2024-07-21

Comments

This release is long overdue.

Although it could be seen that the majority of its large features since ONScripter-EN's revival have already been carried out, this release carries the major feature of variable screen resolutions, allowing for games to present multiple resolution options to players and scale and position assets, text, and menus accordingly. In addition, it features a range of hardening and bug fixes which have been implemented over the past year or so, including the much appreciated help of Sean McGovern in these changes.

And, looking forward, there is still much to be done in terms of features as well as QoL and bugfixes; just check the BUGS file if you don't believe me! Among the premier planned features is the ability for game creators to implement real bold and italics, as well as potentially font switching, which could be used to bring a whole new depth to atmospheric titles. Besides that, UTF-8 mode still needs a good deal of testing and polishing, and I am already aware of misalignments of menus when using proportional fonts, which should be fixed when font switching is first implemented internally, whenever that happens.

And ONScripter-EN is no longer a piece of software on life support, but being actively used in new projects! Besides its use in a re-release of Tsukihime and a few solo indie game creators dropping by the Discord server for advice, ONScripter-EN has been utilised by the new novel game localisation and archival group eien in one - and soon to be two - projects aiming to provide plug-and-play dual-language (Japanese and English) versions of near-dead novel games originally made using NScripter. You can read more about eien in a Fuwanovel interview here.

And so with that news of ONScripter-EN's new-found real-world applications for not just players but new developers also, I present to you our new release 2024-07-21, code name Senbei!

2023-06-28

Comments

This is the first release with UTF-8 and proportional font support! There are still some issues which need sorting, but it's pretty stable, and in my testing, UTF-8 support works well and proportional font support works surprisingly well without making changes to the script for games designed for monospaced fonts. There is some information about these changes in the README.md

This release introduces a bugfix for the ;gameid directive, although this only matters for if you've been using recent builds of ONScripter-EN, and it doesn't apply to games using a game.id file. Otherwise, you should make a copy of your save data before using this new version, and put it in the save folder given at startup (On windows, see the files in %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\ONScripter-EN for the terminal output).

The release codename "turducken" was chosen due to this release containing such a mashup of changes.

How to try out proportional fonts in old games

1. Enable UTF-8/proportional mode

• Change the script's name as follows to enable UTF-8/proportional mode:
  • 0.txt -> 0.utf
  • nscript.dat -> pscript.dat

2. Replace the font

• Delete the old font (likely default.ttf) from the game's directory
• Place a proportional font into the game's directory, called "default" with one of the following extensions:
  • .ttf
  • .otf
  • .ttc
  • .otc
• If you don't know which font to use, I recommend Giga Sans. If you do use it, remember to rename it to "default.otf".

3. Ensure that upscaling is not active

• Upscaling, as achieved through the window-width option of ons.cfg, is known to be buggy as of now.
• Open ons.cfg (if present - if not, ignore this step)
• If there is a line reading window-width=XXX, delete the whole line

4. Run the new onscripter-en binary as normal!

Changes

• UTF-8 script suport
• Proportional font support
• Some of the options listed by --help now only show on their supported operating systems
• Relatively major bugfix for the ;gameid directive

2023-06-05

Comments

In terms of the user experience, the main change is that you can now use .otf, .otc, and .ttc fonts in addition to the original .ttf!
Also, there are now fallback fonts for Windows (MS Gothic) (requires Vista +) and MacOS (Hiragino Maru Gothic).
Since the last release, we have begun updating the API reference with new information, changes, and examples! Check it out here!

Changes

• OTF, OTC and TTC font support
• Fallback fonts for Windows and MacOS
• More code brought in from onani relating to UTF-8 support - this includes the Encoding class, UTF-8-related glyph conversion functions, and other such utility functions
• freetype-config has been replaced by a hand-written shell script, because it's not generating one during the configure stage for some reason and the old fix would very likely only work for me
• The BUGS file now has an index since it has sort of turned into a general-purpose development tracker, also including things which need to be added to the API documentation

2023-04-17

Comments

Mostly just changes to select when used in conjunction with rgosub - now you can safely use a custom rmenu subroutine without the risk of the choice being skipped.

Changes

• New fix for select command, allowing it to use rgosub-defined rmenus
• New fix for select + rgosub, meaning that nested calls to the rgosub label no longer cause the select to be skipped

2023-04-11

Comments

Linux now has pop-up message boxes for the yesnobox and okcancelbox commands, to a point where I'm happy with their implementation and stability.

Binary only provided for Linux since nothing changed in the Windows builds.

Changes

• Pop-up message boxes for Linux

2023-04-09

Comments

There are no real changes to the user experience, however some things have been cleaned up under the hood. There are also now Windows builds and build instructions, courtesy of Seung Park.
The numbering scheme for releases (when using the -v option) is slightly off, but the next time I publish a release I'll make sure they're all right.

Changes

• Minor bugfixes, may improve portability
• Changed working of rmenu bug fix to be easier to work with
• Code cleanup around where I was changing resolution-setting
• 32- and 64-bit Windows binaries and build instructions

2023-02-25

Comments

This is the first version since I started working on this project that I would call "stable". The changes are just bugfixes for bugs I knew about in the first release, relating to rmenu functionality during choice selections.

Changes

• Changed how the fix for rmenu functionality during select command works to save the game's state at the beginning of that page of text, instead of directly before the choice
• Ironed out bugs surrounding rmenu functionality during select command to allow loading of saves, script resets etc.
• A little more dependency slimming

2023-02-20

Comments

This is my first release since I started working on ONScripter-EN. I think it's safe to say that this release is quite buggy, and probably won't build on much without tweaks, but I've done a lot of updating work and you must add more before you can refine it back.

In terms of what I plan to do with this, I'm certainly going to be bugfixing a lot and I want to get a Windows build working, which from my first attempt seems like it'll take a while. I suppose I might as well fix bugs before getting a build working.

I might have considered looking into autotools, but that would have been a whole other can of worms and as long as I can get a somewhat reproducible method to build on Windows and Linux (and anything else that isn't a nightmare to maintain) I'm willing to drag out this zombie of a build system for as long as it'll go. At least for the time being, I have a fairly stable Linux build.

Changes

• Commands ported from ONScripter: ;$, autosaveoff, savepoint, getbgmvol, getmp3vol, getsevol, getvoicevol
  • This includes support for custom resolutions
• Hacky fix to allow saving game within choice selection
• Dependencies updated to latest versions (but they still need stripping back like before)