tymmur

I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Just ask Apple. Over the years they have made products, which didn't match any existing markets. Sometimes it went poorly (like the Newton) and sometimes it went well and sort of created the market for the product (iTunes Store, iPhone, computers small enough to put on a table, home computers with floppy drives, CDs etc). I would say VNs are sort of the same thing. They can't really get into an existing market, but it has a chance of making a market of its own.
 
With VNs trying to create a new market, it certainly have to rely on good reputation and type. Sadly I feel like VNs suffer from what happened to the gaming industry in the 80s. Some people managed to make great games and then Wall Street went in to get easy money and released garbage. It was a disaster because great quality and garbage got mixed together. The poor quality companies died, but so did some good ones because selling a $30 game is hard when the shop has a barrel of $5 games. Even if they were of worse quality, people went for 6 games for the price of 1. There is a number of great VNs out there, but there is certainly also quite a lot of garbage, which isn't worth the money or time. Money isn't the greatest in VNs, but that haven't stopped some companies from mass releasing cheap VNs with little or no contents. While there is a market for both, it does mean that somebody plays a good VN, tells somebody else about it and the other person goes "I'm not sure about this thing. I will pick a cheaper one first to see what it is" and then the result is a dropped VN and no more VNs for that person.
 
I think the quality/price issue might be the biggest issue for VNs becoming popular. There is also the Rapelay issue, which told people what products from Japan is all about. It doesn't matter what the truth is. Whenever a VN tries to make it into the general market, people "knowing it all" warns about it because it's one of those evil things. Clearly it's much better to play a game where you shoot everybody.

I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Just ask Apple. Over the years they have made products, which didn't match any existing markets. Sometimes it went poorly (like the Newton) and sometimes it went well and sort of created the market for the product (iTunes Store, iPhone, computers small enough to put on a table, home computers with floppy drives, CDs etc). I would say VNs are sort of the same thing. They can't really get into an existing market, but it has a chance of making a market of its own.
 
With VNs trying to create a new market, it certainly have to rely on good reputation and type. Sadly I feel like VNs suffer from what happened to the gaming industry in the 80s. Some people managed to make great games and then Wall Street went in to get easy money and released garbage. It was a disaster because great quality and garbage got mixed together. The poor quality companies died, but so did some good ones because selling a $30 game is hard when the shop has a barrel of $5 games. Even if they were of worse quality, people went for 6 games for the price of 1. There is a number of great VNs out there, but there is certainly also quite a lot of garbage, which isn't worth the money or time. Money isn't the greatest in VNs, but that haven't stopped some companies from mass releasing cheap VNs with little or no contents. While there is a market for both, it does mean that somebody plays a good VN, tells somebody else about it and the other person goes "I'm not sure about this thing. I will pick a cheaper one first to see what it is" and then the result is a dropped VN and no more VNs for that person.
 
I think the quality/price issue might be the biggest issue for VNs becoming popular. There is also the Rapelay issue, which told people what products from Japan is all about. It doesn't matter what the truth is. Whenever a VN tries to make it into the general market, people "knowing it all" warns about it because it's one of those evil things. Clearly it's much better to play a game where you shoot everybody.

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 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 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 have done some thinking about what to do regarding moving the translation to a new script and has come up with a plan. We should have some text only version of each script file where just the text is present. That is Japanese line and then on the next line the translation. Last is a blank line to tell the lines apart. This should be a hybrid, meaning it contains the lines from both versions and identical lines are merged if possible. Naturally this would require some sort of scripting or it would take ages to make.
 
Translator(s) can then translate simply to editing that file. This will make it clean and not give translators access to code (like sprite changing), reducing the risk of translator introduced bugs due to carelessness.
 
When the translation should be used, a script reads the file and then inserts it back into the script files. Using two different scripts or one script with two different start arguments, it would be possible to use the same translation in both versions. Keeping the old version "alive" makes sense as the remake has higher system requirements and it would likely not require much more work than just moving the translation. Creating a usable game script using a perl script is not really different from the current setup where a perl script ensures the encoding and similar to be correct.
 
This should work if the lines are mostly the same and I assume they will be. Rewriting all the lines would require redoing all the voice files, which mean there is a compelling financial reason not to change the lines too much. Translating the remake also require the ability to extract and insert files in the remake engine. Time will tell if that turns out to be a problem. The wait for the remake seems awfully long when you want to play it. It seems even longer when speculating on how to handle the engine for a translation project.

