Syntactic Sugar

[yummy]

Actually, when I had the idea of a "parallel processing" it was linked with how I work out my creations.

When I work, I always imagine bits of sequences that can be moveable in order to create a scene. If you ever used a music sequencer, you might understand: you have a general pannel which contains the events on different tracks and they can be played simultaneously to create melodies.

You are right Pytom when you use your code to display a character and make it talk. The scene shows up and everythings fine.
You are also right when you mention movie scripts. They are indeed written on a textual format, but they only show what is being played or to be played : there are no parallel paths.

VNs are a little different from movies because you have to take on account that there are multiple paths, parallel events that happen at the same time on a timeline (sometimes in VNs, there are loops which make that kind of timeline more apparent, like in higurashi no naku koro ni, cross channel, school days...).

I don't intend to say that Ren'Py way to process scripts is flawed. It's really good and my opinion on this isn't going to change.

I just wanted to highlight the fact that it is much easier to manipulate a representation of an abstraction (that is to say a representation of a scene for exemple) than a block of text which contains multiple ideas (or multiple abstract ideas).
Imagine a bubble you handle to be shown at a precise time and another bubble which might be shown according to a player's choice.
That's why I thought a storyboard is much easier to handle than a text representation.

I experimented with Labyrinth, that I found in the ressources thread. It helps when you have mixed situations, multiple characters, multiple relationships. It made me remind of those tools FBI and french police use to retrieve someone through their similar acquaintences.

Erm, well, back to the topic.

Somehow, I disagree with mikey on this issue. There are people who are storytellers but not programmers. Some people don't even catch on concepts like methods and functions. There might exist a barrier that repells those who want to tell a story. After all, Ren'Py was made to allow people to create stories through games (originally a story about Onegai Twins if I remember well hehe), not to create an elite of programmers (at least I hope so).

So when Pytom tries to simplify the coding issue, I prepare kudos

Gambare Pytom~

[mikey]

As for parallel processing... well, you can also see the VN like this:

Code: Select all

BG              Chara          Mus               Text
-------------------------------------------------------------
black                                            Hey,it's dark'n quiet
                                                 What now?
                                                 I'll switch on the light.
/black
room                                             Cool, I can see
                Girl                             - Hey, who are you?
                                                   I'm just a girl
                               romantic          I think I like her
                                                 Maybe I can...
/room          /Girl           /romantic
black                          horror            OMG, the lights are off again
                                                 I'm scared

So it's kind of parallel ^_^

Somehow, I disagree with mikey on this issue

Hmmm, perhaps it was Jake? Or just quote the part you disagree with ^_^ I'm not a programmer, conveniently, I let others do that for me *ashamed*.

[yummy]

Yup that's typically a movie screnboard there

I saw something more like that:

Code: Select all

       |-------------------------Timeline------------------------------->
Title  |--------------------------- DAY1------------------------------||
Common |      ||  EVENT  ||         ||   Idle   ||---------||  EVENT  ||
Chara01|  sc1 ||---------||   sc2   ||----------||   sc3   ||---------||
Chara02|      ||---------||   sc1   ||----------||   sc2   ||---------||
Chara03|      ||---------||         ||----------||   sc1   ||---------||

And imagine for each scene what you found in the screenplay you provided, and you get what I had done before coding

It's been rightly pointed out that Ren'Py is not WYSIWYG, and so, people will have to put up with a certain learning curve - while I think it's good to make Ren'Py user-friendly, I don't think that it should respond to each and every whim and whine of people who are unwilling to open a notepad or find it too difficult to copy/paste or to whom syntax highlighting isn't helpful. You have great tutorials by SolarSnake and eclipse, a helpful forum... the list goes on. Because I'm getting the impression that somehow the thought is there that it's the engine's fault if people don't try their hands on games, but with this kind of simplicity, it's just laziness in disguise.

There are times when headaches overcome laziness

[mikey]

There are times when headaches overcome laziness

Well, fair enough. I just wouldn't want to compromise the flexibility of the engine - but as I said, I don't know much about the inner structure of Ren'Py. As it is now though, I find the balance between geek<->casual quite good.

[RedSlash]

Movies uses both text scripts and storyboards as they both serve different purposes. IMO, I think this should probably be the same for ren'py. Ren'py should probably stay as a scripting engine as that is its original purpose, while the GUI (if there should be one) be a separate project which serves as a designer app for ren'py rather than replacing ren'py as the main VN engine.

That said, this means that making ren'py scripting as simple as it can be, but keeping it as powerful and as flexible as it is, would be plus in increasing the amount of users who will choose ren'py as a VN engine.