Never commented on anything on Itch before, but your story is just amazing. Not many H-scenes, but your intent was to get readers; I get it. Great story and keep up the great work. I would to praise you more, but "I'm out of time".
Poco X6 Pro should support it. Are you using custom ROM? Official Xiaomi HyperOS/MIUI ROMs should have Tango translator which translates 32 bit instructions into 64 bit allowing to run 32 bit apps despite not having native hardware support. Most AOSP based custom ROMs don’t include Tango so wouldn’t run apps.
edit: nevermind, apparently Poco doesn’t include Tango binary translator for some reason, at least from what I read.
I did mention that it’s possible on some phone models but it’s definitely not a process for average phone user. After a quick search I couldn’t find if anyone made a ROM or patch for S24 that allows running 32 bit apps so you’re most likely out of luck.
drat. I was hoping. I guess I'll have to wait until it'll be made, or switch to my laptop. Its an antique though, so I don't hold hopes the game would work.
It should work on your laptop. I was testing game performance on my 12 year old ASUS ultrabook with integrated graphics that couldn’t even run Hearthstone when it released. Unless it’s something even more ancient/weaker - you should be fine, maybe there would be some hiccups when loading images/videos but in general it works well. The only exception is that if you’re using Linux and running it under wine and your hardware doesn’t support Vulkan you will need to mod the game by extracting video bundles, transcoding to vp8/vorbis webms and rebuilding them in Unity 2019.4, otherwise videos will likely not work at all or will be completely messed up.
When I've downloaded it, I thought it will be some hentai stuff. I've found a gem. A story so ... I don't even know how to describe it. I was so hooked up, that I've almost detached myself from everything, just to know what happens next. It is one of greatest stories I've ever read, and trust me, I've read lot.
My android treats the installers like apps, and tries to install the installers as apps. But then it says that it isn't compatible. What am I supposed to do?
Because they are apps. They have the same bundle id as game, so when they extract all assets inside and install game it will just replace installer on your phone and you can delete installer apk files. If it says it’s incompatible it’s one of the two - either you have new android and it complains about incompatibility due to 32 bit but you can ignore and still run them OR your phone doesn’t support 32 bit at all, then you’re out of luck, there are some ways to run 32 bits apps but they are complicated and don’t work on every phone. Eventually there will be 64 bit build but likely not this year.
Because of how Android works, the full game has to be split amongst multipler installers. So each installer contains separate parts of the game that all get put back together.
Honestly played like 3 days straight to finish this game, u are an artist. But honestly sometimes I felt like I was on an acid trip while playing this game, in a good way XD
Then what’s the problem? The reason game is split like that is because android doesn’t allow apps larger than 2GB. Actual game is a single app, installers delete themselves after game is installed.
It’s downloading its own content after installing. Unless you want to pay for CDN for us this is not an option we can afford.
It has larger than 2GB apk. This is technically possible because APK files are zip archives and zip archives can be as big as 4GB and packed with zip64 extensions allow nearly infinite size. The problem is - this is non-standard for APK and not ZIP files. Officially Google only supports 2GB or less APK files and so do most phones. Some may be able to open and install these files but most phones won’t. In fact any app that is published on Google store has even stricter limitation - APK size can’t exceed 100MB, we don’t care about this limit because we are not publishing on play store. Still not an option because this will fail to install on most phones.
guys, what kind of song starts with "bad guys... *illegible words*, good guys..." is clearly vaporwave, but I couldn't find the song (even in a playlist with music from the author). as an example, where it is used is Chapter 28, during Ashley's game
If you mean arcs - no. Chapter 44 is the end of Teresa arc, chapter 51 will be end of Kieran arc. If you mean chapters - then yes, next chapter will be 47.
Honestly, the best settings screen of all time. also starts at 20% master volume: Godsend. Includes precise time values for the text delay and auto forward speed for a better understanding of how long, rather than the standard “move sliders until you figure out “Roughly” what they do.
It technically still “roughly” in case of “extra time per word”, but it is exact for other timer. Because words have different sizes it’s closer to “extra time per average word”, for example it will not spend as much time on word “I” but spend longer on very long words. After testing I found that to be much more accurately match the reading speed after adjusting without the need to manually advance because it takes too long or rollback because I couldn’t read it fast enough. But it generally pretty accurately represents how long it will take for average sentences per word.
