The Road to 6.13

[jack_norton]

Just to be sure I understood, the 6.13 will have both DirectX AND the new Text ?

[DaFool]

Probably the biggest change was the addition of a new "quick menu" to the screens.rpy file that's used for new games. Here's a screenshot:

screenshot0001.jpg

It's in the lower-right of dialogue screens. The buttons are fairly subtle by default, so as not to detract from the game, but become more visible when hovered, and change to a yellow color to indicate selection. (All of this is configurable, of course.)

Good thing I caught this as we were about to put $ showoverlay = False everywhere there's a menu or scene dissolve. Would this implementation then automatically hide whenever there's no textbox? Because that would be very convenient.

[PyTom]

Just to be sure I understood, the 6.13 will have both DirectX AND the new Text ?

Yes, those are the two big changes. (That is, the ones that took me the most time, and that people will notice the least.)

Would this implementation then automatically hide whenever there's no textbox?

This is part of the textbox screen. (It's also added to the input screen and the nvl screen.) So it's only shown when one of those screens is shown.

[Counter Arts]

I took note of the location of the quickbar. While there is a Ui theory for things that are flush to the side of the screen being easier to click, it may become hard for people that play in windowed mode since they may accidentally click outside of the window.

Just an observation and a consideration about something that *might* come up in the future.

[Aleema]

The Quickbar is an excellent idea, though I used to never use it, once I did, I wanted it on in every project! Good to see that it's now standard. I do agree with Counter Arts that it's eerily close to the bottom edge, though. I understand why it's there, but at its size, it will definitely resulting in many misclicks off the window. (also, text touching the edges wigs me out) Matching the margin on the right to the bottom may fix this.

What does the "time_warp" parameter do? Sounds ... exciting.

Sounds like a lot of goodies coming our way.

[PyTom]

I've been able to click the quickbar buttons fairly easily, but perhaps I have overly good mouse control? Let's put this aside for the moment, until a prerelease comes out. Then people can give me feedback on how easy or hard the buttons are to click, and we can change things before the final release.

A time_warp parameter is a function from [0.0, 1.0] to [0.0, 1.0], that distorts the progression of time inside a transition - so one could have it pass more quickly, or in a side wave pattern, or something. Think of it like an ATL warper, applied to transitions. (This is a quick add, until I get around to ATL2 and ATL Transitions.)

In other news, I've begin the 6.13 release campaign. The first thing I did was to put together a first draft of the changelog - check it out at:

http://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/changelog.html

[backansi]

In other news, I've begin the 6.13 release campaign.

! Good news which I was looking forward to was here!
Anyway I found something written wrong though it was not found in the changelog.

Code: Select all

textbutton "Music Room" action ShowMenu("gallery")

http://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/rooms ... ge-gallery

[PyTom]

I call your bug in the gallery documentation, and raise you 3500 words of new documentation of text display:

http://www.renpy.org/dev-doc/html/text.html

[PyTom]

Spent the weekend working on release engineering for Ren'Py 6.13. Here's some of the highlights:

Instead of libjpeg, Ren'Py is using libjpeg-turbo. This library is used by google chrome, and promises up to 4x faster JPEG decoding.

Ren'Py is now using ffmpeg-0.8.2 rather than 0.6. This should hopefully make it easier to create movies that play in Ren'Py.

On Windows, when DirectX is missing and GL is not fully functional, we'll prompt the user to install DirectX. We distribute the DirectX web setup with Ren'Py game, so it's a straightforward install.

On Mac OS X, the powerpc binaries will be a separate download that the user will have to add to their game. (It's hard to justify the additional size, for a platform that's mostly dead.)

I'm also working on updating the Linux build environment, but more news on that when I finish.

[Watercolorheart]

I will have to try out the image-based Music and new Gallery rooms soon.

[SleepKirby]

I'm quite excited about this after reading the new Text documentation. The text displayables, non-English display features and translation support, and many of those text tags look like they could be very handy.

[PyTom]

I did some changes to the Linux and Mac build environment. Linux is now being built with GCC 4.5, while Mac is now on GCC 4.2. This should give a small performance increase, while not being particularly noticeable otherwise.

I had been considering increasing the minimum Glibc requirement on Linux, but I decided against that. Ren'Py should run every place it used to - except for powerpc, where you (or your users) will have to download another zip file to make it continue to work.

[Taleweaver]

When do you suppose Ren'Py 6.13 is ready for release? A few features might come in handy for my current project...

[PyTom]

I'm pretty close (days) to a pre-release. After that, who knows? The text changes were substantial, so I suspect that some bug-fixing will be in order.

[Taleweaver]

I'm really keen on seeing how the performance changes with DirectX implementation. I'm on a netbook, and some basic graphics effects (like Dissolve) already put quite a bit of strain on my machine...