4.5 Feature Requests

[PyTom]

Well, I just released a game, and won't start a new one for a while. So now's the time for people to send me Ren'Py 4.5 feature requests, before I get busy with my IntRenAiMo project.

I'll start by asking myself to improve the configurability of the game menu. At the very least, everything should be in a window, and we should probably also allow a way of substituting imagebuttons for many of the textbuttons.

[Tage]

Hm... everything that I want is already there

but I guess I could add this... it may sound stupid and weird, but you know how you left click to progress the story? Is it possible to make it progress when you do a full click instead of just a mousedown? o.o

[PyTom]

Re: Responding to MOUSEUPs rather than MOUSEDOWNs:

Well, technically it's fairly easy to do, so I'll add the infrastructure for it to the next release. (You'll have to redo the keymap yourself.)

Any reason why you want it?

[Tage]

It's just a habit of mine. I usually click and hold down the button when I'm almost done reading the text, and then I let go when I'm done. When I play games that progress onmouseup, my mind gets distracted... x.x; It is a bad habit I picked up from somewhere--where, I do not know, lol.

[PyTom]

Well, I think that I like the mousedown behavior better, since it makes the game feel snappier. So I think that the patch would have limited utility for you... but I'll add it in anyway.

Not an Update: Looks like most games actually wait for mouseup to do events. So I'll change it by default to have mouseup cause actions to occur.

Good thing I forget to hit "Submit".

[Sai]

Yeah usually things are done on mouseUp... just sharing what I was taught in multimedia design... which is that mouseUp should always be used for stuff like links to other pages etc. In other words for finalising actions. Because as said, people may want to wait and hold before finalising anything. They may even change their mind suddenly and drag their pointer away and off the link and if they do that and release the mouse, then the action is essentially cancelled and no effect will have been made (actually I noticed recently in Flash you can tell it to watch for releaseOutside heh... well I'm sure everything can.. so I have no point, don't mind me)

[Tage]

Cool, thanks! So that's where I picked up the habit from... I'm one of those people who hold down the button on links.... >.>;

[PyTom]

I think that in general, games respond to mouse-downs, because it's easier to time a mouse-down than a mouse up. Of course, that doesn't matter for a VN. (Except for the Love Hina DS for the Gameboy Advance... and the less that's said about that, the better.)

[Dre]

I have two things I would like to request. They could already be inside the maker, I really haven't looked that hard.

1. In the begaining of Vigilante, or what I have done, at a point one of the workers show up to greet you. The thing is, I made it kinda random on which worker shows up. Is this possible at some point?

2. Are you aware of the time select system in one of the love hina games.(I foreget which one) But it's where you get a number of choices and a timer. It can be used if you want the player to make quick decisions or make them panick to pick the wroung one.

Yapp, thats all I got, I think both of these could really make a person's game something funz.

[Tage]

I haven't tested it, but there is a random function added to the latest Ren'Py releases. It's supposed to return a random number. And if you can return a random number, you can pull a random character I guess.

[PyTom]

Ren'Py implements a random number generator (and one that is preserved across rollbacks to boot.

You can easly do what you want by writing code like:

Code: Select all

$ choice = renpy.random.choice(("foo", "bar", "baz"))

if choice == "foo":
    # ...
elif choice == "bar":
    # ...
elif choice == "baz":
    # ...

You can read more about the various methods supported on renpy.random by reading the documentation of python's random module:

http://www.python.org/doc/2.3.4/lib/module-random.html

As to having menus with timeouts, my current thinking is that a new function, ui.pausebehavior, will make it possible for a default action to occur when time runs out. There won't be any way to find out which menu option was selected when time ran out... that's a bit harder, as it would mean combining the timeout and the menu.

[Dre]

Wow, it's that simple!? Here I'm thinking I'm going to need some hevey coding. Thanks for the code, this makes things easier and more interesting on my game ideas.

Well, don't over do yourself if the timeout idea is a little tuff to get.

[PyTom]

<zoidberg>What, you want it to be more complicated maybe?</zoidberg>

I should probably point out here that making a game random is a good way to annoy your users, as it means that they will have to keep reloading to get the events they want, at least if the non-determinism is important. It will make the life of someone who wants to fully explore the game (like me) harder, as compared to a traditional deterministic VN.

As of tonight's hacking session, Ren'Py supports ui.pausebehavior. Properly weilded, this will make it possible to have menus that make a default choice, or menus where something else happens if no choice is picked before a timeout. What we can't and won't be able to do is to have the currently selected choice picked when a timeout occurs... that's harder.

(I also changed the default bindings around to make things happen on mouseup, and fixed a bug that prevented the screen from clearing when the middle-mouse button was clicked.)

[Dre]

I should probably point out here that making a game random is a good way to annoy your users, as it means that they will have to keep reloading to get the events they want, at least if the non-determinism is important. It will make the life of someone who wants to fully explore the game (like me) harder, as compared to a traditional deterministic VN.

Yeah, I didn't plan to annoy anyone with the random. It happens in the very beginning and will only have a random of 4.Which ever one shows up won't make a different, so you can play through the first, save, start over and take the rest of 5-15 seconds to see the other 3. Really, I guess no one would even notice it's random unless I mention it.

[mikey]

Well, how about a video file as background?
... what? did I say something?
Or a function which would let you play movies and then return to the game, kind of like cut scenes.