For initial install yes, except for update only. Order in which you run them doesn’t matter, just that you run all 5 of them. For future updates you can just download update installer, as long as you didn’t miss updates it will update to the latest, if you missed some updates it will tell you which installers you need to download to update.
The adult scene animations might not exist, but I actually stayed for the story. It's captivating, the world building is unique and very well thought out.
Story and setting is on par with best (in my opinion) games in this genre: Eternum and Harem Hotel, the latter of which I consider the best game in adult VN genre. Each of many main characters are very, VERY deep and interesting, each has a backstory and their own issues which you get involved in.
I would call this a goddamn masterpiece if it had actual animations in adult scenes, even slight ones, instead of still frames. A shame. Otherwise, a VERY good visual novel. Recommended.
P.S. (Spoilers!) Goddamnit, Jamie is cockblocking so goddamn hard, and she has my favorite body type... you left her for last for the reason Ukiko described? Is that thing going to happen when CJ is going to make love to Jamie or CJ??? Kinda confused here... At least it happened with the twin...
P.P.S. The soundtrack is f*cking PHENOMENAL dude. Huge respect for making your own tracks. The main theme especially, there was a time span when I just listened to it on repeat, it's SO GOOD!
Proton works as well and is probably the more practical approach. I don’t know about other distros, but it’s available as app-emulation/wine-proton in the main Gentoo repository at the very least.
Edit: Err, actually video playback doesn’t work (which I only noticed now); the last image shown/loaded just remains on screen until all videos have been skipped and the next bit of dialogue with its corresponding image is reached, at which point gameplay resumes normally. Looks like either switching to Proton-GE! or cloning Media Framework DLLs from a Windows installation might fix this, but I have yet to try either.
Edit two: So, when running OoT.exe from the terminal, the Wine standard output seems to indicate that this isn’t an issue with the Media Foundation, but with DirectX Media Object libraries being missing, specifically msdmo.dll. Winetricks does have a dsdmo verb, but it seems to only install the 32-bit version of the libraries: https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/issues/660
Edit three: So… After experimenting with a clean Wine prefix, it appears to me that at least some of the information regarding Wine and Media Foundation is outdated and that a lot more Windows libraries have been implemented in Wine since the default prefix was first initialised on my laptop, as both mfplat.dll and msdmo.dll are present now with Wine (Proton) 9 — there is output from mfplat itself in the terminal now and there are no errors regarding msdmo.dll — and the Intel VA-API driver is being called by GStreamer, which means not only is video playback working, but it’s working with hardware acceleration! Well, it would at least if it weren’t for the following GStreamer error right after initialising the VA-API driver:
0:00:01.483014858 834788 0x7a83fc0010b0 ERROR audio-info audio-info.c:302:gst_audio_info_from_caps: no rate property given
</del>
Now, either the video’s audio is being screwy in some way or my GStreamer installation is being screwy, but at least the video codec can be ruled out as causing any issues, at least outside of Steam (and there sadly isn’t much information out there about Proton when used outside of the Steam client specifically).
(Hopefully) final edit: Read my response to Nikolay’s response. Tl;dr: Everything works just fine after switching to DXVK in spite of that GStreamer error (and one more error about a surface being detached or something).
We encode videos with ffmpeg using x264 codec with constrained baseline h264 profile and if it has audio it’s encodeded with qaac codec. If there are some issues with video playback for some reason you can try unpacking movies bundles and transcoding to VP8 and then bundling again with Unity 2019.4 for windows platform but there is no hardware acceleration for VP8 in Unity (even if platform supports hardware acceleration, the only exception is android where unity will sometimes have hw acceleration for vp8 videos).
Here’s ffprobe output for one of the videos, I assume rate refers to sample rate and ffprobe has no problem reading sample rate:
I can provide reencoded bundle but you will need to contact me on discord and I can’t guarantee how long it will take since I don’t have any scripts prepared for VP8 encoding and last time someone needed it was too long ago and we have some new videos + some old videos have been improved. We are not going to make VP8 default because it loses in every way - it works worse on low end hardware, it either is larger or has lower quality or both. It’s not worth for platform with barely any players. VP9 and AV1 are both not supported by Unity and also are significantly more computationally expensive so even if they were supported not worth it (and neither does it allow adding codecs to built in video player, entire video player has to be reimplemented entirely to add new codec and to make it reasonably performant it has to be native plugin so it’s a massive pain).
