Porting ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート (AKA Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart, AKA Noratoto)

Requirements

• whale-tools
• arc-unpacker TODO

Versions available

There are at least 4 known versions of the game in the wild: v1.00 (original golden release), v1.01, v1.02, v1.03 (downloadable as patches from official website).

v1.03 includes the following asset archive files:

• script.dat - scripts
• arc0.dat - everything
• arc1.dat - voice sound clips
• arc2.dat - FullHD graphics
• arc3.dat - contents of patch

Basic porting

The main problem is that Whale format archives do not include any filenames, only the hash sums calculated from the file names. Thus, one must have a list of file names to know which binary chunk identified by a given hash corresponds to which file name. On the other hand, it's only possible to do so by looking up file names used in VN scripts.

So, ideally it goes like that:

1. Unpack Whale scripts using whale-tools; archiver script should be edited before running, replacing line with GAME_TITLE with:

GAME_TITLE = "ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート"

Whale scripts should be converted to UTF-8 (as they're originally in ShiftJIS).

This step can be achieved by running ./noratoto-extract-scripts

2. Now we need create a map of scripts to its IDs (i.e. that 00022_900a40a6e5662415.script is actually A4_01a). Such a map can be created semi-automatically by analyzing labels inside Whale script files, however, fine-tuning by hand is advised to remove all non-gameplay related scripts (i.e. menu, titles, etc).

This step can be achieved by running ./noratoto-gen-script-list and editing script-list.txt in noratoto-trans.

3. Generate list of files used in scripts by running ./noratoto-gen-files-list. This generates files-list.txt in noratoto-trans.

4. Extract files by the file list, again, using whale-tools archiver. This step is automated by running ./noratoto-extract-files.

5. Convert all possible TLG images into PNG images. This step requires arc-unpacker to do the actual conversion - be sure to set up path to it in config file. Automated conversion is done by running ./noratoto-tlg2png

6. TLG images actually come in 2 versions: TLG6 images (which are basically normal bitmaps) and TLG0 containers, which are actually images

• some info on proper way to achieve properly composited images from pieces. We need to extract this compositing info in separate image description file - imgs.json. This task is achieved by running ./noratoto-process-tlg0.

Note: this step requires library from story_utils and TLG0 format description in .ksy compiled as .rb module.

7. Finally, everything is ready to convert Whale scripts to .story format. This is performed by [whale2story] utility, which can be launched automatically on every Whale script by running ./noratoto-script-to-story.

Translation

Translation is done using extracting strings to translate into separate YAML file, translating it there and then reintegrating i18ned strings back into story file.

1. Extract the strings, creating (empty) YAML translation templates with original language only by running ./noratoto-story-to-yaml - this step requires story2yaml from story_utils.

2. Edit translation YAMLs, adding translation

3. Reintegrate it back by running ./noratoto-yaml-to-story - this requires 'yaml2story` from story_utils.