/jp/ Project

We have to pick a VN engine for our VN. Possible VN engines include:
*ONScripter (Narcissu, True Remembrance): Really easy to use but simple VN engine. Not sure if we can get a higher resolution than 640x480 with this.
*Ren'Py (no notable games AFAIK): Seems easy to use and pretty good.
*Kirikiri (Fate/stay night): I don't get this thing at all, and it's in Japanese, but it seems to be capable of pure awesome, as shown by Fate/stay night. Dahdah, our Lead Engineer, seems to know how it works, though.

Posting screenshots here would be nice, so people could compare

Note that not which engine you use, but how you use the engine is most decisive for how your VN looks.

Narcissu (ONScripter):


Your average Ren'Py game (Ren'Py):

(No idea which one it is.)

Fate/stay night (Kirikiri):


Chaos;Head (Nitro+ v2):

I'd love to use this one, but that would be illegal. Nitro+ engine isn't free, and only for Nitro+ VNs.

Yeah, Ren'Py kind of looks gay in comparison as many people who use it aren't experienced programmers, but one can make a nice custom interface with it (O3 comes to mind of course).

oh come on you did NOT have to quote that

personal opinion:
1. ONScripter
2. Kirikiri
3. Ren'Py

OnScripter looks classy, movie-ish, which is fitting for a murder/mystery VN.

God this place is full of retards. You are seriously choosing an engine by a screenshot?

Protip: A screenshot tells you exactly one thing, how good the artist of the game you took it from is.
Good thing I saw this thread before offering my help.

It's possible. You can set it to 800x600 by adding this at the very top of the 0.txt file:

;mode800


I vote for ONScripter, though with what we're doing, it will probably all look the same regardless of which engine we use.

You're judging VN engines from screenshots?

Seriously?

*facepalm*
It doesn't.
ONScripter can also look like a regular visual novel, and like a text-overlaid visual novel. Ren'Py and Kirikiri can also look classy and movie-ish. Like I said, it's not which engine you use, it's what you do with it that decides how the VN looks.

Obviously untrue, just look at the screenshots! EVERYBODY knows that Ren'Py will automatically make your art look like it was drawn by a third-rate weeaboo from dA, while using ONScripter really makes you Japanese! Also, since Tsukihime > FSN, obviously ONscripter > KiriKiri amirite.

According to the poll, ONScripter is the most popular choice. So, if there aren't any objections against ONScripter, we'll use that.

Wow I lol'd hard.

On a serious note, Ren'py isn't bad... it's just that...Python...bleh...

Voting from screenshot or popularity is a bad idea. It should be decided by:

1) Functionality we want.
2) Favor of our Lead Engineer
3) ...probably ease of use?

Well, since a couple of people with half a clue or more are here now, here's a bunch of things about the three engines. Keep in mind that the actual final decision should be mostly left to the person that will end up doing the actual work, but they may or may not know all three engines well, so they might benefit from this.

ONScripter
Pro:
* Cross-platform (even supported on PSP)
* ... that's it, basically.
* Oh wait, performance is decent. Not that that matters, since you can't so much with it anyway.
* For the same reason, you'll master it completely in days.

Con:
* Fragile and buggy
* Extremely limited feature set. Three fixed positions for sprites? Come on.
* Messy and awkward scripting language. It's like QBasic without the charm.
* Bad expandibility. If you want to add anything, you'll have to write a plugin. Since I know what a mess the source code is, I don't want to find out how bad the API is.
* Hackneyed support for western languages. Only ONSlaught supports Unicode, and only PONscripter supports proportianal text. You knew that, right?

