Umineko Project

Pretty much. We are planning to wait at least until all the 8 episodes are ready. Thanks for understanding

So I decided to give my ancient laptop a chance, after reading that things are better on older hardware now.

Average framerate sits around 30, lip sync drops it to single digits, fades and other transitions drop to 15~20, and videos... I don't think you'd want to know.

I know, I know, it's a X3100, there is no worse integrated Intel GPU in existence, but hey... when I'm bored, these things happen.

Oh dear Nothing but guillotine can cure Intel GPU engineers regardless of their product age.
Now there actually are ways to improve performance even with such deadly devices but I would still not expect it to be mostly playable. Once I tried running the port on something like C60 it was equally funny.
You could go with these options: force-fps=30 (maybe 25 or so) to reduce refresh rate and increase the time for background work, hwconvert=disable if yuv shader conversion runs in software and is terrible, no-glclear could speedup things a bit but might break things.

Since you are bored and often use Linux, could you try to reproduce this? I feel like this OS could be the case. (Move to that topic for any details).

So I was thinking now that I got a shiny new phone... are there any plans for Android?

Hmmm… It should not be very difficult given that we support iOS with GLES backend. All the other libraries should be cross-platform. However, we have no resources for that unfortunately. Chiru needs a lot of work, and nobody from our team uses Android (yes, for real).
If somebody does help us to port it, that may be possible. However, that basically means maintaining the port and preparing the binaries, which may be tiring.

Question regarding the audio :

Why are we using fixed 256 kbps bitrate though? You could use a variable bitrate with 8 vbr and would probably get better quality at roughly the same size ( or little larger maybe)

Mostly because we tried to preserve best possible quality. The original files were 192 Kb/s, so we thought that a solid higher bitrate will provide us better quality than vbr with sometimes possibly lower bitrate. The size was not targeted or anyhow taken into account.

Mammon's furniture that is me strikes again: any chance to provide the Japanese original text as well? One-key switch back and forth would be marvelous! Definitely will help improve my shabby Japanese. I know it's not the first priority but a possibility to wait for would be a great blessing please

I'm wary of promising things to be done "someday" I have no idea how much motivation we will have left after Episode 8 is done. This project takes a lot of time from us, and I'm looking forward to the day when its obligations no longer hang perpetually over me

Right now the scripts for the different languages are entirely separate, and we would have to rework a lot of things so they could be done on the fly instead.

Also, it was an intentional decision originally not to include Japanese, to discourage using our work as a replacement for the original PS3 games (it's intended as a way for non-Japanese-speakers to enjoy the game...), though I understand that doesn't take account of players like you who have a partial understanding of Japanese. In fact, I've wanted this feature for editing, too, but it's just unlikely we'd spend time on it over other things -- it's not important enough.

I wish you luck with your Japanese -- hopefully you can read Umineko in either language in a few years' time

Thanks for taking time to reply. I totally understand the choice made by the team. And wish you guys all the best with the development of the Chiro project!