[MAC] Problem initializing Ren'Py

[Jalbar]

Hello! New to the forums and to the Visual Novel world in general. Been thinking on starting my own as of lately, and finally gave it a go. Found information about Ren'Py on the Wikipedia, and now i'm here

I just downloaded the Ren'Py Package 6.2.0 for Macintosh, but i can't make it work. Does it require any 3rd party program? Am i doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance!

[DaFool]

Hmmm... don't have a mac...

but first question is did you extract the files properly (i.e. the directory structure should be preserved, all contained in one folder.)

[Enerccio]

What version you downloaded? Always download latest (6.2.0c), i heard in b were a problem with launcher... but i am not mac owner too.

[Jalbar]

I downloaded the package located at http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Download_Ren'Py.

Tried both .zip and .tar.bz2 files.

It just says "6.2.0", no letter designation.

[DaFool]

Did you extract the .tar.bz2 successfully?

And make sure you don't try to run the program before it's extracted.

What is the specific error you get?

[Twar3Draconis]

Hello! New to the forums and to the Visual Novel world in general. Been thinking on starting my own as of lately, and finally gave it a go. Found information about Ren'Py on the Wikipedia, and now i'm here

I just downloaded the Ren'Py Package 6.2.0 for Macintosh, but i can't make it work. Does it require any 3rd party program? Am i doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance!

Do you get any certain messages or dialogs that popup?

[PyTom]

6.2.0 was tested on a G3 mac, and so should work, provided you have OS X 10.3. What kind of mac do you have?

[Jake]

I just downloaded and ran it fine on mine. (G4/10.4)

The only obvious stumbling block that I can think of is that OSX doesn't by default come with anything for opening tars, bzips or zip files. If you're stuck with a .tar.bz2 or a .zip file, and that's what you're having trouble with, you'll need to download Stuffit Expander or some other unzipping utility.

After installing Stuffit, double-click on the downloaded file in Finder and it'll extract it out to a folder with the same name (e.g. renpy-6.2.0.zip becomes a directory called renpy-6.2.0) - open that folder and double-click on the item called 'Renpy' with Eileen's face as an icon to start it.


(PyTom: Just out of interest, is there no Mac .dmg and .app simply because it's too much hassle to create more than one version of the archive, or are there more technical reasons behind it?)

[PyTom]

Hm... That's odd. My mac automatically decompresses .zips when I download them. (At least, Safari does.) I'm running 10.4 on a G3.

(PyTom: Just out of interest, is there no Mac .dmg and .app simply because it's too much hassle to create more than one version of the archive, or are there more technical reasons behind it?)

.dmg is a disk image, and I don't know of any non-mac software that lets you create one.

.app is a directory, which you have to zip up into a single file before you can send over the net.

[Jake]

Hm... That's odd. My mac automatically decompresses .zips when I download them. (At least, Safari does.) I'm running 10.4 on a G3.

It seems to be a relatively recent thing - Stuffit used to be installed as part of the factory standard setup when I got my mini, but the last three new Macs I've seen haven't had it, and have required it to be set up separately. Although it's a fair point that I've not tried opening a zip with Safari in a couple of years, now.

I just figured it was worth a mention, since I was sat next to a friend of mine just a week or so ago waving his arms around frustratedly trying to work out how to open a zip file on his new Macbook. If you don't already know that zips are archives, it's not an easy one to work out.

.dmg is a disk image, and I don't know of any non-mac software that lets you create one.

.app is a directory, which you have to zip up into a single file before you can send over the net.

Mm, but all the same, Mac people are used to their software coming in the form of an .app inside a .dmg; it seems that Apple are encouraging this, with new Macs only really able to deal with disk images out of the box. To serve Mac users best, a .dmg distribution with an .app inside would be the 'best' approach. I guess if there's no non-Mac software to create the dmg that's an answer in itself, but I was wondering as much whether it would even be feasible for Ren'Py to load game projects from the user's home directory from within an .app in the Applications directory, for example. Keeping user data within an .app is a bit of a no-no, after all.

