Considering developing a new visual novel/3d animation engine

[tanstaafl]

I've been between projects for a while and, as I am not a game developer, I've been considering building a new visual novel engine instead to provide those who do make games with a more advanced and easier platform to present their work. The reason I first started to kick this idea around was several blue screens when using games/stories developed with the RenPy engine and a predisposition to dislike Unity games (though admittedly, Unity results depend entirely upon level of skill when utilizing it.)

The first phase of the project would be to present a platform in which one could:

• Create a visual novel with branching story lines with no coding experience, just drop in the text and images/animations.
• Fully customize the GUI
• Easily compile for any platform (PC/Mac/Mobile)
• Extensible game features utilizing a plugin platform in which developers can pick and choose features (mods) from a central location and simply drop them into the project. (These mods can be developed and submitted by anyone, tested by me or other selected, and approved for safety.)
• POTENTIALLY: Create novels/games directly through a web interface

About me a bit, since I suspect a bit of healthy skepticism from people reading this: I've been a software developer for going on fifteen years. I've worked on projects for Bank of America, Express Scripts, Liberty Mutual, and the like over that time. I'm currently developing LMS (Learnign Management Systems) as a day job. And I get bored and like to have my own projects going whenever possible.

But before I dedicate this kind of time and energy I would like to know if anyone would be interested in this new engine?

 

[User_920791]

A new engine to use for sure would be something interesting, but it needs to work fine on any type of hardware (even on a very old computer) and needs to have at least most of the basic functionality that Ren'Py has since the first release.

Rather than starting from scratch, I think it would be more interesting if you helped to develop some other open source engine.

Personally, I'd be glad if you helped accelerate the development of

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.

 

[tanstaafl]

Considering the technologies I'm looking in to, this engine working on old hardware would be no issue aside from what animations/images the developer decided to include (in terms of size).

As for contributing, not a bad idea, I'll look into the one you mentioned and perhaps a few others. Of course, I'll probably pursue at least researching and designing my engine to some extent to establish what I would need to include to surpass or at least equal other engines feature wise.

 

[HiEv]

Considering the technologies I'm looking in to, this engine working on old hardware would be no issue aside from what animations/images the developer decided to include (in terms of size).

As for contributing, not a bad idea, I'll look into the one you mentioned and perhaps a few others. Of course, I'll probably pursue at least researching and designing my engine to some extent to establish what I would need to include to surpass or at least equal other engines feature wise.

You could look into making a new story format for

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. For example,

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. Since the output is HTML, that should also solve most of the OS compatibility problems (leaving just a few browser compatibility problems to worry about). It would also make it easy to host the games on websites.

It would, however, limit your ability to do 3D stuff (though there are

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).

 

[xht_002]

hit this site up with an email to release an update or the source, with vector hot spot area's so you can draw around "models" and have something the same as action high lighting in renpy

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its better then renpy, and has chaptor threads etc, it would just to go from direct x to openGL though

 

[Madeddy]

Supporting a existing engine was also my first thought. If someone try's such a task like engine development alone and between projects it will in 99,9% be a waste of time and ends with nothing much.

Twine is imho very restricted on interactive text stories and nothing much else. This aside very solid.
Monogatari has not even a real usable docu but works from the looks. Without good docu i would however instantly be out there.
Novelty is for nearly 10 years dead. Really? Building on a corpse?

There are many others, surely something would fit. But why not do something not this big but still useful. I could think of a few useful addons/frameworks for renpy for example. A thought.

Greets

 

[xht_002]

Supporting a existing engine was also my first thought. If someone try's such a task like engine development alone and between projects it will in 99,9% be a waste of time and ends with nothing much.

Twine is imho very restricted on interactive text stories and nothing much else. This aside very solid.
Monogatari has not even a real usable docu but works from the looks. Without good docu i would however instantly be out there.
Novelty is for nearly 10 years dead. Really? Building on a corpse?

There are many others, surely something would fit. But why not do something not this big but still useful. I could think of a few useful addons/frameworks for renpy for example. A thought.

Greets

novelty might be old and dead, but its still alot better then renpy, and being dead is why the source might always end up on github, most code is cross platoform, as it stands, any of the small changes between platforms, just needs to be wrapped in compiler macro's to identify the system

 

[caLTD]

Renpy is good, if you after 2d slideshow game.

You can build web based framework for it.

How ever if you after 3d, it requires quite lots of talent and money. In 3d Assets are problem.

 

[xht_002]

Renpy is good, if you after 2d slideshow game.

You can build web based framework for it.

How ever if you after 3d, it requires quite lots of talent and money. In 3d Assets are problem.

renpy has nowhere near the feature set of novelty, with shaking charector layers, weather, and snow on mouse cursors etc, that alot of hentai games are full of, it just needs a vector layer to highlight models for maps and route props

 

[HiEv]

Twine is imho very restricted on interactive text stories and nothing much else. This aside very solid.

Visual novels are basically interactive text stories with (more) pictures. And it's only as "restricted" as any web page is.

Seems like a natural fit to me.

