Ren'Py 4.5 Released

Discuss how to use the Ren'Py engine to create visual novels and story-based games. New releases are announced in this section.
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PyTom
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Ren'Py 4.5 Released

#1 Post by PyTom »

I'm pleased to announce the release of Ren'Py 4.5 "Inked Finger". This release includes a number of new transitions and widgets, mpeg-1 movie support, and rewritten rendering code that should improve display speed in some common cases. As always, it can be downloaded from the Ren'Py website:

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

For most users upgrading from 4.4.2 to 4.5 should be as easy as copying over the game directory. If you updated styles used in the game menu, however, you may need to change your script, as the names of some of those styles have changed. If you have problems figuring out the new names, just ask.

I'd appreciate people letting me know if they have any problems with the new rendering code.

A list of changes for version 4.5 follows:

New in 4.5

We now ship an extras directory, with interesting sample code. It includes:
  • fullscreen.rpy, containing code to automatically switch the game into fullscreen on the first run, while preserving the user's preference on later runs.
  • 640x480.rpy, which shows how to customize Ren'Py for a game that runs at 640x480.
  • kanamode.rpy, contains the code to emulate the interface of the various Digital Object games, which display text one line at a time, but keep a page of text on the screen at once. (screenshot)
Added a new CropMove transition. This single class is the root of not one, not two, but fourteen transitions, in the forms of wipes, slides, slideaways, and rectangular irises. You can see some of these transitions in action in the demo, which now has a new section, "What's new with Ren'Py?"

Added support for playing MPEG-1 movies. Rather than explain it all here, we'l just mention that you can read the new "Movies" subsection of the "Multimedia: Sound, Music, and Movies" section of the Ren'Py manual. We support both hardware-accelerated full-window movies and using a movie as a widget. This is also shown in the what's new section of Ren'Py.

Added ui.grid(). This is a widget that places its children in a grid. The children must have sizes that do not consider the amount of space available for the grid to work.

Added ui.pausebehavior(). This separates pausing from the saybehavior paving the way for uninterruptable pauses (a bad idea, IMO) and menus that dismiss themseleves after a certain amount of time.

A new function, renpy.exists(), can check to see if a given file can be found in the searchpath. This could be used, for example, to make a game that only tries to play music if an add-on music package is downloaded, and the files placed in the appropriate place.

Added the ability to bind mouse events to mouseup as well as mousedown, and changed some of the default bindings to be on mouseup rather than mousedown. If you make changes to config.keymaps, you'll need to change mouse_1 to mousedown_1, and so on for various other button numbers.

Moved the place we look for menu sounds from the style of the choices in the menu to the style of the menu itself, as that seems more rational. Also, gave menus their own style. (Can't believe I forgot that.)

Made a few changes to the library screens. First of all, we rationalized (to some extent, it's still pretty ugly) the names of the styles for library widgets. So some of that may have changed. We placed preferences and the yes/no dialogue inside windows, which can be styled by the user. We then routed all button and label creation through two functions, _button_factory and _label_factory. By overriding these functions, the user can (for example) replace the default textbuttons with imagebuttons.

Made 'f' toggle fullscreen at the main menu. This will help on virtual windows, where the mouse doesn't work right in fullscreen mode.

Improved rendering speed. Now, we aggressively cache things to minimize re-renders, and only draw to the screen the parts of the screen that have changed. In common cases, such as the case where only some text has changed, this can greately improve performance. In other cases (transitions), we have to redraw the entire screen anyway, so there's little improvement.

Fixed a bug in which hiding the UI was not working properly. (This broke the center mouse button behavior.)
Last edited by PyTom on Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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#2 Post by mikey »

Ver. 4.5 "Inked Finger"? It's a cool thing to give names to releases! :P

I've run out of superlatives, really, and I almost hate myself for planning my RenPy release for around summer, I wish it could be sooner. Anyway, I'll experiment around, looking forward to the improved 640x480 support ^_^ (640x480 forever!)

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#3 Post by PyTom »

I've been giving names to releases for a while now, on and off. You're the first one that seems to have noticed.

IIRC, 4.3 was "Birthday Present" (which, through the magic of timezones, was released on my and Lemma's birthday), and 4.4 was "Christmas Bonus" (released on Christmas). One of the 4.4 sub-releases was "Can you hear me now?", a reference to a commerical for cell-phones, and to the sound problems Ren'Py had been having.

4.5 is named "Inked Finger" after the inked fingers of Iraqi voters. The election was something which deeply impressed me, and which occured during this development cycle.

Older versions had the version names coded internally and printed as part of a version string when an exception occured, but I decided to suspend that now that end-users are using Ren'Py.

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#4 Post by Piroshiki »

Great release! Nice to see that the middle mouse click is working again, and mpeg support is a good addition. However, it would seem that midi files aren't working anymore...
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#5 Post by Tage »

Sweet! :D Can't wait to play around with it. Good job!

About the MIDIs not working...They are working for me (Windows XP Pro: SP2)

I noticed the names P=

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#6 Post by PyTom »

The midis are working for me as well. Piroshki, can you describe how/why they are not working for you? Also, could you check that the synth volume on your computer is turned up. (Perhaps by trying to play the midi in the game directory with another program.)

