Oldest VN You've Played

Ren’Py has been consistently good and open so it just became the standard now (much like KiriKiri and NScripter before it), we might very well see it be replaced eventually; but I don’t think we’re going to get a competitor real soon doubly so when considering it has made western visual novels viable thanks to it’s great english documentation.

Personally, I don't want to see Ren'Py replaced unless it's by a better free software project. I think it's good that a lot of VNs are being built on a free software engine today, and that the developer is able to make a living off doing development for it. It's even better that it's seeing adoption globally, not just in one region.

not professionally; but I do have quite a bit of knowledge and experience of poking at systems and hacking things together using whatever tools at my disposal, and when I started getting into visual novels (very much thanks to Fate) I wanted to know how it worked behind the scenes,

Fair enough. I'd say I'm much the same, but I probably don't poke as deeply as you. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with me! Honestly, I'm sure I would have never come across it on my own. Reverse engineering is something I'm interested in but is going to take me a while to get any good at. This might be an interesting place to start.

4 hours is really short from what I’ve come to realize and I can’t imagine there are too many flags and branching paths to keep track of so it would be trivial compared to something like the original Tsukihime which has a script file of 4.5MiB (encoded in SHIFT_JIS so vim didn’t even know how to display half the characters) which has 5 routes, a whole bunch of branching paths and flags it keeps track of, and way to many dead ends you’ll run into without a guide because of a wrong choice you made half an hour ago and vndb lists it as 42 hours (those are some real fast readers).

Yeah, those games aren't very complicated, and the routes are short. Or rather, they aren't really routes. You get some alternative dialogue for a scene and that's about it, at least for the earlier games. To be honest, I'm not a fan of VNs with a lot of routes. I'm mostly in it for the story, so I love Kinetic Novels like Higurashi and Umineko (though technically they're a challenge to the player, so there is a 'game'). I do want to play Tsukihime one day.

How do you even get SHIFT_JIS working in Vim/Neovim? Did you use an alternative editor? Or did you just install the SHIFT_JIS locale from Broken Dragon and run vim with LC_ALL=ja_JP.sjis?

I’d give it a shot with AETools first, unless it’s on a custom engine for those games specifically or something used for like 5 games in total it should work.

I initially delayed responding to you so I could get around to trying this out, but I haven't gotten around to it. It's got files like VOICE, MGD, MSD, BGM, DATA, and SE. No file extensions. VNDB hasn't recorded the engine, so it doesn't seem like anyone knows. Maybe I'll find out.

The .xp3 files are just archives, they contain various files and what those are and where they are depends on the game, Fate/Stay Night: Réalta Nua Ultimate Edition (A community version of the game patched with all sorts of goodies from various releases) has files to load assets from the PSVita release which are stored in their own archive. You’ll have to explore the extracted files yourself (I recommend doing so in whatever file manager you have as the AETools file preview sucks ass) you’ll quickly find the file structure though as it is made to make sense. The big thing I learned is that this is a process of trial and error (largely the latter for me) and when your approach doesn’t work out try a different angle and throw more stones at the window until you find the brick that breaks it.

I generally use LF as a file manager, haha. But Nautilus would do, I'm sure. Thanks for all this. This is a pretty interesting conversation, so I've recorded the relevant bits into a document somewhere in case I have need of them later.