Errant Heart

[Angra Mainyu]

[Ren]

[Jake]

[Angra Mainyu]

Hmm. Well that's an interesting perspective. Although, I suspect your dislike for NVL mode is matched only by my dislike for ADV mode. My belief is that ADV mode adds to the "puppet show" feeling of a VN. My perception of NVL mode is: it's like reading text on top of an image, which is intended to convey the general feeling of the scene. But yes, I do worry that since we have so many expressions, interrupting the NVL window every 30-or-so seconds will become irksome to the reader.

So, while I dislike ADV mode, I'm certainly not adverse to the idea of exploring alternatives.

I suppose the simplest compromise would simply be using NVL mode whenever there are no characters on screen, and then switch to ADV when there are characters on screen.

While I haven't played Torrey and the Vampire (and am not in a position to even check it out for the better part of a day), I am curious about their solution. I assume it was an NVL window that only took up half the screen?

Come to think of it, I believe Doomfest released a little game a while ago that messed around with the NVL window. Memo, if I recall correctly. Although, in this case, the NVL window was off to one side.

You know, given the nature of wide-screen displays, that might be a viable option as well—placing the NVL window along the left side of the screen, leaving the right side clear for sprites. In a way, it'd almost be like looking at a two-page layout in a book, with text on one side and images on the right.

Although, even that has it's issues. Cheif among them being the fact that any time any graphical changes are invoked, the NVL window WILL disappear. I believe Archer asked PyTom once about making it not disappear, to which PyTom effectively responded, "Why would you want to do that?".

[Jake]

[DaFool]

I've tried a half-NVL project years ago, one which didn't go anywhere, and it was mainly inspired by Narcissu with its super-widescreen backdrops (for its time).

Also, if the NVL textbox keeps interfering during transitions, why not remove the backdrop gradient altogether? If you've played the recent trial of Mahoyo, notice that they barely have any gradient left -- instead, they put vignettes at the top and bottom of the screen to simulate a page layout, and then they place drop-shadow on the text itself (or you can also use outlines if it fits -- mikey uses centered outlined text a lot).

I'm even noticing many JVNs dropping the textbox altogether and switching to drop-shadow, especially during H-scenes.

[Jake]

[Archer]

Ah, I think the whole text box thing is probably one of the biggest issues visual novels have to struggle with. Having listened to a few audio books (to preserve my sanity through the hours and hours of tedium required for doing graphic novels), it occurred to me that it might be interesting to do away with the text all together. But, besides just being expensive to have that kind of voice work done, I think a lot of people might not care for the idea of having the entire story read to them...

So we're stuck figuring out how to marry graphics with a ton of text in such a way so as not to annoy the audience or hurt either part of the experience, but there just doesn't seem to be a really good way of doing it.

Personally, I've always found ADV windows to be rather annoying. It's a bit like watching a subtitled anime with a whole lot of talking--my eyes are constantly glued to the bottom of the screen, and I'm not really looking at what's going on above it. With subtitles, it's just a compromise that needs to be made when you don't know the language, but for a visual novel, it feels odd for it to be that way by design.

I think there's something to mikey's style, with the floating text at the center, though you do get stuck with your text needing to be large and heavily-outlined... Not to mention you can only use about one line at a time this way.

And while I'm sure it's probably possible to keep the NVL window up at all times (I've learned a lot more about RenPy since we first threw the idea around), one problem that did occur to me with it, is that you're always going to run into the chance that the text in the window will obscure the characters' faces during a sprite change (and, from checking out a video of Mahoyo, it looks like they must've realized the same thing, since their window still fades in and out). We're discussing the idea of making sure the buffer is cleared each time an expression changes, but I'm not sure how practical that'd be. If we end up doing it every other line, it kinda defeats the purpose of using NVL in the first place.

An NVL window that takes up only a part of the side of the window is certainly an interesting idea. From a readability standpoint, a narrower column width is much better than reading a long line that goes across the entity of the screen, but, on the other hand, I get the feeling that this would ultimately be little different than my ADV issue, save that now the reader would be focused on one side of the screen, rather than the bottom.

[Jake]

[Angra Mainyu]