Narci2 busting bugs and looking at posters
Before I start talking about bugs, it seems that Minamiawaji, famous for it’s daffodils, and also the final destination of the original Narcissu has put up posters up featuring Setsumi, advertising the daffodil season.
I haven’t found a larger picture of it, that’s just the one put up on NekonekoSoft’s blog page.
Onto bugs and codebases…
Not too many people are privy to the data, but the Narci2 project is many little pieces held together by lots of glue. There’s a bunch of script files that have to be melded together, but not before some preprocessing parsers generate voiced and unvoiced scripts, then something pulls all the data together and wraps it up into a final package.
The glue holding all that together is a combination of GNU Make, perl, and a few shell scripts and binaries…. Suffice it to say, I have no idea how it’s all put together since I’m not familiar with either language, and only know enough about it all to make the thing build me something that runs…
There’s some magical voodoo scripts that appear to build installer packages for OSX, Unix, and Windows… except I also have no idea how they fully work (or if they actually work in some cases)… So instead of hacking at it and hoping to get it right, it’s probably easier to shout MESSSAGGEEE and get a known working installer with debugging support…
Then there’s the totally separate Ponscripter engine, which was left in a state that was close to alpha when I had to inherit the project. Lots of features to ponscripter was pretty much experimental… We get lots of new features, and of course.. the inevitable bugs that go with them.
Before Haeleth disappeared from the project, he had for the most part built out all the features necessary to make Narci2 work, and pretty much little else. Even then bugs still lurk in the engine. Sadly, working with the source code for Ons/Pons is totally beyond me, in part because I just don’t know C/C++ all that well, but also because the codebase is, by all accounts, scary.
We all have Uncle Mion of the Sonozaki-futago-tachi for taking over the codebase and committing bugfixes…
Otherwise, how else would I have a fix tonight for a nasty little random crash bug plaguing my QA team where 5 different people all reported crashes and freezes, and none could manage to reproduce the crash.
Inheriting a blob of tech with next to no documentation is an utter pain… thankfully, knowing the right people can lighten things to something manageable…
I agree with you : releasing narci2 would be suicidal (imagine the engine freezes when you didn’t save…). I hope all of this would be fixed as soon as possible.
Anyway, all of you, please, don’t give up!
Keep up the hard work, Agilis and friends! We’ll all be here waiting patiently.
Although a rough patch has been hit, I still am rooting for you all the way, as with the rest of the community I’m sure!
“Rough patch”?
Riiight. ^_~
A rough patch would’ve been the 10 months with no devs, no active QA team, and a job that puts the physical experiences to the terms “PTSD” and “nervous breakdown”.
Meanwhile, I have QA people, I have bugs being fixed a day or two after we uncover them. I’ve got people helping out with the twiddly bits of release engineering. And my hands have stopped shaking a…
Rough patch? This is clear sailing!
Please don’t give up!
Agrees. Don’t give up! xD and is it true that there is going to be a narci 3?
Narcissus 3 has been out for a while, I believe.
Yes, Narci3 even has scripts uploaded on tlwiki. Been waiting for Narci2 since i’ve read it for the first time sometime in 2008!