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 ...