Last updated on 2023/04/01: ONScripter-insani is back, and now hosted on GitHub. All maintenance and documentation for these builds will be on GitHub from this point forward. For documentation, on the other hand, we heartily recommend Kaisernet's excellent *NScripter API Reference -- it's much more updated and much more comprehensive than ours was.
Welcome to our support site for the Japanese visual novel scripting engine NScripter and its open-source (GPL) counterpart, ONScripter. During its heyday, NScripter was one of the single most dominant visual novel scripting engines on the market -- only AVG32/RealLive could be said to have enjoyed as much popularity as NScripter did. As a brief measure of the kind of impact that NScripter had on this market, consider the following games -- 月姫 (Tsukihime), 銀色 (Gin'iro), みずいろ (Mizuiro), 月は東に日は西に～Operation Sanctuary～ (Hanihani); these were all created using NScripter. In this day and age, companies seem to prefer to build their own engines than to use NScripter, and for that matter NScripter itself has not seen any development in several years. However, that is not to say that games that utilize NScripter are no longer made -- in fact, one of the most notable recent visual novel releases (as of May 2005) happens to have been built with NScripter: サナララ (Sa-Na-Ra-Ra) by Nekonekosoft.
ONScripter, written by Ogapee, is a GPL'd clone/replacement for Nscr.exe (the NScripter runtime executable), is built on SDL, and is easily portable to any number of operating systems. Its compatability with existing NScripter games tends to be quite good, other than the fact that there does not presently exist any top menubar functionality. We at insani are actively working with Ogapee to improve ONScripter -- and you can see what we're up to here.
You are currently on the Home page. For further information about NScripter and a brief overview of its capabilities, please go read the About/FAQ section. For a non-exhaustive list of games known to use the NScripter engine, please see the List of Games. For a nearly-comprehensive look at the commands and scripting format of NScripter, please go to Kaisernet's excellent *NScripter API Reference. If you're really keen on seeing our historical documentation of this API, it's still available, although you should really just use Kaisernet's instead. For the latest insani-enhanced ONScripter builds (for Win32, Mac OS X, and x86 Linux) or the source code to ONScripter, please go to the ONscripter Builds section. If you're a translator who wants to get started translating an NScripter-based game -- or if you're one of the equally crazy English-speaking people who wants to write his own visual novel using NScripter -- then you'll want to pick up a copy of the Development/Translation Kit (currently Win32 only; ports to other operating systems in the works). For a quick bird's-eye view of what's been going on in ONScripter development -- especially with regard to insani's enhancements of it -- read the Changelog. Finally, for related links -- including to translation projects known to be using ONScripter and to other visual novel engine toolkits -- please head on over to the Links section.