this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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[Guide] Playing Visual Novels on GNU/Linux (wiki.comfysnug.space)
submitted 1 year ago by Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/138679

We've been working on a guide to help players on all major GNU/Linux distributions play visual novels for the past few weeks. This guide is designed to be used by both beginners and experts, with minimal need to touch the command line.

openSUSE wins the award for "never had to touch the terminal" and "simplest setup instructions", but Fedora is a close second.

While there are a few existing visual novel guides for GNU/Linux around, we've tried to fill in the gaps we noticed. We've put a lot of research into this guide and ensured it is accurate while remaining simple and approachable.

If you're interested, start here!

We have an extensive Troubleshooting section on our Problems page if you're having trouble getting visual novels to work, too.

I wrote this guide with a lot of help from two other people, including /u/neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space. It’s available on our community wiki, https://wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, meaning you’re free to share, remix, and build on the content as long as you credit us.

We also have some other pages you may find useful:

  • If you're looking for something to play, check out our Recommendations page.
  • If you want to know where and how to buy a visual novel you want to play, our comprehensive Buying page will help you out.
  • And if you want to read a visual novel in Japanese, our Reading in Japanese page offers a lot of advice and points you to some useful software to make the process easier.
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[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Granted, most of the VNs I have played used the same engine (ren'py) but usually it is as simple as unpack the tarball, then run the only shell script in the main directory. Sometimes you might need to do a chmod +x on the files in the libraries folders and the start shell script if it was packaged on a Windows system but that is about it.

[–] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 1 points 1 year ago

Ren'Py is a fantastic engine and it would be great to have more games developed in it. Unfortunately, a lot of visual novels don't use Ren'Py, so they are only released for Windows and need to be run through Wine. This includes the vast majority of Japanese visual novels before 2010. The good news is that most of the time, this works pretty well—assuming you do it right. The setup isn't complicated and hopefully this guide makes it easy to follow.

There's a neat trick for running NScripter games natively on Linux, even if they were only developed for Windows: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:vnsonlinux#playing_nscripter_games_with_onscripter

ONScripter is a drop-in replacement for the NScripter engine that works on Linux, and it can interpret NScripter game files just by running it in the same folder. This worked for me with TRianThology.

Steam games tend to work out of the box thanks to Valve, but this guide is for the visual novels that aren't released on Steam (which there are a lot of).