Ren'Py 6.8.0 Released

[Formedras]

I finally extracted 6.8.0 and SciTE for Ren'Py 6.8.0; Ren'Py's launching of SciTE works perfectly. SciTE fans rejoice.

Honestly... I think that your SciTE builds should be made consistently available on each version's "Other Downloads" section, or at least the code necessary to include Ren'Py support into base SciTE. I understand that JEdit is going to be the standard editor for Ren'Py unless you can come up with a better POSIX-compliant code editor. (Non-3 systems are already recompiling everything anyway. They won't mind one more program... too much.) But SciTE currently a better solution for Windows.

[jack_norton]

I suspect 6.8.0c will be the final 6.8.0 release. I also suspect the next release won't be for a month or so, and I believe that Heileen will come out before then. Since jack_norton was talking about using bitmap fonts for various reasons, I wanted to be sure that we supported a fully-featured bitmap font format, which SFont and MudgeFont aren't.

Well the game is basically ready, just waiting for 2 backgrounds... (goes to whip his artist). Bitmap fonts will be cool because you can use any font without worrying about all the copyrights issues you have with normal TTF ones

[mikey]

But SciTE currently a better solution for Windows.

Generally, I think that the default text editor should be a minimalist simple application that highlights the code (e.g. Scite), since for any new user or non-technical person this will already be plenty.

If programmers or technically inclined people want a more featured editor (e.g. JEdit), then THEY should have the burden of extra downloads to replace the default editor, and the dependencies (e.g. Java).

I think that practically this puts the very beginning users at a disadvantage compared to the last of the Scite Renpys, making it more fussy to just unpack and start. Effectively, Java is RenPy's dependency now - not technically, but practically - since when people download the engine, they will want to make their own projects.

So anyway, as much as it pains me to say it, I'd also like Scite back - I thought it was just me being unwilling to adapt, but there is quite some talk about the new editor, so these are my thoughts on it.

[Twar3Draconis]

But SciTE currently a better solution for Windows.

Generally, I think that the default text editor should be a minimalist simple application that highlights the code (e.g. Scite), since for any new user or non-technical person this will already be plenty.

If programmers or technically inclined people want a more featured editor (e.g. JEdit), then THEY should have the burden of extra downloads to replace the default editor, and the dependencies (e.g. Java).

I think that practically this puts the very beginning users at a disadvantage compared to the last of the Scite Renpys, making it more fussy to just unpack and start. Effectively, Java is RenPy's dependency now - not technically, but practically - since when people download the engine, they will want to make their own projects.

So anyway, as much as it pains me to say it, I'd also like Scite back - I thought it was just me being unwilling to adapt, but there is quite some talk about the new editor, so these are my thoughts on it.

I don't mind using JEdit- It runs on Mac, thus I don't have to go messing around with program settings. I'd say, probably including SciTE in the Windows Packages, while JEdit remains in the Mac/Linux packages. I think the switch was not because PyTom wanted to add a more featured editor, but rather an editor that functioned on every OS.

[mikey]

My idea was just to make it dependence-free, so that it just needs to unpack and run. I've never used Linux or Mac, so maybe they have Java as part of their system, in that case it would not be a dependency. But indeed, I don't see why for the different OS there couldn't be different editors, whichever is least fussy and quickest.

[delta]

I'm pretty new to Mac development, but maybe someone should just figure out how to compile SciTE for OSX.

[PyTom]

There were a number of reasons to switch to jEdit:

- jEdit works on all operating systems. There is no native support for Mac OS X in jEdit. The ports I've seen require GTK to be installed at the X server that ships with Mac OS X to be running... both of which are pretty non-standard.

- jEdit is constant sized. Since it uses Java to provide cross-platform compatibility, it doesn't grow in response to me adding new platforms. Since Ren'Py currently supports four platforms (Windows x86, Linux x86, Mac OS X ppc, Mac OS X x86) and will probably be adding another relatively soon (Linux x64), this is a problem.

- jEdit is far easier to configure. With jEdit, changing the color of text involves going to Tools > Global Options > Syntax Highlighting. With SciTE, it involves editing a config file with an arcane syntax.

- jEdit has a number of plugins. My favorite is one called VoxSpell, which underlines misspelled words for you. Such a plugin would be nigh-impossible to write for SciTE.

- Finally, the current version of jEdit is a start, rather than an end. At some point, I would like to write or have written navigation and autocompletion plugins. It would be nice to have a list of labels running down the left side of the window, or to type "show ei" and have "eileen happy", "eileen vhappy", "eileen concerned" pop up.

I'm not sure when I'm going to get to these, but the point is that the capability is there. They could also be a reasonable semester project for a programming class, or even a summer of code project.

I would consider setting up a web page (renpy/Editors) on the wiki that explains how to integrate SciTE, Emacs, and other text editors with Ren'Py.

Oh, and one of the new features of 6.8.0 is that it will warn you about a missing Java when it can't start jEdit.

[delta]

One of the main problems I have is that I only use jEdit to read tracebacks and lints anyway, so its long startup times and constant bitching about encodings for no reason is massively annoying. If I switch to SciTE, I don't get tracebacks shown to me automatically at all (OSX).

I can't edit editor.rpy, because I'm in a distributed multiplatform development environment. I COULD change the environment variables, but that won't help other people using Macs. And we're talking about the capabilities "lolworksoutofthebox" Ren'Py in any case.

Also, I think spelling correction is a bad form of feature bloat and people who want it should just use an office package to write their texts to begin with, not to mention that you're not even shipping with Voxspell. I really would like to suggest that it would be far more useful to put work into internal features of the engine that aren't part of the workflow, which differs for every person and has nothing to do with the engine itself.

[PyTom]

Well, the key to preventing long startup times is to leave jEdit running in the background. In that case, there's virtually no startup time.

What's this encoding bitching? I've never seen that.

[delta]

jEdit is slower than SciTE, even if you let it running, I'm not even going to start on how it is if you don't.

And this. It's rather random (affecting various files, sometimes even tracebacks), but it happens a lot. It's not just me either, see http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 514#p58514

[PyTom]

Okay, I checked out the KS SVN, and the problem is likely because there is no UTF-8 BOM at the start of those files. I'll add UTF-8 to the list of fallback encodings that it mentions, which should fix the problem.

[delta]

Well, UTF-8 without BOM is a perfectly valid encoding, and it's pretty bad that the editor complains about it if Ren'Py itself has zero problem with it.

[jack_norton]

Ok today was making the builds for Heileen, using 6.8.0c : when tried to run it on my Intel 10.5.1 Mac, the app doesn't start at all and says "You can't open the application "Heileen" because it is not supported on this architecture."
So seems like you made a PPC-only universal build!! I think 6.7.1 was fine, I'm going to check it now.

UPDATE: yes, with 6.7.1d I can run the game without problem even on leopard. So, something wrong happened in the latest version.

[jack_norton]

Another minor bug , in pc this time: I put the file icon.ico in the base directory (inside Heileen/game/) but I still get the default renpy icons when I compile the .exe

[delta]

the base directory (inside Heileen/game/)

That is not the "base directory", it's the "game directory". The base directory is a level higher. This one stumped me for a bit too.