Ren'Py 5.1.0 Released

[PyTom]

I noticed that it's been one year since the first public release of Ren'Py 4. In that year, Ren'Py has grown from a one-person thing to a community, about a hundred-strong, judging by the number of downloads each new release gets over the course of a month. Foremost among that community is the elite group of people who have released games with Ren'Py... without them, I'm not sure if I would have the motivation to keep improving this code. Their work inspires me to do my best.

Anyway, I'm pleased to announce the release of Ren'Py 5.1.0 "Paper Anniversary". This marks the start of a new development branch of Ren'Py. This release features a number of improvements. New sound code supports playing up to 8 compressed sound files at once, as being able to play multitrack compressed sound would seem to be a necessity for voice support. There is also now the ability to adjust the volume from inside Ren'Py. We control the hardware mixers, allowing us to raise the volume over a starting value. To help control volume, we've added support for turning the existing bar widget into a slider. Many settings are now controlled by these sliders.

Ren'Py can be downloaded from the same place as it has been for the past year:

http://www.bishoujo.us/renpy/

Copying over an old game directory should work, but if you want to use the new-style slider, then you should copy in the style declarations from scripy.rpy, and the various image files referenced in those declarations.

The mixer support is still a bit experimental, and I'm not sure how well it works on real windows hardware. Specifically, I'm not sure if the mixer response is exactly logarithmic, as the documentation claims. One way to test this would be to repeatedly change the music volume while playing the sample sound effect... does the effect's volume change? I'd like to know either way.

This release is still a little experiemental, and drops Mac support for a while. So I'd probably stick to 5.0.1 for a game released in the next week, until we get some idea of the stability of this thing. It should be okay, but you never know...

Anyway, let's find out What's new in 5.1.0!

There is now a new sound system, supporting playing up to 8 mp3, ogg vorbis, ogg speex, mod, or wav files at once. Midi can also be played, but is limited to one midi file at a time. Audio files can be read out of archives. Music and Sound now have their own mixers, which control the system mixer. The low-level audio api has been ripped out and replaced with new renpy.sound and renpy.music apis, which are somewhat higher-level, and more flexible.

In order to support this, we've temporarily dropped Mac support. In a few weeks, we'll be releasing a tool that restores and improves Ren'Py's compatability with the Macintosh platform. To help support this tool, this release includes .rpyl files for the demo game and DSE.

The bar widget has been extended. It can now be adjusted by the user, and it can show a thumb in the middle. Various volume and speed preferences have been adjusted to take advantage of the new bar widget.

All of the backgrounds in the demo-game script and in the reference now are of the form "bg name". This lets one run a command "show bg newbg" to replace the background without replacing the current screen. The demo game also has been prefixed with a UTF-8 BOM, so editors should (hopefully) load and save it as UTF-8.

There is now a new font text tag. By writing {font=Font1,Font2}, one can change the font in the middle of a block of text. Use this wisely. Font files with extensions are now also searched for in the system font directories, although we do not recommend this unless you are having encoding problems.

Menu labels and choices support percent-substitution, like say statements always have.

Now, all of the im image constructors take properties as arguments. This lets placement properties be applied to images, as with regular widgets.

A new extra, chinese.rpy, implements word-wrapping for the Chinese language. Or at least tries to.

Fixed a bug which made the images created with im.Rotozoom incompatible with im.Alpha.

Fixed a weird focus bug that manifested upon rollback when resized frames were on the screen.

[mikey]

Congratulations! Let's hope for another good year for ren'ai games.
*raises cup with soft drink because he doesn't drink other things"

So what's the next level? Ren'Py already has a solid VN engine, a working DS engine... are there any longterm plans? Or simply improving and adding features on demand?

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The above are those ringy curly party strips (hanging from the side, obviously) ^_^

[Otaku Dash]

Congrats Py'Tom! Let's see another year full of Ren'ai "mgaic" brought by your wonderfull work on this engine.

*brings a cup with water to make a toast, since he doesn't drink alcool*

HUZZZA FOR PY'TOM!!!!

(Btw downloaded this version to work on my game. Thanks for your wonderfull work on Ren'Py).

[PyTom]

So what's the next level? Ren'Py already has a solid VN engine, a working DS engine... are there any longterm plans? Or simply improving and adding features on demand?

Frak! Deer Park ate my post. And I had a fairly long writeup, too.

Short version:

No major plans. I think I've achieved parity with ONScripter, so now it's mostly waiting for new ideas to hit me. If anyone has feature requests (that still keep Ren'Py a VN/DS engine), please let me know.

Improved mac support will be coming soon... perhaps as early as next week. Depends on if my new mac has arrived yet. (Yep, I bought a (used) mac just for Ren'Py development.)

I'm considering improving tool support. Finishing RPY-Edit and adding a preview feature may be nice. So would be adding a voice studio tool, but the latter would require someone convincing me that the're actually producing a voiced game.

I need to update renai.us.

The DSE will evolve in response to user request and feedback, although for certain games Icekiss's variant may be more suitable.

[mikey]

If anyone has feature requests (that still keep Ren'Py a VN/DS engine), please let me know.

