The layout change was originally intended for mobile devices, but since the iPhone and Android phones identify themselves as screen devices and not handheld devices, the layout changes were carried over to netbooks and PCs as well. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, as the current layout was intended for high-resolution widescreen monitors anyways.

Please note that the 1024-pixel threshold might move up in the future as mobile devices evolve and their screen resolutions increase. Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome in the forum!

If you were one of the few who tried to register during this time, sorry for the screwup and please try again. I deleted all the accounts since may 21st, so you can reuse the usernames.

If there's any more problems, contact me here or here.

If you want to help out by testing and filing bug reports or perhaps you want to lend your video and image editing skills please apply on the forum.

As some of you have already found out, the TLWiki has a new project listed. The game's called Eden*, and yes that is our logo along with Coalguys'. A few of the staff expressed interest, and with phiber's suggestion, joined efforts.

Does this mean work on School Days will stop? No. Hopefully in the previous post I cleared up where we are in terms of overall completion. Translation is done so that means AstCd2 is free to work on other things. Ascaroth is in charge of the website and release engineering for School Days, and as you can see, this website looks great and he built us a "compile installer and patch" button, so he's free as well. Lastly, I am only a QC for the Eden* project so I am still here testing and compiling SD test builds as a full-time job.

So again, School Days development will not change. Everyone will be back to work on it after the holidays.

This year brought us to the episode 1 milestone, which was rather significant in this project's progress. This release meant that we had accomplished reverse engineering a completely alien engine from scratch. This feat also means there could be future potential to start Cross Days as a simultaneous project or a future project.

We also gave help to those who were translating the game into other languages as well, mainly Ghost Team for their Russian project.

Remember during the release of ep 1 I said we had hoped to finish ep 2 and 3 by now? I had seriously underestimated the amount of work needed to bring ep 2 to completion and a bit of mismanagement on my part contributed to this unachieved goal. Right now I can probably peg progress for ep 2 at 68%, with most of the remaining work to be done on images and testing.

As for the rest of the game, translation has been done for all 6 episodes, with 3 being edited, one being tested, 4 being mapped for decisions, and images to be done for 5. Completion is TBD.

We are still looking for image and video editors. Sorry I didn't get to everyone in time, but if you are still interested please email me at kanna@sekaiproject.net. I will try and reply within 2 days.

Requirements:

• Image editors need to be comfortable with editing and redrawing images in Photoshop.
• Video editors need to be comfortable with editing videos using a combination of After Effects and FRAPS.
• All applicants must be able to dedicate 2 hours per week to the project.
• You will need to coordinate with other image and video editors in the team.

Please notify us of your interest through the specified thread in the forum, and we will contact you with further details afterwards.

We look forward to your application!

A lot of problems were in staffing. Not many people who play eroge know how to hack DirectX9, and not many people know how the Overflow game engine works either. It took basically 4 or 5 people to understand and manipulate the engine for a proper English translation. As you play the game you'll notice the subtitles changed into a smaller (perhaps more readable) style, we also took time to translate important visuals such as the note-passing between Sekai and Makoto. Once we figured everything out, the rest was easy work.

All in all, I'm just trying to say we took this long because we were going into uncharted territory and trying to build the foundations for our translation. Of course, future episodes shouldn't take as long and I hope to be at episode 3 or 4 by the end of the year.

Now, on to the actual release annoucement. Before installing the patch be sure to read our readme file. Hopefully we made everything easy to understand for everyone. The installer is made so you will be able to install the patch with or without an existing game installation. As mentioned in the readme, if you are on Vista/7 it's highly recommended to install our group's certificate. This will help with troubleshooting later on, and it's also required if you want full functionality in game explorer. ]]> Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:00:00 MDT http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n6 http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n5

Also, before anyone starts complaining on the forums about it, I would like to repeat that this release will only contain content for episode 1. Sorry to disappoint those who expect a full release, but we're trying really hard to get things done, I swear! ]]> Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:00:00 MDT http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n5 http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n4

So, the game release date has been pushed to June 26 instead of the previous date of April 24, which was of course delayed from February 22.

"Just how hard is it to string together a series of videos? Too difficult for Overflow, it would appear. Even their compatibility checker has had eleven revisions." - Sankaku Complex

Now, being a customer that actually buys Overflow's stuff, I'm not very happy with the delay but after having worked on the project for a year I think I have to defend the staff a bit. It's actually quite difficult to put videos together, even for one scene. For example, a 1 minute scene has 8 subsections and each one may have more than one cut. Then you have to dub and sync the audio to these and coordinate playback. Let's not forget the decision paths too, since each of the decisions has to go somewhere (not in the start of ep 3 though, see the links for details). So now you have to test and make sure your paths are correct, which means checking with the director and writers. Yes, they've been at this for 6 years and decision trees are part of any game but it's still damn hard to do.

The Cross Days compatibility checker for those who "played" it should already know it's not really 11 revisions. It's actually only 3 revisions to the actual engine and 11 test scenes. I've taken apart the program and the scripting engine has improved dramatically over School Days. So it's not really coding incompetence (except Summer Days; seriously whoever decided to use that engine is a moron) that's holding up the game but probably working out the storyline and paths.

For fun, I actually put up the decision flowchart I made for the QA staff so you can all see what a mess it is. Keep in mind this is only for the first 2 episodes, so imagine ep 6 being a clusterfuck of text and arrows.
School Days Route Paths Episodes 1 and 2 ]]> Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:47:00 MDT http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n4 http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n3 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:35:00 MDT http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n3 http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n2 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:29:00 MDT http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n2 http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n1

During the past few months, we have been internally testing the game installer. In order to be a complete replacement instead of a mere patch, we have had to restart halfway, so our development time was nearly doubled. The original idea seemed to be very solid, but unfortunately the libraries needed to perform online installations was flagged by many anti-virus scanners as malware. As a result, the installer size has grown from a few hundred kilobytes to around 260MB for just episode 1. We may consider releasing multiple installers to save redundancy, but it is unlikely at this point.

The information page has changed significantly and is now in line with our official documentation. As a preview for the patch, I have also posted it for public viewing. It is located at http://www.sekaiproject.net/readme ]]> Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:44:00 MDT http://www.sekaiproject.net/news/#n1