Hi, and thanks for the info! I knew that AV1 was heavier on the CPU, but I wasn’t aware that VP9 was too, not to mention not being able to easily include videos in multiple codecs :/
So, this is probably gonna sound a bit silly, but video playback just started working flawlessly with full hardware acceleration once I switched from Wine’s built-in DirectX(/Direct3D?) 11 implementation to DXVK — it’s even using functionality called VideoEnhance in intel_gpu_top, which I’ve only ever seen one other application do and which I still don’t fully understand — so this ended up being a bit of a wild goose chase in the end. Between that and the only seemingly relevant information that I could find online being H.264-encoded videos not working in Steam games due to Steam likely not wanting to risk stepping on any patent owners’ toes, that is not enabling H.264 on Linux by default and instead opting for a mixture of reencoding videos on their servers and whitelisting specific games (and Media Foundation apparently not being supported/implemented in past versions of Wine), I apologise for the confusion 😅
By the way, I’ve only played through the first fifteen chapters thus far — yes, I skipped over a few video scenes without even realising that they were video scenes and thought that Wine or the game was acting up — but this has been the most beautiful and immersive visual novel I’ve played on itch thus far, so, to you and the rest of the team, thank you so much for creating this amazing game and I wish you all the best!
Edit: So, I just had a thought: Instead of the built-in DirectX 11 implementation being faulty, it could be that it just defaulted to my NVIDIA dGPU instead of my Intel iGPU, which would nicely explain why video playback returned nothing when it was decoding the video on the iGPU. Now, generally, OpenGL applications default to the iGPU on my laptop — yes, it did seem to fall back to OpenGL rendering according to the terminal output, and no, I didn’t check which GPU was in use — but, seeing as Vulkan applications manage to always default to the dGPU unless I force the iGPU, I could imagine Wine’s DirectX 11 implementation following suit in spite of using OpenGL in the end.
Before somebody asks: “Why didn’t you install DXVK right away‽”, well… I did, but MinGW64 being kinda fragile and me being kinda liberal with compiler flags on my installation of Gentoo led to any and all games crashing immediately upon trying to open any sort of window because of faulty stack smashing protection getting tripped. You can see the DXVK issue ticket here, but, in short, removing -fstack-protector-strong from my global CFLAGS (which I actually did a while ago but just didn’t rebuild MinGW64 in the meantime), adding -fno-stack-protector and removing -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 for MinGW64 specifically for good measure, and rebuilding DXVK fixed the issue for me.
Well, I was always saying that you need Wine+DXVK for game to work properly on Linux, no DXVK always lead to some issues with videos for people. Those who don’t have vulkan capable hardware need VP8 bundles but that’s very rare, pretty much everything in the past 10 years should support vulkan.
Speaking of patents - there is a way to avoid having to pay royalties for using h264 by using prebuilt OpenH264 binaries from Cisco. Limitations are that it only supports constrained baseline profile, must be downloaded on demand instead of bundled with software and must be optional (so there should be option for user to disable OpenH264). And I’m not 100% sure on that but I think if there is hardware codec then royalties are on hardware manufacturer rather than software that uses it. Video codecs are a patent minefield but all the royalty free codecs are designed by companies that only care about web and reducing traffic so they are all extremely computationally expensive, so h264 is still the best consumer codec that supports decent quality/compression while working well on low end hardware.
I see. I didn’t know that OpenH264 couldn’t be bundled, although I guess in hindsight it makes sense so that Cisco can keep track of how much they need to pay in royalties.
By the way, is the Discord server the right place to report bugs/issues with the game? I have experienced the game crashing/closing unexpectedly when not in focus, but it’s very infrequent and seemingly completely random, so I haven’t encountered it on the few times that I’ve had the game running in the terminal as opposed to the itch.io client. If the server is the right place to go regarding this, I’ll join once I have at least some idea as to what’s going on.
About torrent - this isn’t official but people share it on rpdl. There are also mirrors available on f95. If you’re downloading from itch I really recommend using some download manager that allows continuing download from different link because itch downloads are not very stable.
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Never commented on anything on Itch before, but your story is just amazing. Not many H-scenes, but your intent was to get readers; I get it. Great story and keep up the great work. I would to praise you more, but "I'm out of time".
why there are no animation in the sex scene its like fliping comic book?
Man you're going to be shocked when you learn what Visual novels developed from...
Anyway the latest patreon version has started the retroactive addition of animation in sex scenes for the first 12 chapters.
