Changelog (Ren'Py 7.x-)

There is also a list of incompatible changes

8.4.0

Requirement and Dependency Changes

Ren'Py now requires Windows 10 or later to run. This means that it will no longer run on Windows 7, 8, or 8.1.

Ren'Py is no longer built for 32-bit ARM linux. This drops support for the Raspberry Pi 3, and very old Chromebooks. Ren'Py is still being built for 32-bit ARM Android.

Features

The new config.keep_screenshot_entering_menu variable determines if a screenshot taken with FileTakeScreenshot is kept when entering a menu context.

The thumb_offset style property now can take a tuple giving different offsets for the two sides of a bar. The new thumb_align style property controls how a thumb is aligned with the bar.

The input displayable now takes an arrowkeys property, which controls whether the arrow keys can be used to move the cursor in the input, or are used to move the focus between displayables.

The config.translate_additional_strings_callbacks callbacks make it possible for a game to offer additional to be added to translation files. (For example, strings from third-party libraries or data files.)

The ___() (triple underscore) function makes it possible translate a string, and then apply text interpolation to the result. Interpolations occur in the scope of that the function is called from. The triple underscore function also marks the string contained inside for translation.

Other Changes

The show expression statement has changed so that show expression "bg washington" is equivalent to show bg washington. Previously, the expression would be used as a tag, which would rarely be correct. If a displayable is given instead of a string, a tag will be generated.

One the web platform, renpy.emscripten is the emscripten module, making it available without needing to import it. You should still check that renpy.emscripten is true before using it.

When config.nearest_neighbor is true, image fonts are scaled using nearest neighbor scaling, rather than the default bilinear scaling.

The "Image Attributes" screen also indicates if transforms are applied to a layer, as it can be hard to determine otherwise.

8.3.4 / 7.8.4

Fixes

Python Builtins (like len) are now always available during string interpolation.

Animated presplash images now take precedence over static presplash images, matching the documentation.

There have been a number of fixes related to dragging of viewports and drag displayables.

Movies are stopped when returning to a channel from a context.

An issue where autosave could hurt performance by causing interaction restarts has been fixed.

Ren'Py now uses the previous window type when running the nvl hide statement.

A displayable that does not support keyboard focus will now be ignored during keyboard focus computations.

An issue that could cause Input to not be masked properly when the contents of the input was a space was fixed.

An issue preventing Android and iOS keyboards from being shown when the window was empty has been fixed.

An issue that could cause the image cache to be managed incorrectly has been fixed.

An incorrect build prevented the web version of Ren'Py from working properly, on Ren'Py 7.8.3. This has been fixed.

Other Changes

Displayables rendered for imagemaps are offered (config.screen_width, config.screen_height) pixels of space, rather than an arbitrary size. This shouldn't matter for images, but makes non-image displayables behave more consistently.

The ATL "update" event, which was issued in rare circumstances, has been removed.

The new renpy.get_statement_name() function returns the name of the currently executing Ren'Py statement, the same name given to config.statement_callbacks.

SpriteManager has been modernized, and now can be saved.

8.3.3 / 7.8.3

Fixes

Empty masked inputs no longer show a single mask glyph.

If a Movie has a transform as its image or show_image, that transform is reset each time the movie is shown.

The config.nvl_adv_transition no longer forces the dialogue window to be hidden.

Screens that are used by another screen are now updated properly if the interaction restarts before the screen is first rendered.

The achievement.steam.get_session_ticket() function now works as documented.

Changes to audio filters take place immediately after reload.

config.skip_sounds now works as documented.

Model now creates meshes as described in the documentation when no textures are supplied.

The image attributes screen now quotes image and displayable names.

An issue with rollback not restarting music has been fixed.

Underlines and strikethroughs will not be broken when drawn using harfbuzz-based text shaping.

Ren'Py now ensures that IMEs are activated on the primary window when the game starts, rather than on a presplash window.

Bars no longer lose the selected_hover prefix when adjusted using keyboard or game controller.

Rounding errors during pixel perfect text positioning have been fixed. These errors could cause text to jump 1 pixel during dissolves.

The rarely-used gl_anisotropic transform property now works.

The keyboard_focus_insets property now works as documented.

A rounding issue that could cause bar_invert to stop working has been fixed.

Ren'Py will render a displayable a second time if box_wrap is True, to ensure that the displayable is offered the correct amount of space when wrapped to a second line. In rare cases, this could change layout.

Controller events can now cause Ren'Py to focus a displayable with default_focus set. Previously, these events weren't considered inputs by the focus system.

There have been a number of fixes to the way Ren'Py handles dragging a viewport filled with buttons.

A drag may now contain a draggable viewport, allowing a window to be more directly emulated.

Other Changes

Android bundles now use install-time assets packs, rather than fast-follow packs, to ensure that all assets are available when the game is run.

An AlphaMask will now cause mask transformations to restart each time it is shown.

Displayables zoomed down to 0 pixels big will no longer get focus.

The "always" option to _renpysteam.keyboard_mode is no longer supported. If given, the "once" mode is used, requiring the player to explicitly request the Steam Deck keyboard when required.

The number of frames that Ren'Py passes through the rendering pipeline before switching to powersave mode has been increased to 12, to ensure that frames make it through compositors in a timely manner.

Ren'Py locks the image cache less, which should prevent some frame drops when loading images.

Synchronized start of audio/video no longer occurs on movie channels unless explicitly requested.

When rolling back to a point where a looping Movie was showing, the looping movie will be played again if it had been stopped.

A Movie will only stop movies that it has played, rather than any movie on the associated channel.

When renpy.set_audio_filter() is called with immediate false, the filter will be applied when the queued file is played, rather than at some indeterminate time in the future.

The Frame displayable is no longer adjusted to be pixel perfect, preventing visual glitches.

When using text shaders to display text with outlines, Ren'Py will create pseudo-glyphs. These pseudo-glyphs cover the start and end of each line, and are used to ensure the outlines will be shown.

8.3.2 / 7.8.2

Fixes

Fixed a build issue with 8.3.1 and 7.8.1 that prevented the Android version of Ren'Py from starting properly, making games unplayable.

8.3.1 / 7.8.1

Fixes

Image keywords (zorder, behind, at, onlayer, and transform) may not occur in an expression, like a list after at.

Using local shader variables by name in {shader} tags now works.

Textshaders now work with very large sizes and numbers of characters.

Lint avoids checking non-files as files.

The show_done character callback is now called and documented.

The web version of Ren'Py now saves persistent data when the screen is idle for .33 seconds.

The path to game.zip in a web build can now be configured by editing the generated index.html.

The web version of Ren'Py now defers calls to FS.syncfs, preventing errors that could be caused by files being rapidly renamed.

By default, synchronized start of audio now only occurs on looping channels, like music channels. The default can be changed on a channel-by-channel basis by supplying synchro_start to renpy.music.register_channel().

Other Changes

The new renpy.stop_skipping() cancels slow and fast skip.

Fast-skipping when slow-skipping (or vice versa) now cancels skipping.

On PC, Ren'Py will disable fullscreen when opening a URL.

Ren'Py now correctly clips displayables that are positioned at negative offsets to the parent, provided the displayable does not exit the clip rectangle.

AudioData now explicitly supports video, and supports properties inside angles (like <from 1.0 to 6.0>).

config.font_transforms is now documented. This allows you to define new font transforms for accessibility purposes.

The multiple argument to Character is now supplied to Character Callbacks.

8.3.0 / 7.8.0

Audio Filters

This release adds an audio filter system to Ren'Py, providing a way of processing the sound coming out of audio channels. The audio filter system is based on webaudio, and includes the following filters:

Biquad, a way of implementing Lowpass, Highpass, Notch, Peaking, Lowshelf, Highshelf, and Allpass filters.
Comb, a delay line with filtering and feedback.
Delay, a delay line without the feedback.
Mix, a way of mixing two audio streams.
Sequence, a way of applying more than one filter to audio.
WetDry, a way of filtering a stream with a wet and dry control.
Reverb, a way of applying artificial reverb to the audio.

Text Shaders

This release adds support for text shaders, which are OpenGL shaders that are applied to text, using information that is provided by the rendering system. The big advantage of this is it now becomes possible to change the way Ren'Py shows slow text to something else. For example, the dissolve text shader causes characters to dissolve in from left to right, rather than showing all at once.

Text shaders are able to process the color of the text, including the alpha channel. Text shaders can also adjust the position of the text - for example, the jitter shader causes text to bounce around.

Text shaders can be introduced using the {shader} text tag, using the textshader style, or using the config.default_textshader variable. A text block should either use text shaders or not - mixing is not supported.

Custom text shaders are supported using the renpy.register_text_shader() function. These have access to new uniforms and attributes that are appropriate to text display.

Other Shader Changes

Shaders part can now access shader part local variables to prevent conflicts between variables used by different shader parts. While used mostly with text shaders, shader part local variables are available for all shaders to use.

The new config.shader_part_filter variable can be used to filter the shader parts that are used. This makes it possible to implement preferences that turn on and off shader parts as required.

Two new model uniforms have been added, u_drawable_size and u_virtual_size, making it easier to project gl_Positions in shaders to coordinates that are used elsewhere in Ren'Py.

Visual Studio Code

The Ren'Py Language Visual Studio Code extension is now maintained by the Ren'Py project. As part of this, if you have a Visual Studio Code installed, the launcher will prompt you to install the new extension.

