later on, meaning it's easier to miss details, which turns out to be important later. It's not unusual for me to watch the same scene more than once in an anime, because paying attention to subtitles and what is displayed in the image easily makes me miss both. VNs on the other hand has the pace I choose. I rarely use auto forward, meaning if I need 10% more time on a line to really get what it is saying, I click 10% later. Knowing that I can do that, I don't even have to try to "rush reading", which I think is required once in a while in anime. In fact multi line anime subtitles (lots of text) usually makes me pause to read it without rushing. As for VNs vs books. I prefer VNs because it's a more complete experience. There are voices and sound effects to get you deeper into the story while music sets the mood. The text is usually good. You get one or a few lines at a time. A book requires you to pay more attention to which line you are reading. Somehow I find that distracting, particularly when moving to the next line. The text is also generally quire big, which will strain the eyes less. Last, but not least VNs have choices. The interaction is worth quite a lot. I'm not sure I would compare VNs to games as VNs do not try to be games. The exception is VNs like Kamidori, which works well as a VN and at the same time is a decent RPG and to some degree some business simulation (not sure precisely how to classify the shop). Those parts melds together in a way, which makes them work great, but it does pose the question if the target audience would be VN readers or gamers.

Yume Miru Kusuri was the first VN, which came to my mind when reading the first post. I don't know about Mizuki's route, but the other two seems shockingly realistic. I spent ages reading it because I kept taking breaks to reflect on my own time at school. It was quite hard, but it made me realize stuff I didn't understand while they were happening. I went to class with somebody, who was a weirdo. He suddenly turned into something sort of like Nekoko (in some aspects so similar that it's downright scary) and reading YMK made me realize why. Sometimes high, sometimes sleeping. This made him completely isolated. After a few weeks like that, I woke him up, said something like "This is not working out. We need to talk" and then we had a lengthy conversation about how he hated his parents, his future and stuff like that. After that he turned around in a few days, became his usual odd character, who paid attention in class and the last time I saw him, he had manage to get into a university. It wasn't until I read YMK years later that I realized what I had actually done. The bullying part is also shockingly realistic, both in terms of how the bullying is performed and how the school reacts. Speaking of personal observations, no bullying in YMK seems extreme. Presumably the most extreme story I can tell is 2 guys suddenly trapping me in a corner and holding on to my arms and then a 3rd one wanted to test how many kicks to the head it will take to make somebody pass out. Apparently he had seen a movie and wanted to try it himself. I'm not quite sure how, but I somehow went into survival mode and seconds later he ran away screaming and bleeding. The other two made a run for it too and they never bothered me again. It's the only time I have been in a real fight and I think I would suck at it in general. The school didn't care at all. Based on other stuff I have seen and people telling me they have been exposed to, the list of stuff taking place involves a bag full of urine, pouring water into schoolbags to ruin the books (forcing the student to pay for new ones), forcing minors to watch gay porn against their will, random assaults due to entertainment value. The list goes on and on and generally speaking the schools simply don't care. What YMK doesn't touch is when the teachers joins or even starts the bullying. With all this in mind, YMK seems extreme, but not unrealistically extreme. However reading what other people write about YMK has made me realize that quite a lot of people fail to realize how realistic it is. If people discard it as 100% fiction, they learn nothing. I learned a lot from it and I leveled up my understanding of live/awareness so to speak. However realizing that perhaps most people miss that makes me sad, though it tells me of human ignorance as well. I can't say I'm happy with what I have learned (it's only bad stuff), but given that it is the real world, I'm happy that I have an understanding how the kind of people I can encounter in life as well as better insights in my past. Wish upon a shooting star also made me learn something. No, it's not the fake science it tries to explain. What I actually learned the most from was the translation notes. It tells about Japanese history and culture to make the reader understand what goes on and what is told in that TL notes pdf file is actually quite interesting. How can anybody be on the internet and not be exposed to female anatomy all the time? Before I started using add blockers, nude women showed up everywhere, even in places you wouldn't expect, like regular newspapers. One would expect them to trigger on viewing habits, but my experience is that they show up even in browsers never used for viewing adult content. I saw an anime, where an American went "mip mip mip" or something like that and it was hard subbed in Japanese to tell what he was supposed to say in what was supposed to be English. The fansubber even had to write it was supposed to sound like English. I forgot which anime it was though. I'm not sure how much they care. I fear it's more like they do it as good as they can. English proficiency in Japan is kind of horrible to be honest and how to teach English at school is a hot topic because the vast majority learns too little and ends up hating the language. One major problem is that in order to get better conversation skills, they teach English in highschool in English. It might be good for some, but the students who aren't skilled enough to understand the teacher ends up learning nothing at all. Sadly this problem is not unique to Japan. By the time I encountered a VN by chance, I knew all that except for system locale. I'm not saying I used it, but I knew how to use it, which is close enough. Interestingly enough I later ended up needing knowledge about system locale while providing support and it ended up as telling some Russian guy to use AppLocale to use English locale to get it working as intended. Totally unrelated to VNs, yet it solved the problem.

