Ren’Py Developer Update - October 2021 link
Happy Halloween, and welcome to this month’s Ren’Py developer update. October was a busy month, and one spent on releases, addressing issues, and preparing for future development. In this update, I’ll talk about what was accomplished and also about Ren’Py versions.
October link
Releases link
Two releases came out last month. Ren’Py 7.4.9 was a big release of Ren’Py that added support for the Android App Bundles as well as a large number of other improvements. Most of this was covered in last month’s update, but additional testing took over a week, and so it wasn’t until October 8th that 7.4.9 came out.
There was one change that caused a bug that triggered intermittently when large (bigger than 4096px in at least one dimension) images were predicted or shown. This issue would hide those images, leading to problems that were reported as multiple unrelated bugs.
As a result, I immediately turned around and started work on 7.4.10, which came out 15 days later, after a couple of prereleases. This fixes this issue and a few more.
Every time I do a major release, I get a few more issues reported. Right now I’m trying to decide if a 7.4.11 makes sense, and I’m sort of leaning towards it. While there aren’t a lot of issues, it might not make sense to wait for 7.5 for a release.
There really hasn’t been a lot of feature development this month, as my time went into release processes, but it looks like that will be changing soon.
New Computer link
Another task I accomplished this month was to upgrade my computer to be able to support developing Ren’Py 7.5. The upgrade was to add a Ryzen 5950X, as well as a new motherboard, case, cooler, and power supply, while keeping the drives, GPU, and RAM from the previous version.
This should be a big help on some of the projects I plan to tackle in the next few months, like adding support for Python 3 and Apple Silicon-based macs. In both cases, the faster I can build things, the faster development can happen, and so I figured the upgrades were a reasonable investment.
For the record, the computer I develop Ren’Py on is named Eileen (after the Ren’Py mascot), and runs Ubuntu 20.04. As best as I can tell, I first put together this computer in February of 2012, and it’s been upgraded multiple times since then.
Editor link
Another change I’ve been doing is to try to switch Ren’Py development to Visual Studio Code, from LiClipse, a variant of Eclipse that I’ve been using for years and years. I’ve been really impressed by the language-renpy extension that’s been put together by Daniel Luque and others.
You can find out more about it at:
https://github.com/LuqueDaniel/vscode-language-renpy
But it’s frankly quite nice, and shows the power of separating the editor support from the engine. Doing that means that other teams can work on editors and support tools, without one being preferred by Ren’Py.
That being said, I’m going to look and see if it’s possible to distribute vscode and language-renpy with Ren’Py, as that’s something people have been requesting.
Versions and Releases link
One thing I’ve decided to do over the last month is to become a little more formal about the meaning of the digits in a Ren’Py release number, and to make those make more sense.
Most notably, I’d like to move away from mixing fixes in with new features and more complex improvements, to make it clear what’s what. So the new intent is:
- The first digit is a number that denotes the major release of Ren’Py. For now, 7.x.y releases will be Python 2.7 based Ren’Py, while 8.x.y will be for Python 3, when that’s ready. I don’t know exactly what will cause this to change, but it would be a similarly major update.
- The second digit is the feature release. This should change when Ren’Py adds new features, and stay the same for pure fix releases.
- The last digit goes up with a patch release that fixes issues, and resets to 0 with a feature release.
This is a reasonably standard way of doing things, similar to the way that Linux does it. Where I’ve been kind of wanting to change is that there have been several releases in the 7.4 series that should have been feature releases, including 7.4.9.
I’d like to target a feature release every 3-4 months, which is probably a good balance between changing too fast and holding features back that people need.
Lastly, you’ll see a few extra details after the official version number. Ren’Py 7.4.10 is listed as 7.4.10.2178 internally, which means there have been 2,178 changes since development of Ren’Py 7.4 started. The number of changes can be used to distinguish prereleases from final builds. You might see a u or n after the number of changes - u means that it was an unofficial build, and n means that it’s nightly.
Thank You link
And with that, we come to the end of this month’s update. I’ll be starting feature development for Ren’Py 7.5 soon, and I’ll bring you up to date next month. As always, thank you for your support.