I've been cruising the internets when I'm not busy with mirror moon, work, or writing my own story, and I have stumbled across (with the nudge from Peorth and Graus) about Katawa Shoujo.

Katawa Shoujo (goddammit, I keep typing 'Kawata') is the biggest (known) Original English Language Visual Novel (more commonly known as OELVN) project to date. I believe they are approaching the 200,000 word mark, which is pretty big, considering it's almost a third of the size of Tsukihime, quite hefty itself.

It is an eroge and is under development by Four Leaf Studios. KS was partially inspired by a thread on 4chan's /a/ board, which is fairly amazing in my opinion, as you have to have balls of steel or lack of brains to take a page of doodles, character descriptions and ideas, scenarios and somehow compile it into a visual novel.

Katawa Shoujo's main quirkiness (apart from the easily-typoable name; did it again :/) is that all of the main characters are disabled in some way. The main character you play, Hisao, has a heart condition; some are blind, some are without legs, and so on. The story is set in a school for the disabled. I thought it was initially odd at first to have a visual novel full of cripples, I gradually warmed up to the idea, as it brings out the idea that disabled people have feelings, too.

I have seen some of the character designs and I am definitely already liking some characters more than others (so sue me). Also, the backing music is composed by NicolArmarfi, and after hearing a sample (namely Romance in Andante II), I would have to say the music is probably one of the main things I'm looking forward to in Katawa Shoujo.

A demo is being worked on, although estimated time of completion is unknown.

I'll be keeping an eye on this project, so I guess I'll keep people posted.

Website: http://katawashoujo.blogspot.com/
Forum: http://ks.renai.us/
IRC: #zettai-shoujou on irc.rizon.net

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I have done up a screencast of QED showcasing the basic features.

This is my first screencast so it's terrible, some things bug out here and there, and I constantly have to switch between Dvorak and Qwerty otherwise you would be wondering why I'm saying L when it shows up as N, etc :p

Please be warned: This video contains POSSIBLE SPOILERS for ALL ROUTES IN FATE/STAY NIGHT!

I avoid the UBW and HF files, but the dashboard contains maybe ten lines out of HF Day 4. From what I read, it's not that much different to the other Day 4s, so maybe not.

The screencast is encoded with H264 in the Quicktime container, so you'll either need Quicktime or Quicktime Alternative to view it. The size is 31.3mb and the duration is 23 minutes and 39 seconds.

View

Enjoy!

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Been a loooooooong while since I last posted a blog here.

Anyway, it's 2008 and I'm working full time for a year. The sad thing is, I have more free time working full time than I had working three full days a week plus five units a semester at uni.

So with my free time, I've been getting back into the scene, catching up various things (which involve playing Tsukihime a whole year and a bit after it was originally released >_<, and playing Fate/stay night). One of the major things I'm working on, however, is this little fickle thing we call 'QED'.

It's one of those weird acronyms that is out of sync with the words itself. It's an acronym for 'distributed quality enforcement', and also the codename of a fairly exciting tool that I'm developing for mirror moon. In a nutshell, it allows us to streamline the proofing/editing process by quite a lot. I'm estimating that it'll increase the ease of reporting errors in the text, as well as making the grue's (GRand Unifying Editor) job much easier.

Previously, we have tried a variety of different solutions for proofing, including Trac, flyspray and are currently using just a forum thread for it. Trac and flyspray was too complex for what we wanted, but granted, they were full on issue reporting applications. I happened to browse the forums one day and came across the forum thread with a day of UBW's proofing.

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We have 17 beta testers now and there's still four days before applications close. I'm a lot stricter this time, so anyone who doesn't get a reply, no hard feelings.

Of course, if we do need more beta-testers, I'll ask for some more, and possibly review the ones that didn't pass the first one.

And I found this as part of the reason why they deleted the mirror moon wikipedia article.

They haven't actually even finished translating anything yet, never mind whether translating an obscure H-game is notable. --UsaSatsui 12:43, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I found it absolutely hillarious. Of course, nice to see that Haeleth and Gp32 were defending us, thank you ^_^

Well, it was deleted because it broke WP:V and WP:VAIN, so maybe when we actually release Tsukihime and someone else writes the article, we won't have our own little article on wikipedia :(

chendo - out

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Title says it all.

