Supported engine · LiveMaker / LiveNovel
LiveMaker (its visual-novel authoring mode is called LiveNovel) is a long-running Japanese engine behind hundreds of doujin and commercial VNs. It ships a game as a single Windows .exe with all of its assets packed into a VFF archive appended to the end of the executable — and the script itself compiled into binary .lsb scenario files, so the original plain text is gone. RuneTranslate reads it anyway. It detects a LiveMaker game from the archive's signature, then drives pylivemaker — the reference open-source LiveMaker toolkit — as a bundled sidecar to read every .lsb, pull out the dialogue text blocks and menu choices, and hand them back as a clean list. You translate with any provider — DeepL, an LLM (OpenAI / Anthropic), free Google Translate, or a local model — with the engine's inline formatting tags masked behind placeholders so they can't be mangled, and an optional AI-refiner second pass to tighten phrasing. On export, RuneTranslate re-inserts your translations into the .lsb scenarios and repacks the whole archive back into a copy of the game .exe — a full, runnable translated build you can play directly. It was verified end-to-end on a real 411 MB commercial LiveMaker game: 7,715 dialogue and menu lines extracted, translated, and repacked in seconds, with the rebuilt game intact. This is a newly added, best-effort engine — the scenario text and menu choices are covered; verify the translated build in-game before sharing. Source language is Japanese by default and configurable per project.
LiveMaker scripts reuse character names and recurring terms across thousands of lines. Add them to your glossary first so every line of dialogue and every menu renders them the same way. Glossary 101 →
Point RuneTranslate at the game directory — the folder containing the LiveMaker .exe (often alongside a live.dll runtime). Engine detection recognises the game's embedded VFF archive automatically; your original files are never modified.
RuneTranslate opens the archive appended to the .exe and reads every compiled .lsb scenario with the bundled pylivemaker sidecar, listing all the dialogue text blocks and menu choices — with speaker labels for context and the engine's inline tags masked behind placeholders.
Translate with DeepL, an LLM (OpenAI / Anthropic), free Google Translate, or a local model. The inline formatting is frozen so a provider can't reorder or delete it, and an optional AI-refiner second pass tightens the phrasing. Translation memory reuses repeated lines.
On export, RuneTranslate re-inserts your translations into the .lsb scenarios and repacks the whole archive back into a copy of the game — a complete, playable build. On LiveMaker 3 it also switches Latin text to half-width so English reads cleanly.
Launch the exported .exe and play. Because it's a full rebuilt copy, there are no loose files to manage. Confirm the dialogue and menus read correctly in-game before sharing.