I have done some thinking about what to do regarding moving the translation to a new script and has come up with a plan. We should have some text only version of each script file where just the text is present. That is Japanese line and then on the next line the translation. Last is a blank line to tell the lines apart. This should be a hybrid, meaning it contains the lines from both versions and identical lines are merged if possible. Naturally this would require some sort of scripting or it would take ages to make.
 
Translator(s) can then translate simply to editing that file. This will make it clean and not give translators access to code (like sprite changing), reducing the risk of translator introduced bugs due to carelessness.
 
When the translation should be used, a script reads the file and then inserts it back into the script files. Using two different scripts or one script with two different start arguments, it would be possible to use the same translation in both versions. Keeping the old version "alive" makes sense as the remake has higher system requirements and it would likely not require much more work than just moving the translation. Creating a usable game script using a perl script is not really different from the current setup where a perl script ensures the encoding and similar to be correct.
 
This should work if the lines are mostly the same and I assume they will be. Rewriting all the lines would require redoing all the voice files, which mean there is a compelling financial reason not to change the lines too much. Translating the remake also require the ability to extract and insert files in the remake engine. Time will tell if that turns out to be a problem. The wait for the remake seems awfully long when you want to play it. It seems even longer when speculating on how to handle the engine for a translation project.

I have done some thinking about what to do regarding moving the translation to a new script and has come up with a plan. We should have some text only version of each script file where just the text is present. That is Japanese line and then on the next line the translation. Last is a blank line to tell the lines apart. This should be a hybrid, meaning it contains the lines from both versions and identical lines are merged if possible. Naturally this would require some sort of scripting or it would take ages to make.
 
Translator(s) can then translate simply to editing that file. This will make it clean and not give translators access to code (like sprite changing), reducing the risk of translator introduced bugs due to carelessness.
 
When the translation should be used, a script reads the file and then inserts it back into the script files. Using two different scripts or one script with two different start arguments, it would be possible to use the same translation in both versions. Keeping the old version "alive" makes sense as the remake has higher system requirements and it would likely not require much more work than just moving the translation. Creating a usable game script using a perl script is not really different from the current setup where a perl script ensures the encoding and similar to be correct.
 
This should work if the lines are mostly the same and I assume they will be. Rewriting all the lines would require redoing all the voice files, which mean there is a compelling financial reason not to change the lines too much. Translating the remake also require the ability to extract and insert files in the remake engine. Time will tell if that turns out to be a problem. The wait for the remake seems awfully long when you want to play it. It seems even longer when speculating on how to handle the engine for a translation project.

Looks like MusumakerHD is announced http://digitalcute.com/digitalcute/musumakerhd
 
720p graphics, better training animation and more contents (or whatever they add. Haven't quite figured it out) sounds great, but with a new script, the existing translation can't be copied. In a best case scenario I can write a perl script to look up the lines and then paste them into the new script where the Japanese line haven't been changed, but that might require a bit of luck. All the modified graphics will have to be redone. I'm not 100% sure what I should think about this. It's so great and bad at the same time.
 
Naturally there is technically nothing preventing us from sticking to the current version, but..... I want the HD version with the extra content.

Looks like MusumakerHD is announced http://digitalcute.com/digitalcute/musumakerhd
 
720p graphics, better training animation and more contents (or whatever they add. Haven't quite figured it out) sounds great, but with a new script, the existing translation can't be copied. In a best case scenario I can write a perl script to look up the lines and then paste them into the new script where the Japanese line haven't been changed, but that might require a bit of luck. All the modified graphics will have to be redone. I'm not 100% sure what I should think about this. It's so great and bad at the same time.
 
Naturally there is technically nothing preventing us from sticking to the current version, but..... I want the HD version with the extra content.

Looks like MusumakerHD is announced http://digitalcute.com/digitalcute/musumakerhd
 
720p graphics, better training animation and more contents (or whatever they add. Haven't quite figured it out) sounds great, but with a new script, the existing translation can't be copied. In a best case scenario I can write a perl script to look up the lines and then paste them into the new script where the Japanese line haven't been changed, but that might require a bit of luck. All the modified graphics will have to be redone. I'm not 100% sure what I should think about this. It's so great and bad at the same time.
 
Naturally there is technically nothing preventing us from sticking to the current version, but..... I want the HD version with the extra content.

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.

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.