Will Windows 8 break Renpy?

[hugolino]

"With the touch-centric Metro interface, Microsoft is starting from scratch. It’s built a radically new look and feel and added new features, and expects developers and users to make a great leap forward. Support for old-school Windows is still there, but it’s been shunted off to one side." (http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/mou ... different/)

"One developer told me recently about hearing 40 percent of the code has changed since the Windows 8 Developer Preview released in September. I find that hard to fathom (or believe) but even 10 percent would be trouble enough for developers trying to nail down a software strategy for Metro." (http://betanews.com/2012/02/17/windows- ... -disaster/)

The subject of this thread is an exaggeration, but do you think Renpy will have to be revamped for Windows 8?

[LVUER]

We have to ask PyTom for that... but if RenPy could be made to support HTML5, that would be awesome. Since that means all OS that could run web browser could also play RenPy games.

[jack_norton]

Made a thread about that (the end of open platforms) and PyTom said he is confident about using a virtualization technology for Windows8. Surely, having a Renpy->HTML5 converter would be the definitive solution to the problem for many years, but is also a big task and not sure he has time/motivation to do it.

[PyTom]

As best as I can tell, Windows 8 can be broken up into two parts - Windows x86, and Windows on Arm.

I'm not expecting Windows 8 x86 to be a major problem. As best as I can tell, it will have a traditional Windows desktop, as well as support for the new metro-style apps. I'd suspect that all existing games - Ren'Py games among them - will run on Windows 8 x86. (I'm downloading the developer preview now, to be sure.)

Then there's the fullscreen "Metro" environment. Apps will have to be rewritten to run on Metro. Porting to it will be a challenge - Ren'Py sits on top of a fairly large software stack - Python, SDL, Pygame, Libavcodec, Angle, and more - and availability of Ren'Py will depend on most of that stack being ported.

The big "problem" is with Windows on Arm, which claims to only support Metro apps. I don't know how popular WoA will be - it has the same problems as Android and iOS (you need to rewrite your apps - again), and it's the third entry in the market. It isn't clear to me that it will take off like Windows 8 x86 will.

We'll see. When my tools make a port something I can accomplish in a reasonable amount of time, I'll port.

[PyTom]

Fooling around with the developer preview, Ren'Py seems to work just fine. The .7z installer is triggering a security warning, but once I bypass that, Ren'Py works. So I might tweak things a bit, but so far so good. (Hardware acceleration isn't working, but I suspect that is a virtualbox driver issue, rather than a real one. I'm actually displaying using DirectX, but it's not working since the drivers aren't there.)

Windows 8 is a PITA to use. A lot of the gestures make sense on a touch device, but don't make any sense for a mouse-based computer. I hope they fix it before it's final.

[hugolino]

Thanks for the quick response, especially on a question that is months ahead of the Windows 8 release.

This is off-topic, but I imagine the new Mountain Lion (OS X) gatekeeper feature will require those releasing OS X versions of Renpy games to educate users not to panic when the operating system warns about a lack of an official developer signature on a game.

"Apple has made two specific additions to Mountain Lion that cannot be found on iOS. The top one is Gatekeeper, a new security feature designed to fend off malware by controlling what applications can and cannot be installed.

As a new preference within Mountain Lion's security tools, users can choose between one of the following allowed source options:

• Mac App Store
• Mac App Store and identified developers
• Anywhere

By default, Apple's got Mountain Lion set in the middle option, which employs a signature system that checks with Apple to see if a creator of a non-App Store app is a registered developer."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57378 ... ut-of-ios/