Visual novels are japanese games which are essentially just books with pictures/music which accompanies what is going and branching storylines based on the decisions you make. Think of them as 'choose your own adventure' books, with less emphasis on battles/picking up the right item. A lot of them get passed over for containing pornographic material, but several don't have any, and those that do have those scenes few and far between. Put it this way, if you try them expecting titillation, you'll be disappointed.
To get them running, just extract VNDS to a directory on your card, then extract the contents of the game you want to the NOVELS directory of that. (e.g. Saya would be VNDS\NOVELS\SAYA, and if you wanted to add the sound files, add them to VNDS\NOVELS\SAYA\SOUND)
They aren't for everyone, but worth trying once at least.
Though with sounds your experience may be degraded with the time needed to load some parts. So its your choice if you want sounds or not for the time it takes to load.
Okay, another Problem turned up:
In spite of sound files, I can't hear a thing.
I tried setting the sound and music volumes to max, but still nothing...
Though with sounds your experience may be degraded with the time needed to load some parts. So its your choice if you want sounds or not for the time it takes to load.
If you store the sounds in uncompressed ZIP format (manually: just ZIP the sound folder to sound.zip with compression set to none. or automatically: use the novel manager program in the tools folder), file access is -much- faster.
QUOTE(Sorakun @ Feb 1 2009, 06:54 AM) Okay, another Problem turned up:
In spite of sound files, I can't hear a thing.
I tried setting the sound and music volumes to max, but still nothing...
Maybe you didn't extract the .tar.gz to the correct folder? The sound folder should be a direct subfolder of the novel folder (/vnds/novels/saya/sound) and make sure that you don't have /vnds/novels/saya/sound/sound
You can let the program output warnings about missing files by changing:
debuglevel=warning
to
debuglevel=missing
in config.ini
Yeah. Someone on the VNDS forums was working on getting some of the Kagetsu Tohya (Tsukihime spin-off) side-stories done, so they should appear before long. Personally, I'd like to see Umineko get ported over at some point, since the english translation has been going really quickly and the linear nature of the game should make for an easy transition across, but I'll take what I can get, like everyone else.