Also, could someone explain to me why every single light bulb on a car has to be different? (Sorry, spent the last two hours changing all the burnt out bulbs on my car. This involved two trips to the auto parts store, and I'm still not done.)

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#7 Post by Piroshiki »

Well, the midi's I'm using are working perfectly fine with other versions of RenPy or on winamp, but as soon as I use them in 4.5, they don't play at all. Mp3 and wav files are working perfectly though. I also had the same problem playing midi on versions anterior to 4.3.1 (I think it was 4.3.1, the one where you changed something with the sound library to fox the crackling mp3's). So just to see if it could work, I tried replacing the lib folder with that of a version that could play midi, but it didn't change anything.

...since it's apparently working for everyone else, chances are that it's just my computer being weird again v.v;;
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typo report

#8 Post by Tage »

I finally got around to viewing the demo. After the fullscreen video file played, the background video file played. However, when the background video file tried to stop, the program exited and gave me this error log:

Code: Select all

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

NameError: name 'movie_stop' is not defined

The last script statement executed was on line 862 of game/script.rpy.

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

  File "run_game.py", line 61, in ?
  File "renpy\main.pyc", line 157, in main
  File "renpy\main.pyc", line 121, in run
  File "renpy\execution.pyc", line 68, in run
  File "renpy\ast.pyc", line 222, in execute
  File "renpy\python.pyc", line 642, in py_exec_bytecode
  File "<none>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'movie_stop' is not defined

The last script statement executed was on line 862 of game/script.rpy.

Ren'Py Version: Ren'Py 4.5
You forgot to put "renpy" infront of "movie_stop()" =| And for some odd freaking reason... The skip function is not working. It WAS working with this release. I am not sure when it stopped working. My only guesses are either it's my computer acting funky or it bugged when I skipped through the movie file. I've tried exiting the program and restarting. I've tried deleting the whole folder and extracting it again from the zip. The only other thing that I would try is to restart my computer, but I'm downloading something right now.

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Re: typo report

#9 Post by PyTom »

Tage wrote:You forgot to put "renpy" infront of "movie_stop()" =| And for some odd freaking reason... The skip function is not working. It WAS working with this release. I am not sure when it stopped working. My only guesses are either it's my computer acting funky or it bugged when I skipped through the movie file. I've tried exiting the program and restarting. I've tried deleting the whole folder and extracting it again from the zip. The only other thing that I would try is to restart my computer, but I'm downloading something right now.
Gak. You got me. Looks like I'll be releasing a new version fairly soon.

Oh, skipping should stop working after you've changed the script. (For the same reason that loading changes after a change... there's no way to tell that a line remained the same between two versions of the script.) It'll start working on the next play-through.

But I don't know why it would stop working for any other reason. What happens if you use TAB to toggle skip mode? Does the indicator show?

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#10 Post by Tage »

Wow, how do you notice replies so fast? =O lol

I tried tab as well. The indicator does show. So, if I edit the script.rpy, the skip function stops working?? I didn't know that. Well, anyway, it doesn't work from a fresh "install" of the demo either. So I have no clue what happened. x_x; I rarely restart or turn off my computer, but I think I'll restart it tomorrow. *cough*

Okay, I think it's my computer because I just extracted an earlier version of ren'py demo and it doesn't work there either. The question I'm wondering now is, "What the heck is wrong with my computer?!" My CTRL button does function properly and so does the tab button... -.-;;

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#11 Post by PyTom »

Tage wrote:Wow, how do you notice replies so fast? =O lol
Replies to threads I've posted in get emailed to me. My email delay is usually less than 60 seconds, and then a biff program lets me know I have mail.
I tried tab as well. The indicator does show. So, if I edit the script.rpy, the skip function stops working?? I didn't know that.
I think what's going on is that you're forgetting that skip, by default, only skips over lines you've seen already. When you modify the script, or unpack it in a new directory, there's no way of knowing what you've seen already, so Ren'Py won't skip through anything.

If you play through the demo once, and then try skipping, skip should probably work. (But let me know if it doesn't.)

(I've had a long-held belief that odd numbers are evil, and powers of two are lucky. I probably should only release even-numbered versions.)

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#12 Post by Tage »

::asks himself, "WHY ARE YOU SUCH A NEWB?!"::

yeh, you hit it right on the head. That was my problem...

PyTom wrote:Replies to threads I've posted in get emailed to me. My email delay is usually less than 60 seconds, and then a biff program lets me know I have mail.
ah, gmail does the same thing (which is what I'm using)
PyTom wrote:(I've had a long-held belief that odd numbers are evil, and powers of two are lucky. I probably should only release even-numbered versions.)
Hm...there's no reason to interrupt your belief now after so long

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#13 Post by PyTom »

Well, I figure the best way to break the odd-number curse is to release a new version. Expect 4.6 to be out in a few days. The theme of this release is "Stuff I forgot to put in 4.5". We'll have things like independent margins and padding and layers with their own transitions, to slide things onto the screen.

To hold people over, I've uploaded a screenshot of the new button menu extra (the buttons are themable, I just didn't bother to make a new frame for them.)

http://www.bishoujo.us/hosted/button_menu.jpg

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#14 Post by Tage »

oooo... pretty n.n

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