Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

Discuss how to use the Ren'Py engine to create visual novels and story-based games. New releases are announced in this section.
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Dan_Tsukasa
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#46 Post by Dan_Tsukasa »

LIVE2D is interesting. Though I'm unsure of the particular benefit of Live2D over various other 2D Polygon animation programs such as Spriter, Spine, After Effects or even Photoshop.

If all people end up doing in the end is exporting the things as spritesheets, it sort of defeats the whole point of using Polygon Animation in the first place, the main benefit of 2D Polygon animation is being able to control those animations whilst in the game itself, blending the animations together smoothly, none of this can be done by using spritesheets.

Not to mention using Spritesheets results in dramatically larger file numbers and file sizes for the game itself.

If someone really needed to go that route and only planned to export as spritesheets then Photoshop or After effects might be easier solutions.

I find it a bit odd people are discussing using such great software and simply exporting out as spritesheets, completely defeating the main benefit of such software, if thats the end result its best not to spend a bunch of money on software which you're barely utilizing for its purpose.

Live 2D however would be best if its fully integrated into Ren'Py from the get go, so you're able to really take advantage of the final results, whilst I'm more a fan of Spine personally as I find it more powerful than Live 2D, the same situation stands with Spine, or even Spriter.

Though from my understanding Live2D is 'free' on the technicality that you only make a small amount of money, once you hit a certain income amount you have to pay more, its pretty standard with most software, Spine and Spriter are the same, go over a certain amount and you pay a yearly fee.

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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#47 Post by PyTom »

The nice thing about spine and spriter is they're documented well enough that I can do a third-party implementation of one or both of them. Live2D has no format documentation that I can see, and the libraries are all closed source, so there's no way it can be used with an open-source engine like Ren'Py.

And honestly, I think that spending the time to learn a more-generic tool will pay dividends. I don't think the current animations are some thing that would enhance a game over static sprites. I think I'd rather have Ren'Py leapfrog the current technologies.
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#48 Post by xPerfectSuicide »

Ever you considered the alternative of E-Mote?

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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#49 Post by Dan_Tsukasa »

PyTom wrote:I think that spending the time to learn a more-generic tool will pay dividends. I don't think the current animations are some thing that would enhance a game over static sprites. I think I'd rather have Ren'Py leapfrog the current technologies.
Do you mean that things like spine and spriter make more sense because they can be used for more than simply slighly animated sprites.

Wheras something like E-mote and Live2D are almost soley for Visual novels, and so if you wanted to do something that wasn't a sprite, you'd be having to take the software in directions it wasn't intended to achieve your result. Wheras Spine or Spriter (Ironically I own both, I just dislike Spriter, its taking too long to develop) are more generic, so achieving the same thing as Live2D or Emote is easy enough, but you've still got a lot of options for various other things too.

ie: Someone wants to animate their background or something else, its possible with all this software, its just not the aim of Live2D or Emote. As great as they are their focus is too specific, and whilst its suited for visual novels perfectly, its only suited if you wanted to do the exact same thing as visual novels already do, but just with animated instead of static sprites. It would be an uphill battle to do dynamic backgrounds or dynamic title screens etc. Even simple effects like particles or ripples are dramatically easier to do in spine or spriter since you can set your emitter to a specific point, ie: dynamic tears (if you so wanted). I've never even checked if particles actually exist in ren'py. But its an interesting thought nonetheless.

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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#50 Post by PyTom »

Dan_Tsukasa wrote:Do you mean that things like spine and spriter make more sense because they can be used for more than simply slighly animated sprites.
Yes.

But I also think that even for animated sprites, a more flexible tool can have benefits. If I understand it correctly, live2d and e-mote both force a structure on your animated sprites, while more flexible tools let you pick your own structure. I don't think this sort of thing is mature enough that we can be sure there's only one way to animate a sprite.
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#51 Post by netravelr »

PyTom wrote:The nice thing about spine and spriter is they're documented well enough that I can do a third-party implementation of one or both of them. Live2D has no format documentation that I can see, and the libraries are all closed source, so there's no way it can be used with an open-source engine like Ren'Py.