I don't think it is possible to make a great wallpaper from that image. On top of suffering from low resolution, it also has a problem with aspect radio. If you divide width by height, you get: * 16:9 widescreen: 1.78 (the most common widescreen) * 16:10 widescreen: 1.6 * 4:3 standard: 1.33 * The image posted here: 0.707 I think the resolution and the aspect radio are so wallpaper unfriendly that it's simply not possible to make a great looking one based on that image.

At the same time it is ranked 268 out of 18524 on VNDB. However the description and tags give me a hunch that the nukige tag is supposed to be there. Nukige tend to give higher VNDB votes, though the board users tend to hate them. Yorhel (the VNDB creator) stated that at some point. This mean sadly a high score is not always the same as a great VN. My guess is that nukige is popular with the people using machine translations as it tend to work best with those, or so they claim. At the same time according to MangaGamer's blog, translating H scenes is not a great task for translators. It's more fun to translate actual story text than all those sound effects and mindless dialogue H scenes tend to be full of. This mean the high sexual content (which Princess Lover has) might be attractive to players, but it seems less attractive to translators. A translation takes quite a while, which mean particularly unpaid translators would have to be more than normally interested in a VN in order to translate it. Looks like Princess Lover just can't fire up any translator enough to get him/her started.

Oops, my bad. I guess I missed the second sentence and then it became Somehow I read that as getting stuck with the sad panda. Now I'm not entirely sure why, but that's what I read and answered accordingly. I have no useful answer to the drawing question though

Works fine for me. The thing is, exhentai is really tricky to log into, but once I managed to do so, my browser remembers that I'm logged in and can use the links. There are apps and stuff to avoid the sad panda, but none of that worked for me. However I just used the regular login like explained here: http://smdc-translations.com/blog/exhentai-without-plugins-bypass-the-sad-panda/ I never posted anything on the forum, which mean my account must be old quite old. It seems to pay off to make an account and then forget all about it only to remember it again once you need an old account.

At some point we made an experiment with the Musumaker translation. I tried translating around 20 lines using TA+jParser. Afterwards RaurosFalls (the real translator) reviewed and corrected the translation. I then read the result more closely to see how well I did. Conclusion: * Hiragana knowledge isn't that important (relatively speaking). I used romaji furigana due to not being strong in hiragana * Vocabulary isn't that important due to being able to look up everything quite fast. Most of the time just hovering the mouse of a word is enough (not always) * Grammar is very important. More or less all mistakes were grammar related. The issue is that the tools provides you with the correct words, but you have to know the grammar in order to put them together correctly. Without a proper understanding of grammar, you get "Jack punch Bill", but can't tell if it is "Jack punches Bill" or "Jack is punched by Bill" or "Jack wants to punch Bill" or even the negative version of each, like "Jack didn't punch Bill". This is why I say in order to get started, the most needed skill is grammar. Don't get me wrong. The other skills are useful and needed in the long run. I'm talking about how to get to the point where you can read the first line somewhat reliable and without resorting to guesswork. Particles is usually a unique topic. However for this post I include it in what I refer to as grammar. After all it is a tool to tell what is the main object and so on, which is usually referred to as grammar. I think once the grammar has been mastered, it would make sense to switch the furigana to hiragana. It shouldn't be done too late as hiragana is important to master as well, but doing it too early distracts the focus from grammar and the learning process becomes overburdened, which in turn makes people run away screaming and they learn nothing.

I'm not sure about the language barrier. It might clash with the dialect in London (no joke). Still it could be worse. I encountered non-English speaking people in Germany The first thing, which comes to my mind is the science museum. The UK was the world in the 18th and 19th century and they started and powered the industrial revolution as well as scientific progress. That would be something, which is uniquely British. Ride the Underground (nicknamed the tube). The Metropolitan line (the black one) opened in 1863 and is not only the first underground railroad in the world, it's the only one, which figured out ventilation to successfully run steam underground. Today it's more or less just another line, but the stations reveal their age if you pay attention. It could be something to add to the list when people asked you what you did, even if you just used it for transportation. Stand on the middle of London bridge. It was the best place to see the important buildings in the 19th century and it's still a good place. Do not confuse it with tower bridge, which would also be worth a visit.

