Ren'Py 6.12 Development Thread

[PyTom]

As the light at the end of the tunnel is approaching for 6.12, I've decided to start a thread where I can write about the various developments going on.

So far, the major changes for 6.12 are:

- Performance Improvements for the GUI system.
- Android Support
- A new SpriteManager system.
- Drag and Drop

Many of these are related - for example, the performance improvements were necessary to stand a chance on Android. The next line of development is a little bit of work on image prediction, especially with respect to screens.

Today I implemented an improvement to screen language imagemaps. Now, Ren'Py will cache the hotspot image data in files underneath the game directory. If a cache file exists and is newer than the image data it caches, it will be used. This means that, instead of having to load up to 5 screens of hotspot data, Ren'Py can load one image file. When the hotspots do not take up much of the screen, this can be a significant performance improvement. It also significantly reduces imagemap usage.

Attached, find an example hotspot cache file. These live in <gamedir>/cache/. Thanks to mugenjohncel for the sample images.

[Naeddyr]

I'm rather happy about the drag and drop system. The game I'm cloning had one instance of that, and I'd started wondering what I'd do about it.

[yummy]

Waah that's awesome, that's a feature that I longed for since the renpy ATL series. Good job ^^

[NoriMori]

Um, I'm not sure if I should make a new thread about this or not, so I just thought I'd try my luck posting it here…but, for some reason in application updating software such as AppFresh, this version of Ren'Py shows up as version "r1296787508". Previous versions have never done that, they've shown up as version 6.10.2, etc… I can only assume it's a weird quirk of this release, and it would be nice if that were fixed so that AppFresh doesn't get all confused…