Game looks super cool but before i start it, i wanna ask how much story is covered till now(like in 0-100%).. there's 47 chaps, that's why i ask
100 chapters are planned, but chapters 1-15 are very short compared to the rest. So less than 50% but it’s also very long (425k words, 41.5k renders).
When's the next chap 48 update coming?
Chapter 48 is out now for patrons and will be public on July 1st.
For patrons came a few hours ago.
best vn here!
This game is super enjoyable! when are we meeting that goth girl at the park tho.. I'm at chapter 35 and she have only appeared... 3 times? I think?
The game looks too good and I was going to try it but it is not compatible with my Poco X6 Pro cell phone :(
Poco X6 Pro should support it. Are you using custom ROM? Official Xiaomi HyperOS/MIUI ROMs should have Tango translator which translates 32 bit instructions into 64 bit allowing to run 32 bit apps despite not having native hardware support. Most AOSP based custom ROMs don’t include Tango so wouldn’t run apps.
edit: nevermind, apparently Poco doesn’t include Tango binary translator for some reason, at least from what I read.
i'm using poco f3 and it runs normally
I made experimental 64 bit build so if you still want to try to play, it is on discord.
Thanks :)
Trying to install the chapter 47 and it doesnt want to work on my android.
I saw a previous post saying theres a way to possibly make it work. Does anyone know what to do for that?
For reference, I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
I really love this game, and have been playing it for quite a while. I'd hate to miss out.
I did mention that it’s possible on some phone models but it’s definitely not a process for average phone user. After a quick search I couldn’t find if anyone made a ROM or patch for S24 that allows running 32 bit apps so you’re most likely out of luck.
drat. I was hoping. I guess I'll have to wait until it'll be made, or switch to my laptop. Its an antique though, so I don't hold hopes the game would work.
My luck
Also. Thank you for the response. I appreciate you looking into it for me
It should work on your laptop. I was testing game performance on my 12 year old ASUS ultrabook with integrated graphics that couldn’t even run Hearthstone when it released. Unless it’s something even more ancient/weaker - you should be fine, maybe there would be some hiccups when loading images/videos but in general it works well. The only exception is that if you’re using Linux and running it under wine and your hardware doesn’t support Vulkan you will need to mod the game by extracting video bundles, transcoding to vp8/vorbis webms and rebuilding them in Unity 2019.4, otherwise videos will likely not work at all or will be completely messed up.
well, I am not running Linux so it should be ok. I'll give it a try, and again. Thank you for getting back to me. Its greatly appreciated
please what song is used when chapter 1, Jamie waiting for CJ at the station?
There's a playlist of oot here in yt https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjFmFIO-Pczns_3HvqdwywNrp0qvXPc-&si=j9etRh4W...
When I've downloaded it, I thought it will be some hentai stuff. I've found a gem. A story so ... I don't even know how to describe it. I was so hooked up, that I've almost detached myself from everything, just to know what happens next. It is one of greatest stories I've ever read, and trust me, I've read lot.
After about 4 months of playing this game i can say that this is the best vn i have ever played. Literal peak cinema
Can I change the MC name on Android?
The MC's name is fixed. MC really isn't a self-insert anyway.
Mc name can't be changed cuz it's already fix
is it animated?
i don't know for 45 and beyond but its not
There are some animations here and there but none for H-scenes right now. (i've only played up to chapter 44 I believe)
Animations for H-scenes are apparently planned to be added in at a later date.
They are now present in the prologue and Ch12 with the new update that is available to patrons and will be going public on July 1st.
your novel looks amazing!
Love game
My android treats the installers like apps, and tries to install the installers as apps. But then it says that it isn't compatible. What am I supposed to do?
Because they are apps. They have the same bundle id as game, so when they extract all assets inside and install game it will just replace installer on your phone and you can delete installer apk files. If it says it’s incompatible it’s one of the two - either you have new android and it complains about incompatibility due to 32 bit but you can ignore and still run them OR your phone doesn’t support 32 bit at all, then you’re out of luck, there are some ways to run 32 bits apps but they are complicated and don’t work on every phone. Eventually there will be 64 bit build but likely not this year.
Well crap. Thanks for telling me.
I made experimental 64 bit build, it is available on discord if you still want to try it.
I need some sort of Spotify playlist or smth with this game soundtrack cause why is it so good
Closest you'll get since half of it's custom commissions,
Youtube Soundtrack
I may sound stupid, but what's the difference between android installers from 1 to 5?
