General engine information

MAGES. engine appears to have been designed with the following goals:

• Suited for visual novels: Duh.
• Massively crossplatform: We have seen releases for PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One, Win32 and iOS, and some games contain script files for Android. A wide variety of formats are supported in every asset category, and simultaneous multiplatform releases often ship with different formats per platform.
• Rich text: Script text supports plenty of markup sequences in addition to dialogue style properties. @channel threads in Steins;Gate are formatted text, not images or complex UI structures.
• Simple extensibility: Besides traditional character sprites, there have been releases featuring 3D graphics or Live2D sprites. There's no entity-component-system; larger features are fairly self-contained. Game-specific features are thus tacked-on, which likely involves code duplication, but makes for a simple structure.
• Not data-driven: Scripts mostly control state. Game-specific features are largely implemented natively; game assets are far from interchangable between different builds.
• Deterministic resource usage: Binaries are littered with global variables. Almost all objects, from opened asset archives to character sprites, are assigned one of a fixed number of (reusable) slots. (Though this doesn't exactly make games very memory-efficient on rich platforms like Windows...)

In this guide, we will first look at Steins;Gate 0 as released on PC. A fairly recent version of the engine, but with no particularly fancy features.

Variations

MAGES. engine has a few particularly notable variations:

• KID engine: The original. We don't know much about it except strings are encoded using a standard encoding (with in-band markup sequences) in Ever17.
• 11eyes PC: Ships scripts in SCS, apparently the original source code format.
• Mobile ports: The Android and iOS versions of Steins;Gate and its fandiscs ship scripts in SRC¹, apparently a preprocessed source code format. We have not investigated whether the runtimes originate from the same codebase as the console/PC versions (apart from the Android version of S;G, which is a complete Java rewrite). Note the Android and iOS ports of Chaos;Child (and likely any future titles) use binary SCX scripts like the primary version.
• Chaos;Head Dual: Vita release that combines Chaos;Head Noah and Chaos;Head Love ChuChu!; the latter is built in MAGES. engine, the former on rUGP, but there is asset sharing between the two.

¹. On Android, the scripts are "encrypted" using a trivial shift cipher. ↩