5.6 Nearly Done

[Watercolorheart]

Who loves you?

*grin*

Oh, I'm not sure what to ask for ... except just 1 thing that I can keep on coming back to ...

I wish Ren'Py offered AVI or SWF support ;_; .... I have so much trouble encoding to MPEG for some reason. I was thinking of just asking someone else on the board to do it, because I can't get music and FPS to stay consistant. The sync is ALWAYS off.

[PyTom]

(Well, currently Ren'Py is fast enough that these aren't noticeable)

Actually, scene, show, and hide commands will never be noticeable, as these commands do not cause an interaction to occur, they simply update the scene lists inside of Ren'Py. So you could have a thousand show and hide statement in a row, and the user wouldn't see anything change on the screen.

[monele]

PyTom : alright, seems to work either way ^.^

[PyTom]

BCS>>> AVI support is likely, but not for a few releases.

In other news, I finally integrated the support for bilinear scaling into Ren'Py. It was actually a bit of a pain... since accuracy issues that were fine on a frame-by-frame basis stood out like a sore thumb when animated.

Anyway, I now have a subpixel version of the bilinear code, and it works reasonably well. So all that's left is the new features in the scene and show statements, and then it's documentation, release engineering, and release!

[Watercolorheart]

I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what bilinear scaling is.

But, Pytom, you must love us because even I can tell you must be pouring all your spare time into finishing this up really quickly. You're really devoted to your userbase, I know I thank you <3 ...

If AVI support will be in a future version, then I'm not too worried. Likely, by the time I actually complete a full 14 FPS animation, it will be implemented in the latest Ren'Py version.

[monele]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_filtering

The little example in the upper right corner is probably all you need to know about it ^^

[Watercolorheart]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_filtering

The little example in the upper right corner is probably all you need to know about it ^^

Ah, thank you Monele. Yes, I understand that.

So, basically, it softens the pixels instead of hardening the edges.

[Jake]

So, basically, it softens the pixels instead of hardening the edges.

That's the observable effect, certainly - more accurately, it interpolates to get new values to go 'between' the pixels from the original unscaled image.

When you do simple linear 'nearest-neighbour' scaling, you literally just make the pixels bigger and end up with lots of very large squares of colour - it's called 'nearest neighbour' because when working out what colour you paint a pixel in the zoomed image, you map it down onto the original image and colour it the same as the nearest pixel to that location.
When you do bilinear scaling, you map the pixels down to the source image - so if you're scaling up to four times the size there's a four-by-four grid, sixteen pixels in your new image that used to be the same pixel in the original - but instead of just picking the nearest one you say "this new pixel's halfway between the centre of this one and that one on the unscaled image, so we'll give it a colour halfway between those two pixels' colours".

[PyTom]

Jake is pretty close in his explanation of bilinear filtering. The one thing is that we're working in two dimensions, so that makes life a little more difficult. We have to pick 4 sample points instead of 2, and perform 3 interpolations.

Basically, say we have:

Code: Select all

A         B

   X

C         D

Where X is the projection of the pixel we want to draw, and A, B, C, and D are the four pixels it falls between. Say it's 1/3 of the way away from the A/C line, and 1/2 of the way away from the A/B line.

Then we would compute the color of the pixel as follows:

X_top = A * (1 - 1/3) + B * (1/3)
X_bot = C * (1 - 1/3) + D * (1/3)
X = X_top * (1 - 1/2) + X_bot * (1/2)

This method only works well when scaling down to a factor of 0.5. Beyond that, you need to consider more then 4 pixels, and we don't handle that. (But that's a factor of .5 in both dimensions, so you really scale down to an area of .25.)

There are some implementation subtleties here, most notably the fact that in practice division is unacceptably slow, so you want to eliminate it when figuring out how far you are away from the various lines.

[PyTom]

Okay, and the new documentation is now up on the wiki:

http://www.bishoujo.us/wiki/Changes_in_5.6.0

5.6.0 will be released half-documented on the wiki, and half in the reference manual that ships with Ren'Py. Hopefully, by 5.6.1, the content will be migrated over to the wiki, and we'll be generating the RM from the wiki.

So now all that remains is release engineering, testing, and the release. Hooray.

[RedSlash]

I guess bilinear interpolation would help out in handheld platforms where the screen is small and as a result the graphics have to be scaled down. But for those situation it may be just better to pre-scale/redo the actual graphics.

I like the new features list for 5.6.0. Mini-game sounds awesome, that just adds a new level to the flexibility for ren'py making it pretty much limitless. Awesome!

[Piroshiki]

Hm, apologies for the last minute change, but since the full mouth arc version of 9a_happy I posted a while ago left me with a bad feeling, I played around with it some more today and came up with something that (I would like to believe) doesn't look nearly as creepy as the third version and still happier than the first version. Of course, which one you use in the final product is entirely up to you...

[DaFool]

And as usual Eileen comes with finer CGing than I can ever hope to achieve. Good job Piroshiki!

Re: wiki, my jaw dropped when I saw the entry for 'Multi-Game Persistence' I thought this was one of those 'nice if, but doesn't really matter either way' sort of feature requests, didn't expect it to turn up already. Respect points / internet cookies just shot up considerably.

[PyTom]

Just in the nick of time, as I was just about to begin the build process.

[DaFool]

nevermind. Didn't see the new sticky for 5.6.0 release.