Patching an Android app with .rpyc files?

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chronoluminaire
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Patching an Android app with .rpyc files?

#1 Post by chronoluminaire »

Hello, all! It's been a while...
I've been overjoyed at the advent of Android Ren'Py games. I have more gaming time on my phone than on my desktop, and it's awesome to be able to get great VNs with all the Ren'Py features like rollback, unlimited save slots, and so on. There are some superb VNs out there for Android now - well done to all the creators!

One thing Ren'Py allows people to do is distribute extra patch files that modify the behaviour of an existing game, often in the form of a .rpyc file. This works great for desktop games. But is there any way to drop one of these files into an Android game? I'm guessing it'd require root privileges?

The specific example I'm after is the wonderful Everlasting Summer, which has a great Android version with gestures to access the menu, history/rollback, turn on skipping, and hide the text window! But like the Steam version, it has black screens during several scenes. There's a .rpyc file that one can drop into the Steam install to enable the full content, but I was wondering whether it was possible to do the same thing to the Android version.
I released 3 VNs, many moons ago: Elven Relations (IntRenAiMo 2007), When I Rule The World (NaNoRenO 2005), and Cloud Fairy (the Cute Light & Fluffy Project, 2009).
More recently I designed the board game Steam Works (published in 2015), available from a local gaming store near you!

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Re: Patching an Android app with .rpyc files?

#2 Post by papiersam »

I doubt that it's easily doable, given that the APK is packed, while on desktop, the folders/directories are more openly accessible. What would probably be best is if you look into the Pythonic way to achieve this, rather than the Renpy way.

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Re: Patching an Android app with .rpyc files?

#3 Post by PyTom »

You can do it if you root the device, but there isn't an easy way to do it without root.

With root, you can (going from old memories here), put a .rpy file in /data/data/com.domain.game/files/game , and Ren'Py will pick it up. It's been a long time, so it's hard to remember the path.
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chronoluminaire
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Re: Patching an Android app with .rpyc files?

#4 Post by chronoluminaire »

Sounds about right. Thanks. My phone isn't rooted at the moment, but I may be getting a new one imminently, so I'll try it on the new one if and when that happens.
I released 3 VNs, many moons ago: Elven Relations (IntRenAiMo 2007), When I Rule The World (NaNoRenO 2005), and Cloud Fairy (the Cute Light & Fluffy Project, 2009).
More recently I designed the board game Steam Works (published in 2015), available from a local gaming store near you!

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Re: Patching an Android app with .rpyc files?

#5 Post by Formedras »

Sorry to necro bump, but apparently there is a way for a developer to allow users to add these kinds of patches; I'm interested in finding out how to do this. The project that demonstrates this is the adult game Summertime Saga; its incest patch is installed for Android on "/storage/emulated/0/summertimesaga". It does appear that the dev needs to set this up themselves; a user can't just make the right directory and expect it to work.
I'll check if the code is open so I can look up how myself, but seeing an answer here from someone who knows what they're doing would be great.
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