You seem to be in denial about your own identity considering how you proclaim that without anybody telling you otherwise. You know, Norway never actually declared itself independent from Denmark

I didn't take the survey because it seems a bit pointless since I'm not really using them. I really tried, but I don't like the result. They tend to make VNs less enjoyable, or perhaps not at all. Machine translations are not accurate enough and the dictionary approach takes such an effort that I get nowhere in the story. Also it usually requires running in windows mode, which also distracts me from the VN itself. I totally love Translation Aggregator though. Setting it up to use jParser, it becomes a really useful tool for reading Japanese text in general. Copying text and I get it in romaji and dictionary lookup as well. Quite useful for text documents and web pages. Sure just providing some URL to google translate is a lot easier, but the accuracy of the info you get is a lot worse. I believe TA+jParser is a good way to learn how to read Japanese. From what I have tried so far (and failed), the study guides (books and online alike) tend to focus on a bit of vocabulary, then some hiragana, then a bit of kanji, then a bit of grammar, more vocabulary and so on. The problem with this approach is that I learn a bit of hiragana, then forget it because I'm not using it and suddenly it's mandatory to continue. Often there is no real focus because you have to learn all of it. However my new plan (when I get time) is to study grammar intensively. Once I figured that out, TA+jParser should help me continue as it deals with shortcoming in kanji/hiragana and vocabulary. I will then learn those as I need/use them and with a bit of luck I will remember them. At least I will not really have the issue that I learn something and then I forget because I'm not using it in the next chapter. Time will tell if I'm right about using this approach. I have a hunch it will work much better for me than the average person though as it seems to match my systematic way of thinking. The same can be said about VNDB, at least it could before they banned a bunch of people for making the boards a very hostile place. It goes as far as VNs shouldn't be translated because they are meant to be read in Japanese and if you want to read VNs, you are supposed to train yourself to be fluent in Japanese. It also seems that if something is translated, it should be targeted at US citizens only and rewritten to match American culture. This has lead to people wanting to ban translators for using British English and harassment of people not as familiar with US culture/folklore with claims like they would not be worthy of reading VNs if they can't even adapt to something that simple. I do not use the term elitists about such people. I think of them as fanatics or fascists, which to some degree is the same thing. Fascism is a very misused word today, but ti actually mean the concept of making other people think/do the same as you. Not by arguing them, but by force to leave them no choice. Wanting to ban people for using British English not not enjoying a specific VN classifies as fascism. I was about to write that the internet is a scary place, but I will actually broaden it and say people as a whole are scary.

I do not have great confidence in any translation done by people, who can't tell the words language and font apart. That could explain a lot. Sometimes people get inside somewhere, which makes them think they know everything. They get their 15 minutes of fame by stating "I speak on behalf of ... and we will put a man on Mars next year" or similar nonsense and it's a PR nightmare when it happens. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in the VN community too. If they are actually translating into English and they are trying to do a proper job, then I feel sorry for them for getting a bad reputation based on this. Personally I will ignore it and let whatever they release speak for itself. I hope for a proper English translation rather than multiple languages. I can't remember which VN, but somebody made a English translation and one member released it as the final one when it was 100% translated and 0% QC/proofread/tested and called it the final release, not work in progress. They kicked him out, but that didn't recall the flawed patch. They did eventually release one of good quality, but somehow it's not the same when a number of people already played through with the first patch.

I do find 5 languages at once to be somewhat unrealistic. However I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. If there is a real translation project going on from Japanese to English, then other people can translate from English to other languages sort of at the same time. Alternatively they sit at the computers at the same time and really do translate into multiple languages at once because they talk about the translation line by line. I see multiple approaches how this might be possible and as long as it isn't proven to be impossible, I will assume it to be true. Assuming false with no evidence would be somewhat offensive if it turns out to be true. Having said that, I will not wait for the translation to arrive. If it suddenly shows up, then fine. If not, then I just moved on. That's my attitude towards all translation announcements, particularly if I don't know the people doing the translation. There are too many times somebody announced something, which ends up never being released to get really excited over an announcement like this. That's not the current group's fault, more like the general fault of the internet. Also I do have to say that I started by checking if it was posted on the first of April. 5 languages at once sounds like it could have been.