Hmmm, image map support? I know it has that, but I was thinking about (perhaps even in a form of a tool) easily defining polygonal hotspots and assigning texts to them. So you can click on a tree in the picture and it starts to text the lines - this is an old tree blah blah. But it would probably require some wysiwyg editor.

Kind of like Adam the double factor. It would be something more than just a VN though. So I guess that's something to consider if people want experimental forms of play. That's the only thing I can think about now apart from the usual refinements and tweaks of which there are many, but none really important.

[ShiraiJunichi]

I don't see a button to disable auto-forward... Is it disabled if the slider is all the way to the right?

[PyTom]

Yes. The current design uses an extreme position to disable things... In this case, an extremely long auto-forward delay disables auto-forward.

In the same way, extremely fast text-speed is infinite text speed, and zero volume is mute.

I'm interested in feedback on this design.

[ShiraiJunichi]

For the volume it makes sense- it's what I would expect. The auto-forward is a bit different though. I wasn't sure if it was disabled, or I just didn't wait long enough for it to skip to the next page... The current design for the auto-forward seems counter-intuitive. However, it does save space, which is kind of nice...

[Icekiss]

Well, the best approach I've seen for that is a combination of checkbox and slider:
Unmarking the checkbox disables the feature, and grays out the slider.
So if you want to make it more intuitive, that's what I would do. (Especially for the auto-forward feature, since there are TWO sliders associated with it.)

(More generally speaking, checkboxes are more concise than one "enabled" and one "disabled" button, too)

[oyster]

1. how can I test the Chinese rpy?
2. bug report:
choose 'show me the feature' -> user interaction->input a name->choose one character, click click and click

Code: Select all

I'm sorry, but an exception occured while executing your Ren'Py
script.

Exception: yanchor <curry {'callable': <class 'renpy.display.layout.Position'>, 'args': (), 'kwargs': {}}> is not known.

The last script statement executed was on line 1379 of game/script.rpy.

-- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------

  File "run_game.py", line 70, in main
  File "renpy\main.pyo", line 169, in main
  File "renpy\main.pyo", line 132, in run
  File "renpy\execution.pyo", line 76, in run
  File "renpy\ast.pyo", line 253, in execute
  File "renpy\python.pyo", line 676, in py_exec_bytecode
  File "game/script.rpy", line 1379, in <module>
  File "game/script.rpy", line 767, in day_planner
  File "renpy\ui.pyo", line 46, in interact
  File "renpy\display\core.pyo", line 721, in interact
  File "renpy\display\core.pyo", line 929, in interact_core
  File "renpy\display\core.pyo", line 508, in show
  File "renpy\display\render.pyo", line 142, in render_screen
  File "renpy\display\render.pyo", line 81, in render
  File "renpy\display\layout.pyo", line 210, in render
  File "renpy\display\render.pyo", line 81, in render
  File "renpy\display\layout.pyo", line 210, in render
  File "renpy\display\render.pyo", line 81, in render
  File "renpy\display\layout.pyo", line 210, in render
  File "renpy\display\render.pyo", line 81, in render
  File "renpy\display\layout.pyo", line 659, in render
  File "renpy\display\render.pyo", line 81, in render
  File "renpy\display\layout.pyo", line 439, in render
  File "renpy\display\render.pyo", line 81, in render
  File "renpy\display\layout.pyo", line 417, in render
  File "renpy\display\core.pyo", line 207, in place
Exception: yanchor <curry {'callable': <class 'renpy.display.layout.Position'>, 'args': (), 'kwargs': {}}> is not known.

The last script statement executed was on line 1379 of game/script.rpy.

Ren'Py Version: Ren'Py 5.1.0

[PyTom]

1. how can I test the Chinese rpy?

Just copy it into the game directory. You may want to also edit the chinese_punctuation variable defined in that file, although I did copy in everything you mentioned.
[/quote]

I'll check out the bug in a bit.

(Update)

Stupid, stupid, stupid me.

To fix the layout bug, change line 710 of the script to make it read yanchor='center', rather than yanchor=center.

[denzil]

I tested playing mod files (finally they play) but had some problems:
-bigger files case loop of beginning of the song for while (5MB caused loop for about 30 sec, might be a slow computer: Pentium 3-450, win xp)
-some .xm files cause Ren'Py crash (Endless Dream for example)

[Blue Lemma]

Stupid, stupid, stupid me.

Yeah, PyTom, you're only a computer genius who's about to get a Ph.D - Stupid stupid stupid!

Of course, I never have bugs ....... *looks around nervously* ........

Hmmm, image map support? I know it has that, but I was thinking about (perhaps even in a form of a tool) easily defining polygonal hotspots and assigning texts to them. So you can click on a tree in the picture and it starts to text the lines - this is an old tree blah blah. But it would probably require some wysiwyg editor.

Imagine the possibilities for interactive H-scenes! ... I mean, uh, story scenes! ...Yeah! ^_^ *looks around nervously again*

[PyTom]

Denzil:

Thanks for the feedback, I will work on tracking down those issues. I haven't tested mod support too much, as I know little about the format.

Lemma:

About to get the Ph.D. is a bit of an overstatement. "Once more, unto the breach" is more appropriate... I head back to New York on Sunday.