And honestly, I think that spending the time to learn a more-generic tool will pay dividends. I don't think the current animations are some thing that would enhance a game over static sprites. I think I'd rather have Ren'Py leapfrog the current technologies.
This. I'm interested in bringing animations to RenPy titles as well, but Live2D is very closed, assistance from the devs is very expensive (comparatively), and it restricts you to just one type of development. I would be much more interested in using something like Spriter or Spine as it opens up a lot more options for developers. I'm very excited to hear that it's being looked into.
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#52 Post by PyTom »

My feeling is that it will be one of the first things I do once I get Ren'Py 7 out the door - although it may take a while, since I will probably need a more flexible renderer to make it work.
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#53 Post by Dan_Tsukasa »

PyTom wrote:My feeling is that it will be one of the first things I do once I get Ren'Py 7 out the door - although it may take a while, since I will probably need a more flexible renderer to make it work.
I've no prior experience with PyGame outside of Renpys implementation, so I've no idea how much or little has changed, but I do believe Spine has PyGame support, which means it works with the default pygame renderer, unless Ren'Py uses something unique of its own that is. Which might be possible given that Standard PyGame is 2D and 3D renderer, whereas the one in Ren'Py is pure2D right?

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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#54 Post by PyTom »

Actually, it's the other way around - pygame is pure 2d, while Ren'Py uses OpenGL to provide accelerated 2d rendering using the 3d hardware.

Do you have a link to working implementations? I could hack something in and improve it later.
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#55 Post by Dan_Tsukasa »

PyTom wrote:Actually, it's the other way around - pygame is pure 2d, while Ren'Py uses OpenGL to provide accelerated 2d rendering using the 3d hardware.

Do you have a link to working implementations? I could hack something in and improve it later.
Theres this: https://github.com/terrysimons/spine-python

I haven't looked through the code myself yet but the introduction states

A Pure Python implementation of the Esoteric Software Spine runtime for pygame.

But I can't verify if its a good implementation or not.

Theres also this but they're for Python standard as opposed to PyGame it seems.

https://github.com/maxattack/little-polygon

Theres 3 linked on from the Esoteric website under Python, however the top one just appears to give a link to the main Spine repository on Github, I can't see python in that list.

http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes#Python

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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#56 Post by PyTom »

I can't use little-polygon, since it's under the GPL.

spine-python doesn't seem to have a license associated with it.
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#57 Post by Dan_Tsukasa »

Hmm.

I understood it more to be references to hack something similar together.

Something that I never understood about licensing with code is, nobody ever see's code (ren'py is open source so people would but I mean in closed source things) so how do people follow that sort of thing up anyway. But largely, there are only so many ways to code something to do the same thing, so 2 methods by 2 completely unknown people could possibly turn out very similar to eachother by pure coincidence.

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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#58 Post by PyTom »

If you're skilled enough, you can sort of tell.

For example, I looked at Tyrano once, and saw that it used the ffmpeg dll. (I think it was ffmpeg, maybe libav? They're basically the same thing.) I know ffmpeg is at least LGPLed, so you kind of know there's a license violation going on there, since there didn't seem to be the required written notice. I don't make a big deal out of it - I reported it to the makers privately, so they should have fixed it by now, hopefully.

As a creator, you are responsible for what you distribute - you have to check the licenses of code. You can hide it - but that's incredibly dishonest. And if you get caught, or people downstream for you get caught, you or they are responsible for it.
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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#59 Post by Dan_Tsukasa »

PyTom wrote:If you're skilled enough, you can sort of tell.
As a creator, you are responsible for what you distribute - you have to check the licenses of code. You can hide it - but that's incredibly dishonest. And if you get caught, or people downstream for you get caught, you or they are responsible for it.
Of course, I wouldn't do it myself but I always wonder if sometimes big companies just do things knowing nobody is ever going to decompile their code anyway, its unethical to be sure, but doubt its as rare as it should be.

All that aside it looks like any integration with Spine even as a hack isn't too likely in the short term, due to one of those having licensing and the other having no written licensing terms.

I could contact the 2 creators to request permission or to confirm the license of the 2nd one if you'd be interested.

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Re: Does Ren'Py support Live 2D?

#60 Post by PyTom »

If you could contact the second one, that would be great. If not - the spine format is not terribly complicated.
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