Limits/Features of Ren'Py

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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Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#1 Post by 706 »

I'm currently looking around for an engine I can use to make something along the lines of a visual novel. I was just reading about Ren'Py and was wondering about the features. Does Ren'Py only allow a branching storyline via choosing one of several options? What if I wish to have a game with unseen variables that change depending on choices made and later on these variables would determine what options are available to a player? Would Ren'Py allow me to create variables and have them changed when paths are chosen?

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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#2 Post by monele »

Certainly :).

I suggest checking this out : http://renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Features

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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#3 Post by themocaw »

In a word: yes, it will work. My current game I'm developing uses just such a mechanism: the character gains "love," "wuss," and "jerk" points as they make different conversation choices, and their point totals determine which ending they get.

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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#4 Post by NetGenSuperstar »

Ren'Py is designed to make simple games easy even for novices, and complicated games easier than alternative engines. You could certainly create a visual novel with no story branches and only one character, and just as easily add code to support twenty characters with endings corresponding to how you've interacted with each character. Ren'Py can even support complex dating sim games with multiple variables relating to every possible emotion an NPC can feel, and create a dynamic ending based on the results of analyzing said data. If you have that kind of time. :lol:

To be honest, there's no reason to use anything over Ren'Py. Nothing I've seen has features Ren'Py doesn't, and nothing has everything Ren'Py has. Plus, it's the only English VN engine I know of that runs well on Windows, Mac OS and Linux -- and that's just the officially supported platforms. Unless you're willing to spend money on a commercial engine, I'd say go with Ren'Py for your game-making needs.

Okay, PyTom, you can send me that money now. :D

EDIT: 100 posts? Do I really talk that much?

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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#5 Post by Chibi Hentai Senshi »


To be honest, there's no reason to use anything over Ren'Py.
...unless you are making a hybrid game or need more complex alpha layers?

or so I'm hearing in rumors. but yeah generally, especially for a first project, definitely best way to get going

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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#6 Post by Jake »

Chibi Hentai Senshi wrote: ...unless you are making a hybrid game or need more complex alpha layers?
To be honest, speaking from the point of view of someone who worked on a hybrid game with some relatively complex blended layers in a custom engine, the main reason we didn't use Ren'Py wasn't a technical thing so much as NIH syndrome, which I think all programmers I've met suffer from to some degree. My project partner was doing all the programming, and he simply preferred working in his own language on a project he knew inside out (i.e. wrote himself from scratch) rather than in a language he'd not touched before using someone else's code.

We couldn't have done everything we wanted to in Ren'Py quite so easily as regular Ren'Py features, but firstly not all of the things we wanted to get into the project made it into the final cut anyway (Fice wrote some great-looking bloom code that would have enhanced the dawn and dusk scenes but never got implemented in script, for example) and secondly most of those things would have been possible, just no easier within Ren'Py as from within Fice's engine.

There are things that Ren'Py isn't the best engine available for, but very very few of those things could really be called 'visual novels', IMO. (Of course, I'm speaking from an English-speaking perspective, I have no idea what the available options are in other languages.)
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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#7 Post by DrakeNavarone »

NetGenSuperstar wrote:To be honest, there's no reason to use anything over Ren'Py. Nothing I've seen has features Ren'Py doesn't, and nothing has everything Ren'Py has.
*cough*Menubar*cough*... Although, I think that's no fault of Renpy's but a limit of SDL, isn't it? (That's why ONscripter doesn't have one, right?) The engine I've been toying around with recently, Kirikiri, does have menubar support, however. It's also very customizable like Renpy, and creating macros is a little simpler than making user defined renpy statements IMO. And if you've played or seen either Fate game, you know how far you can push Kirikiri, but there hasn't been a Renpy game with Fate-caliber action scenes yet...

Still, it's not like Kirikiri doesn't have its flaws too, and I'll definitely agree that Renpy is the premiere English Visual Novel Engine ("out of the box" Renpy has a much nicer look to it then Kirikiri does, which practically needs customized menus and message frames and such). But there isn't any absolute greatest vn engine since all of them hold at least one advantage over the other in at least one area.
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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#8 Post by Jake »

DrakeNavarone wrote:*cough*Menubar*cough*... Although, I think that's no fault of Renpy's but a limit of SDL, isn't it?
I'm struggling to think of anything that you could mean by 'menubar' that SDL couldn't do... what do you mean?

