cross-posted from: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/138679

We’ve been working on a guide to help players on all major GNU/Linux distributions play visual novels for the past few weeks. This guide is designed to be used by both beginners and experts, with minimal need to touch the command line.

openSUSE wins the award for “never had to touch the terminal” and “simplest setup instructions”, but Fedora is a close second.

While there are a few existing visual novel guides for GNU/Linux around, we’ve tried to fill in the gaps we noticed. We’ve put a lot of research into this guide and ensured it is accurate while remaining simple and approachable.

If you’re interested, start here!

We have an extensive Troubleshooting section on our Problems page if you’re having trouble getting visual novels to work, too.

I wrote this guide with a lot of help from two other people, including /u/[email protected]. It’s available on our community wiki, https://wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, meaning you’re free to share, remix, and build on the content as long as you credit us.

We also have some other pages you may find useful:

  • If you’re looking for something to play, check out our Recommendations page.
  • If you want to know where and how to buy a visual novel you want to play, our comprehensive Buying page will help you out.
  • And if you want to read a visual novel in Japanese, our Reading in Japanese page offers a lot of advice and points you to some useful software to make the process easier.
  • Quack Doc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    you haven’t been able to get bottles working for VNs? I’m willing to help out in this case, it’s how I predominately played most of my VNs

    • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Unfortunately not! Admittedly, I only tried the Flatpak on Arch while I tested Lutris on all the distributions we provide instructions for. I got a bunch of different errors when trying to launch Sono Hanabira 1. I’m reinstalling Bottles with Flatpak now so I can test it again.

      First, I create a Gaming bottle. I change the Runner to system Wine, which is Wine Staging 8.12 for me. Then I get the classic File Join error:

      So, it seems like the filenames are garbled. I install cjkfonts as a dependency—I wish it gave me feedback as to what it’s doing like Lutris does in the installer while it does this because it takes a while, but that’s a small usability thing. I also set the LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 environment variable in settings for the bottle. I try to launch it again and the text isn’t garbled anymore, but I still get the filejoin error:

      This is weird, because I’m pretty sure this is a result of a bug that existed from 2008-2022 fixed in Wine 7.10, and I’m using Wine 8.12.

      At this point, I wonder if the locale is taking and run the commands listed in this comment: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2129#issuecomment-1354415425

      I try again, but I get the same error. At this point, I figure Sono Hana is probably a tricky game so I try H2O now, which I know works in normal Wine, Lutris, and even CrossOver, but I get this:

      And I get a lot of similar issues for other VNs, too.

      • Quack Doc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’ll see if I can give it a try later tonight, since there may have been a regression since I last played anything. do you have any specific VNs you had issues with aside from sonohana? I played through the rance series using bottles up to magnum quest.

        I try again, but I get the same error. At this point, I figure Sono Hana is probably a tricky game so I try H2O now, which I know works in normal Wine, Lutris, and even CrossOver, but I get this:

        • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Here are some other VNs:

          • I tried Dracu-Riot and don’t even get a window:
          002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126).
          • I tried Hatsuyuki Sakura and got an odd one complaining about not being able to find Startmenu.exe:
          StartMenu.exeが見つかりませんでした。
          • I tried Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata, which gives me this:
          00c4:err:module:import_dll Library UnityPlayer.dll (which is needed by L"Z:\\run\\user\\1000\\doc\\2bcd2b83\\Sutekina_kanojo_no_tsukurikata.exe") not found
00c4:err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Importing dlls for L"Z:\\run\\user\\1000\\doc\\2bcd2b83\\Sutekina_kanojo_no_tsukurikata.exe" failed, status c0000135
          • I tried Amrilato, which tells me it can’t find the game executable and gives me this:
          002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126).
Failed to launch. Arguments are:
0 "Z:\\run\\user\\1000\\doc\\4b6a94df\\lib\\windows-i686\\TheExpressionAmrilato
.exe"
1 NULL
2 NULL
3 NULL
          • I tried Higurashi Meakashi, which gives me this even though there is a data folder named this:
          002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126).
There should be 'HigurashiEp05_Data'
folder next to the executable

          And it continues on in this fashion. I’m using sys-wine-8.0, but switching to soda-7.0-7 gives me identical results. It seems something is fundamentally broken in the install, but I don’t see how that could be given I installed it via Flatpak.

          • Quack Doc@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I do have dracuriot so I will be able to test that again then, by chance are you running the games from bottles internal system bottles’ “Program files”, I run all my games from that

            • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceOPEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Most of these games are installed in my ~/games/VNs folder, but Higurashi is in a Wineprefix. These games were installed long ago, and some of them don’t even have methods of installation. Since you gave me the idea, I installed Flatseal and gave Bottles free reign on “All user files (filesystem=home)”, which it didn’t have, but that didn’t help. I’m very much not an expert on Flatpak, so it’s possible I missed something basic. Lutris on Linux Mint worked perfectly fine with Sono Hana 1, so I don’t know what’s different about Bottles.

              Edit: I copied Sono Hana 1 to ~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/runner-dir/drive_c/Program Files/その花びら1 and it worked! In the end, it was something basic. I think I’m going to break the sandbox though because I don’t want to move all my games there: https://docs.usebottles.com/flatpak/expose-directories/use-system-home