Ren'Py 7.4.0 Prereleased

[PyTom]

This is a prerelease, so please don't release a game with it, except to a test audience.

I'm happy to announce Ren'Py 7.4.0, the product of over a year of development, and one of the biggest releases of Ren'Py to date. This release focuses on updating Ren'Py's internals so that Ren'Py is ready for its next 15 years.

Some of the bigger changes are:

• A new model-based renderer. While this is opt-in for the moment, it opens the way to features that creators have been requesting for a long time, such as being able to recolor displayables, blurring the screen, and using Live2D to animate sprites. The model-based renderer is extensible with shaders, allowing for custom effects.
• A new Python 3 compatibility mode has been added, to pave the way for Python 3 support in the next release. This mode changes the ways in which Ren'Py runs, to allow you to begin porting your game before full Python 3 comes out in Ren'Py 8.0.
• Ren'Py's build system has been modernized, and the libraries underlying it have been updated. This allows 64-bit Windows to be supported.
• The web platform has bene updated, to allow for the incremental download of games.

This release also raises the minimum requirements to run a Ren'Py game. It is now required that a user's computer have OpenGL 2, DirectX 9, OpenGL ES 2, or WebGL to run Ren'Py. The model-based renderer requires OpenGL ES 3 or WebGL 2.

With these changes, there have been a few deprecations. The 32-bit armv7l platform has been removed on iOS, as this platform hasn't been supported by Apple for several years. The Editra text editor has been removed, as it hasn't been supported for quite some time, and wasn't compatible with the new build system.

It's my hope that this release will enable creators to take on projects they couldn't before, and will provide a solid basis for the next releases of Ren'Py.


Downloads of 7.4.0 can be found at:

https://www.renpy.org/release/7.4.0

A full list of changes to Ren'Py can be found at:

https://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/changelog.html

A list of changes that may require you to update your game can be found at:

https://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/incompatible.html

Please also check out the credits and sponsor list.


I'd like to thank everyone that's been trying out the nightlies as 7.4 has been developed - they've found many issues, and so my hope is that 7.4 is ready for wider testing. I'm especially interested in making sure that Ren'Py runs well using the model-based renderer, which takes advantange of the features of modern GPUs to enable things that Ren'Py couldn't do before.

To try out model-based rendering of an existing game, hit shift+G and pick the GL2 renderer, then quit out and restart the game. If Ren'Py won't start, you can put it into a safe mode by holding down left-shift as it starts up. To invoke model-based rendering in your own game, add define config.gl2 = True to your script - this is necessary before using Live2D, Matrixcolor, Transform-with-blur, and other new features.

There are two features that I still have to implement - custom cursors and Steam.

Please report any issues you have either here, or if you're 100% sure it's a bug, at the Github issue tracker.

Once again, thank you to the community, everyone who contributed or will contribute codes, translations, tests, and games. This has been one of the roughest years of my life, but thanks to you I think that Ren'Py is on the right track for a bright future.

[Imperf3kt]

Amazing work, can't wait to try it out.
Good thing I have a brand new GPU arriving tomorrow lol, my old Radeon 5770 xxx OC is really showing its age.

[curry nochi rice]

Yay 64bit and L2D support soon

[quillyquillquill]

Thank you Tom, and as well everyone's that's contributed to the Ren'Py community! Super excited for this one.

[RicharDann]

Wow that's a lot of great new features and improvements, it sure has been worth the wait. This opens up so many possibilities, can't wait to try it out, to PyTom and all the dev team thank you so much for your hard work and dedication! You're amazing!

[akakyouryuu]

Thank you very much, Pytom.
I'd hoped blur function.

I have some question about it.

I tested blur in tutorial.

I rewrited script.rpy in tutorial

Code: Select all

# The game starts here.
#begin start
label start:
#end start

    scene bg washington
    show eileen vhappy:
        blur 100.0
    with dissolve

Then, blured Eileen is shown at left in screen.
She is shown at left even if blur is None like below and renderer isn't GL2.

Code: Select all

# The game starts here.
#begin start
label start:
#end start

    scene bg washington
    show eileen vhappy:
        blur None
    with dissolve

Originally, She is shown at center, so blur changes default position. This is bug?

[RicharDann]

I'm having some trouble running old projects in the prerelease.

The Question and Tutorial game that come with 7.4.0 run just fine, as well as newly created projects, but every one of my 7.3.5 projects throws this error.