Launcher Changes

Under Navigate Script, the TODOs button now has a count of TODOs next to it.

Under Navigate Script, the files view now has a checkbox that allows a creator to filter out translation files.

Window Statement Changes

There have been changes to the window statement:

window show and window hide no longer disable the automatic window management that Ren'Py does. Instead, these statements will immediately show or hide the window, without changing automatic window management.
The new window auto False statement will disable automatic window management, and the new window auto True statement will re-enable it. (The existing window auto statement will also work, but window auto True is preferred.)

The intent behind this is to make window hide more useful, as it can be used to hide the window for effects without disabling automatic window management.

When a window show occurs after window hide, Ren'Py will look forward to the next say statement to determine the type of the window to show. Previously, it looked back to the last say statement.

Screenshots and Paper Dolls

Taking a screenshot now hides the notify screen, so multiple screenshots do not leak the path to the previous one. This controlled by config.pre_screenshot_actions.

The new renpy.render_to_file() and renpy.render_to_surface() functions make it possible to capture displayables (including trees of displayables, like layered images) and save that to a file or a pygame_sdl2 Surface.

Steam

Ren'Py's Steam support has been updated to use the latest version of the Steam DLL.

There is now support for the Steam Timeline, part of the Steam Game Recording system. This support is controlled by the config.automatic_steam_timeline variable. When true, the default, save_name is mirrored to the steam Timeline, as is the menu/laying state. It's possible to add additional events to the timeline using achievement.steamapi.add_timeline_event. (Remember to check that achievement.steam is not None before calling this function.)

Wrapped methods of the Steamworks API are documented on the Achievements page.

Android

Ren'Py now targets Android 15 (API level 35), though versions down to Android 5 may still work.

Features

The new anymod keysym prefix makes it possible to bind to a key while ignoring the meta, alt, and ctrl key modifiers.

The translation identifier screen (accessed through shift+D) is now the translation info screen, and now includes information about the line being executed. If a language is selected, the screen will also show the line being translated, and the text of the say statement being translated.

Creator-Defined Statements can now take an ATL block, which is supplied to the execute function as a keyword argument giving an ATL transform. It's also possible to define a creator-defined statement that optionally takes an ATL block, or a block of script statements.

It is now possible to supply menu arguments to renpy.display_menu(), and the new renpy.Choice class makes it possible to supply arguments to each item in the menu.

The layer that bubbles appear on is now controlled by bubble.layer and bubble.retained_layer.

Retained speech bubbles are now automatically cleared away when other say, menu, or call screen statements are invoked. This is controlled by the bubble.clear_retain_statements variable.

The renpy.get_ongoing_transition() function has been added. This returns the transition that is currently being applied to the top level or a layer.

The config.translate_ignore_who variable makes it possible to ignore certain characters for the purpose of translations.

The Hide action and renpy.hide_screen() actions now take an immediately keyword argument, which prevents 'on hide' handlers in the screens from running.

Character Callbacks are now given information about the line of dialogue and the segment of the line that is being shown.

The renpy.call_in_new_context() and renpy.invoke_in_new_context() functions take an option _clear_layers keyword argument. When given, this controls which layers will be cleared when changing to the new context.

The default volumes of mixers are now set by using the default statement with preferences.volume.<mixer>. For example, the default volume of the music mixer can be set with default preferences.volume.music = 0.5. This also supports creator-defined mixers. Please see Mixer Defaults for more information.

The ui.adjustment class now takes a new raw_changed property, which takes the adjustment and the new value, before it's clamped. This can be used to perform actions when the adjustment scrolls out of range.

The SplineMatrix class has been added, which makes it possible to transform matrices in a non-linear way.

The Input displayable now takes an action property, which is an action that runs when the user presses enter with the text input active.

Ruby/Furigana text can now inherit its color from the parent text, by setting color to None.

Transform now supports the fps property, which quantizes time inside the transform to a particular number of frames per second.

Where appropriate, Bar Values now take min and max parameters, which can be used to define a range that is not zero-based.

Other Changes

The notification screen is now hidden before a screenshot is taken.

The crop transform property now always takes the size of the crop box, even if bigger than what is being cropped.

The hspace and vspace text tags now respect window scaling.

Lint will now report obsolete image manipulators.

The renpy.open_file() function now returns an io.BufferedReader object when encoding is None, allowing the .peek method to be used.

Ren'Py will load .rpe.py files from config.renpy_base directory and the project's game directory, and execute the file before the game starts.

Ren'Py will now load .rpe files from the config.renpy_base directory as well as the project's game directory.

Files ending with .rpe or .rpe.py are excluded from the build process.

Images can now be oversampled at the directory level.

ATL polar coordinates now support the radius being a negative number.

The displayable inspector (Shift+Alt+I) now shows a displayable's id if it has one.

Displayables now have an id field, that contains the id given in screen language. The config.clear_log variable has been added, which controls whether the dialogue log (config.log) is cleared each time Ren'Py starts.

Munging of names beginning with __ now takes place inside strings, to allow munged names to be used inside substitutions. This should be fairly transparent, but for a discussion of the implications see incompatible changes

The renpy.fetch() function can now take user-specified headers that are supplied as part of the HTTP/HTTPS request.

Bar Values that set values (like DictValue, FieldValue, VariableValue, ScreenVariableValue, and LocalVariableValue) now take a min and max parameters, which can be used to directly set the bar's endpoints.

The keyboard_focus_insets style property makes it possible to have keyboard focus work with overlapping buttons, by artificially reducing the size of the buttons to remove the overlap, when determining keyboard focus.

The synchro_start option (documented as part of renpy.music.play()) is now True by default in that function, and in the play statement. The implementation of synchro start has changed to make understanding it easier, while retaining the same behavior in most cases.

The web version of Ren'Py now supports loading video from origins other than the origin of the game, if the video origin allows for it.

8.2.3 / 7.7.3

This release fixes an issue that prevented 8.2.2 and 7.7.2 from being built properly.

8.2.2 / 7.7.2

Accessibility

The accessibility menu can be accessed on touch screens by making a large ⋀ gesture. That is, press, move a large distance up and right, move a large distance down and right, and then release.

There is a limited amount of self-voicing support for Android and iOS, largely limited by the nature of touch-screen focus. Dialogue will be read out, as will interface elements that become focused, but right now it's hard to focus an element without activating it.

NVL-Mode and Window

The interaction of window auto and nvl mode, especially config.nvl_adv_transition and config.adl_nvl_transition, has been improved. The major change is that the latter transitions will now only occur if the window has not been shown or hidden, preventing double interactions from occuring.

The (rarely used) nvl hide and nvl show statements now set the flag used by window auto, preventing the window from being shown wince in a row by these statements.

Fixes

Two issues that could cause the Android version of Ren'Py to lock up if the window lost focus have been fixed.

The force parameter to renpy.alt() now works as documented.

The xfill and yfill properties can no longer cause a window to shrink.

An issue where fonts with an incorrect line height would not work with the harfbuzz text shaper has been fixed.

List slicing is now allowed inside string interpolation. For example, The first ten are: [long_list[:10]] will now work.

Ren'Py will now generate translations for strings in _ren.py files.

Ren'Py now checks that achievement names are strings.

An issue with weakref pickling on Ren'Py 7 has been fixed.

The rpy statement is now considered to be always reachable.

The launcher no longer plays a stream of silence while it is running.

When building a small games as an Android App Bundle, fast-forward packages were incorrectly included. This has been fixed.

Other

The Traditional and Simplified Chinese translations have been updated.

Hovered handlers now run when a displayable is assigned thew default focus.

The attribute_filter callback of Live2D is now always run.

The sound channel now fades out audio over the course of 16ms, just like the music channel does.

It is possible to have two Live2D displayables using the same model but different default_fade times.

The new config.log_events variable controls whether Ren'Py logs pygame-style events, for debugging.

The new config.python_exit_callbacks lets you specify a list of callbacks that can be used to de-initialize Python modules just before Ren'Py shuts down.

The config.raise_image_exceptions variable has been documented. It controls if Ren'Py will raise an exception when an image name is unknown, or display a warning instead.

The config.raise_image_load_exceptions variable controls whether Ren'Py raises an exception when an image fails to load, or displays a warning instead.

The config.raise_image_load_exceptions and config.raise_image_exceptions variables are set to False when the player ignores an error.

When config.log_event is true or RENPY_LOG_EVENTS is in the environment, Ren'Py will log most pygame-level events that happen.

When filtering text tags (with renpy.filter_text_tags() or places that call it), the axis tag is now handled correctly.

The statement callback system (config.statement_callbacks) has been documented.

The modes system (renpy.mode, config.mode_callbacks, etc) have become undocumented. This was likely not used by any game, and has been replaced by config.statement_callbacks. Mode callbacks still work, but shouldn't be used by new games.

8.2.1 / 7.7.1

Text

The Harfbuzz text shaper now reads more information using Harfbuzz. This will generally yield the same results, with small exceptions, such as the underline being in a slightly different place.

Vertical text handling under the harfbuzz text shaper has been fixed to properly place the text. Porting those changes to the freetype shaper is not possible, so the freetype shaper no longer supports vertical text.

See vertical for more information.

Updater

An issue with the updater that caused it to fail to sign updates when run on a Windows system has been fixed.

The updater now forces the webserver to use the identity encoding, which improves compatibility with some web servers. The updater also times out if the server does not respond to a request within 10 seconds.