EDIT: Looks like some clarification is needed. The progress is referring to the rewrite, -not- the translation (that was finished long ago). Yes, romhacking.net, I'm looking at you :p

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And I got an OP2!

Pretty good considering I played WoW, had Tsukihime and did a fair bit of films.

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Yeah, been busy recently.

Like playing WoW all day. Yeah, right.

Anyhow, been running good old MC, but we can't down Domo cause we ragequit 8 hours into the run cause it's late/early in the US, and today we ragequit at Garr cause we only had 2 warlocks and the tanks couldn't hold aggro.

Started a character on Frostmourne, level 17 NE druid named Leraf, send some gold my way kthxbai.

Otherwise, I'm messing with Rockbox on my iRiver H340, phat firmware, btw, and I recently started coding some Drupal modules for running manga scanslation sites since I reckon manga-sketchbook.org needs new backend. MangaNuke was my half-assed effort but I never finished it. Writing modules in Drupal is sooooo much easier. Don't have to mess with AJAX or caching myself.

And the OPs were released yesterday or something, but I couldn't get it cause I didn't sign up for Smart OP. OPs are pretty much one of the most important marks you get. All university courses have an OP requirement, and medicine and whatever needs an OP1. Usually. OPs range from 1-25, and it's done like a bell-curve; OP25s are often harder to get than OP1s.

I need an OP2 to get into the scholarship course I want, but I probably won't get that... WoW and CAM screwed me over in the last two terms. I won't get anything lower than a 5, I hope.

And yeah, we have something new coming.

Soon.

And you might already know. If so, keep quiet. There's no rush.

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Title speaks for itself. As of an hour ago, I have officially graduated from high school :D

Then I'll be away for a week of partying, drinking and picking up chicks at Schoolies.

SO LONG, SUCKERS!

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WinHex. I love you.

The problem with the filesystem was that the directory listing headers were shifted 4 bytes for some reason. All I had to do was delete (backing them up, of course) four bytes out of the appropriate spots and I have most (if not all) my files back.

WinHex rules.

Quick update about Tsukihime itself:

As I said, the rewrite will take a while to complete since it has to be done by a single person to get the consistency that we want. I'm not giving any ETAs but I can tell you it'll take over 6 months. Unless somehow has much more free time than he has now.

Personally, I'm busy and won't be able to work on the project till the end of my high school life (!), but that's approaching quite close.

And I'm wondering about all those user spikes the last couple of days o.o

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Hi. I haven't updated for a while, and I'm waiting for something to finish (I'll tell you later on) so here I am.

I 'dinged' 17 last Saturday... had a small party where I had a few friends (male and female) over to chat, eat, play Mario Kart/Super Smash Brothers/Tekken/Halo/Karaoke Revolution and watch FFVII. Not too bad.

But yeah, the second I woke up on Sunday, I had to resume my editing frenzy for CAM. I worked on the holographic effect then, and it shaped up pretty well.

Today: I just finished rendering some glowing effects for the dream sequence and was about to import it into Premiere when... "Unknown file format."

"... What?"

I tried opening the file manually... no go. Confused, I try unmounting the drive and remounting it.

"This drive has not been formatted."

Shit. With a capital S. I'm HOPING that it's just the FAT table's that's screwed and that's all I need to fix it, so I found a (hopefully very useful) article (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8366) which will hopefully save my ass. I booted into Gentoo and merged GPart, a partition table rebuilder and now it's running.

I seriously hope this works... cause otherwise that's at least 100 hours of work gone. And it's Windows' fault.

I'll update this... whenever I have an update.

Update: 12:18am

I used WinHex to shift the partition header to where I -think- it belongs. It works to some extent (I can see files and directories in WinHex), but explorer hangs when loading (due to some FAT directory corruption).

Booted into Linux, fsck.vfat had nothing to say, either, and gpart still didn't work.

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