Ren'Py 4.7 Released

[PyTom]

Well, another day, another Ren'Py release. I'm happy to announce the release of Ren'Py 4.7. This release adds a new text tags feature, allowing text styles to be changed within a block of text. As usual, Ren'Py can be downloaded from its homepage:

http://www.bishoujo.us/

Upgrade to this version by copying over your game directory.

To provide a stable platform for IntRenAiMo/NaNoRenO projects, I plan to limit any new releases of Ren'Py between now and the end of March to bug fixes. You can do your part by helping to thoroughly test this release.

Below, find the changelog for versions 4.6.1 to 4.7. You may also want to check out the release notes for the fairly recent (yet buggy) releases 4.5 and 4.6.

New in 4.7

The demo was updated to show the new features in 4.7.

The big new feature in this release is text tags. Text tags is a markup language that allows text properties to be changed inside a single unit of text. It lets you emphasize individual words by making them bold, bigger, or a different color. Rather than explaining it fully here, let me point you to the new "Text Tags" section of the documentation.

There were two changes that were made to Ren'Py to support text tags. The first was that interpolation now quotes the interpolated text, making it impossible to introduce a text tag via interpolation.

The second change is that renpy.input() and friends now take as arguments strings giving allowed and excluded characters. The default is to exclude the '{' and '}' characters, meaning that it's impossible for a user to input a text tag.

Finally, this release features even more defensive programming involving sound. Now, if the mixer does not initialize, no further sound operations will be performed.

New in 4.6.2

4.6.2 was never officially released, as it didn't cure all of the sound woes, and didn't have much else in the way of new features.

Added a speed test, which tests the speed of the dissolve transition on a user's system. This test can be accessed by typing 'S' during the demo (that's shift+the 's' key).

Fixed a bug with sound on systems with no soundcard in them. (Also, put in a note to remind myself not to re-introduce that bug.)

Fixed a bug in which imagemaps would not redraw properly.

New in 4.6.1

Fixed a major memory leak in the rendering code. This leak was rendering 4.6 and 4.5 unusable on smaller systems.

Executed 250,000 statements (well, 5 statements in a loop, while skipping), and ensured that there was no memory leak during the execution of these statements.

Added a memory profiler. You can see it by supplying the --leak option to run_game.exe or .py, but don't expect to understand it.

Changed Dissolve so that it tries to use compositing when it can. This means that it only draws to the screen once... which is a little bit of a speedup on a really expensive operation.

Fixed a bug that was preventing predictive image loading from working.

[mikey]

Well, another day, another Ren'Py release.

Slowly, you'll have to change the numbering, because you'll reach 10.0 in no time. No "name" for the release? Awwwww....

[PyTom]

Sorry... I couldn't think of a good valentines day pun. Maybe I'll add one in when I think of one.

And I figure I'll just keep going with 4.10, 4.11, etc. If it works for Linux, it works for me.

[Alessio]

Text tags RULE! :))))
No, honestly, it's great! Thanks, Tom! That's it, no more wishes now. Back to writing my game.

[Dre]

Whoa, how did I miss this release? Nice add on's! *Go's to download*

[Megaman_Z]

Downloaded it today, experimented a bit, and found something you might want to take a look at, PyTom...

when you set the Library.enter_transition to the "irisout" transition, it doesn't quite work as I would expect it to: the save boxes on the right side come up before the menu background stretches that far (and ditto on the menu choises)... the opposite occurs when the opposite transition (irisin) is used for the library.exit_transition. I can't discribe exactly what looks wrong, but it doesn't quite feel like a "smooth" transition.

don't worry too much about this, (to me it's an aesthetic thing) but could you please look into it.

[PyTom]

Confirmed as a bug. Since it's a bug that won't affect users, I'll wait until the next release of Ren'Py to fix it. But thank you very much for bringing this to my attention... it really takes people playing around with the engine to reveal all the obscure bugs, like this one.

Update: Fixed in my subversion repository.