Live2D

Ren'Py will now automatically guess the size of the live2d textures, and adjust the maximum texture size the live2d library uses to match it.

Ren'Py will avoid many render-to-texture operations when showing Live2D.

Fetch

The renpy.fetch() function now works during the image phase and during an interaction, as well as outside an interaction.

The renpy.fetch() function now takes a params argument, which specifies parameters that will be added to the URL.

Other Changes

When a textbox is replaced (using {w}), a replaced event is generated, rather than hide.

Adding a new displayable with default_focus set will cause the displayable to be focused, if the keyboard or gamepad is used, even if the interaction does not restart.

It's now possible to build an iOS app from the command line without installing rapt (Android support).

The renamed and newly-documented config.max_texture_size variable make it possible to set the maximum texture size used by Ren'Py. This isn't useful for 2D textures, but may make sense for textures used by Model.

Template Projects are no longer required to have the same files as a standard Ren'Py project.

Other Fixes

An issue that could cause an Android device to reach a black screen when resuming from pause has been fixed.

Ren'Py will now run from a directory with : in the name, on Linux and other platforms where that's legal.

The use of config.layer_transforms will no longer reset the timelines of transforms set with camera or show layer at.

Lint no longer crashes when the a LayeredImage use a variable that isn't set.

A crash when blur was less than 0 has been prevented, by clamping the blur value.

An issue that caused drags to block saving has been fixed.

8.2.0 / 7.7.0

Harfbuzz Integration

Ren'Py now uses the Harfbuzz library to perform text shaping. On all versions of Ren'Py, Harfbuzz is used to supply additional information to the freetype authinter.

On Ren'Py 8, Harfbuzz is also used to shape text, reordering and selecting glyphs based on the context they're in and the language of the text provided. This is required to support scripts that require complex text shaping, such as Brahmic/Indic scripts. (You'll need to provide a font that supports the appropriate language.)

The new shaper style property controls the shaper used to text, for compatibility with older versions of Ren'Py.

Variable Fonts

Ren'Py now supports OpenType variable fonts. These are fonts that use one or more axes of variability to change how the font is rendered. For example, a font may have the "weight" axis, which controls how bold the font is, and the "width" axis, which controls how wide the font is.

Variable font support required Ren'Py 8 and the harfbuzz shaper to work.

To support variable fonts, Ren'Py has added the instance and axis style properties, and the instance and axis text tags, as well as the renpy.variable_font_info() function.

See the variable fonts documentation for more information.

Font Hinting

There is a new hinting mode "auto-light", that performs autohinting in the vertical but not horizontal direction.

The new config.font_hinting variable makes it possible to enable font hinting on a per-font basis, while the style system can be used to control hinting per-use. For example:

define config.font_hinting["MyFont.tff"] = "bytecode"

enables bytecode hinting for MyFont.ttf.

Text Interpolation Improvements

Interpolations in strings are now treated as Python expressions, rather than simple fields. While not identical, this concept will feel familiar to those that have worked with Python f-strings. This allows for some logic to be incorporated directly:

default exp = 1000

label start:
    e "I am level [exp // 225]!" # Will show "I am level 4!"

When a variable is interpolated into a string, and the interpolation namespace exists, that namespace will be searched for the values to interpolate. For example,

define t = "Not shown."
define interpolate.t = "Shown."

label start:
    e "[t]" # Will show "Shown."

Speech Bubble Improvements

The speech bubble feature that was added in Ren'Py 8.1 now has a new way to retain speech bubbles, so that the bubbles pop up one at a time, and remain displayed on the screen until explicitly cleared, similar to dialogue in motion comics. See the speech bubble documentation for more information.

The new bubble.properties_callback variable can be given a function that filter the list of bubble property names based on the image tag that's speaking. This makes it possible to have bubbles that are specific to some but not all characters.

Several changes work together to make it possible to apply a transform that animates speech bubble show and hide. An example of this is included in the Bubble Screen documentation.

Position types and ATL interpolation

ATL interpolations, which are statements such as linear 1. xpos .6 (and have nothing to do with text interpolation), now accept interpolation between positions of different types. This allows the following, which was previously documented against and didn't work:

transform mixed:
    xycenter (520, 300)
    easein 3. align (.0, .0)

label muxed:
    show a at Transform(pos=(.5, .6))

    "..."

    show a at Transform(pos=(520, 150))

As part of the implementation of this new feature, there is a new position type, called position, which enables you to provide both a absolute and a relative component to place or size a displayable. For example, you can now tell something to be xsize position(-10, .5), and the displayable will make the displayable take half of the horizontal space offered to it, minus 10 pixels.

Developer Tools

There is a new "Skip splashscreen" option in Options section of the launcher preferences. When checked, this will cause games launched to skip the splashscreen label when starting.

A new 'Show Filename and Line' option is available from the shift+D developer menu. When enabled, this will cause the filename and line number of the current statement to be displayed. Clicking on the filename and line will open the file in the default text editor, at the given line, if possible.

Data Actions

The Data Actions are now presented and explained in a more condensed manner. These actions have been reimplemented using a data manager that describes what to do with the data (Set-, Toggle-, Cycle-, Increment-) and a data accessor that describes the kind of data to change (-Variable, -ScreenVariable, -LocalVariable, -Field, -Dict).

There are two new managers:

The Cycle- actions (CycleVariable, CycleLocalVariable, CycleField...) take a list of values and each time the action is run (i.e each time the button is clicked), the target value is set to be the next element in the list.
The Increment- actions (IncrementVariable, IncrementDict, IncrementField...) add a certain value (by default, 1) to the target value. These can also be used to decrement the field.

The LocalVariableValue bar value and LocalVariableInputValue input values have been added, for completeness.

HTTPS/HTTP Fetch

Ren'Py now has better support for HTTPS/HTTP Fetch, using the new renpy.fetch function. While the Requests library still remains supported on Desktop and Mobile, (it's used internally by Ren'Py), the new fetch function:

Support GET, POST, and PUT requests for HTTPS and HTTP URLs.
Supports fetching from the web platform, subject to the rules of the web platform.
Will not block the game while downloading.
Can take data as either bytes or objects that be encoded to JSON.
Can return data as bytes, as string, or objects decoded from JSON.

Accessibility

The new group_alt property available on screen language displayables allows the creator to specify text that is spoken the first time one of a group of related displayables is spoken.

The new extra_alt property available on screen language displayables allows the creator to specify text that is spoken when the '?' key is pressed, to provide additional information about the displayable.

Both of these properties are inherited by the children of the displayable, unless they are overridden by a more specific value in the child.

The new renpy.alt() function can be used to speak text using the self-voicing system.

future in python

Ren'Py now allows creators to pass __future__ compiler directives for Python code run in Ren'Py. This is done using the rpy python xxx statement at the top of the .rpy file(s) on which you want them to apply, where xxx is the name of the future feature. For example:

rpy python annotations

Translation Improvements

For most dialogue, Ren'Py will now create one third the number of objects to support translations. This helps reduce startup time and reduce memory usage.

In addition, Ren'Py can now defer loading translations until a translation is needed. This can improve startup time when the game is large and many languages are present.

Deferred translation loading is disabled by default. The documentation on Deferred Translation Loading explains how to enable it and caveats that apply.

Scene, Show, and Hide Transition

The new scene, show, and hide transitions makes it possible to automatically perform a transition after sequences of scene, show, and hide statements that are not followed by a with statement, or a window show transition.

This is controlled by the new _scene_show_hide_transition variable, and documented at Automatic Transitions after Scene, Show, and Hide.

Android

The Android build system has been updated to use recent versions of Gradle and the Android Gradle Plugin. This means that Ren'Py now supports and requires Java 21, the most recent long-term support version of Java.

A series of changes have been made to Ren'Py to allow games larger than 2GB to be be downloaded to a Android or iOS device. How to do this is documented at Downloader for Large Games on Mobile. It fundamentally involves creating two games - a very short one that is downloaded to the device, and a larger game that is downloaded to the device when the short game is run.

The user-visible version on android is now taken from build.version, which defaults to config.version.

Assets you place in the rapt/prototype project will be placed into the built project.

The files produced by the Android build process will include the version number in their name, making it easier to distinguish between builds.

Web

The way Ren'Py goes fullscreen on the web platform has been changed, to improve compatibility with both desktop and mobile web browsers.

Ren'Py now covers the game with a transparent div at start, to help the browser detect a click and allow audio to be played. It will proxy the click to the game and hide the div once this detection is finished.

The HTTPS/HTTP Fetch function is now supported on the web platform, allowing web pages to make HTTPS and HTTP requests, subject to the same rules (CORS) as other web pages.

Updater

The Ren'Py Updater has been rewritten to use a new format, and is implemented entirely in Ren'Py. That makes it compatible with more web hosts, and for the first time it support https.

The updater will create a signing key when it is first run, and will sign generated updates with that key. When the updater is run, it will check that the updates are run with that key. This means it is no longer extra work to produce a secure update.

Translations

There is a new Danish translation of the launcher and The Question.

Many other translations have been updated.

Features

The new config.layer_transforms variable allows you to supply a list of transforms that will be applied to each layer, or to the combination of all layers in config.layers.

The new Continue action will load the last save (by default, including autosaves and quick saves). This is intended for use from the main menu to continue the game, especially a linear visual novel.

The new ruby_line_leading style property controls additional line leading on lines that contain ruby text (furigana). This will generally use less space than the existing line_leading property.

