# 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

Just run:

```
$ make run
```

That's all!  
Except if you never built a GUI program, linker throw errors at you. Well,
you have two choices here:

1. Get raylib library as binary from Github (only for Linux/MacOS for now).
That's kinda easier, but you need to trust Microsoft Corporation.
(Not cool).  
Just run `make fetch-raylib` for that, then `make run` once again.
2. Build it yourself. Good news is that raylib's source code is included
in repo (external/raylib/src/), and `make` trying to build it by default.
So, if you have an error you need some OS-specific additional steps. 
Read them here:

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

## 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.