Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

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UmutD
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Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

#1 Post by UmutD »

Hello!

I want to make a new game with Ren'py, and I wonder if I should start with 8 or 7.5. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit.

In renpy website, it says only 32-bit support is gone for version 8, so I'm guessing win7 64-bit should be fine if that's the only requirement. But when I checked python 3.9 (which seems to be what renpy 8 is using from what I've gathered), it is said to be not compatible with win 7.

When I run renpy 8, it seems to be starting up fine on my machine, but I don't know if it would give me errors in the future, in the middle of development, which would be pretty bad (I'm guessing we can't easily switch to renpy 7 at that point, please correct me if I'm wrong).

So I'm thinking of using renpy 7.5, but that way I will be probably missing features like proper steamdeck support etc, which doesn't seem ideal...

I'd be grateful if you can provide info on this. Thanks.

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Re: Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

#2 Post by Ocelot »

RenPy uses a custom-built version of Python which runs on Windows 7. In theory, future versions of RenPy can drop Windows 7 support, like it dropped XP and 32-bit support, but in this case you can just not upgrade to the new version. Not to mention that this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
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Re: Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

#3 Post by UmutD »

Oh, that sounds great, thanks for the fast reply! So if I'm understanding right, it won't break my project halfway to continue with 8 under these circumstances, hopefully.

As a related question, would I need to do anything extra to port my current project (which I started in 7.3.5), to 8.0.3? Or should I start from a completely new project that is setup from renpy 8 interface, to avoid some future problem that might not be clear to a newbie like me?

It seems like I can see & open the old project when I fire Ren'py 8 (game's log file updates to 8 when I launch the project from renpy UI)... and I can even go back and open it in 7 again, which is not something I'm used to seeing in other software like Unity or Photoshop etc.

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Re: Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

#4 Post by Ocelot »

RenPy is mostly backward-compatible. Aside from specific differences between Python 2 and 3 (like ones explained there https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/changelo ... ren-py-8-0 ) or version-specific incompatibilities (documented here: https://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/incompatible.html ) it should be able to run games made for previous versions.

And as long as your game scripts do not contain anything unsupported by previous RenPy versions, they would be able to open games made in future versions of RenPy.

So you can just continue developing in newest RenPy version. If there are some incompatibilities, you can fix them on case-by-case basis.
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Re: Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

#5 Post by UmutD »

Great! Thanks for helping out, really appreciated!

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Re: Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

#6 Post by PyTom »

Ren'Py 8.0 and 8.1 will work with a fully updated Windows 7.

After that, things will become a lot hazier. The problem is that it doesn't look anyone is making a version of Python 3.11 that supports Windows 7, so if we want to move to Python 3.11, support for Windows 7 will need to be dropped. Both Microsoft and Chrome will be dropping support for Windows 7 next year, so that's likely when Ren'Py will do it as well.

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Re: Does Renpy 8 work fine with Windows 7 (64-bit)?

#7 Post by UmutD »

Ah, that's understandable, though it is painful to see windows 7 support ending, for me it's still working pretty well performance-wise and it won't be very easy for me to update my current setup when the time comes.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

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