 

[Madeddy]

Renpy is good, if you after 2d slideshow game. ...

novelty might be old and dead, but its still alot better then renpy

Sry if this sounds harsh, but it looks like you do not really understand what Ren'py is.

In the area of an editor there has ren'py not much, thats correct. A reason why i would downvote it. Ren'py is focused and build for Visual novels and with this has disadvantages if you try to do adventures or rpg's with it. However it uses python as base and with this ... no limit.

... being dead is why the source might always end up on github, most code is cross platoform,...

You're right. But much work i would say. One needs to see whats there code wise. Resurrecting the engine and open it for multi-platform would surely a very good thing for the community.

...
Seems like a natural fit to me.

If you like it, good for you.

Greets

 

[tanstaafl]

I think perhaps I didn't explain my ultimate goal quite clearly enough. My goal was not to solo build a platform that competes with established platforms, but to build a platform that has is extensible by the community easily and from a common source.

As a base example, adding navigation, weather effects, etc. would be comparable to going to skyrim nexus and downloading a mod for that game.

 

[Epadder]

Creating something in the same space to do the same thing as existing platforms, inherently competes with established platforms. If you want to create something people will use it has to provide a distinct advantage over existing products.

Why would I choose to use a product that can't compete with other options? :biggrin::angel:

 

[polywog]

Renpy is good, if you after 2d slideshow game.

You can build web based framework for it.

How ever if you after 3d, it requires quite lots of talent and money. In 3d Assets are problem.

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[tanstaafl]

Creating something in the same space to do the same thing as existing platforms, inherently competes with established platforms. If you want to create something people will use it has to provide a distinct advantage over existing products.

Why would I choose to use a product that can't compete with other options? :biggrin::angel:

Think of it in terms of crowd sourcing. Currently, with existing options for platforms if you want a cool, unique feature you have to code it yourself or find the feature somewhere on the net as a guide. With the base platform I'm thinking of there would be a central repository and, with minimal scripting/coding, the feature could be dropped in.

Think of nodejs and npm. Someone is building a project, they realize they need a new feature, the command is as simple as "npm install <api/project/whatever>" and the API for that feature is now there. No fuss no muss.

 

[xht_002]

Sry if this sounds harsh, but it looks like you do not really understand what Ren'py is.

In the area of an editor there has ren'py not much, thats correct. A reason why i would downvote it. Ren'py is focused and build for Visual novels and with this has disadvantages if you try to do adventures or rpg's with it. However it uses python as base and with this ... no limit.

Greets

novelty is built for visual novels, alot of renpy games have maps, story route props, and inventory, with action area high lighting in games like milfy city, summertime saga, my cute room mate,

if you can be bothered, you can probably script the inventory in novelty, but action area highlighting, with clipped vectors around your model, needs a new layer, and an update released, all you can do in novelty is draw a hotspot square to click on, to get hightlighting, you mask a layer ontop of the viewable image, and do some vector analyzing for the hotspot

 

[W65]

Wouldn't it be less work to develop a VN framework for Unity or Godot? Additions to that framework would be available from the repositories that already exist for those platforms. As far as I know from my almost-zero research, neither platform has a widely-accepted VN or menu-based game framework. That would also build on the popularity of those platforms in the hope of pulling in more interested plugin developers. Then again neither platform is nearly as drop-in-and-go as what you're describing and it would be a ton of work to build that on top of someone else's platform.

And, then again, I don't exactly know how extensible something like that would end up being because I know nothing about how those platforms really work beyond some dabbling. No idea how nicely assets for those platforms play together, I mean. My totally uninformed guess is that it would depend on how well the framework was built with an eye to being extended, since after all coding assets for Unity are in--what, C#? So it's not like they're being programmed in some proprietary scripting language.

In what language would the plugin developers be working?

What would be the end product of your engine? Would it be something like a RAGS, where the player downloads some client and loads stories into it, or would it be more like Twine where you end up with an HTML file, or would it be like an RPGMaker where players just run an executable? Mostly asking out of curiosity.

I look forward to seeing where this ends up going. I'm not a VN developer, but it might be interesting to contribute plugins if it's in a language that I know something about. Not that I know anything more up-to-date than Java or that I know that better than a college freshman, but still.

(Selfishly, what I'd like to see is an engine for building menu-driven-with-image games; the games I'm thinking of are things like No Haven, Strive for Power, Brothel King, and maybe even the EraToho games. The last of those is kinda fascinating to me since the Japanese have this really sorta neat text-with-mouse-navigation engine--it's sorta like a single-player MUD engine. Only thing is it's amateur Japanese spaghetti code from my ten minutes of studying it, which makes it impossible to translate, even for someone like me who has all the time in the world. It's like that game Elona, which was developed in some horrific neo-BASIC "HSP" language. If I understand correctly, it's like having developed a roguelike in Pascal.)

 

[xht_002]

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is better then unity, xenko is MIT licence, with direct x 12, vulkan and VR included

if steam ever sorts out the XXX section, you can keep all the money to yourself with xenko