Because my first thought is a bar across the top of the screen that the user can click on at any time to access game/system functions, and I'm fairly sure you can do that in Ren'Py with UI features. Did you see the Phoenix Wright demo Monele made, with the 'Court Record' button?

(I was under the impression that the main reason ONScripter wouldn't have a feature would be because NScripter doesn't have that feature; isn't it more a feature-matching exercise than a new development?)
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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#9 Post by DrakeNavarone »

Jake wrote:I'm struggling to think of anything that you could mean by 'menubar' that SDL couldn't do... what do you mean?

Because my first thought is a bar across the top of the screen that the user can click on at any time to access game/system functions, and I'm fairly sure you can do that in Ren'Py with UI features.
Okay, after a bit of research, it might not be a limit of SDL as it is a limit of a cross platform vn engine, since a Windows style menubar seems to be difficult to implement or emulate in Linux or OSX. At least, that's the case with ONscripter (see here). Of course, Renpy is also cross platform, so it may suffer from the same shortcomings in this case. It may very well be possible to have a menubar in Renpy, but I guess you risk breaking the builds for non-windows platforms.

And of course, there's always a work around. Renpy's ui functions can certainly get you something equal or even better functionality wise, but it's not the same exact thing. And I'd even bet that it's possible, with some decent coding ability, to emulate a windows style menu bar almost exactly, but it's not something that's supported "out of the box". The point of the post was to illustrate a feature of other engines that Renpy doesn't have, and it's just the first thing that came to mind for me, as many japanese vn engines usually do have a menu bar (Nscripter and Kirikiri included), but they're generally not cross platform.
(I was under the impression that the main reason ONScripter wouldn't have a feature would be because NScripter doesn't have that feature; isn't it more a feature-matching exercise than a new development?)
Well, it might be the main reason, but it sure isn't the only reason. One issue might be the fact that ONscripter is intended to be cross platform, so things like the menubar can't be carried over. And another is that a function or feature just hasn't been added or implemented yet. One example I discovered recently is that ONscripter doesn't support the "lsp2" and "amsp2" commands (both of which involve image rotation), which are a part of Nscripter. So yes, while ONscripter strives to be a clone more than an improved-upon successor, it's not a perfect clone.
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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#10 Post by Zephie-chan »

From personal experience in using both ONScripter and, to a more limited degree, NScripter, I have to tell you that NScripter actually does have menubar support (it comes standard in a lot of Japanese games that use it), but ONScripter doesn't. I do not know why this is, actually. I never bothered to figure it out. Additionally, the English ONScripter compilations are different compared to its original Japanese version, and it's not updated as often. The reason for differences is that there are features needing to be programmed into it to correctly work for English text (last I used ONScripter, some features were disabled in the English version as well).

I don't follow ONScripter anymore, and these issues may be fixed and/or now implemented, but I prefer Ren'Py because it's, in my opinion, more straightforward in comparison to ONScripter, and updated way more often. I also like the idea of being able to easily plug-in customizations, provided you have enough experience with Python to do so. With ONScripter, you would have to write the plug-in in whatever language (probably C++) and then rebuild the engine from source so that it would support it.
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Re: Limits/Features of Ren'Py

#11 Post by Jake »

DrakeNavarone wrote:Okay, after a bit of research, it might not be a limit of SDL as it is a limit of a cross platform vn engine, since a Windows style menubar seems to be difficult to implement or emulate in Linux or OSX.
Ah! You mean the Windows program menus...

Yeah, I guess that's less likely in a cross-platform product. But that said, I'm not sure I'd count that as a VN feature, either; you can accomplish exactly the same thing from a game point of view with Ren'Py's UI functions, it just won't look the same as a platform-native solution. ISTR - although I've not done it myself - that you can also assign shortcut keys to game functions so that Alt-F would still open your 'File' menu, so usability-wise it would be similar.
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