https://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/changelog.html
and download it from:
https://www.renpy.org/release/6.99.14.1
The main focus here is on improving the image cache and image prediction, while at the same time reducing pauses caused by image prediction.
Some of the highlights of the image prediction work are:
- Pressing f4 shows the image load log and cache/texture usage.
- When loading a texture, Ren'Py will scan it to find the bounding box of the non-transparent pixels. Only transparent pixels will be loaded into texture memory. This directly addresses sprites that are LiveComposities of multiple full-size images - Ren'Py crops these before loading them into a texture, reducing the memory usage substantially.
- The config.cache_surfaces variable is now False by default. This means that Ren'Py will toss images after turning them into textures, halfing (or more) memory usage. This can slow things down if you do a lot of image manipulator work (so turn it off then), but should be a speedup in more normal code.
- The image cache is now 300MB big, and controlled by the config.image_cache_size_mb variable directly. (Assuming config.image_cache_size isn't set.)
- Ren'Py refuses to call functions that read from disk during image prediction.
- ConditionSwitch has a predict_all option that causes all available displayables to be predicted. This can be used (for example) if a character has a small number of emotion images, to load them all whenever the character is about to go on the screen.
- The renpy.start_predict and renpy.stop_predict options now take wildcards, so it's possible to do renpy.start_predict("eileen *").
- The ATL "on hide" clause has been fixed.
- The Python global interpreter lock (GIL) is released when flipping the OpenGL screen. This should make tasks that run in a background thread (music playback, image preloading, autosave, etc.) faster.
I've gotten some reports that 6.99.14 has been making the fans on people's computers spin up, thanks to the way we make more aggressive use of the GPU. What I'm asking is that people hit shift+G in your game (or the tutorial). That will pop up the powersave window. Please change it between Enabled and Disabled, waiting a minute or so between each change, and see how that affects your computer's fans. (It says you need to restart for it to take effect, but this particular setting doesn't need a reset.) Let me know either way - the fact that it doesn't change anything is also of interest to me.
Thanks.
(This is version 6.99.14.1.3188, for the record. 3188 changes since the start of the 6.99 series.)