Game window size changing mid-game is possible?

[Soraminako]

So, I have another strange problem. ^^;

I was testing stuff and made a nice animation opening for my game. Then, I made a mini-game that ended up requiring a wider screen to display everything the way I wanted.

So, I could either keep my animation and have a mini-game that's cramped and ugly, or I could have a nicely sized mini-game and have to redo the entire animation.

I'm sure this kind of thing is likely to happen again even if I don't finish this game, so in any case, I wanted to ask: Does anyone knows if we can have the window size change during the game? As in, the game loads in 800 x 600 pixels, then it plays the opening and everything in that size, and when you reach the mini-game it switches to 1200 x 600, or whatever other format. (And then back again after the mini-game is done, ideally.)

Is that possible? And can we have the option to either have it happen automatically, or give the player the choice to use the cramped mini-game size or to switch to the wider size? (I know I could tell them to go to full screen, but then the format will remain the same as before, while what I want is to make the window wider, but not taller.

Any help you can give on the subject is much appreciated! ^^;

[DrathFox]

I came across this page with a Framework package, it contains a lot of nice tools to make a minigame and whatnot. Inside of the Framework is a demo game. What I noticed in there is that there is one window setting for the VN itself but once the actual minigame takes place it opens as a different window with its own resolution properties, when the minigame is finished it returns the player to the VN window.

http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/frameworks/Renpygame

If you have any further questions I'll try and help out. I'm pretty new to this approach as well but picking up more and more each day.

[Soraminako]

Oh hi there! And yay!

Thank you for the link, that seems like it will be very helpful! (Although I shudder in horror when I see "It's intended for people who are capable programmers." at the top of the page, hahaha~ XD *has a foreboding feeling*)

I'll be back to ask questions when if I fail at using it. XD

It's great how we keep learning more every day!

[PyTom]

In general, you want to use Creator-defined displayables in preference to renpygame. The latter is more for combining existing games with Ren'Py.

How is your minigame implemented? Changing resolution isn't possible, but maybe you could put everything inside a Transform to scale the minigame down.

[Soraminako]

The mini-game is very cramped, so if I make it even smaller it will be hard to see each piece. ^^;

Although maybe it could work anyway, and in any case I'd love to know how to do what you mentioned, PyTom! It would be very welcome if you could show the code.

[PyTom]

Well, if it's a CDD-based minigame, you could just do:

Code: Select all

    add my_minigame zoom .5

That also works for spritemanager, drag and drop, and bunch of other things, with some minor code changes. It's tough to give a totally general answer.

[Soraminako]

CDD? ^^; (Is that classic drag & drop? Or something else?)
Thank you for the code, but where would that go? ^^;

It's a drag & drop mini-game in a screen. I call it from a label in the game, then return to the normal labels after the mini-game is done.


By the way, if you or anyone else ever feels like expanding the wiki on drag & drop, it would be WONDERFUL.
It's one of the most awesome features of all, but it's so confusing that even just using the example in the wiki takes ages to learn. Especially since the drag & drop code in wiki (at least last time I checked it) doesn't work with the recent versions of ren'py due to drag_group vs. draggroup, but that at least was solved by searching in old posts in the forum.

Drag & Drop could be used for puzzles (jigsaw or not), dress-ups, inventories, so many different things within the longer games in ren'py, but it's under-used because so few people know how to make it work, much less actually use it for anything beyond the immediate application shown in the wiki. ^^;

Maybe sometime we could all do a thread to list the features that would be nice to expand the wiki upon.
I think one of the problems is that the people who most need the wiki can't use a lot of the things in it (because it's too advanced), and the people who know enough to add wiki pages are so advanced that they don't necessarily know what newer users and intermediate users would have difficulties with and need added wiki pages or explanations for.