NScripter Hacking & Mods

[Aspirety]

This topic is for discussion on all things NScripter Hacking. You can share resources, ask questions on how to use NScripter, or even share your own NScripter-based mods and creations.

ONScripter and PONScripter are also welcome to be discussed here.

[Renall]

If you’re interested in extracting the files from the new release of Umineko, the coder for WH has you covered on tools. The specific tool you’d be looking for is nsadec.exe, an extractor tool. Download the repository and put nsadec.exe in the game folder.

Now for the tricky part (there are utilities that get around this but this is the easiest one to get). You need to start a command line prompt in the Umineko directory. On Windows, Run -> ‘cmd’ and navigate to the folder of choice using e.g. cd c:\umineko1to4\ or whatever your directory may be. Steam version is probably contained in the Steam\steamapps\common\ folder.

Now type the following and hit Enter: nsadec.exe -o extract arc.nsa

This will start a long process in the command prompt window as things are automatically extracted to a new directory called /extract/. You can now browse that folder for the graphics from the game. Note that for some reason I haven’t been able to get BMPs extracted to load and I’m not sure why that is exactly, but all PNGs (which is everything of interest, for the most part) are accessible. The new PC graphics are in a subfolder called /big/. The old graphics are in the folder /bmp/.

---

Now, let’s suppose you want to look at the script (or edit it, I don’t know). Where is that and how do you extract it?

Good news: You don’t have to extract anything. There is a file sitting in the root directory called 0.utf which is the actual script file. I strongly recommend using an editor like Notepad++, Adobe Dreamweaver, or basically anything that isn’t Notepad or WordPad. The script file is huge for a text file at a whopping 11 MB and the loading routines of a weaker editor will crash your word processor. Also it helps to have an editor that displays in fixed width fonts, as you are essentially looking at code (albeit fairly simplistic code PONscripter interprets as engine commands).

Some things to take a look out for:

• Lines like mld c,$EVA_ikariA1,80 are displayable calls, basically showing a sprite. You can find the matching sprites in their respective /tati/ folders in the image extract. In theory you can change this to change which sprite is displayed, but some of the other stuff is used to determine where the sprite is displayed on the screen and so forth. I don’t know much about that so someone else will have to explain what the various numbers and commands mean.
• Lines prefaced by langjp are the Japanese script. Lines prefaced by langen are the English script. Be prepared for a very long search if you’re looking for a specific line. Certain text editors with regular expression find-replaces could go through and erase every line not starting with langen to give you an “English script” of a sort, but you’ll have to work that one out. And it won’t have any sprite cues unless you also preserve those.
• For the most part, the episodes are in order, with no separate files between them, so watch out for spoilers as all text from all episodes 1-4 will be available. Extra code is mostly at the bottom but unless you’re hacking things like the TIPs menu this probably won’t matter to you.

[MrDent]

I’m attempting to make an arc.nsa file that contains the CGs from the PS3 version of the game as well as the Steam version, but I can’t seem to recompile them properly. I’m using the nsamake.exe, but no matter what I do, the game opens without menus. I’m kind of new at this stuff, so I might’ve done something obvious but wrong… I made sure that it didn’t include the directory, but still no menus. The splash pages at the beginning won’t show either. It works like this no matter what the content of the compiled arc is, too, because it behaves exactly the same with and without the CGs added.