[PyTom]

I prefer to think of Ren'Py, along with a game, as a single application, rather than have multiple games sharing a single instance of Ren'Py.

[NetGenSuperstar]

The only obvious stumbling block that I can think of is that OSX doesn't by default come with anything for opening tars, bzips or zip files.

My Mac never came with Stuffit (which sucks, anyway), but it can open tarballs and .zip files using a system application called BOMArchiveHelper. It should be transparent to the user, making the functionality almost built-in. If your OSX 10.4 doesn't do that, there may be something wrong with your OS.

[Jake]

I prefer to think of Ren'Py, along with a game, as a single application, rather than have multiple games sharing a single instance of Ren'Py.

Mm, I'd noticed. I'm just suggesting that this is fundamentally incompatible with the Mac's application paradigm, which says that all the worky bits go in the .app package folder, and all user data goes elsewhere (in the home directory), be it documents, projects, settings or whatever. All the Mac users I've seen who haven't previously been users of a different OS don't really know what to do when they download a thing which isn't a .dmg or .pkg and/or they don't get an auto-run installation script or a nice big friendly icon they can drag to Applications. The reason I mentioned going into the archive and specifically running the launcher was simply that I wouldn't be overly surprised to find a typical Mac user had opened the archive successfully then dragged the launcher on its own into their Applications directory and tried to run it from there.

If there was any intent to make a Mac-specific distribution of Ren'Py, I'd suggest that packaging it as an .app in a .dmg and fiddling it to look for game projects in some subdir of the user's home directory would be a useful thing to do - consider the main Ren'Py distro more like an IDE than a single standalone game, but make the packages it creates still exist as standalone games. But I can easily appreciate that maintaining a separate Mac distribution isn't a particularly appealing prospect.

It should be transparent to the user, making the functionality almost built-in. If your OSX 10.4 doesn't do that, there may be something wrong with your OS.

Well, mine, my Dad's... I was chatting with him last night, we speculated that it could be a difference between the default out-the-factory settings and the result of installing from the Tiger disc; it seems the factory install has a couple more things preinstalled that are optional downloads.

[Jalbar]

6.2.0 was tested on a G3 mac, and so should work, provided you have OS X 10.3. What kind of mac do you have?

A G4 iBook with OS_X 10.3.9 installed

The only obvious stumbling block that I can think of is that OSX doesn't by default come with anything for opening tars, bzips or zip files. If you're stuck with a .tar.bz2 or a .zip file, and that's what you're having trouble with, you'll need to download Stuffit Expander or some other unzipping utility.

After installing Stuffit, double-click on the downloaded file in Finder and it'll extract it out to a folder with the same name (e.g. renpy-6.2.0.zip becomes a directory called renpy-6.2.0) - open that folder and double-click on the item called 'Renpy' with Eileen's face as an icon to start it.

Yes, i decompressed the file with ZipIt, and ran the application. The icon appears on my dock a few seconds, does the "jumping" animation of being initialized, and then disappears without being run. I neither receive any message, or system error.

I just found the error data file in the main folder, it gives this message as output:

I'm sorry, but an exception occured while executing your Ren'Py
script.

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'font'

After initialization, but before game start.

-- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------

File "/Users/Jalbar/Desktop/renpy-6.2.0/renpy/bootstrap.py", line 197, in bootstrap
File "/Users/Jalbar/Desktop/renpy-6.2.0/renpy/main.py", line 292, in main
File "/Users/Jalbar/Desktop/renpy-6.2.0/renpy/display/core.py", line 911, in __init__
File "/Users/Jalbar/Desktop/renpy-6.2.0/renpy/display/core.py", line 595, in __init__
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'font'

After initialization, but before game start.

Ren'Py Version: Ren'Py 6.2.0c

[Twar3Draconis]

I'm not to good with reading the error messages, but it might be your script that holds the issue.