It is now possible to reset the preferences to their default values by calling Preference() with "reset" as the argument.

The new defaultdict class, which exists in the default Ren'Py namespaces, is similar to Python's collections.defaultdict, while participating in rollback.

The new MultiRevertable class makes it possible to define a class that is both a revertable object and a revertable data structure (like list, set, or dict.)

The new config.pass_controller_events and newly-documented config.pass_joystick_events variables allow the game to access controller and joystick events directly.

The new renpy.get_screen_variable and renpy.set_screen_variable functions make it possible to access screen variables, especially in Action subclasses.

The new build.time variable is set to the time the game was built.

The new build.info variable lets you store information at build time, and read it back in the distributed game.

When the top left pixels of presplash image is transparent, the presplash will be displayed in a window that uses 1-bit transparency.

The new EditFile() action attempts to open a file and line in a text editor.

The virtual dpi of an SVG file can be set with the new dpi parameter to Image().

The new CopyToClipboard() action copies text to the clipboard.

The new renpy.confirm() function provides a way of using the confirmation screen from within Python.

The new renpy.reset_all_contexts() function removes all contexts from the stack, and creates a new context that continues at the next statement. It can be used to fully reset the game upon load or when an error happens.

The new renpy.last_say() function returns information about the last say statement to run.

The new iap.request_review() function allows the game to request that the player review the game on Google Play and the Apple App Store.

The new gui.history_spacing variable controls the spacing between history entries in newly created games.

The nw text tag can now take a value, which is a number of seconds to wait before the line containing the tag is automatically dismissed. The common construct "{w=2}{nw}" can now be written as "{nw=2}".

Movie now takes a keep_last_frame parameter. When true, this causes a non-looping movie to display its last frame after the movie ends.

The jump expression statement can now take a local label name of the form ".local_name". Previously, only "global_name" or "global_name.local_name" were allowed.

Creator-Defined Screen Language Statements can now copy all properties from other screen language statements.

The new renpy.invoke_in_main_thread() function can be used by a Python thread to invoke a function in the main Ren'Py thread. (Most Ren'Py functions can only be called from the main thread.)

Launcher Changes

The launcher now supports Template Projects. These are indended for use by projects that replace the default GUI. If a template project is selected when creating a new project, Ren'Py will copy the template project and update the name and translations, but will not make other changes to script files and images.

The launcher has been slightly redesigned to reduce the amount of whitespace, allowing more options to appear on some screens while still providing room for translations.

A Command Line Interface has been documented, making it possible to build Ren'Py projects from the command line.

Other Changes

Hide and replace transform events that are applied to screens are now always allowed to run to completion, even if the same screen is shown again. This makes it possible to use transform events with screens that may be shown again immediately, like the say or bubble screens.

Containers (including fixed, hbox, vbox, side, grid, viewport, and vpgrid) now pass some transform events (hover, idle, insensitive, selected_hover, and selected_idle) to their children, meaning that children of a button can have their own transforms to respond to those events.

persistent._clear() will re-run default statements that update persistent variables, making it possible to avoid persistent becoming entirely de-initialized.

The pixel transparency test used by focus_mask will now only involve the GPU if inside the bounding box of non-transparent pixels, improving performance in some cases.

Ren'Py now uses the GL2 renderer by default on all platforms, and ignores the config.gl2 variable. This is because of issues with the old GL renderer that are not present in the GL2 renderer. On ancient hardware, it's still possible to use the GL renderer by pressing shift+G and enabling it directly.

On PC platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux), when the game window moves, its position is stored. The window's position will be restored when the game is run again, if:

The layout of the player's monitors hasn't changed.
The window is fully contained on the player's monitors.

Otherwise, the window will be centered on the primary monitor.

On controllers (including the Steam Deck), the function of the B button has changed to show and hide the game menu. The previous behavior of the B button, selecting a button's alternate function, has been moved to X.

The non-default hardware video playback path has been removed from android and ios. This path hadn't been the defaults since 2020, as it supported a subset of the video formats Ren'Py supports.

Ren'Py now enforces that the angles given to the angle and anchorangle properties are in the range 0 to 360 degrees, inclusive of 0 but not of 360. Previously, angles outside this range gave undefined behavior, now the angles will be clamped to this range. A 360 degree change will no longer cause motion, but will instead be treated as a 0 degree change.

When animating angle and anchorangle with ATL, if a direction is not supplied, the shortest arc will be used, even if it passes through 0.

Ren'Py will now produce an error when an ATL block is present, but the block is empty. (For example, show eileen happy: with no indented lines following it.)

To make it more useful for making interfaces compatible with right-to-left languages, the box_reverse style property has changed its behavior in two ways:

Space is offered to displayables in the order the displayables are presented in the screen, where previously the space was offered in reverse order when box_reverse was enabled. This can change the sizes of some displayables.
A hbox that has box_wrap set will wrap from top to bottom, rather than bottom to top. A vbox with box_wrap set will wrap from left to right, rather than right to left.

When a file causes an autoreload, Ren'Py will check the directory containing the file and all parent directories for git lock files. The autoreload will be deferred until the lock files are removed when the git operation completes.

AV1 movies that contained an previously-unsupported colorspace conversion could cause Ren'Py to crash, and now will play properly.

The websockets package is now included in Ren'Py 8. This can be used to connect to websockets-based APIs from the desktop and mobile (but not web) ports of Ren'Py. As the package depends on Python 3, it's not included in Ren'Py 7.

8.1.3 / 7.6.3

Changes

Ren'Py now considers config.gl2 to be true on macOS. This is because there are several fixes for window resizing on newer versions of macOS in the gl2 renderer that are not present in the gl renderer.

MMX acceleration for video playback has been re-enabled on Windows and Linux.

The way the Steam Deck keyboard is shown has changed. They keyboard is now shown, once, when a text input is displayed. By default, the keyboard is shown at the top of the screen, and the keyboard will only be shown once. If it's hidden (for example, the Steam button is pressed), the player needs to hit Steam+X to show it. This works around issues with the Steam Deck.

The 32-bit windows Live2D library will be installed into Ren'Py 7. You may need to reinstall Live2D to get this library.

Fixes

An issue that prevented keys from being bound to text (for example, keysyms like "r" rather than "K_r") has been fixed.

There have been several documentation fixes.

An issue with rollback not working at the start of the game has been fixed.

8.1.2 / 7.6.2

Changes

There have been many documentation improvements.

When using renpy.classify(), a directory will now match patterns that do not end with /. (For example, "renpy.app" will match the renpy.app directory).

ATL has been changed to use a deep compare to determine if a transform should be continued or restarted. This means a transform will restart if global variables it uses are changed.

The styles of a viewport's children will not change when it gains drag focus. This was rarely used, and the style change could cause drags to be slow or to miss.

Load will now roll the game back to the statement after the last statement that interacted to the user. (Previously, it would roll back to the start of the current statement.) This makes rollback on load match other rollbacks.

The _autosave variable now takes precedence over forced autosaves, including those on quit and at choice menus.

PYTHON* variables are filtered from the environment when launching a Ren'Py project from the launcher.

In self-voicing mode, Ren'Py will try to ensure that self-voicing notifications are fully spoken to the player, even if the notification window fades away.

Self voicing now speaks screens closer to the player before those further away from the player.

Frame() will ensure that the frames it draws are at least one pixel in size in both dimensions.

renpy.pause() can now roll forward to calls and jumps from screens.

On the web browser, the "display" : "window" preference now disables fullscreen mode.

It is now possible to bind mouse buttons to skipping.

Fixes

Problems with the web port entering fullscreen mode have been fixed.

The Ren'Py 8 launcher can now launch games on Windows systems where the path to Ren'Py is not representable in the system encoding.

The functionality to import Python from the game/ directory has been improved to better comply with Python's PEP 302.

GamepadExist() now works as documented. As a byproduct of this fix, the gamepad screen will be displayed in Help when in developer mode.

An issue analyzing nested comprehensions in screen has been fixed, fixing a case where nested comprehensions could cause default variables to not be available.

Viewport inertia continues even if the interaction restarts during the animation.

The if_changed clause to play (and renpy.music.play()) now considers and preserves looping.

VS Code launch has been fixed on Linux.

Several crashes on the web port of Ren'Py 7 have been fixed.

Movie functions now ensure the relevant channels exist before playing. This can fix issue caused by loading a Movie from a save file.

8.1.1 / 7.6.1

Android

When creating keys for Android, Ren'Py will now use the same key for APKs and Play Bundles, as for new games it's not necessary to use different keys. (For existing games, Ren'Py will continue to use the existing separate keys.)

We've received reports of games uploaded to the Google Play as bundles having their APKs rejected for having different keys. This was caused by an old release of Ren'Py that used the APK key for bundles. A solution to this problem is documented in incompatible changes.

Fixes

The "system cursor" Preference() now applies to config.mouse_displayable, when it used to only disable config.mouse.

Web audio now treats the end time as a time, not a duration.

An issue with that prevented audio volumes and pan from participating in rollback has been fixed.

Fix an issue where Live2D could select an image despite all of the required attributes not being present.

Support for start, end, and loop times in videos has been restored.

Hotspots can no longer be const when the images used by the imagemap the hotspots come from are not const.

An issue with non-resizable windows on macOS has been fixed.

An issue with linting fonts in the font directory has been fixed.

