PyTom wrote:My initial reaction is that is 1 month, 23 days late.
Ahahaha, it took me some time to calculate what exactly was on that day. ^_^
PyTom wrote:I mean, I'm both flabbergasted by both the "how?" and the "why?".
Ok, I'll try to answer.
"Why": RenPy allows programming on pure python, providing a kind of good UI library. Using it in nonintended ways is fun, because it's both exciting (with python programming is fun again) and challenging (some details of how RenPy works are too VN-specific). Several days before New Year party I found out that RenPy supports Drag&Drop, at this moment I reinvented it with awful shit-code for Travnica game (stay tuned, english version is coming soon). When celebration was over, we had a long Russian State Winter Holiday weeks. During this period I've tried Drag and thought "hmmm, one can use them to make something windows-like". This idea was so strong I couldn't help but to code this down.
"How": basicly, to make something like this you need to store a DragGroup in a variable and to manage Drags inside it when a window needs to be added/closed/updated. As for applications, I've agressively used non-public API. And yes, this was not too easy. There are lot's of places where I feel that I'm reaching current RenPy's limits.
Some most interesting limits worked around:
* if Drag has a scrollable ViewPort inside, it is still dragged, not scrolled. Kind of solved this in SnaplessDrag class.
* Button reacts only to left and right mouse keys. Screw this, my MultiClickedButton class reacts to middle click and mouse scroll too! (That was actually needed for MicroAmp and Minesweeper game)
* Text does not have properties to disable tag support. Created TaglessText class for this.
* Grid uses the same widths&heights for all the columns&rows. UnevenGrid class solves this.
* Adding & removing sound channels is not allowed when the game have started. Using non-public API to do this.
* I was not sure if new Styles can be generated after init phase, but I needed this. So all styles are handled by directly passing ui properties.
Behaviour and performance issues:
* RenPy works extremely slower if DynamicDisplayable contains a clickable Button (FPS 60 instantly drops to FPS <20)
* RenPy slows down if a hundred(s) of focusable objects are displayed.
* RenPy consumes hundreds more of memory Mb when a very long Label is displayed inside ViewPort. It is hundreds Mbs less if one Label is replaced with a Vbox with lots of Labels.
Unsolved limits:
* RenPy core code uses "renpy.something" calls and "import renpy.something" imports in lots of places, which makes it uneasy to run multiple instances of RenPy. Still, I have successfully runned "The question", which is kind of success.
* Maximum Unicode code is 65536 on some platforms
* HTTPS is not supported (which means that english Wikipedia is accessable and russian is not, lol)
* Only one video stream can play at a time
* Video stream can't be paused
* Audio&video stream can't be rewinded
* Audio&video stream total length is avaliable with any APIs (for MP3 I have parsed some headers to extract this)
* Equalizer can't be implemented with any current APIs
* I don't know a way to drop a given set of images from image cache without purging everything
* If an exception is thrown from audio subsystem or during render, my code does not catch it and does not show a beautiful application window with a traceback without ruining the whole system.
* Many more...
