NovelRT Reimu (2026.0.0)

A foreword, from the NovelRT maintainer team.

Well, this is a big moment. We've been in an in-dev/pre-alpha state since 2018, with previous releases not really working as we wanted or desired. It has been a lot of work to get here, and while many contributors have come and gone over the years, we would not be where we are today without a single one of them - so, first of all, thank you for your contributions to our brainchild. It means the world to us.

With our very first major release going out into the world, many things for the project will likely be set in stone moving forward, but also many things will change. For example, implementing new features to rapidly grow the suite we provide is likely to be our newest priority, instead of spending forever on core systems to ensure the foundation is good. I think it is, at this point.

With this release now in the wild, we will also be looking to begin running larger road tests, such as community-based game jams. Plans are still underway for this, but I really do hope to see you all there.

Again, thank you for your contributions and patience with us. We hope you enjoy what we have built, and will continue to build.

What's new?

• Basically all of the core systems are now in place as part of this very first release of the engine.
• We now support both from-source game creation and a singular pre-built fabulist-only target for basic visual novel creation. The prebuilt target, fittingly is simply called VisualNovel. On windows this will present itself as VisualNovel.exe for example. To configure it, you simply have to modify the example VNConfig.json provided as part of this release, following the example folder structure also laid out for resources such as sprites and fabulist scripts.
• fabulist is now in the main source tree for the time being until we are settled on its design.
• The ECS is ready for road testing. Supports fully parallel work as well as system execution dependency order. See SystemScheduler.hpp for full documentation.

Known issues

• Currently, the audio APIs are not part of the build. This is unintentional, and will be fixed in a future fix version.
• The input APIs may be limited depending on use case for general 2D games.
• Currently, all of the binaries produced in the build artifacts are flattened into one folder. This is unintentional, and will be fixed in a future fix version.
• The dynamic resizing of the window is sluggish. It is unclear if this is just a side effect of trying to resize while presenting frames or not.
• The Doxygen documentation for this version is currently incorrect and outdated. This is due to a broken CI hook we will be looking to fix. The documentation still exists in the header files.
• The DesktopResourceLoader may exhibit inconsistent behaviour between loading assets via the file path and via the UUID.