KiriKiri
Pro:
* Modern, rich feature set
* Much of the "userland" (the VN framework) is written in a modern, Java-ish scripting language.
* Good performance

Con:
* Disregard for western text. It has no problems with UTF-16LE, but it does not do word-wrapping. Your only recourse it to use insani's break-preparser, which is a nuisance at best.
* Completely Japanese development environment. Not only is there no English documentation, but the various helper programs you need are 100% Japanese as well.
* Windows only. This is odd, since it's GPL, but that's the way it is.
* Does not run properly on non-Japanese locales. It can be made to run on them at all by manually converting all engine scripts to Unicode, but last I tried it still choked if the user has no support for Asian languages installed.
* The scripting language (TJS) is rather technical, and it's exclusive to KK2. Not that big of a deal since it's not exactly horribly complicated either, but it is markedly more complex in day-to-day affairs than both ONS and Ren'Py.

Ren'Py
Pros:
* Cross-platform for major desktop OSs.
* Scripting language is dead simple to the point of brainlessness.
* Highly expendable in a standard programming language. Almost all of it is written in Python, and you can use unlimited inline Python as well.
* Active and helpful community.

Cons:
* Develops performance issues at a high level.
* Advanced functionality is prone to be buggy because hardly anyone uses it.
* The community is active and helpful, but also full of some of the most horrible weeaboos and clueless people you'll find on the internet.

CONCLUSION
If you just want to do do a simple game, you aren't going absolutely wrong with any of them. However, since you may decide to get elaborate in this project or a later one (when you would benefit from prior experience), why would you choose an engine that does not offer that choice for no real gain in ease of use? That rules out ONScripter right there. Really, the only appeal ONScripter has is nostalgia (wtf why), prior experience (get out before you get any, you'll thank me later), fanboyism of particular games made with it (stupid) and the ability to translate existing games (does not apply here).
KiriKiri and Ren'Py are pretty much even as far as functionality goes. Ren'Py has its own problems, but performance and bugginess will not be an issue until you start going wild with really advanced functionality, mostly on a level that KK2 doesn't even offer to begin with.
However, there are some rather hefty arguments against KK2, even if you happen to be fluent in Japanese. You are limiting your audience to people running Windows with support for Asian languages. You WILL curse at the lack of wordwrapping. Is that worth not being lumped in with the Ren'Py crowd? It's your choice.

You can also wait until KK3 comes out (which promises multiplatform capabilities at least), but it's anyone's guess how well it will support English developers, and it's not even really on the horizon yet.

Well, good sir, those are much appreciated and badly needed insights into the three engines.

I agree with him that it should be our Engineer who picks our engine, since he'll be the one to be doing the stuff anywhere near associated to the engine anyway...

Indeed, thanks a lot for the detailed explanation.

I agree. We need Dahdah to read these arguments and give his opinon about this stuff.

np, just don't say KS never did nuthin' for ya.

Thanks, your post is pretty much accurate. Don't worry, please decide yourselves.

I already know how to use KiriKiri and ONScripter. I haven't worked with Ren'py but I'm willing to learn it too if you guys decide on that one.

KiriKiri has the best functionality, but as said, it has the Japanese Locale problem. Did you try changing to Unicode the System scripts too, right? Not only scenario ones.

ONScripter, yeah the scripting is fugly, but it's simple as hell, I just learned it yesterday and I'm already able to do menus, scenarios and routes... but it's not very customizable. Although fits better a simple project than KiriKiri.

Ren'py, I haven't worked with it but it seems it's pretty customizable and has good functionality; I'm still willing to learn this SDK.

Don't worry, decide for yourselves.

You'll be the one that turns our story, art and music into a visual novel. If you can make it more awesome with engine X than with engine Y, then I really think it would be best if we'd pick the engine you can work best with.

Ok, if you put it that way, here's how I look at it:

ONScripter: Simple, But I think we'll be missing a few functions.
Kirikiri: However, we'll be doing the VN in English...
Ren'Py: Somewhere in between ONScripter and KiriKiri? I'd hit it.

A small update: I got KiriKiri to work today without AppLocale or Japanese non-unicode (changing EVERY script to UTF-16; thanks to Anon1 for pointing me to the wiki article explaining it).

I was checking Ren'py just now, and I thought it was pretty good...except for the menus lol. For a simple project it's good though!