Minigame going away. Here's what's coming.

[PyTom]

Submitted for your approval.

I'm stongly considering getting rid of the current Minigame api. It's actually a bit of an ugly API, one which is a bit nonstandard when it comes to minigame programming, and yet at the same time one that isn't quite powerful enough to let users create their own Displayables.

I'm considering dropping the current Minigame interface, and replacing it with two things.

The first thing would a documented way of creating a user-defined displayable. This would allow a sufficently clever programmer, of which we now have several, to create displayables at the same level as Ren'Py does. These displayables would be the same as the various displayables that are built into Ren'Py.

The second thing is something I'm calling renpygame. It would be a fairly thin wrapper around pygame, that allows games written using a large subset of pygame to run under Ren'Py with very little modification. The idea is that people who want to write complicated minigames can use pygame to do it, and the fairly large base of pygame programming knowledge out there.

So, to the Ren'Py community I pose the following questions:

1) Does this seem like a good idea?
2) Is anyone using the current Minigame interface? Would you be inconvenienced by its removal?

[DaFool]

1.) No problems here.
2.) Python / Pygame is still way over my head. I think with the current system, sims and RPG battles are doable (and being programmed closer to renpy rather than pygame generally, they tend to feel more integrated and less like they are just a module being launched separately).

Aside from a walkable worldmap (hint, hint), I cannot think of anything else that is needed to achieve anything within the limits of a text-based, turn-based system.

[PyTom]

The pygame support is intended for AVG hybrid games, things like Soft Landing, where you have a skilled programmer who knows pygame, and wants to use it to write some other sort of game that would be hard to write with Ren'Py, and then integrate it with Ren'Py to provide visual novel support.

It would allow you to write hybrid VN/Action games, although the Action part would need to be written from scratch.

The custom displayable support would be the thing to use for world maps, and in general anything that one wanted displayed on the screen while Ren'Py is controlling. (One nice thing is that it's at least theoretically possible to save while a custom displayable is on the screen, subject to all the various caveats about saving.)

[monele]

Sounds good. A little more control is always good ^_^. Never used the minigame interface and I don't think I ever will (especially since I'm trying to simplify projects lately...)

[Counter Arts]

Hmm... I would be interested in performance.

I would be interested on how this would be performance-wise.

Shoot-up'em up/Visual novel hybrd? If something like this is viable cross-platform with renpy then you got one heck of a powerful engine.

Is this still limited by pixel operations? If I did make a game that is a shoot em up, would the performance be similar to performance with the particle effects? Would this be limited by the number of pixels drawn (sometimes over top others) or something else?

What kind of operations would take up cycles?

[rocket]

Is Soft Landing written in PyGame? *blinks*

They wrote their own VN engine right?

[PyTom]

Counter Arts>>> The determining factor performance-wise is generally the number of pixels that need to be drawn on top of each other. Performance should be reasonable... I mean, we have games like [url=http://www.pygame.org/shredwheat/solarwolf/]SolarWolf[/quote] that are written in pygame.

rocket>>> No, or at least I have no idea what Soft Landing is written in. (ISRT C++, but I'm not sure about that.)

The idea is that people could write similar games in pygame, and take advantage of Ren'Py for the menus and interactive bits.

[rocket]

Coolio.

Hm.. Somebody knows Python 'cause he wrote a proggy in it to parse an Omnigraffle file so they could use it as their level editor.
http://softlanding.metalbat.com/?p=117

Now if only there was an turn based tactical land combat simulation engine in PyGame that could be coerced into into mating with RenPy...

[Counter Arts]

okay... so you can't do (intense) danmaku but you can still do a pretty decent fighting game in my opinion. You just can't explode the entire screen

I programmed in XNA before and I got a (smooth) slot machine base working with a blue, red or green glow for no other reason except for special effects. But man, that required a lot of knowledge of computer graphics hardware.

And like... yeah... I don't think there is too many people here who KNOWS how to push the power of renpy to the limit yet. Not that they need to. Most problems here people have been facing, I would guess, would normally have an easier alternate solution. That is... it won't really degrade the intended effect to a point where being cross-platform isn't really worth it.

Being cross-platform is great! I want to try to stay as cross-platform for as long as possible before I make a switch to something hardware accelerated.

So yeah... thumbs up from me.

[Shish]

so you can't do (intense) danmaku

~30 mins proof of concept from someone who's never used pygame before: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/blastwave_poc1.zip (Needs python + pygame installed, arrow keys move and z fires)


(Yes, I have been playing too much Touhou. I see bullet patterns when I close my eyes )

I want to try to stay as cross-platform for as long as possible before I make a switch to something hardware accelerated.

o_O

AFAIK parts of pygame are already hardware accelerated, and if you want fully accelerated graphics, opengl is cross platform :3

[PyTom]

~30 mins proof of concept from someone who's never used pygame before: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/blastwave_poc1.zip (Needs python + pygame installed, arrow keys move and z fires)

Note to people interested in playing this: The player is the guy at the bottom of the screen who immediately dies.

AFAIK parts of pygame are already hardware accelerated, and if you want fully accelerated graphics, opengl is cross platform :3

At least for the start, I'm not planning on allowing the user to change video mode, which means no hardware acceleration will be supported. I might change that later.

Hm... looks like I'll have to add in pygame.sprite, which I don't usually ship with Ren'Py. I'll also look into some of the other pygame modules, at least the ones that don't require C support.

[Enerccio]

~30 mins proof of concept from someone who's never used pygame before: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/blastwave_poc1.zip (Needs python + pygame installed, arrow keys move and z fires)

Note to people interested in playing this: The player is the guy at the bottom of the screen who immediately dies.

LOL I got score 520
Its funny that you have 3 lives but when hit, you loose 100...

[Jake]

Yes, I have been playing too much Touhou.

I... don't understand. 'Too much'?

Note to people interested in playing this: The player is the guy at the bottom of the screen who immediately dies.

But suddenly I'm very interested!

(As it goes, I've been meaning to look at the minigame interface for a while now, and just never found the time... so for my part I'm interested in the changes, but not affected by them.)

[rocket]

(Yes, I have been playing too much Touhou.

UN-POSSIBLE!

~30 mins proof of concept from someone who's never used pygame before

(O.O)! SUGOI! You win at life!

Hai! Hai! I wanna work on a Danmaku/Ren'ai/Hentai mashup!

[Free Time Machine]

I don't think there is too many people here who KNOWS how to push the power of renpy to the limit yet.

I know! It's exciting, isn't it? The potential for collaboration is present in the fact that everyone is dependent on the community's progress for their own innovations.

GO TEAM!