In some cases, when a class that inherited from the object class was changed to no longer inherit from the object class, Ren'Py would crash. Ren'Py now diagnoses this error, and config.ex_rollback_classes lets you suppress the error. The error is only shown to developers, and is otherwise silently ignored.

Other Changes

The Ren'Py sync screens now use styles prefixed with sync, allowing basic customization without having to edit the screens.

Ren'Py will disable text input methods when text editing is not possible, which makes it possible to use the space key to advance the game even if an input method that uses the space key is active.

ATL Transitions now use the animation timebase. This is generally the same behavior as before, until the interaction restarts, in which case the transition would often incorrectly restart.

Preferences no longer have defaults, meaning all preferences can be changed using the default statement.

The absolute() type, used to represent absolute amounts of pixels, now ensures the result of mathematical operations with integers and floats remain absolute numbers. This fixes a class of problems where operations performed on absolutes could produce the incorrect type, leading to layout problems.

Live2D now checks for a motion after evaluating an attribute_filter, and does not sustain the previous motions if a new motion is present.

8.1 / 7.6

Documentation Improvements and Fixes

There have been many documentation improvements and fixes, many of which are not in the changelog.

The documentation now has a new theme, including a dark mode.

Ren'Py Sync

Ren'Py Sync is a new feature that makes it easier to move save files between devices, using a server that is run as part of the Ren'Py project. For example, when a player has to leave, they can click "Upload Sync" on their computer to upload the saves and get a short code. They can then choose "Download Sync" on the copy of their game on their phone, enter the code, and keep playing as they travel.

Ren'Py Sync is designed with privacy in mind - the saves are encrypted, and only a hash of the game title is sent to the server.

Ren'Py Sync is enabled by the new UploadSync and DownloadSync actions.

Speech Bubble Dialogue

Ren'Py now includes a new Speech Bubbles dialogue system. This is a comprehensive system that allows dialogue to be displayed in comic-like speech bubbles, and includes an interactive editor that allows the speech bubbles to be repositions, and the look of a bubble to be changed interactively.

Adding bubble support to an existing game requires adding files and script to the game. The bubble documentation includes the required changes.

Platform Improvements

Web

Ren'Py 8.1 can now be used to create games that run inside the web browser. When running inside the web browser, Ren'Py used Python 3.11 (3.9 is used on all other platforms).

On Ren'Py 8.1, Ren'Py can be used to create progressive web apps that run inside the browser. Depending on the browser and platforms, it may be possible to install a web game on a device in a manner similar to a native application. Other platforms allow pinning a web app to the home screen.

There is a new Preference(), "web cache preload". If enabled, the game will download all game data to the device from the web server. When online, the game will check the downloaded data, and only download newer data if required. When offline, the game will use the downloaded data.

Ren'Py can now play back movies on the web platform. Only movies that the browser supports can be played.

Macintosh

On the Macintosh, Ren'Py now uses a universal binary that can run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon processors.

Android

Android has been changed so that the android.keystore file and bundle.keystore file are expected to be found in the project's base directory, and not in the rapt directory. This allows projects to be built with different keys, and helps ensure the same keys are used with multiple Android versions.

When the new "Generate Keys" button is pressed, if old keystore files exist, Ren'Py will offer to copy the old files into the project.

The android configuration file has been renamed from .android.json to android.json. Ren'Py will automatically create the new file if the old exists.

Sticky Layers

A sticky layer is defined as one that, when a tag is shown upon it, will be treated as that tag's default layer until it is either hidden, or shown on another sticky layer.

In practice, that means showing a tag on a layer other than its default, and assuming that layer is sticky, it will be updated with attributes set via a show or say statement without the need to respecify the layer.

The following example assumes that the default layer for eileen is master, and that near is a sticky layer:

show eileen onlayer near
eileen happy "Hello there!"  # will now work, where previously it would not
show eileen excited          # implicit onlayer near
hide eileen                  # implicit onlayer near
show eileen                  # implicit onlayer master, eileen's default

The default for this feature is for the master layer to be sticky, as well as any layers created with renpy.add_layer() unless passed the new parameter sticky=False.

Detached Layers & Layer Displayable

Detached layers are creator-defined layers which are not automatically added to a scene. They are instead displayed using a new Layer displayable which can be show on other layers.

One of the driving factors behind this is that it allows shaders and other transform effects to be applied to a group of tags while still allowing them to operate normally with other systems such as show and say statements. It also also allows the same layer to be shown multiple times, for instance in reflections or several TV showing the same channel.

As detached layers don't participate in scene building in the same way as typical layers, they are defined directly in config.detached_layers rather than through add_layer(), and are inherently sticky.

New Image Formats and Image Oversampling

These releases add support for two new image formats:

The AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is a new image format that uses modern compression techniques to produce smaller files than JPEG, PNG, or WebP. In many cases, converting images to AVIF will reduce their size without sacrificing image quality.
SVG files are a vector graphics format used on the web. Ren'Py supports a SVG files containing a subset of SVGs capability. (Notably, Ren'Py does not support text in SVG files.) Ren'Py will automatically oversample (or undersample) SVGs when the game is scaled, to ensure the SVGs remain sharp at any resolution, similar to the way it oversamples text. This makes svgs a reasonable choice for interface elements that need to remain sharp.

This release of Ren'Py also adds support for oversampling raster images, like PNG, JPEG, WebP, and AVIF. For these images, oversampling is done by including an @ and number in the filename. For example, "eileen happy@2.png" will be oversampled by a factor of 2. This allows for easier ways of making a remastered version of a game with minimal changes to the code. Image manipulators, which are now obsolete but common in older games, support oversampled images.

For raster images, oversampling causes the image file to be loaded at full resolution, but treated as if it was smaller by the oversampling factor. For example, if the image is 1000x1000, and is oversampled by 2, it will be treated as a 500x500 image for the purpose of layout. If the game is scaled up, all of the image data is available to keep the image sharp.

Image oversampling can also be used with the new config.physical_width and config.physical_height variables to upgrade the resolution of a game without having to adjust the game's layout.

AV1 Video

Ren'Py now supports the modern AV1 video format. AV1 is supported in WEBM and MKV containers. AV1 videos should be about 30% smaller than the equivalent quality movie encoded with VP9, the previous best codec.

Note that the newer AV1 format requires more CPU to decode. It's possible that some hardware that plays VP9 fluidly will struggle with AV1.

Audio

Mixer now work on power in decibels, similar to the way the volume controls on audio equipment and computers work. An empty mixer slider represents -40 dB below the maximum volume, while a full bar represents 0 dB, the full volume. This makes the mixers more dynamic. Previously, the volume slider had to be very near the bottom before it had an effect. Now, the volume increases and decreases match the way people perceive loudness.

Variables that control the default mixer volumes, such as config.default_music_volume, config.default_sfx_volume, and config.default_voice_volume now work on a scale where 0.0 is -40 dB, and 1.0 is 0 dB. SetCharacterVolume() works in a similar way, as do the new preferences.set_mixer() and preferences.get_mixer() functions.

The audio fadein and fadeout functions also work using power. This ensures that the fade is apparent over the course of the entire fadeout or fadein, rather than only at the end. The audio fading implementation has also been rewritten to allow fades of very short lengths. Previously, fading would produce errors if the fade time was too short.

The config.fadeout_audio variable (renamed from config.fade_music) controls the default fadeout used when stopping audio, or changing audio using play. (It is not used by queue). The default value is now 0.016 seconds, which eliminates popping sounds that occured when audio was stopped abruptly.

Audio panning (renpy.music.set_pan()) is now constant-power, so that panning audio should not change the volume.

Draggable Viewports

Viewports can now be dragged by the user, even if a button or other displayable inside the viewport is focused. Ren'Py will now detect when the user is dragging, and switch focus to the viewport, allowing the viewport to move.

The draggable property of viewports and vpgrids can now take a screen variant like "touch", in which case the viewport will only be draggable if touch is enabled.

_ren.py Files - Ren'Py in Python

The new _ren.py file format allows Ren'Py script to be embedded in a valid Python file. For example:

"""renpy
init python:
"""

flag = True

is equivalent to:

init python:

    flag = True

The purpose of this new format is to allow Python-heavy script files to be edited with Python-specific tools, while still running as Ren'Py script.

Constant Stores

Ren'Py has the ability to mark a named store as a constant, by setting the _constant variable in that store. If true, variables in that constant store will not be saved, and objects reachable solely from that store will not participate in rollback.

The reason to declare a store constant is that there are small per-store and per-variable overheads that are required to support rollback. Declaring a store constant can eliminate these overheads.

The following stores are declared to be constant by default:

_errorhandling _gamepad _renpysteam _sync _warper audio achievement build director iap layeredimage updater

Variables in a constant store can be updated during the init phase, but should not change after the init phase finishes.

Lenticular Bracket Ruby Text

Ruby text, small text above the main characters used for readings and translations, can now be written be written by enclosing it in full-width lenticular brackets (【】), with the full-width or half-width vertical line character (｜ or |) separating the bottom text from the top text. For example:

e "Ruby can be used for furigana (【東｜とう】 【京｜きょう】)."

e "It's also used for translations (【東京｜Tokyo】)."

In some contexts, the left full-width lenticular bracket (【) must be doubled, to "【【", to prevent it from being interpreted as the start of ruby text. For example:

e "【【This is not | ruby text.】"

Accessibility

The new config.tts_substitutions variable allows the game to provide substitution rules for self-voicing. That is meant to allow the creator to control pronunciation of words that might be mispronounced by the text to speech engine.

