Updating to Ren'py 8!
Added 2022-07-12 09:33:21 +0000 UTCFirst, an update on how the LR2 display work is going! After a few days of ironing out issues (and fixing bugs that were, on review, painfully obvious) I have the basic clothing and character display code working. It properly grabs character faces, hair, and clothing, and applies only those images from the Live2D model. Next up I need to add support for all of the body parameters, which will mean modifying the Person class code to actually store those values.
While I've been working on this something surprising has happened though: Ren'py 8 has released! This turns out to be a Big Deal, because with this update Ren'py is moving from the outdated (and no longer supported) Python 2.7 to the much more modern Python 3 (Python 3.9 in particular). Ren'py is going to continue to support a Python 2.7 version for the moment, but I expect that will end at some point in the near-ish future when maintaining feature parity becomes difficult.
Since I'm already deep in code changes for LR2 this is an ideal time to get this change done. In particular I want to make sure this update doesn't do anything unexpected to the Live2D code (a quick test project suggests everything should work fine). Python 2.7 and Python 3 are very similar, to the point that most code written for one should work without modifications for the other. I'm expecting a few logic bugs to be introduced due to the different ways Python 3 deals with things like division, but the unit test suites I've written should catch most of those and they'll all be quick fixes.
By switching over to Python 3 we should see minor performance improvements (the internet seems split on exactly how much, ranging from "trivial" to "twice as fast"). The major benefit will be guaranteed Ren'py support going forward, which means I can pull in Ren'py bug fixes and performance improvements without any extra effort on my part. I've also heard from mod makers that there's a bug in the old version of Ren'py 7 I was developing on that is resolved by updating.
The Renpy 8 update should be fairly quick to do, so I'll have an update about that in a few days!
Comments
As someone who has done such conversions multiple times, it shouldn't be to bad. Where my concern lies with this stuff, as with any RenPy project, is the weird hybrid file formats you end up coding in, and how those get in the way of any automation tools.
Steve Sombdy
2022-07-14 15:50:39 +0000 UTCAlso hopefully won't take awhile. Even an easy task can be quite tedious and time consuming, something Vren seems to have experienced with the clothing stuff so far.
Killer300
2022-07-13 23:09:23 +0000 UTCOh yes, I hope the switching over to Renpy 8 is not a long process, best of luck to you and thanks for the update!
NakedAlice
2022-07-13 13:34:15 +0000 UTCActually it's the other way around with Python - a lot of Python 3 code will run in Python 2, but the reverse is typically not true (mostly because P3 is a lot stricter with brackets). Still it's not exactly rocket science to convert.
GAZZA
2022-07-13 05:25:37 +0000 UTCJust did some further reading into renpy 8.0 and it adds steam deck support! Which is great as I'm using one as my main Mobile PC. If you need a tester for that hardware let me know!
Colin T.
2022-07-12 13:14:02 +0000 UTCHmmm.......jiggling....
NuTrix
2022-07-12 13:09:51 +0000 UTC
