The IRC channel I started years ago to be a “neighborhood bar” for game translator type people, #denpa on irc.synirc.org, has picked up a number of regulars who work on (P)Onscripter.

So far I’ve seen Mion, who you probably can call the lead dev now, but also Roto and Andrius who build, patch, test, and other things. Many of us in the community owe them a big debt for getting the engines that power major projects like Higurashi, Umineko, Narci1 and 2, a bunch of Al|together projects, and many of Deja Vu’s projects.

For those not aware, Ponscripter is the special build use for Narci 2 that added proportional font and UTF8 support to Onscripter. Adding in the features was a hack in its own right, and breaks some backward compatibility to get the new nice features.

So last night, while a bunch of bugs, memory leaks, and regressions were being discussed, this came up:

02:16 < Roto> narci has never really pushed the capabilities of nscripter…
02:16 < Roto> which is why it made a good embedded port \o/
02:16 < Agi-Sumika> minimalism f t w
02:16 < Roto> no sprites in motescripter :P
02:17 < Roto> but it has proportional font support and utf-8 scripts \o/
02:18 < UncleMion> heh, cool
02:19 < Roto> (which of course are easy things when starting from scratch)
02:19 < UncleMion> yeah…
02:19 < UncleMion> (p)ons is more of a juggling act :3
02:20 < Agi-Sumika> <_<
02:20 < Agi-Sumika> juggling…. grafting a living apple branch onto a walking giraffe, same deal
02:20 < UncleMion> >_>
02:21 < Roto> sounds like pons has a new mascot :P
02:21 < Agi-Sumika> frankenstein’s monster?
02:21 < UncleMion> giraffe+apple?

The end result?

Meet the apple/griaffe graft… We haven’t figured out what to name it, but either way:

and

Cute, isn’t it?

And if people are wondering why “bug fixes” is taking awhile? Well, just imagine how big a giraffe’s neck is!