For example:

define config.tts_substitutions = [
    ("Ren'Py", "Ren Pie"),
]

Will cause the word "Ren'Py" to be pronounced as "Ren Pie" whenever self-voicing speaks it.

Self-voicing now respects the voice volume mixer.

Save Token Security

Ren'Py now uses tokens to warn users when a save file is moved between devices, to prevent the user from making mistakes described in the security documentation.

This works by generating a token the first time Ren'Py is run on a given computer. This token is included in saves and in persistent data. If the token for a different computer is found in a save file, the user is warned and asked if they want to continue. If they choose yes, the user will be asked if they want to automatically accept all saves from that computer.

Persistent data is loaded if it's from the current computer, or a computer with an accepted token.

The first time a game is run with a version of Ren'Py supporting save tokens, all save files that exist for that game are checked, and if a token does not exist in those files, the token is added. This should prevent prompting during upgrades to Ren'Py 8.1/7.6 or later.

There is intentionally no way to disable this feature, as it's important for end-users to be warned about the security issues when possible.

New Search Paths

Ren'Py will now search for audio files in the game/audio directory, and font files in the game/fonts directory, if not found in the game directory. Images will still be searched for in the game/images directory, but other files will not be found there.

New 3D Stage Properties

There are several new properties that affect the 3D Stage:

point_to: Selects the point that the camera is looking at, or has a sprite point at a point or the camera.
xrotate, yrotate, zrotate: Rotates a sprite or the camera around the given axis.
orientation: Rotates a sprite or the camera around all three axes at once, using the shortest path on a sphere.

Live2D

Ren'Py now supports the new features found in Live2D Cubism Editor 4.2. To support these features, it should be run with Cubism 4 Sdk for Native R6_2 or later.

Live2D is now supported on x86_64 Android.

The new Live2D.blend_opacity method makes it possible for a Live2D update_function to change the opacity of the Live2D model.

Launcher and Engine Translations

Where possible, machine translation has been used to update strings used by the launcher and the engine, to update translations that might not have been updated in many years.

If you'd like to improve these translations, you can do so. Edit the .rpy files in launcher/game/tl/language, and send them to us. Please remove the "Automatic translation" lines when you do.

The following languages have had their translations automatically updated:

Finnish
French
German
Greek
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Simplified Chinese
Turkish
Ukrainian

The following translations had manual updates:

French
Portuguese
Spanish
Japanese
Ukrainian

Conflicting properties

Setting two conflicting style or transform properties at the same time, for example xalign and pos, or ycenter and yanchor, has always been undefined. The actual behavior has always been changing across versions of Ren'Py, in particular between Python 2 and Python 3.

The new config.check_conflicting_properties variable makes Ren'Py raise an error when such a conflict is detected. Due to a mistake in the former default input screen, this variable is only enabled in newly-created projects. Nonetheless, it is strongly advised to define it to True in all projects, to fix all revealed conflicts, and to keep it to True afterwards.

More New Features

The input displayable can now take multiline input.

The new JSONDB system allows a developer to store data in a JSON file that can be saved alongside the game script. For example, a JSONDB is used to store the speech bubble information.

The new areapicker displayable provides a way for tools to let the player select an area on the screen.

Movie can now take a group argument. If the Movie is in a group, and it has started up, and another Movie in the same group had displayed in the prior frame, the Movie will display the last image of the old Movie. This is intended to allow movie sprites to switch from one to the other seamlessly.

The new config.file_slotname_callback variable allows the developer to customize how file slot names are generated. One application of this is allow the developer to apply a prefix to save slots (for example, to select between dlc and non-dlc saves). The new autosave_prefix_callback allows a similar prefix to be given to autosaves.

A new tool, accessible through the developer (Shift+D) menu, allows persistent data to be viewed.

The interactive director can now create a statement that removes an attribute from an image.

The show screen, hide screen, and call screen statements can now take expression, as, onlayer, zorder, and with clauses, which have the same meaning as the corresponding clauses in the show and hide statements.

The renpy.include_module() function can now be used to load a rpym file in such a way that its init blocks are interleaved with those from the rest of the game.

The new "voice after game menu" preference controls if voice is allowed to continue playing after the game menu is shown.

A creator-defined statement can now execute a function at the same time the default statements are executed. This is after the init phase, but before the game starts; when a save is loaded; after rollback; before lint; and potentially at other times.

The new config.after_default_callbacks allows callbacks to be run immediately after the default statements are executed.

The interactive director now lets you negate an attribute by right clicking on the attribute name.

The Text() displayable now takes a new tokenized argument. When true, the Text displayable expects to take a list of tokens taken from a custom text tag.

Two new layers are now part of Ren'Py. The "top" layer is displayed above all other layers, and does not participate in transitions. This makes it useful for display information that is always shown. The "bottom" layer is displayed below all other layers. The bottom layer is useful for handling keys in a way that is always active.

Ren'Py supports the C90 encoding for Thai fonts, which uses the unicode private area to provide glyphs that are combinations of base characters, vowel marks, and tone marks. This can be enabled by selecting a Thai font that supports the C90 encoding, and then setting language to "thaic90".

It's now possible for a mouse keysym to be given modifiers corresponding to the state of keyboard modifiers when the mouse button was pressed. For example, "shift_mouseup_1" will only trigger when mouse button 1 is released while the shift key is held down.

Keysyms have been reworked to make it possible to bind to numeric keypad keys (like the arrows and home) when numlock is off, and the keymap has been reworked to make better use of the numeric keypad.

Normally, when a displayable or screen with the same tag or name as one that is hiding is shown, the hiding displayable or screen is removed, cancelling the hide transform. The new show_cancels_hide transform property controls this behavior.

The console (accessed with shift+O) help command can now take an expression, in which case it display the pydoc documentation for the function or class that expression refers to.

The new renpy.get_translation_identifier() function returns the unique identifier for the current line of dialogue, if there is one.

The new config.scene_callbacks function contains a list of functions that are called when the scene statement is run or the renpy.scene() function is called.

The size text tag now takes multipliers, so it's possible to have:

"{size=*2}This is double size{/size} and {size=*0.5}this is half size{/size}."

The dismiss displayable now takes a keysym property, specifying what keysym causes the dismiss.

The new config.autosave_callback is run after a background autosave finishes.

The new renpy.music.pump() function can be called to cause audio changes to take effect immediately, rather than at the start of the next interaction. The main use of this is to allow a sound to be played, and then faded out. (By default, a play followed by a stop causes the track to never be played, and hence never faded out.)

The new renpy.clear_attributes() function allows for an image tag to be cleared of all the attributes attached to it. The previous way to do this was to hide and show the image again, which had the consequence of also resetting the placement of the image on the screen. It is not the case with this function.

The new config.font_name_map variable allows you to name font files or Font Groups, so that it becomes easier to use them in {font} tags. Previously, there was no way to use a fontgroup in a {font} tag.

The Scroll Action now takes a delay parameter, so that the scrolling is animated over a short period of time.

The new preferences.audio_when_unfocused preference now enables the audio of the game to be paused when the player switches to another window.

The screens' for loops now support the continue and break statements.

Disabling Dialogue's Monologue Mode is now possible using the rpy monologue none statement at the beginning of the file it should apply to.

Other Changes

The polar motion properties (around, radius, and angle) will now produce circular, rather than oval motion, with radius using the minimum of the available wdith and height to scale distances expressed as heights. The new anchoraround, anchorradius, and anchorangle properties can position the anchor using polar coordinates.

Lint will now check your game for statements that can never be reached, and will report the statements.

Lint will now check your game for translations that are no longer being used, and report those.

It's possible to configure the channels used to upload to itch.io using the build.itch_channels variable.

Triple quote strings can now be used in most places a single quoted string can. Most notably, this allows triple quoted strings to be used in screens. For example, you can use:

screen example():
    text """\
line 1
line 2
line 3"""

to create three lines in one text displayable.

The maximized window state is now stored int preferences, and if a game was maximized when it shut down it will be maximized again when started again.

A screen language displayable can now have at transform on the first line:

text "Spinny text" at transform:
    rotate 0.0
    linear 2.0 rotate 360.0
    repeat

It's now possible for a screen language statement to have both an at property and an at transform block, provided the property comes first.

Local variables (prefixed with __) may now be used in f-strings.

The {nw} tag will wait for self-voicing to complete, when self-voicing is enabled.

The selected_insensitive style prefix will now be generated, and selected and selected_insensitive events will be given to transforms when appropriate.

Displayables with an id property can now be given the prefer_screen_to_id property, which controls if properties supplied by the screen override the properties supplied by the displayable identifier. The default remains that the displayable identifier overrides the screen.

The fadein clause can be used when queuing an audio track.

Ren'Py will limit calls to BOverlayNeedsPresent on Steam Deck, preventing a freezing issue.

Dialogue is now present in the history list (and hence the history screen) during the statement in which the dialogue is shown. Previously, it was only present at the end of the statement.

When config.steam_appid is not set, Ren'Py will delete any existing steam_appid.txt file in the game directory. This is to prevent the wrong app id from being used.

Audio volumes are now preserved when muted. (This means that the volume will not drop to 0 when the game is muted.)

It is now explicitly documented that non-self-closing tags will be closed at the end of a block of text. This was the behavior of many versions of Ren'Py, but would produce lint warnings. Now, the following is explicitly valid:

e "{size+=20}This is big!"