Because of how Android works, the full game has to be split amongst multipler installers. So each installer contains separate parts of the game that all get put back together.
That makes sense now. Thanks.
This game emotional asf ong
there is absolutely no way to change mc's name?
Just Alt + F4
And For Android?
Press and hold power button.
I'm lucky af to be named chad irl
What the fuck. I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I'm just vibing, is this what it feels like to be high?
no, but its definitely uniquely transfixing
Honestly played like 3 days straight to finish this game, u are an artist. But honestly sometimes I felt like I was on an acid trip while playing this game, in a good way XD
Nothing could have prepared me for that beach scene when you meet his dad. PEAK.
Genuine peak dude i have only played for like 15 minutes, shits amazing
you should keep going, it only gets better from there
played it all last week, it's so fucking good dude, I never thought I'd want to give a hug to ecchi characters in a VN before but it's just so good
How to download this game on Android?
Instructions are above download. You need to download installers 1-5.
Do I need to install ALL of the installers?
1,2,3,4, & 5 for a fresh install. Big game, 40k renders
Shame, from what I can see, it's more advanced and higher quality than your average visual novel.
Then what’s the problem? The reason game is split like that is because android doesn’t allow apps larger than 2GB. Actual game is a single app, installers delete themselves after game is installed.
The initial .apk cannot exceed 2gb, a game can download however much more it wants after installation.
Unless you feel like giving us $1000 a month to pay for bandwidth to enable direct downloads, that's what you're getting.
It one of the 2:
It’s downloading its own content after installing. Unless you want to pay for CDN for us this is not an option we can afford.
It has larger than 2GB apk. This is technically possible because APK files are zip archives and zip archives can be as big as 4GB and packed with zip64 extensions allow nearly infinite size. The problem is - this is non-standard for APK and not ZIP files. Officially Google only supports 2GB or less APK files and so do most phones. Some may be able to open and install these files but most phones won’t. In fact any app that is published on Google store has even stricter limitation - APK size can’t exceed 100MB, we don’t care about this limit because we are not publishing on play store. Still not an option because this will fail to install on most phones.
gotta admit she may be a bit insane but i love Cro so much xD
does the game contain ntr? I really hope not since looking at the images and description of the game I was surprised
No
Do you plan to add a Spanish translation?
Any plans to add a chapter select? Would help me out in replaying to remember story.
Most likely.
Fuck me jogging I haven't laughed like that in a while. Thank you father
guys, what kind of song starts with "bad guys... *illegible words*, good guys..." is clearly vaporwave, but I couldn't find the song (even in a playlist with music from the author). as an example, where it is used is Chapter 28, during Ashley's game
Im pretty sure you're talking about this one, I looked for it for a while as well.
CM「ずっとずっと。新留小学校」編（全編）— Phoenix #2772
Its from this album
MAXELL カセットテープ XL 渡辺美里 15" 1980-90
https://phoenix2772.bandcamp.com/album/maxell-xl-15-1980-90
thank you, brother!
Is 46 p2 the end of another section? I'm waiting to play past the end of the last section so I don't leave off in the middle of one.
If you mean arcs - no. Chapter 44 is the end of Teresa arc, chapter 51 will be end of Kieran arc. If you mean chapters - then yes, next chapter will be 47.
arcs is the word i was looking for, thanks you
Sorry but, is there any anal scene ?
One sex scene teasing it, with the implication more is coming.
Hope they will add it in the next update
And in Tropicali ? Is there any ? (*﹏*;)
Honestly, the best settings screen of all time. also starts at 20% master volume: Godsend. Includes precise time values for the text delay and auto forward speed for a better understanding of how long, rather than the standard “move sliders until you figure out “Roughly” what they do.
It technically still “roughly” in case of “extra time per word”, but it is exact for other timer. Because words have different sizes it’s closer to “extra time per average word”, for example it will not spend as much time on word “I” but spend longer on very long words. After testing I found that to be much more accurately match the reading speed after adjusting without the need to manually advance because it takes too long or rollback because I couldn’t read it fast enough. But it generally pretty accurately represents how long it will take for average sentences per word.
good
do you have to download ALL installers and run them one by one?
For initial install yes, except for update only. Order in which you run them doesn’t matter, just that you run all 5 of them. For future updates you can just download update installer, as long as you didn’t miss updates it will update to the latest, if you missed some updates it will tell you which installers you need to download to update.
i see i see thank you
The adult scene animations might not exist, but I actually stayed for the story. It's captivating, the world building is unique and very well thought out.
