Nscripter

The original NScripter was only available for Microsoft Windows and only supported Japanese. Therefore, several clones were written. The most popular was ONScripter, an open source engine based on the SDL graphics library. Thanks to ONScripter, users now have the opportunity to play games and novels created on the NScripter engine on other platforms. In particular, there are ONScripter ports for Mac OS X , Linux , Sega Dreamcast , Sony Playstation 3 , Sharp Zaurus , Nintendo DS , PlayStation Portable and Apple iPhone .

Since ONScripter, being a purebred clone, inherited the same shortcomings as its “grandparent”, patches were developed by an English-speaking group of fan translators called insani , adding support for 1-byte characters along with Shift-JIS, as well as correct line breaks (function was absent because in Japanese there are no hyphenations as such), which subsequently entered the official ONScripter distribution. Despite this, the group continued to maintain its own branch, called ONScripter-En. In 2006, insani transferred the development of the Peter “Haeleth” Jolly branch.

In 2006, work began on ONScripter 's unicode-oriented branch, called Proportional ONScripter, or simply PONScripter. Unlike ONScripter, Proportional ONScripter supports scripts encoded in UTF-8 format, as well as many additional features, including:

• various styles of text - italics, underlined, crossed out, etc.
• connection of up to 8 different font files (system ones are still not supported)
• no restrictions on the font format: raster, OpenType, etc. are supported.
• proportional fonts along with full-width and monospaced fonts (hence the name of the branch)
• interface string localization

All this made it possible to translate short stories originally released on the nScripter engine into all languages ​​of the world, including Russian.

At the end of 2009, the developer changed on the English branch of ONScripter-En and Proportional ONScripter. It was Mion, the head of the fan-made localization group Sonozaki Futago-tachi, who at one time released a translation of the novella, the original source Higurashi no Naku Koro ni .

This is a small patch modification that adds support for scripts encoded in Windows-1251 instead of Shift-JIS, which is used in the original version of the original ONScripter-En branch.

At the beginning of 2009 it was written as an alternative to ONScripter. Partially includes the capabilities of Proportional ONScripter, as well as a large list of supported encodings for scripts along with Shift-JIS and UTF-8. It also allows you to stretch a low-resolution image to full-screen, without changing the screen resolution itself. At the time of this writing, compatibility with existing short stories is low, and a number of necessary functions are missing.

ONScripter-En was used in almost all English-language localizations of nScripter novels. Due to the fact that Naoki Takahashi added support for 1-byte text only in the latest version of his engine, a potential translation audience was missed.

Proportional ONScripter was used in Russian-language localizations of the free short short stories Tokoyo no Hoshizora , Natsu no Hi no Resonance , Negaeba Kitto , in the official French version of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni , as well as in several unofficial ports of commercial short stories.

ONSlaught was used in the Russian-language localization of Tsukihime .

An example of a simple “program” for the nScripter environment outputting “Hello, world!”

  * define

 game

 * start
 setwindow 26,344,26,5,22,22,0,0,0,1,1,1, # 2266BB, 0,320,639,479

 `Hello, world! \

 end

An example of a simple main menu with a background (with comments)

  * define

 effect 2,10,1000; Assign effect 2 to the 10th effect: "appearance from the dark", with a duration of 1 second

 game

 * start

 bg "image.png", 2; Open the background image with the specified effect

 locate 10,12; Arranging text, buttons

 select "Start Game", * gamestart; Register the button

 * gamestart; The game begins

 setwindow 26,344,26,5,22,22,0,0,0,1,1, # 2266BB, 0,320,639,479; Arrange text borders, font size, etc.

 bg "fon.jpg", 2; Set the background for the game

 `Hello, world! \; Print the text

 end

• NScripter website (Japanese) .
• Site of Japanese ONScripter (Japanese) .
• Official site of the English-language branch ONScripter-En and Unicode-oriented modification Proportional ONScripter (English) (unavailable link) . Date of treatment December 3, 2010. Archived January 31, 2011.
• Page of the Russian-language modification of ONScripter-ANSI (unspecified) .
• ONSlaught project website .
• Full documentation for working with NScripter / ONScripter / PONScripter . (inaccessible link)