Self-voicing and auto-forward mode may now be enabled at the same time. When this is the case, auto-forward will only occur when the dialogue is focused.

Ren'Py no longer requires grids or vpgrids to be full - it will now pad these grids with nulls as required.

The execute_init argument to renpy.register_statement() now respects the init_priority argument. Previously, all execute_init function ran at init priority 0.

The config.label_callback variable has been renamed to config.label_callbacks, and now takes a list of callback functions.

A number of documented functions, classes and Actions have seen their signatures (meaning the arguments they take) corrected in the documentation, making them safer to use.

Ren'Py used to normalize all whitespace to standard spaces, and now supports non-standard spaces such as \u3000, the full-width ideographic space.

8.0.3 / 7.5.3

Security

There is now a new Security page in the documentation, intended to help players understand the security implications of mods and sharing save files.

Changes and Fixes

Ren'Py has been updated to target Android API level 33, corresponding to Android 13, allowing new games to be added to the Google Play store. The Play Billing library has been updated to version 5.

Init statements inside a module loaded with renpy.load_module() are now run in init-priority order.

Lint now respects config.adjust_attributes.

A case where blurs could become transparent has been addressed.

When the translation language changes during a menu that is using dialogue as a caption, Ren'Py will jump the game back to the start of the say statement that added that dialogue, allowing it to be re-translated.

When a game is being developed, Ren'Py will now produce an error if the first use of gui.preference() has not been given a default. This makes an error that could happen at runtime in that case more explicit.

There have been many documentation improvements.

This release fixes a problem with Matrix equality that could prevent transform properties that use Matrixes from being animated correctly.

Ren'Py now properly analyzes variables that are bound by lambdas.

The Tutorial and The Question have been translated into Ukrainian, and the Ukrainian translation of the launcher has been updated.

8.0.2 / 7.5.2

Fixes

There have been a number of changes to the way autoreload (shift+R) works, to try to prevent Ren'Py from creating an invalid save file when an autoreload after an error happens, and Ren'Py is in an invalid state. The goal of these changes is to preserve the save file from before the change, and reuse that.

Ren'Py is now able to perform audio fadeins and fadeouts of less than 0.68 seconds. Previously such short fadeins and fadeouts would be result in an underflow and no fading. In this release, the precise duration of a fadein and fadeout is not strictly guaranteed.

Several functions in achievement.steam (or _renpysteam) had regressions when reimplmented in terms of achievement.steamapi. These regressions have been fixed.

An issue that prevented built distributions from launching on aarch64 has been fixed.

An issue that could cause excessive CPU and memory usage when a store had large number of variables in it has been fixed.

Loading a save slot that was saved with a different language than is currently set will no longer prevent config.after_load_transition from occurring.

Several problems that preventing In-App Purchases (IAP) from working on Ren'Py 8 have been fixed.

An issue with examples in the tutorial game not working in a non-English languages has been fixed.

Tinydialogs is now included in the source code distribution of Ren'Py.

Default Focus Changes

There have been several changes to the default_focus property of focusable displayables like buttons and bars. This property allows Ren'Py to select a displayable to gain default focus when displayables are added to removed.

The new rules are:

When the mouse is used, focus follows the mouse and default_focus is ignored.
When a displayable with a higher default_focus than any other displayable is shown, it is given focus.
When the displayable with the highest default_focus is hidden, the displayable with the next highest non-zero default_focus is given focus.

The goal is to support common keyboard and controller navigation patterns, while not getting in the way of mouse users.

Other Improvements

Ren'Py will now warn when encountering an explicit translate None statement that does not translate strings, styles, or python.

Ren'Py will now predict dialogue followed by the extend special character, and if it can prove that the extend will always occur, will take the extended text into account when determining line breaking and spacing.

There have been many copyedits and other improvements to Ren'Py's documentation.

The console has been improved to display more Python 3 types.

MouseDisplayable() now respects default_mouse, if set.

In Ren'Py 8, Python blocks are now compiled as if the from __future__ import annotations statement was present.

A modal screen or dismiss statement now blocks the pause statement and renpy.pause`() from ending. Previously, what happened in this case was undefined and varied between versions.

On macOS, Ren'Py will now properly adjust when the game window is moved between displays with different scaling.

Command-C and Command-V now work for copy and paste on macOS.

The default input screen in screens.rpy has now been changed to prevent a conflict between the xalign and xpos of the vbox. The fix was to change the use of xalign to xanchor.

Ren'Py will now start if a sound card is not present, even in developer mode. Errors with audio hardware are now written to log.txt.

The Japanese translation has been updated.

New games created with Ren'Py no longer filter out ruby/furigana text tags.

8.0.1 / 7.5.1

Improvements

The launcher now has a Ukrainian translation, courtesy of Matias B.

The web port will now reuse audio data when an audio file loops, reducing the memory usage.

ATL transforms used inside a MouseDisplayable() are now reset each time the mouse is changed. Previously, this behavior was undefined.

The trace screen used by the console is now updated once per frame.

There have been a large number of documentation improvements.

Fixes

Alt text is now played in first-to-last order. A change to 8.0 caused the order alt text was played in to be reversed.

A rounding error that would cause the CropMove transitions to work incorrectly was fixed.

An issue preventing the zoomin and zoomout transitions from working was fixed.

The Movie displayable can once again take a list of movie files to play, rather than only a single filename.

An issue with building on Android has been fixed.

Object identity is used to compared the arguments of Function() actions. This prevents an issue where an action could be incorrectly reused if the action's arguments where equal, but not the same (for example, two empty lists).

Problems with getting and setting Steam statistics have been fixed.

The dismiss is now correctly modal.

8.0 / 7.5

Python 3 Support (Ren'Py 8.0)

Ren'Py 8.0 runs under Python 3, the latest major version of the Python language.

If your game uses minimal Python (for example, just storing character names and flags), it should work the same as it did before. Otherwise, please read on.

The move to Python 3 makes over a decade of Python language and library improvements available to the Ren'Py developer, as described in the What's new in Python documentation. There are far too many changes in Python 3 to include here, so please check that and other Python websites for descriptions.

That being said, a few things made available to the Python in your Ren'Py games are:

Functions can have keyword-only parameters. (These are also supported in parameter lists for labels, transforms, and screens.)
The ability to annotate functions arguments and return values with type information. (This is only supported in Python.)
Formatted string literals can now be used. These are strings like f"characters/{character}.chr", where the text in braces is replaced by a formatted Python variable, similarly to the way that interpolation works in Ren'Py dialogue. This is only available in Python, however, and not in most purely Ren'Py statements.

There are a huge number of other improvements in the ten major releases of Python between 2.7 and 3.9, so be sure to read the above and other Python documentation to find out everything that's improved.

One of the greatest advantages is that this moves Ren'Py off Python 2.7, which is no longer supported by the Python Software Foundation, and so the move to Ren'Py 8.0 helps secure Ren'Py's future.

There are a few things that may need to be converted if you used advanced Python.

In Python 3, division always returns a float, rather than an integer. (for example, 3 / 2 is now 1.5 rather than 1). The // operator divides as an integer. This change can affect Ren'Py positioning, where floats are treated differently from integers.
In Python 3, the keys, items, and values methods of dictionaries now return views, not lists. The iterkeys, iteritems, and itervalues methods are not supported. The xrange method is gone, and range no longer returns a list.
Except clauses now must be written like except Exception as e:, as the old syntax, except Exception, e: is not supported.
All strings are now unicode by default (Ren'Py has been forcing this for several years), and files are opened in text mode by default. (However, renpy.file() opens files in binary mode. It's been renamed to renpy.open_file() and can take a default encoding.)
Many Python modules have been renamed.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Ren'Py ships with a cut-down version of the Python Standard library, so not every Python module is available in Ren'Py. Please let us know if there is something missing you have a good use for, especially if that module does not require a library dependency. While async and await are available, Ren'Py doesn't directly support coroutines.

Ren'Py 8.0 ships with Python 3.9.10, and is available on the Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS platforms. The web platform will be supported in a future release.

When running under Ren'Py 8, Ren'Py now runs without the equivalent of the Python -O flag. This means that docstrings and assert statements are available.

Our experience is that many games run unchanged under Python 3, especially games that use Python primarily through the Ren'Py API, to manage game state. Ren'Py 8 has been used to run unmodified Ren'Py games going back to the year 2006.

Continued Python 2.7 Support (Ren'Py 7.5)

Ren'Py 7.5 is being released at the same time as Ren'Py 8.0, to continue to provide a version of Ren'Py that runs on Python 2.7, as a way of supporting games in development (or being maintained after release) that still require Python 2.7.

In this release, Ren'Py 7.5 also supports the web platform, which Ren'Py 8.0 does not yet support.

For this release, Ren'Py 7.5 and Ren'Py 8.0 should support the same set of of features.

We plan to continue to support Ren'Py 7.x until we see that the community has moved to Ren'Py 8.x, or until changes to the Python ecosystem mean that supporting Ren'Py on Python 2 is no longer tenable.

Please test your games on Ren'Py 8 - for many games, few to no changes will be needed. If for some reason you can't port your game to Ren'Py 8, please let us know what is holding you back.

Platform Support Changes

This release adds support for the 64-bit ARM Linux (linux-aarch64) platform. While based on Ubuntu 20.04, this has been tested on Chromebooks, and should also work on the 64-bit ARM platform.

