# 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).

## Table of Contents
- [Installation](#installation)
- [Design](#design)
- [Contributing](CONTRIBUTING.md)
- [License](LICENSE.md)

## Installation

### Installing raylib

You have two options here: build raylib manually or get it automatically
from Github. They are both easy to do, but for building you need to install 
additional dependencies, which is not really cool and for auto download you
need to rely on Github.

It's up for you what to choose.

##### Manually building

If you want build raylib manually, you need to prepare some dependencies:

- [Linux](docs/working_from_Linux.md)
- [MacOS](docs/working_from_MacOS.md)
- Windows
- ChromeOS
- FreeBSD
- Raspberry Pi 
- Android

##### Auto download Vinora 

So, you need some C99 compiler (we use `gcc`), `make`, `git` and `wget`.

`sudo apt install build-essential git wget`

After you installed this, run: 

    make fetch-raylib

It would download raylib from Github instead of building it. 

### Building Vinora 

Simply run: 

    make

It would Vinora Engine.  
That's all, you've done!

___

## 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 play some music 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