The ONScripter Thread -- PLEASE READ

[gp32]

As we draw near to the beginning of al|together 2006, many of you have chosen your pieces. I know that the majority of you have chosen pieces that run on NScripter, thinking that it will make things significantly easier. While this is in one sense true, in another sense there are many things that ONScripter does slightly differently from NScripter -- and enough of these things, as Iriliane found out firsthand, can cause all sorts of Random Weirdness (tm) to appear to occur.

If you are a translator who has taken on an NScripter-based piece, and if you plan on using ONScripter, you should at this point download ONScripter 20060331-exp (available here), stick the contents in the same directory as the piece you're trying to translate, and take the piece for a whirl. Don't just stop at the title screen -- play it through the entire way, and do some of the behaviors that a normal player does -- saving the game, loading the game, resetting to the main menu -- and see if things work.

Furthermore, there are a bunch of other issues you will need to deal with:
- If you are doing a piece that has MIDI music, that needs to be rendered out as MP3's or OGG's, as currently ONScripter crashes in Mac OS X after playing through a looped MIDI once. Obviously, this is not good. Obviously, I'm going after this bug. But for now, you need to prerender the music.
- Beware WAV files that are actually MP3 files with WAV headers. These are more common than you'd think -- when ONScripter seems not to be playing music, or not playing voices, that's the first thing you should check.
- There are currently issues with the "timer" series of commands that can cause all sorts of random weirdness (again, a problem that Iriliane bumped into), but these can usually be worked around in a trivial fashion.

There are undoubtedly others, as well.

At this point, I am offering my technical services to any translator who is participating in al|together 2006 with an NScripter-based piece; play through the piece you'll be translating, make sure you get all the endings, note any and all weirdness that occurs. Then contact me via this thread, and we'll make sure we have your piece in shape and ready for translation before al|together 2006 begins.

It is crucial that you contact me now, as I am not as busy as I most likely will be during the festival.

So ladies and gentlemen, take off every ONScripter!

For great debug ...

[gp32]

onscripter-20060621-insani has been released. This is the official al|together 2006 reference build. Please begin testing your chosen projects with it.

[gp32]

onscripter-20060707-insani has been released. This is a Mac OS X-only build that addresses a critical bug in Ogg Vorbis handling on big-endian platforms -- there are no other changes, so all other platforms should continue using the 20060621 AT2K6 reference build.

[gp32]

A build of SARDec -- a tool for decompiling .sar archives -- is now up at nscripter.insani.org.

[satsu]

It looks like "The world to reverse." uses a plug-in not supported by onscripter to produce a scratchy old film effect for "hallucinate", one of the two stories. Any hope of it being supported?

[Haeleth]

Yes, we can probably arrange something; I don't know offhand if ONScripter supports any form of plugin, but a custom build with the effect should be quite feasible.

[gp32]

onscripter-20060722-insani has been released. This directly supersedes the 20060621 AT2K6 reference build for all platforms. Significantly, the !d, !s, !sd, !w, #colorcode, and / as newline ignore classes of commands now work properly in conjunction with the ` 1-byte-character keyword. Also, some issues with volume control have been fixed. Please read the changelog for more details, and please especially note the second known issue.

Yes, we can probably arrange something; I don't know offhand if ONScripter supports any form of plugin, but a custom build with the effect should be quite feasible.

ONScripter has no plugin architecture in place, so you're probably going to have to go the custom build route.

[gp32]

onscripter-20060723-insani has been released. This build incorporates a large number of improvements, including a greatly improved skip mode system as well as a totally rewritten 1-byte-character linewrap algorithm. This directly supersedes the 20060722 build; furthermore, barring any critical bugs, this will be the stable reference build for the rest of the AT2K6 period.

See also the new NScripter Command Reference entry on the backquote syntax. Now you can't say that it's not documented somewhere :p

[gp32]

onscripter-20060724-insani has been released. This is a bugfix release, and is the last one planned for the AT2K6 period.

Edit: it has come to my attention that some people are seeing strange behaviors in skip mode. This happens when you use both 2-byte and 1-byte characters in the same script -- so make sure that you're only using 1-byte characters. This means you cannot use Japanese punctuation, among other things. This also means that you'll only be able to do limited playtesting until you've completely translated 0.txt.