Story and setting is on par with best (in my opinion) games in this genre: Eternum and Harem Hotel, the latter of which I consider the best game in adult VN genre. Each of many main characters are very, VERY deep and interesting, each has a backstory and their own issues which you get involved in.
I would call this a goddamn masterpiece if it had actual animations in adult scenes, even slight ones, instead of still frames. A shame. Otherwise, a VERY good visual novel. Recommended.
P.S. (Spoilers!) Goddamnit, Jamie is cockblocking so goddamn hard, and she has my favorite body type... you left her for last for the reason Ukiko described? Is that thing going to happen when CJ is going to make love to Jamie or CJ??? Kinda confused here... At least it happened with the twin...
P.P.S. The soundtrack is f*cking PHENOMENAL dude. Huge respect for making your own tracks. The main theme especially, there was a time span when I just listened to it on repeat, it's SO GOOD!
For me its the best VN i have played no doubts, you literally are left in either a cliffhanger or with an existential doubt
To run on linux and wine I found you have to use this version of wine https://github.com/mmtrt/WINE_AppImage/releases/tag/staging-v8
also can you add the ability to torrent the game the download keeped crashing
Proton works as well and is probably the more practical approach. I don’t know about other distros, but it’s available as
app-emulation/wine-protonin the main Gentoo repository at the very least.Edit: Err, actually video playback doesn’t work (which I only noticed now); the last image shown/loaded just remains on screen until all videos have been skipped and the next bit of dialogue with its corresponding image is reached, at which point gameplay resumes normally. Looks like either switching to Proton-GE! or cloning Media Framework DLLs from a Windows installation might fix this, but I have yet to try either.If the developers ever see this comment, it would be nice if the videos could be reencoded as VP8, VP9, or AV1: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ve0kjw/a_developer_is_asking_what_codecs_are_supported/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/videoplayer-videos-do-not-play-on-steamdeck.1387941/Edit two: So, when runningOoT.exefrom the terminal, the Wine standard output seems to indicate that this isn’t an issue with the Media Foundation, but with DirectX Media Object libraries being missing, specificallymsdmo.dll. Winetricks does have adsdmoverb, but it seems to only install the 32-bit version of the libraries: https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/issues/660
</del>Edit three: So… After experimenting with a clean Wine prefix, it appears to me that at least some of the information regarding Wine and Media Foundation is outdated and that a lot more Windows libraries have been implemented in Wine since the default prefix was first initialised on my laptop, as bothmfplat.dllandmsdmo.dllare present now with Wine (Proton) 9 — there is output frommfplatitself in the terminal now and there are no errors regardingmsdmo.dll— and the Intel VA-API driver is being called by GStreamer, which means not only is video playback working, but it’s working with hardware acceleration! Well, it would at least if it weren’t for the following GStreamer error right after initialising the VA-API driver:Now, either the video’s audio is being screwy in some way or my GStreamer installation is being screwy, but at least the video codec can be ruled out as causing any issues, at least outside of Steam (and there sadly isn’t much information out there about Proton when used outside of the Steam client specifically).(Hopefully) final edit: Read my response to Nikolay’s response. Tl;dr: Everything works just fine after switching to DXVK in spite of that GStreamer error (and one more error about a surface being detached or something).
We encode videos with ffmpeg using x264 codec with constrained baseline h264 profile and if it has audio it’s encodeded with qaac codec. If there are some issues with video playback for some reason you can try unpacking movies bundles and transcoding to VP8 and then bundling again with Unity 2019.4 for windows platform but there is no hardware acceleration for VP8 in Unity (even if platform supports hardware acceleration, the only exception is android where unity will sometimes have hw acceleration for vp8 videos).
Here’s ffprobe output for one of the videos, I assume rate refers to sample rate and ffprobe has no problem reading sample rate:
I can provide reencoded bundle but you will need to contact me on discord and I can’t guarantee how long it will take since I don’t have any scripts prepared for VP8 encoding and last time someone needed it was too long ago and we have some new videos + some old videos have been improved. We are not going to make VP8 default because it loses in every way - it works worse on low end hardware, it either is larger or has lower quality or both. It’s not worth for platform with barely any players. VP9 and AV1 are both not supported by Unity and also are significantly more computationally expensive so even if they were supported not worth it (and neither does it allow adding codecs to built in video player, entire video player has to be reimplemented entirely to add new codec and to make it reasonably performant it has to be native plugin so it’s a massive pain).
