I'm happy to announce Ren'Py 7.4.0, the product of over a year of development, and one of the biggest releases of Ren'Py to date. This release focuses on updating Ren'Py's internals so that Ren'Py is ready for its next 15 years.
Some of the bigger changes are:
- A new model-based renderer. While this is opt-in for the moment, it opens the way to features that creators have been requesting for a long time, such as being able to recolor displayables, blurring the screen, and using Live2D to animate sprites. The model-based renderer is extensible with shaders, allowing for custom effects.
- A new Python 3 compatibility mode has been added, to pave the way for Python 3 support in the next release. This mode changes the ways in which Ren'Py runs, to allow you to begin porting your game before full Python 3 comes out in Ren'Py 8.0.
- Ren'Py's build system has been modernized, and the libraries underlying it have been updated. This allows 64-bit Windows to be supported.
- The web platform has bene updated, to allow for the incremental download of games.
With these changes, there have been a few deprecations. The 32-bit armv7l platform has been removed on iOS, as this platform hasn't been supported by Apple for several years. The Editra text editor has been removed, as it hasn't been supported for quite some time, and wasn't compatible with the new build system.
It's my hope that this release will enable creators to take on projects they couldn't before, and will provide a solid basis for the next releases of Ren'Py.
Downloads of 7.4.0 can be found at:
https://www.renpy.org/release/7.4.0
A full list of changes to Ren'Py can be found at:
https://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/changelog.html
A list of changes that may require you to update your game can be found at:
https://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/incompatible.html
Please also check out the credits and sponsor list.
I'd like to thank everyone that's been trying out the nightlies as 7.4 has been developed - they've found many issues, and so my hope is that 7.4 is ready for wider testing. I'm especially interested in making sure that Ren'Py runs well using the model-based renderer, which takes advantange of the features of modern GPUs to enable things that Ren'Py couldn't do before.
To try out model-based rendering of an existing game, hit shift+G and pick the GL2 renderer, then quit out and restart the game. If Ren'Py won't start, you can put it into a safe mode by holding down left-shift as it starts up. To invoke model-based rendering in your own game, add define config.gl2 = True to your script - this is necessary before using Live2D, Matrixcolor, Transform-with-blur, and other new features.
There are two features that I still have to implement - custom cursors and Steam.
Please report any issues you have either here, or if you're 100% sure it's a bug, at the Github issue tracker.
Once again, thank you to the community, everyone who contributed or will contribute codes, translations, tests, and games. This has been one of the roughest years of my life, but thanks to you I think that Ren'Py is on the right track for a bright future.