I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. At first it's pretty funny Next it becomes scary with human stupidity Last I started wondering how I could remind you of such stupidity I realized precisely what's wrong with the blurred image. When I focus on the screen, if something shows up in front of the screen, it is out of focus and becomes blurred. When looking at the image, my eyes/brain somehow tries to make it 3D, which mean my eyes try to focus on an object closer than the screen. Naturally this doesn't fix the blur issue and the whole image feels wrong and uncomfortable. Pixelated parts doesn't get confused with out of focus and the image stays 2D, which mean the eyes keep focusing on the screen itself, making the image much more calm.

No offense, but I actually prefer the pixelated image better than the blurred one. The pixels are sort of "that's how things are in Japan" while the blur feels like some out of focus item, which takes the attention and dominates the image in the wrong way. If time is spend decensoring an image, it should really be decensored or the time could be spend better doing other stuff. Somebody started drawing uncensored penises for Kamidori. The quality is good, but he (she?) stopped after just a few scenes because it was way too time consuming. It also contained some uncensored females. Personally I wouldn't even try to decensor anything unless it's layered or similar because I lack the skills to draw anything useful. Instead I searched sankakucomplex for musumaker and found two great looking decensored images. With a bit of copy paste, I ended up with 4 using a format and naming, which made them show up ingame. I did this fairly quickly and presumably much faster than it takes to decensor even just one image, meaning this simple approach turned out to be quite rewarding. Maybe it was dumb luck, but you have to try to see if it works. Sadly I haven't been able to figure out who actually did the decensoring and now the HD remake is announced, which naturally isn't compatible with the CG from the non-HD version.

When I saw the title, the first VN, which came to my mind was Snow Sakura. The story is decent and it's full of funny moments. It's a fairly long story, but the comedy never gets old as it never repeats itself. It keeps coming up with something brand new rather than make multiple versions of the same jokes. The exception is Kozue, who has a tendency to repeat what other people say, except she changes one hiragana, which in turn changes the meaning entirely. Those jokes really loses the play on words part in the translation though. I'm not quite sure why My Girlfriend is the President is mentioned several times. I remember it more as absurd than funny, but I guess it depends on what type of humor people prefer.

Oh yeah, that too, though the ability to hide the text window would be good enough. Quite a number of VNs hide it with right click or similar. The ability to hide is really simple from a coding point of view while moving is more complex. Also I'm not even sure I like it to move around, at least not unless there is a reset position feature.

For me the most important part of the UI is the text itself. The reason is when I read a VN, I sit back, relax and do in fact read the text. Some VNs have less than perfect font/size/color and it strains the eyes, which makes me quit reading prematurely. This mean the text should look calm somehow with enough contrast to make it readable and the colors should match too in order to provide the calm for the eyes text effect. The ability to remove screen flashes/shaking/whatever. Some people may like them, but I don't. This includes all sorts of fancy stuff to do to the choice buttons, like shaking and using a timer. I think the purpose is to give the reader the feeling or urgency to match the story, but it gives me the sense of being annoyed enough to drop the VN. What other mentioned already (backlog, fast forward to next choice, replay voice etc). Perhaps even assign a hotkey for each, making the VN fully controllable without using the mouse at all. It would be awesome if you go all the way and allow changing the hotkeys. That would also prevent any possible issue with foreign keyboards. Speaking as a programmer, UI is actually one of the hardest tasks. Often programming tasks are fairly strait forward, like store all strings printed on the screen to allow the backlog to access them, or replay voice plays an audio file. UI is less specific and less standard solution. Instead it should look good and simple, provide all the needed features and be intuitive. "look good" and "intuitive" is not something you can answer with math or algorithms and the answer varies from person to person. For this very reason I hate UI designing.

Musumaker isn't dead and there is a 15% patch out. Even better, the common route is done (though not released yet), meaning 26.6%-31% has been translated (precise number depends on counting method and QC state). There is a HD remake announced, but since it isn't released yet, support for that one is currently unknown. http://forums.fuwanovel.net/topic/12348-musumaker-translation-project-common-route-100-translated/

