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The Fate/Stay Night VNDS port is generated from the original game files by using a specially written program. The convertor program had some silly assumptions about folder structure and also didn't work if the default system encoding was something other than CP1252. You also needed to run all the substeps manually, including extracting and converting all the images and sounds.
I've since fixed all those problems and added a little GUI window to tweak all the quality settings. The voice quality was pretty low in v1.0, so I've increased the default quality considerably. (The old quality setting was 70, it's now 90). I've also increased the music quality, added a step to remove redundant JPEG headers and I'm now pngcrush'ing the sprites. The convertor also has an optional setting to reduce the number of colors sprites use (decreases image quality, but also file size).
In addition the download contains new versions of my VNDS sound encoder and image convertor programs. The old version of the image convertor sometimes generated JPEG images unreadable by VNDS -- this should no longer be the case.
As usual for feature requests and bug reports visit the VNDS forum or send me an email.
Mediafire
Rapidshare
The last route (Heaven's Feel) has finally been translated into English. Could've released it two days ago if this wasn't exam week for me :|
This new release fixes two or three minor bugs -- the one big improvement is of course the new content in English. The Japanese version also benefits from the translation. I use the English version to determine where to insert the voice data in the Japanese version, and the untranslated part didn't have voice info for obvious reasons. So now all the routes are fully voiced as well.
Torrent
This is just a minor update that doesn't really change a lot in the script files. But the previous version was released just before vnds changed its savefile format, so it doesn't work 'out-of-the-box' with vnds 1.3.1 and newer. If you want to use your old (pre 1.3.1) savefiles you'll have to convert them to the new format though.
Additionally, I've compiled a version with the original Japanese script. Please note that the PC version of FSN didn't have voice acting; the English version only had voice acting edited in during translation. I wrote a small program to scan the English script for voice commands and insert them into the Japanese version. This should work pretty well most of the time, but it's possible that in some places the audio file played doesn't match the text on the screen.
Warning: This is a patch, not the entire game. Install version 0.9 first and extract the archive to '/vnds/novels/' overwriting script.zip, GLOBAL.SAV and for the Japanese version info.txt as well.
Almost at 1.0! I'm slowly running out of stuff to improve/add. This update adds the script files for Heaven's Feel. Heaven's Feel is still untranslated, so the game will be in Japanese once you enter the route. With a bit of work I could also release the entire game in Japanese, but I won't bother if no-one really cares so send an email to mail@weeaboo.nl if you'd really like to play the untranslated version. Another thing I've added is delays between sound effects. In previous releases the game wouldn't wait for a sound effect to finish before continuing which was really noticeable during fight scenes.
And of course a new build of vndsx. Get it here.
* 1.3.0x 23/05/08:
anoNL:
* bugfix: ArchiveFileHandle.Read() didn't work as expected (didn't update the read pointer afterwards)
* bugfix: removed file io from interrupt handler
* bugfix: texture streaming bug in the save/load menu
* rewrote text cache to use freetype's built-in caching system
* added option to interrupt delay commands by pressing A, B or the touchscreen
* skip scene functionality, hold R and press Y to skip ahead to the next scene/choice
* added support for AAC format (for sound effects only)
I replaced our own text-cache with a more advanced implementation -- it's a lot better suited for rendering Japanese characters. A few people wanted a faster way to skip scenes than fast-reading by holding the Y button, so you can now skip ahead to the end of the scene by holding R and pressing the Y button.
You might wonder why I added another sound format (AAC) to use for sound effects. The other format we use ADPCM can be decoded by the sound hardware in the DS, so it's basically compression without the trouble of having to decompress it. That's nice, but the quality/filesize ratio is inferior more advanced formats as MP3. AAC appears to have the best sound quality at very low bitrates (think 16 to 64 kbps). Using AAC sacrifices (a lot of) CPU power for a reduction in file size. The AAC implementation also doesn't have the filesize limit that ADPCM sounds have (~256KB) so you can use sound effects of any length.
Now you're probably wondering why I'd go through all the trouble of adding AAC support when the sound effects only take up around 20MB. You see, I really wanted to add Realta Nua's voice data but ran into a few problems: poor audio quality, huge filesize and a file size limit of 256KB per file. The new AAC implementation solves all three -- the size of the audio for Fate+UBW is now ~415MB, with pretty decent quality. So yeah, you can now enjoy the game with full voice acting.
Rewrote the sprite display code for this release. In earlier versions I simply ignored the depth information specified in the original game script -- causing characters in the background to be drawn over characters in front of them. I also tried to remove some unnessecary drawing. I've also added delays after sound effects so they don't stop immediately in case two sound effects play directly after each other (most problems with this were mainly during fight scenes with rapid hits sounding really shitty).
The bulk of my work lately has really gone into improving vnds. I didn't really like the in-game menu's all that much. Of course they were functional, but pressing L+R+Start to return to the novel selection is a bit nonintuïtive for a first time user. So first, I changed the controls around a little. Press X or Start to enter the menu, and X or Start again to return to the game. While in the menu, you can use the d-pad or touchscreen to select a save slot. There's even a button to return to the novel selection screen.
I always have trouble finding the save I want to load with just a slot number and a save date. Adding screenshots to the saves really helps you tell them apart. The screenshots are saved seperate from the normal save data, so your old saves will still work. And newly created saves will also work on older versions of vnds.