Narcissu 2 Afterwards - Engine differences

One of the big features, as well as the big blocks that came up, with Narcissu 2 release was the game engine.

In 2005, the original English Narcissu was released on the onscripter-en engine. For the most part, it was functional and did the job.

For the 2010 Narcissu 2 release, we had switched to ponscripter, which is a fork of the GPL onscripter, with lots of new features added in.

I’m sure some people would complain about all the time spent on transitioning to the new engine, but there are so many benefits, and I’ll try to cover the most salient ones here.

Full UTF-8 support

Onscripter-en doesn’t support UTF-8, and many groups had trouble using the engine to provide localized versions in various languages that use an entirely different character set. All the script files for Narcissu 2 are in UTF-8, and if the proper fonts are set up, any language should work.

I’m sure foreign translation teams will be happy to know that.

Vastly improved font rendering.

I’ve got slight typophilic tendencies, so to me this is a huge feature. Ponscripter incorporates the Freetype font rendering engine (I think, I haven’t looked at the source), and does a beautiful job of rendering fonts with proper kerning. Woo!

And the P in “ponscripter” stands for Proportional. As in, proportional font rendering. It is this exact feature that spawned the creation of the new engine.

For reference, I found a screenshot of the original Narcissu:

And here’s the same line in the new engine:

It’s a world of difference! Proper kerning is a godsend! Wooo!

And yes we had also upgraded the font to Bitstream Charter.

Softsubs

The OP movie to Narcissu 2 has subtitling. The timings aren’t very exact due to the current implementation (slated to be overhauled at some point) but those are softsubs, not hard subs encoded into the mpeg clip.



comments



  1. 04/03/2010 07:16 PM | #

    Yay for proper font rendering!!

    :3 And, YES, Narcissu DEFINITELY needed a serif font.

  2. Magedark
    04/03/2010 10:58 PM | #

    I’m not going to lie, I kinda liked the old Narcissu font.

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