I don't see a problem in the culture gap. If it is a problem, then "fix" it with translation notes. If you read it in Japanese, you asked for issues if you don't get the culture. I once read a thread at VNDB regarding this topic. It ended in a flamewar between "keep it Japanese" and "rewrite into match American culture or people will not understand it". The pro Americans claimed ownership of English and any English reading person who wasn't from America was declared as being wrong and insignificant. Unsurprisingly one of those pro-Americans has also made the statement that "(some translator group, I forgot which one) should be banned from translating because they use British English". That guy managed to get himself banned from VNDB though, but not for those statements. Personally I would prefer the culture in a VN to be the culture it was written to match. Rewriting your own concepts into a translation is a big no-no*. This mean a Japanese VN should have Japanese culture and an English VN could easily have English/American culture. It's not the culture itself, which is the issue, but rather the rewrite, which ruins everything it touches. I have yet to see a strait to English VN, which I like as much as those, which were originally Japanese, but I think that's more a writer quality issue than the culture. To be fair, I'm not too happy about the majority of the Japanese ones either. I do really love some though. Otherwise I wouldn't be here * jokes like play on words are hard to translate. This mean the "correctness" of a translation could be accepted as less accurate if it doesn't alter the overall meaning. Translators could even add jokes if it matches the VN, but care would have to be taken when doing something like that as it should never alter the mood/culture/story or anything like that.

As I read it, the goal isn't to move to a new server software, but rather to get something, which can be backed up easily and have minimal risk of data loss. Secondary goals are low maintenance and user friendliness/user features. If the current software doesn't live up to the requirements, then fix it or find some new software, which does. If it is decided to move to new software, then copy the server to some local server, convert it and check the result. If it breaks stuff, delete it and start over. Repeat until you get it right. Once you know how to do it, backup the server and switch the software. If it unexpectedly breaks stuff, you still have the backup you can restore. A semi related note on this: quite a number of servers today are virtual servers and with good reason. You can back up the entire HD disk image, run whatever update you want and if it breaks, you can restore the old HD by simply copying a single (big) file. Having the entire server on a disk image also mean it can be copied to other servers if needed. Chances are that the server is already a virtual server unless there is a dedicated server hardware, which is paid to not run anything else. I feel a bit weird saying this as "the new guy". I hate when people show up out of nowhere and tell how to do something and demand it to be done that way (usually ignoring that there is a reason why it isn't so already). I will not demand anything and have tried to be more objective about this post. Still I would like to request not giving up just because of one failed attempt at some point. It is almost to be expected that the first attempt fails, which is why you should sandbox your tests until you get something working. If I have to say my opinion on this matter, then I would say I would prefer different forum software. I hate the post comment interface with all the mandatory mouseclicks and while it is supposed to be intuitive, I get lost in it and still haven't figured out how to make posts look like I want. However this isn't a critical issue. The dataloss is and if the current software has an unfixable design flaw, which makes it prone to dataloss, then I strongly wish for something better.

Back in the 60s, plenty of people loved The Beatles. Outside the English natively speaking countries the vast majority of the fans didn't understand a word of the lyrics, but this has never been seen as weird. Based on that, I don't see why it should be weird for English speaking people to listen to non-English music without understanding it. Personally I don't understand the lyrics in new songs, regardless of language due to background "noise". If I understand the lyrics, I generally don't get anything meaningful from them anyway. "I love this girl. She is wonderful....", well good for you. I generally stick to calm instrumental music. I like some traditional Japanese music (or classical sounding), not because it's Japanese, but because of how it sounds and the west never produced anything like that. The same goes for traditional Chinese music. It works very well for low/mid volume background music when I work on something, like VN scripts or programming. Having said that, it's not like I don't like music with lyrics. Weird Al is great, but it's the sort of music/music videos where you have to pay attention, which mean it works much worse as background music.

Post it in this thread I can try. If it's hard to see, the best option might be to make multiple people try to verify. One person can miss something, but the risk that 3 people miss the same mistake is not that great. This mean getting others to verify is not a replacement for checking yourself.

I viewed it at 300% and the problem was suddenly not that serious anymore. I know it sounds simple, but I was surprised at how clear and readable it looks when scaled up. Much better than text usually looks when upscaled. I think the only way to go is to use OCR, but assume it to make mistakes, which mean you have to verify every single kanji it provides, as even minor mistakes in this step will be horrible later on. Looking at an upscaled png would be helpful for this task. Omnipage's OCR engine would rule for a task like this, but sadly it cost $150 It doesn't look like they have "free for non-commercial use" or student discount or anything, making it out of reach. Still I mention it because it might be available at school or work (it was to me once). Scanning this image in public shouldn't be a big deal. It's not even close to being eroge or anything like that. For the unlucky of us, there is no real choice other than to use the free OCR, even if it isn't as good.