# Vinora Engine

Vinora Engine is a visual novels engine with focus on *simplicity* and 
*portability*.  
It doesn't use any script language (like Python in Ren'Py), 
but instead it use Markdown dialect called Vinora Screenplay.

It's on early stage of development, so it has no use if you an 
average user.  
But if you are a programmer -- you are welcome to 
[contribute](CONTRIBUTING.md).


## General design

### Game structure
Visual novel on Vinora Engine looks like this:

```
example
├── engine
│   ├── vinora_lin
│   ├── vinora_mac.bin
│   └── vinora_win.exe
├── game
│   ├── bg
│   │   ├── school_day.png
│   │   └── school_night.png
│   ├── cg
│   │   └── debate.png
│   ├── conf
│   │   ├── main.ini
│   │   └── options.ini
│   ├── music
│   │   ├── day.mp3
│   │   ├── home.mp3
│   │   ├── night.mp3
│   │   └── school.mp3
│   ├── sounds
│   │   ├── door.ogg
│   │   ├── exit.ogg
│   │   ├── play.ogg
│   │   └── stop.ogg
│   ├── sprite
│   │   ├── alice
│   │   │   ├── happy.png
│   │   │   └── sad.png
│   │   └── bob
│   │       ├── happy.png
│   │       └── sad.png
│   ├── ui
│   │   └── main_menu.png
│   ├── video
│   │   ├── ending.mp4
│   │   └── opening.mp4
│   ├── Chapter1.vnrs
│   ├── Chapter2.vnrs
│   └── Chapter3.vnrs
├── mods
├── translations
└── run_game.bat

```

A little bit overwhelming, but it's actually really simple. Let's start 
with root directory:

```
example
├── engine
├── game
├── mods
├── translations
└── run_game.bat
```
`run_game.bat` is cross-platform (Bash/Batch-compatible) script, which will
run a right engine binary from `engine/` depending from which OS it was 
executed.

Than this binary will look at `game/` and start reading game script. If user 
in-game would choose to play `mods/` or switch to one of the 
`translations/`, it will overwrite any information from `mods/` in RAM.  
(For example, if I switch to Russian, `translations/ru/intro.vnrs`
would be displayed instead of `game/intro.vnrs`. Same with mods.)

**game/** directory has a bunch of Vinora Screenplay (.vnrs) files and 
assets directories (bg, cg, conf, video, etc).  
Obvious question is *why we didn't make general `audio/` and `video/` 
directories?*

Well, in Vinora Screenplay to put image on a screen you write something
like this:

`[](music/home.mp3)`

So, difference between music and sound is that music is played on loop. You 
can change by appending {loop} or {!loop}, but still, this is *default*
behaviour.

And the only way how Vinora can distinguish `music` from `sound` or `sprite` 
from `bg` is by parsing their directory name.


### Vinora Script overview