Moe first designate the emotion of protection toward vulnerable character such as Rei ayanami in evangelion and sailor saturn (hotau toMOE) in sailor moon. But in these anime these girls are still bishoujo (pretty girl). The other type of girl was the lolicon (gasp).

[etc]

I don't know why you're rambling on about something you clearly don't actually know about.

Kyoani started the moeshit craze

Like how Infinity Ward started the FPS craze.

Raoh? There was a Fist of the North Star anime movie as recently as 2008. More recent than Kamichama Karin, never mind the decade old Kanon.

A now vs '82 image could have Minky Momo/Tokimeki Tonight/Asari-chan vs Jojo/Jormungand/Psycho-Pass...

sdl_ttf uses freetype, it's not really useful for realtime though since it calculates every pixel of every character based on the cuves every single draw call, what you want to do is use it to render the font to a surface once when the program loads and copy the surface to a GL texture saving off the character spacing metadata (for use later so you can properly space the characters based on the font).

Alternatively you could use freetype to draw strings only when the string changes, so each string is reused over many frames and drawn as one draw call, like a sprite.

This means you can use Unicode and varied sizes without having a system that works out what characters you need at what sizes.

Try watching the beginning of ep 13. Rei get instructed to imagine moving her hand. She does use the hand grip before the Eva's hand moves, but those physical controls may be more like a safety lock. The Eva has a lot of mechanical parts attached to it that supply power, restrain it, hold weapons, etc.

btw. WHERE'S 8TH EP OF CHUUNIBYOU ((

A special place known as Woden's Day.

You will need to travel through the fourth dimension to get there.

You only need to encrypt a hash of the file's content to form a signature.

The advantage over storing the hashes of the data in the executable is that you can update your data and sign it without having to update the executable.

anyone knows when Deadmen Wonderland or Infinite Stratos 2nd seasons are coming?

Deadman Wonderland bombed right out of sight. Not a realistic chance of that getting a second season.

IS might happen eventually, but it's thought to have run into trouble due to the unstable author's falling out with the publisher.

I'm curious about the mission of the ball with the 3 sisters , do they change on each playthrough?

Yeah, there's a few things like that in the game. I think the script makes that kind of choice after the point where the save used by the mission menu is made.

After low and high chaos playthroughs, I tried seeing how much of the game could be completed on Very Hard while minimising the abilities used and never getting engaged in combat. Meaning, using blink only when I could find no other physical route, not using any other magic, avoiding incapacitating people, etc.

Outside of the blink tutorial, there seemed to be two places where blink had to be used. Both early in levels, where people are guaranteed to have mana I suppose. I had kind of hoped it would turn out that the game could be completed without using magic in the real world, but never mind.

Other than targets I had to knock out to meet objectives, there were two guys I choked. Also, two guards I distracted. Playing it this way turned out to be fairly easy. The main thing needed was simply having a clear idea already about where to go to complete the objectives.

So, the player gets lots of tools and magic, making you massively powerful compared to the enemies, but it's effectively nearly all just for the fun of the crazy stuff you can do.

@ham and brie

But there are no chars in those functions?

What is the declaration of std::string? What is the return type of its operator[]?

The problem is that it doesn't really work. The algorithm has a bug but I'm not really sure where. I think values above 128 get mangled.

That'll be because char is signed.

YAML is similar, but a lot looser in its syntax...from what I've been able to tell, the choice between YAML and JSON largely comes down to how strict you like your data formats to be.

Yes, it's looser in the sense that C++ is looser than C.

The thing that initially made me look at alternatives to JSON was simply wanting to be able to have valid comments, but I also found I generally prefer having less overhead of formatting rather than data.

I'd echo the recommendations of JSON over XML, but would further suggest using YAML over JSON. A YAML parser such as yaml-cpp will parse JSON files, but YAML has features that can make it even more readable.

Actually, text-overlaid-on-screen games are generally called NVL (novel) games in Japan, with AVG generally being reserved to textbox-at-the-bottom-of-the-screen games.

Tell that to Leaf.

Sound novel is one of those terms nobody fully agrees about, but generally it's defined as a VN that has more focus on its audio than its visuals.

And tell that to the people that did the filming and photography for Chunsoft's 428.

While we're at it, before anyone asks, the term 'kinetic novel' is sometimes used for linear VNs with no choices at all.

Kinetic Novel is branding by VisualArt's for a line of products. Linearity is a characteristic (along with lack of porn), but it doesn't seem to be used as a genericized term for that in Japanese.

I find it kind of interesting that the Japanese use different terminology from the distinction made in English between adventure games and visual novels.

Within Japanese terminology, most games that are called visual novels in English are just adventure games (abbreviated ADV or AVG). The distinction for a visual novel is the text style: it generally means a subcategory that uses the full screen for text, which allows the writing style to be closer to that of a novel. Leaf/Aquaplus used the term for games such as Shizuku and To Heart. Chunsoft had used Sound Novel for basically the same thing.

Which makes me wonder why -- with all that potential -- 90% of VNs are about a guy in highschool trying to pick one of several archetypical chicks. You have the ability to tell any story you want and make it sink deep, and this is what you choose to do over and over? I just don't get it. Western indie VNs are more varied, but the average quality is relatively low. I like Christine Love's games, but I think that Analogue for example looks pretty amateurish. Aside from the writing of course.

Two sided network effects cause almost any entertainment medium/genre to have a mass of rather similar works.

But would it also be fair to suggest that you might be less likely to be aware of the atypical work done by Japanese developers?

Christine Love's Analogue reminds me of the Serial Experiments Lain PlayStation adventure game, in which the player uncovers a story about Lain by going through data files such as her counsellor's audio logs.

Is it a coincidence that the girl looks alot like Mei from Another?

Mei is part of a trope, and Rikka is emulating the look of such characters because she thinks they're cool.

It actually gets worse; many visual novels (including, say, Planeterian and Umineko) don't even have choices, just being a linear story with no interaction whatsoever. The 'are VNs games?' discussion has been going on for ages with no clear consensus. I personally consider them a separate medium (otherwise I'd have included Umineko in my list).

Type-Moon's Mahoutsukai no Yoru also has no choices. Could possibly be the VN with the best production values, so it's interesting as a demonstration of some of what that storytelling medium can do besides branching.

And PC-98 porn games.

Windows 2000 used the NT kernel. Windows 95, 98 and Me used an MS-DOS based kernel.