Other ONScripter Engine Variations

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ONScripter-insani

The legendary translation group Insani came out of retirement after fourteen years, and alongside two new (old) translations, they are providing a new ONScripter fork: ONScripter-insani. Originally, ONScripter-insani was the first English-compatible ONScripter branch; today it is a new fork off the main branch, with English compatibility features added back in, in order to be as up-to-date as is possible.

ONScripter-insani retains the full source code of the main branch, along with its legacy SDL1 dependence: by omitting the INSANI flag at build time, Ogapee's stock ONScripter will be built. ONScripter-insani itself is built only for 64-bit Windows and Mac, relies on SDL2, and according to insani's NScripter About/FAQ, is not intended to replace ONScripter-EN as it is purposely limited in how far it may deviate from the main branch. Insani's GP32 has kindly assisted our ONScripter-EN development efforts and helped to port over some key features that were added to ONScripter-insani, such as Unicode and proportional-width font support.

PONScripter

PONScripter stands for Proportional ONScripter. It is an old fork of ONScripter that supports Unicode, so proportional fonts and many more languages are supported, and it allows more fine-tuning in text formatting. However, it was abandoned early into its development, so even on the latest forks it is highly unstable and unfeatureful. It uses a bit more resources, has many more bugs and behavior issues, and is not fully backwards-compatible with NScripter nor ONScripter. Support for Japanese filenames is dropped, and new routines and syntax are required; meaning that porting an NScripter game to it is a significantly involved effort. PONScripter does have a legacy mode which runs NScripter and ONScripter-EN games as they were written, but most of its issues are still present. More importantly, PONScripter does not support some custom effects which NScripter and ONScripter-EN do, which results in the MangaGamer version of Umineko and all versions of Umineko Saku lacking the animated rain effects completely -- many such effects were achieved through the use of external DLLs which were later merged into ONScripter-EN by means of emulation, so this presents a huge disadvantage for PONScripter. ONScripter-EN supports both proportional fonts and Unicode, so PONScripter can be considered completely obsolete.

PONScripter was used in more modern Steam localisations of NScripter games, so the code was forked by SekaiProject in order to port it to SDL2 and keep it maintained. You can find it here on Github. Witch Hunt made their own fork of the SekaiProject fork, and were using it for their translation of Ciconia no Naku Koro ni. The many versions of PONS and the changes across them can cause significant problems when trying to run games on the latest version.

Configuration files come in the form of a pns.cfg file, although window-width and scale options are not supported. Documentation is rather sparse, but the latest manpages are hosted here.

Although PONScripter was highly favored for commercial translations, its instability can present problems. Traditionally, when special characters were needed in a translation, one could edit a font for ONScripter-EN to display the special glyphs over supported halfwidth characters. Many translations have done things to this effect, such as Mirror Moon's English translation of Tsukihime assigning the ellipsis character to |. Nowadays, however, the new releases of ONScripter-EN have Unicode support.

ONScripter-RU

ONScripter-RU is yet another fork, but it is probably not for you. ONScripter-RU's only major usage is in the Umineko PS3 project, and it is not known to work with anything else. As stated on its Github page, ONScripter-RU makes use of its own hacks, so don't expect cross-compatibility between it and the other forks.

ONSlaught

Befitting its unique name, ONSlaught was not a fork at all, but rather an attempt to program an NScript interpreter from the ground up. Its developer was annoyed by ONScripter's (former) lack of Unicode support, and the fact that support for languages other than Japanese was splintered across an array of forks. ONSlaught supports Unicode, can fake bold/italics, and is able to run very basic games such as Tsukihime and OMGWTFOTL, but some core features such as text sprites are not working. Due to the developer's contempt for NScripter syntax, it is much more strict and consistent in its handling of script and errors therein, so in order to use it you would have to make some edits to your game script. It is known to have been used in Tsukihime's Spanish translation and its Russian translation. ONSlaught was abandoned in 2011.

ONScripter Plus

ONScripter Plus is an Android app that runs ONScripter and ONScripter-EN games pretty much how they should be run. Of all the incarnations of ONScripter on Android, this is the one to pick. It bears a few bugs and may have some save file issues, but it is a great way to read your novels while away from the computer. You might consider buying the ad-free version for to support the developer.

PONScripter Download Mirrors

PONScripter is not an ONScripter replacement: it is abandoned software which lacks much compatibility. Use at your own risk.

Version: ponscripter-20100502

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