Maybe by next Summer. :roll:
I hope he’s right
Some Demonbane related news: the anime will now be legally streamed on CrunchyRoll. Kadokawa is putting lots of older shows up, including a number of eroge adaptions.
the anime is based on al’s route
the first half is slow but the 2nd half is very good
I have to wonder, what the hell is with this holdup? Yeah, I know. Nitroplus is implementing a new game engine and they’re having difficulty getting it to support English characters. I get that part.
However, what I don’t get is why Nitroplus is even bothering to go through with an engine overhaul for this title in the first place. Demonbane was originally released in 2003, and the most recent version was released in 2009–Why the hell are they wasting time implementing a brand new game engine on a title that’s already been released for 6~7 years? When did Nitroplus introduce this new engine? I can understand if they’re simultaneously releasing a new game for both Japan and America, but Demonbane is relatively old and it’s already been long released in Japan. What’s wrong with using their old engine for this title?
This is ridiculous. There’s gotta be something else going on here that we’re not being informed of. I get the feeling it’s going to be delayed for over a year like KK was when it was in development…
Did they switch engines in their 2009 release by any chance?
I suspect there are so many problems because the game is so old. A similar issue happened years ago with Little My Maid. The game was in development hell for an extremely long time because the game was so antiquated, an engine change was required. Having recently spent a lot of time replaying Nocturnal Illusion, I can definitely understand the attraction of a new engine.
NI doesn’t have speech, so engine tweaks related to that are moot. But it has a lot of annoyances. There are only two text speeds (glacially slow and sluggish) neither one of which is “display all the text instantly”. You can’t go back and rewind text if you missed something. You can only access the system menu (to save, etc) when the game is offering you a choice, because you right-click to open the system menu and the game ignores that if it’s not accepting normal commands. The game doesn’t stretch when you full-screen it; instead, it keeps the game window the same size, and covers up the rest of the screen with black. The translation is lousy, absolutely riddled with typos and wooden wording. (Not an engine issue, but it’s a presentation issue, which is related.)
All of these things were acceptable when the game came out. (I’m given to understand plots more complex than “you bang this chick” had only been around for a few years before NI.) Now that I’ve played games with more sophisticated and user-friendly interfaces, these things grate on me in ways they didn’t ten years ago when I first played the game. Nocturnal Illusion was the second or third h-game I ever played then.
These things are bad news for a new title. Old games that people remember fondly can get away with things people would never put up with now. The only reason I am putting up with the annoying parts of Nocturnal Illusion is because … it’s Nocturnal Illusion. I still rank this game as one of the better h-games I’ve ever played, even given the weak parts in the script and all the other things I mentioned. But that’s only true because I was first exposed to it when it was relatively new. I might not even give the game a second glance if it were released today.
New works don’t get nostalgia filters. They have to stand on their own merits. Upgrading to a newer engine means a better user experience, and one of the things that ticks people off VERY fast is irritating controls. People put up with this kind of thing before, because that was the only game in town. Now, however, games with much better engines have been released. In English. A poor engine will be criticised, and sales will be impacted. Releasing a game with an outdated engine can work for a back-catalog port re-release like NI, but it can’t work for something like Demonbane, the flagship release for an entire new line of products. Nitroplus does not need their games acquiring a reputation for shoddy workmanship, and Peter needs Demonbane selling gangbusters to convince Nitroplus that the entire line of business is worth investing in.
Saying “It’s just an old game, who cares about engine advancements?” is, in some ways, saying that Demonbane is a crappy game and not worth wasting time to do properly. But if that’s the case, why release it at all?
That, combined with the fact that apparently this is a low priority for Nitroplus, could easily be the cause of the delay.
There’s also the very real chance that this “new” engine is being created / modified in order to be used with all their future English releases. The time dedicated now could be an investment of sorts that will pay off with faster releases in the future. From another perspective, maybe the old engine just wasn’t worth the trouble to fix; perhaps it’s been so long since they used the older engine that it’s easier to implement a newer engine rather than fix the old one.
