Tsukihime: And Other Visual Novels

[Robborboy]

What is a visual novel?
A visual novel is essentially a book, with pictures and music. They are VERY simmilar to "choose your own adventure" books. But a lot more often than not they have much deeper stories anc character development.
They come in two primary formats. The technical names escape me right now, but one has a text box at the bottom of the screen for reading, the other has the text across the entire screen.

How does it work?
Pretty much all that is required of the player is read the page, click to move to the next page, then click a choice when the player reaches it.

So, being a player of visual novels, and seeing the king of stories they have make me wonder: "Why not have it with me to play on the go?"

If any of you have ever played them, you know damn well what I am talking about. Especially the select few like Tsukihime, and Umineko.

Some fan has had the bright idea of porting them to the DS, so, why not the Zune? It would be a great way to get story oriented content on it.

The only potential problem I see is a "save" system. I'm unsure if anyone has successfully implemented one on any version, but if so all the more better.

If anyone would like to take up this task, I will provide help where ever I can, be it my personal copy of the game, or remastered soundtracks.

NOTE: Some VNs contain adult content.

EDIT: This post was written with the Zune HD in mind.
EDIT: Revised to meet guidelines of requests.

[badmoodguy88]

There are tools to rip text from a game as it is running.
Translation Aggregator v0.2.5 - HongFire Anime Network
AGTHTUTORIAL
That is the only feasible way of doing this.
Next you are going to need to use some batch text editing (replace all) and clean up that text and sort them into short (zune horizontal screen length)
lines of text.

This is one of the first ideas I played with just for myself, but you don't realize just how much text goes into one of these thing until you try it. I did 183 game message sized pages before I gave up. I did not even get to a condition branch.
But even more laborious than ripping the text is getting photos of the backgrounds and individual people so you can paste them together in game and save a bit of space. Photo editing is not my strong suit but a careful cut and paste (along with a bit of image resizing) is not that hard. The text ripping is not hard either... both are just time consuming.

Condition branching for a visual novel should be really easy. There may be many choices but usually only a few have any real effect other than the immediate dialogue. A walk through of the game to show you what all the branches of the game are.

Personally I would recommend porting a noncommercial game with the authors permission. There are a lot of independent games out there made with this and that visual novel maker and some of them might even help you in a conversion by saving you the trouble of ripping the text, graphics and sound from the game. Plus any thing independent is not going to be super huge.

If you really want a commercial game do it for your own use but don't release it. No really don't do it. You could get in serious trouble.

oh yeah and doing saves will be easy
It is a really tricky piece of code but you can purity much just copy and paste it and then change the name of the save file and all the data that gets shoved in it. All you would need to save is a few variables and total game time if you want to get fancy.

I've spent 3 or 4 hours polishing up the attempt I made at this kind of game.
It has room for 0-99 'pages' of text. to make it do more copy the spots that need updating into word pad and do replace all on something like this.

case 90: for (int i = 0; i < Lines.Length; i++) { Text[i] = Text90[i]; } break;

"case "
to
"case 1"
so that 10-99 becomes 110-199


here is the program
http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/ope...tml#post436680