Hi, and thanks for the info! I knew that AV1 was heavier on the CPU, but I wasn’t aware that VP9 was too, not to mention not being able to easily include videos in multiple codecs :/
So, this is probably gonna sound a bit silly, but video playback just started working flawlessly with full hardware acceleration once I switched from Wine’s built-in DirectX(/Direct3D?) 11 implementation to DXVK — it’s even using functionality called
VideoEnhancein intel_gpu_top, which I’ve only ever seen one other application do and which I still don’t fully understand — so this ended up being a bit of a wild goose chase in the end. Between that and the only seemingly relevant information that I could find online being H.264-encoded videos not working in Steam games due to Steam likely not wanting to risk stepping on any patent owners’ toes, that is not enabling H.264 on Linux by default and instead opting for a mixture of reencoding videos on their servers and whitelisting specific games (and Media Foundation apparently not being supported/implemented in past versions of Wine), I apologise for the confusion 😅By the way, I’ve only played through the first fifteen chapters thus far — yes, I skipped over a few video scenes without even realising that they were video scenes and thought that Wine or the game was acting up — but this has been the most beautiful and immersive visual novel I’ve played on itch thus far, so, to you and the rest of the team, thank you so much for creating this amazing game and I wish you all the best!
Edit: So, I just had a thought: Instead of the built-in DirectX 11 implementation being faulty, it could be that it just defaulted to my NVIDIA dGPU instead of my Intel iGPU, which would nicely explain why video playback returned nothing when it was decoding the video on the iGPU. Now, generally, OpenGL applications default to the iGPU on my laptop — yes, it did seem to fall back to OpenGL rendering according to the terminal output, and no, I didn’t check which GPU was in use — but, seeing as Vulkan applications manage to always default to the dGPU unless I force the iGPU, I could imagine Wine’s DirectX 11 implementation following suit in spite of using OpenGL in the end.
Before somebody asks: “Why didn’t you install DXVK right away‽”, well… I did, but MinGW64 being kinda fragile and me being kinda liberal with compiler flags on my installation of Gentoo led to any and all games crashing immediately upon trying to open any sort of window because of faulty stack smashing protection getting tripped. You can see the DXVK issue ticket here, but, in short, removing
-fstack-protector-strongfrom my globalCFLAGS(which I actually did a while ago but just didn’t rebuild MinGW64 in the meantime), adding-fno-stack-protectorand removing-U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3for MinGW64 specifically for good measure, and rebuilding DXVK fixed the issue for me.Well, I was always saying that you need Wine+DXVK for game to work properly on Linux, no DXVK always lead to some issues with videos for people. Those who don’t have vulkan capable hardware need VP8 bundles but that’s very rare, pretty much everything in the past 10 years should support vulkan.
Speaking of patents - there is a way to avoid having to pay royalties for using h264 by using prebuilt OpenH264 binaries from Cisco. Limitations are that it only supports constrained baseline profile, must be downloaded on demand instead of bundled with software and must be optional (so there should be option for user to disable OpenH264). And I’m not 100% sure on that but I think if there is hardware codec then royalties are on hardware manufacturer rather than software that uses it. Video codecs are a patent minefield but all the royalty free codecs are designed by companies that only care about web and reducing traffic so they are all extremely computationally expensive, so h264 is still the best consumer codec that supports decent quality/compression while working well on low end hardware.
I see. I didn’t know that OpenH264 couldn’t be bundled, although I guess in hindsight it makes sense so that Cisco can keep track of how much they need to pay in royalties.
By the way, is the Discord server the right place to report bugs/issues with the game? I have experienced the game crashing/closing unexpectedly when not in focus, but it’s very infrequent and seemingly completely random, so I haven’t encountered it on the few times that I’ve had the game running in the terminal as opposed to the itch.io client. If the server is the right place to go regarding this, I’ll join once I have at least some idea as to what’s going on.
About torrent - this isn’t official but people share it on rpdl. There are also mirrors available on f95. If you’re downloading from itch I really recommend using some download manager that allows continuing download from different link because itch downloads are not very stable.
One of my favorite game
how do I even get the game on my PC I'm having a hard time every time i download it it doesn't work maybe I'm doing the wrong process
Itch download sometimes fails, try using download manager to recover failed download and continue where it stopped with new link.