Code: Select all

Thu Oct 29 12:29:53 2020
Windows-7-6.1.7600-SP0
Ren'Py 7.4.0.939

renpy/dump.py:245: UnicodeWarning: Unicode unequal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
  if args.json_dump != "-":

Full traceback:
  File "renpy/bootstrap.py", line 326, in bootstrap
    renpy.main.main()
  File "renpy/main.py", line 557, in main
    renpy.dump.dump(False)
  File "renpy/dump.py", line 246, in dump
    new = args.json_dump + ".new"
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf3 in position 23: invalid continuation byte

After initialization, but before game start.
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf3 in position 23: invalid continuation byte

UPDATE: The cause was an "ó" character in the name of the folder where I have my projects. My system language is Spanish. It seems Ren'Py can't access folders or rpy files that include unicode characters like "á", "é", "í", "ó", "ú", "ñ".
The spanish translation of the tutorial is working fine though, so I'm not sure if this is actually the problem.

[PyTom]

akakyouryuu>>>

This is the way Ren'Py has always behaved, though it might not be obvious. If you have no transform, the default transform is used, which centers the character. If you supply a transform, then it's not used, and the position defaults to the top left if not chamged.

Try:

Code: Select all

label start:
    scene bg washington
    show eileen vhappy at center:
        blur 100.0
    with dissolve

To invoke the default positioning.

RicharDann>>> This is a bug I'll fix.

[akakyouryuu]

>>pytom
Thanks, I understood and I have the another question.

The point rotated around and the image position is changed if both of blur and rotate is used.

Code: Select all

    show layer master :
        rotate 0
        blur 1
        pos (.5, .5)
        anchor (.5, .5)
        transform_anchor True

This don't show image at center.

[Tayruu]

The ability to use transform to an entire layer sounds really useful for blur or colour effects (ie. migraines and flashbacks), but I'm not too sure how to do it? akakyouryuu's code snippet above doesn't seem to be blurring the master layer...

That aside, there seems to be something odd going on with text rendering. My line_spacing have all shrunk drastically, and an element on my title screen seems to just vanish. I'm suspecting it's because I'm doing some maths to position it, as using xpos 640 ypos 714 is fine.

Code: Select all

    text _("© {b}02011-20 CREATED BY TAYLOR{/b}") at sysbuttext_trans:
        xalign 0.5 yalign 1.0
        xpos 1280/2 ypos 720-6
        size 18 color cwhite
        outlines [(2, cblack, 0, 0), (3, "#14202050", 0, 0)]

With some testing I can get my line_spacing to appear similar to how it used to be with some line_leading, but this throws the click-to-continue indicator off its inline alignment further and further, and some lines will shift their vertical position between pauses.

[akakyouryuu]

>>Tayruu

Did you used GL2 or ANGLE2?
Blur doesn't work in GL&Angle.

To try out model-based rendering of an existing game, hit shift+G and pick the GL2 renderer, then quit out and restart the game.

[Tayruu]

Ah, whoops, I must've glazed over that part.
While I can't get shift-G to work for some reason (works in the launcher, and Portrait demo, not my main project), probably disabled something somewhere, adding config.gl2 = True did work and the blur works too.

... custom cursor vanished, though, but at least blur appears to run fast and has no problems with my Portrait System.

EDIT: Amusing observation - config.nearest_neighbor = True breaks blur.
EDIT2: Ah, it was my new renpy.Keymap() stuff preventing shift+G. I really gotta remember that I have that.

EDIT3: renpy.store._dismiss_pause = False no longer works.

[Imperf3kt]

Custom cursors aren't working just yet, neither is Steam integration.

[Tayruu]

... so it would probably help to show examples of the text issues. (Warning, large images.)
Here's how some of my text was aligned in the last release: http://t.mwx.ca/misc/2011/tt_textissues_r.jpg
And here it is in the latest nightly: http://t.mwx.ca/misc/2011/tt_textissues_n.jpg

It seems like it's off by 4px, but that's not always the case.
Title screen and other buttons: text is 4px upwards
Speaker labels: 3-4px upwards
Title screen small text: 5px upwards
Line spacing: 17-18px vs 8-9px, in the menus and dialogue, as best as I can measure

[PyTom]

... so it would probably help to show examples of the text issues. (Warning, large images.)
Here's how some of my text was aligned in the last release: http://t.mwx.ca/misc/2011/tt_textissues_r.jpg
And here it is in the latest nightly: http://t.mwx.ca/misc/2011/tt_textissues_n.jpg

It seems like it's off by 4px, but that's not always the case.
Title screen and other buttons: text is 4px upwards
Speaker labels: 3-4px upwards
Title screen small text: 5px upwards
Line spacing: 17-18px vs 8-9px, in the menus and dialogue, as best as I can measure

I'll look into this to see what we get, especially if you can send me a small example of the problem. Freetype was upgraded in this release, and Ren'Py uses freetype for font rendering, so if they changed how they see the font you're using, this would cause this.