Or maybe they got a few new interns and they’d rather they learn a current engine rather than an antiquated one they don’t use anymore. Sometimes the less efficient route for the project is the more efficient one overall. I would definitely count on NItro+ to choose the route that synergizes best with their Japanese releases. If the engine is the same one used with Chaos Head, it could very well be that Nitro+ decided “We’re going to use this engine with all future releases. Period.”
What I’m asking is if it isn’t broken, then why waste time fixing it? Adopting a new engine has just as much potential to bring problems (glitches, etc.) as advancements, and there’s a potential it might not be as well-received as the older time-tested engine.
What was wrong with the old engine with this title in particular? There have been plenty of other games released in the early 2000’s that never had any of the issues you mentioned (Kango Shichauzo series, JKC, Snow Sakura, and Sensei 2 are examples), so interface issues couldn’t have been that prevalent of a phenomenon in the early 2000’s. Plus, Nocturnal Illusion was a mid 90’s game–The game was originally released in Japan in 1995 (when the eroge idustry was still young) and localized here in 1997. The eroge companies would’ve had plenty of time to iron out interface issues by the turn of the millenium.
Did Demonbane have the same sort of interface problems as NI had?
I guess the question I should be asking is what changes are they bringing in with the new engine that would warrant such a delay in the first place? Specifically speaking, of course.
I don’t really speak Japanese well enough to play b-games. Yet. So I can’t answer that question. It is a good question, though; I’m kind of curious why the new engine. Anyone here who played the original Demonbane would know more. Olf?
If I were to guess (and it is a 100% guess) I would speculate that mid-2000’s means XP. Perhaps the original engine was programmed in one of those “you never should have been doing it that way” methods that Microsoft changed in Vista and Win7, so that the game has compatibility issues with those operating systems? It might even be as simpler than that - in order to say ‘Windows 7 compatible’ they would have to retest the old engine for Windows, and maybe make changes - so they figured might as well convert to the new engine they already tested for compatibility?
EDIT: Of course, if there was a Japanese 2009 re-release, they probably already did the Win7/Vista thing for the Japanese version. Anyone know for sure?
Demonbane, the original 2003 release, works fine for me in Windows 7 64-bit.
New update regarding Demonbane.
http://www.nitroplususa.com/demonbanes-new-engine/
At least that explains what the problem with the old engine really was.
If text in English cut off in the old engine it is worth a delay. There are times when a delay is worth boosts in presentation and I’m glad it was only one season and change if it comes out this winter. I would have hated reading it with the old one.
Greatest news ever because of the generous amount of pictures with Azif. I’ll declare now that she is my favorite character based on her character design.
yeah hope it is done soon
So it WAS some kind of problem related to punctuation. (Possibly among others.)
it was word wrap issues
It looks like some periods and commas are missing from that screenshot, and the post also mentions punctuation issues. But word wrap I can definitely see being a bigger issue, because Japanese doesn’t have word wrap; they just wrap the line wherever it needs wrapping. So Nitroplus had to build a word wrapping engine that properly word wraps only at syllable breaks, and follows all the other rules. This isn’t so simple even for people who speak English to do properly, let alone people who aren’t fluent in the language.
There are kinsoku rules; you can’t just break whenever. Unless you’ve got some fancy system for creating Aesthetically Pleasing Lines there’s not a lot of difference in coding something to break just on spaces and coding something to break on characters allowed to by kinsoku.
Unless you’re coding something like an ebook renderer or complex document formatting system, you wouldn’t bother with that either. There’s no problem with just breaking on spaces, especially when working with non-justified text.
Interesting. I stand corrected.
So does this mean future release won’t have issue?
I wonder how long it will take JAST to release third Demonbane game after it is released in Japan.(Nitro+ did announce it as D2 Project in their anniversary.)