Whoa, it managed to crash my Firefox 16 when I ran the preview for the first time! The second time it didn't crash, though.

Short answer: Yes.

Not so short answer: It is possible, however it requires a little bit of know-how. You will need to consider the following:

• a way to manage text, including fonts and display (with different colors)
• a way to manage scenes, you are going to have to manage dialogues and actor animation yourself. This part is easy, if you create a simple engine that looks for data (xml) and processes it, however it requires some game design knowledge.
• resource management. Visual novels are rather resource heavy, considering all those large images of characters and scenes. Background images will take the most space, because they are rather diverse and cover the whole window. Then there are character graphics and, of course, sounds (effects, music).

Considering the resources, I don't think a HTML5 game engine is suitable for fairly large VN projects. Without some way to preload assets during gameplay, you'd have to download all graphics and sounds at once, meaning you have to wait for 50+ MB game to download.

But it is very much doable. I believe there is an example of VN game lying somewhere in the examples forum.

Edit: found the example of C2 visual novel

Joannesalfa, thanks, now I know where the issue is. It looks like the in-memory canvas element isn't being created in CocoonJS, even though they are supposed to fully support it.

I'll see what I can do.

Another codec, another audio file, another bloat.

Indeed. If you make a game that uses Kinect, how do you plan to cater to users who do not have such a controller?

Graphical and sound assets take 90% of the game's size. You can write a 100+ epic RPG, however ultimately it is the graphics and sounds that dictate the game filesize.

So, if you want to create epic RPGs, use reusable graphics and sounds.

blackhornet, I've checked it out. Seems that when upscaled, words no longer fit the word break criteria; words that are too long get broken into two lines, since words no longer fit the width.

That's obviously undesirable, however it is a side effect of the word wrapping implementation.

Also, text centering is grid-based, not bounding box based. It attempts to center the text within the maximum allowable grid, however at large scale there tends to be a lot of wasted space at bottom, which is why vertical alignment appears to be incorrect, especially if using even number of rows. Which of the two lines is the middle one?

The alignment and wrapping methods are rather flawed, so I may have to rework them, however it is a hack job.

I'll see if I can do something, but no promises. For now, keep those limitations in the mind.

Real programming? REAL programming?! <img src="smileys/smiley16.gif" border="0" align="middle">

Try CTRL+F5 (or whatever forces a refresh in your browser)

Should see a golden medal with red ribbon.

Fiddle with blends a bit, I think it was XOR or something?

Alright, I've updated SpriteFont for C2 r100. Note that effects won't work on older C2 releases, so only get Spritefont v8 if you are on C2 r100.

All I've done is remove effects from draw functions and let C2 handle them.

As for incompatibility with CocoonJS, I haven't received an answer from Ludei, though I've mailed them weeks ago, so nothing new on that front.

I'm not sure why it wouldn't work on iPhone, either. I may have to revise how SpriteFont works (specifically creating and storing images; I'm using in-memory canvas).

Maybe Ashley can give some insight?

Are you using C2 r100? Also, I don't have any of the mobile platforms but Android, so I can't really test the plugin there. It's more or less hit and miss for me.

Anyway, C2 r100 has introduced some rendering changes, specifically it now does effects automatically, so I probably should remove them from SpriteFont plugin and see if that helps. I'll see to it now.