The intended way to run Ren'Py games on ARM Linux would be to download the new ARM Linux SDK package, place the game in the projects directory, and use that to launch the game. If the files from the ARM Linux SDK are present when a Linux distribution is made, they will be included, creating a game that can be launched on ARM, but this is not the default, for size reasons.

With the move to Ren'Py 8, we are removing support for the following platforms:

32-bit x86 Windows (i686)
32-bit x86 Linux (i686)

This reflects the obsolescence of 32-bit x86 computing. These platforms remain supported by Ren'Py 7.5, but will not be supported by Ren'Py 8.

Web and ChromeOS

The web platform is currently only supported on Ren'Py 7.5.

Changes to the Safari and Chrome web browsers increased the memory Ren'Py used by about 50 times, causing RangeErrors when the web browser ran out of stack memory. Ren'Py 7.5 includes changes to reduces the amount of memory used inside web browsers. As a result, Ren'Py now runs again inside Chrome and Safari, including on iOS devices.

The new config.webaudio_required_types variable can be given a list of mime types of audio files used by the game. Ren'Py will only use the web browser's Web Audio system for playback if all of the mime types are supported in the browser. If not, webasm is used for playback, which is more likely to cause skipping if the computer is slow.

The config.webaudio_required_types variable is intended to allow games using ogg or opus audio to run on Safari, and can be changed if a game only uses mp3 audio.

When importing save files into a web distribution, Ren'Py will now refresh the list of save files without a restart.

When running as an Android application on a ChromeOS device, the "chromeos" variant will be selected.

The Ren'Py SDK can be run on ARM Chromebooks.

Android and iOS

The Android configuration once again prompts as to which store to use for in app purchases. When no store is selected, libraries to support purchasing are not included in the project. These libraries would include the billing permission, which would flag the game as supporting in-app purchases even if no purchases were used.

Due to issues in underlying libraries, the renpy.input() function and input displayable are now documented as not supporting IME-based (non-alphabetic) input on Android.

On iOS, OpenGL ES calls are translated to the native Metal graphics system. Doing this should improve compatibility with recent Apple devices, and fixes problems running applications under the iOS simulator on Apple Silicon-based devices.

Steam, Steam Deck, and Epic Games Store

This release includes rewritten Steam support, provided by a new ctypes-based binding that gives access to the entire Steamworks API, including callbacks. While the Steam support available through the achievement module remains unchanged, this gives advanced Python programmers access to more Steam functionality.

When Steam is active, Ren'Py will now enable the "steam" variant.

This release includes built-in support for the Steam Deck hardware. The support includes the ability to automatically display the on-screen keyboard when renpy.input() is called. The steam deck also causes Ren'Py to enable the "steam_deck", "steam", "medium", and "touch" variants.

We have a Ren'Py on Steam Deck Guide to help you get your game certified on that platform. Thanks go to Valve for supplying a Steam Deck to test on.

The "Windows, Mac, and Linux for Markets" distribution has been changed to no longer prefix the contents of the zip file created with the directory name and version number, meaning it's no longer required to update launch configurations with each release to Steam. This may require a one-time update to the launch configuration.

Ren'Py now includes support for being launched by the Epic Games Store, by ignoring various command line arguments supplied by EGS.

Visual Studio Code

Ren'Py now includes support for downloading and using Visual Studio Code, including downloading the Ren'Py Language extension.

The Ren'Py Language extension provides rich support for Ren'Py, including syntax highlighting, snippets, completion, color previews, documentation, go to definition, function signatures, error diagnostics, outlining, and more.

Visual Studio Code also has a large system of extensions, including spell-checkers, that can be used with the Ren'Py Language extension.

Visual Studio Code can be activated by going to the editor preferences and choosing to download it. It's also possible to configure Ren'Py to use a system install of Ren'Py with extensions that you choose.

Dismiss, Nearrect, and Focus Rectangles

Two new displayables have been added to Ren'Py to help use cases like drop-down menus, pulldown menus, and tooltips.

The dismiss displayable is generally used behind a modal frame, and causes an action to run when it is activated. This allows, among other things, a behavior where if the player clicks outside the frame, the frame gets hidden.

The nearrect displayable lays out a displayable either above or below a rectangle on the screen. This can be used to display a tooltip above a button, or a drop-down menu below it. (An example of a drop-down menu is documented with nearrect, and an example of tooltip usage is with tooltips.

The rectangles aside of which the nearrect places things can be captured by the new CaptureFocus() action, which captures the location of the current button on the screen. After being captured, the GetFocusRect() function can get the focus rectangle, and the ClearFocus() can clear the captured focus, and the ToggleFocus() action captures and clears focus based on the current focus state.

ATL and Transforms

It's now possible to include a block as part of an ATL interpolation. This means that:

linear 2.0:
    xalign 1.0
    yalign 1.0

is now allowed, and equivalent to:

linear 2.0 xalign 1.0 yalign 1.0

Information about ATL Transitions and Special ATL Keyword Parameters has been added to the documentation.

The pause 0 statement has been special-cased to always display one frame, and is the only way to guarantee at least one frame is displayed. Since 6.99.13, Ren'Py has been trying various methods to guarantee single frame display, and many of which led to visual glitches.

When an ATL image is used as one of the children of an image button, its shown time begins each time it is shown.

The default for the crop_relative transform property has been changed to True.

The function statement will now block execution only if producing a delay, which allows transforms using it to behave more naturally when catching up with an inherited timebase.

Image Gallery

The Gallery class now has a new field, image_screen, that can be used to customize how gallery image are displayed.

The Gallery.image() and Gallery.unlock_image() methods now take keyword arguments beginning with show_. These arguments have the show_ prefix stripped, and are then passed to the Gallery.image_screen as additional keyword arguments. This can be used to include additional information with the images in the gallery.

Boxes, Grids and Vpgrids

Displayables that take up no space (like key, timer or a false showif) inside a vbox or hbox will not be surrounded with spacing. These displayables still take up space in other layouts, such as grids.

Having an overfull vpgrid - when both rows and cols are specified - is now disallowed.

Having an underfull vpgrid now raises an error unless the warning is opted-out using either the allow_underfull property or config.allow_underfull_grids, the former taking precedence on the latter.

A vpgrid with both cols and rows specified is underfull if and when it has less than rows * cols children. A vpgrid with either cols or rows specified is underfull if and when its number of children is not a multiple of the specified value.

Call Screen and Roll Forward

The roll forward feature has been disabled by default in the call screen statement, as it's unsafe and confusing in the general case. The problem is that the only side-effect of a screen that roll-forward preserves is the return value of the screen, or the jump location if a screen jumps. Actions with other side effects, like changing variables or playing music, were not preserved through a roll forwards.

Roll forward may be safe for a particular screen, and so can be enabled on a per-screen basis by enabling the new roll_forward property on the screen. If all screens in your game support roll forward, it can be enabled with the new config.call_screen_roll_forward variable.

New Features

The show screen, hide screen and call screen statements now take an expression modifier, which allows a Python expression to supply the name of the screen.

There is a new "main" volume that can be accessed through Preferences(). The main volume is multiplied with all the other volumes to globally reduce the volume of the game.

The new config.preserve_volume_when_muted variable causes Ren'Py to show the current volume when channels are muted.

A button to clean the Ren'Py temporary directory has been added to the preferences screen of the launcher. This can remove these files to reduce the space Ren'Py requires.

The new config.choice_empty_window variable can customize the empty window that is shown when a choice menu is displayed. The intended use is:

define config.choice_empty_window = extend

Which repeats the last line of dialogue as the caption of the choice menu.

The key displayable now supports a capture property, which controls if the pressed key is handled further it does not end an interaction.

The new "anywhere" value of the language style property allows Ren'Py to break anywhere in a string, for when keeping to a fixed width is the most important aspect of breaking.

The new predict argument to renpy.pause() makes it possible to pause until image prediction is finished, including prediction caused by renpy.start_predict() and renpy.start_predict_screen().

It is now possible to select a language other than the default when extracting dialogue.

The screen language add statement now takes an alt property, making it possible to write:

screen test():
    add "icon.png" alt "The Icon"

The Hide() action now takes None for the screen name, to hide the current screen.

Placeholder() now takes a text argument, that overrides the automatically determined text with something the creator specifies.

The renpy.dynamic() function can now make variables in namespaces dynamic.

The new config.always_shown_screens variable allows one to define screens that are always shown (even in the main and game menus). See also the existing config.overlay_screens.

The location and size of the OpenGL viewport is made available to shaders as u_viewport.

The new RENPY_PATH_TO_SAVES environment variable makes it possible to control where Ren'Py places system-level saves. The RENPY_MULTIPERSISTENT variable has been documented, and controls the same thing with multipersistent data.

The new config.at_exit_callbacks functions are called when the game quits. This is intended to allow the game to save additional data created by the developer.

The config.default_attribute_callbacks variable allows a game to specify default attributes for a tag that are used when other attributes do not conflict.

Other Changes

It is now possible to copy from renpy.input() with ctrl-C, and paste with ctrl-V. When text input is displayed, ctrl will no longer cause skipping to happen.

The renpy.file() function has been renamed to renpy.open_file(), with the old named retained. It has also gained an encoding parameter to open the file with an encoding.

The focus_mask style property now defaults to None for drag displayables. This improves performance, but means that the displayable can be dragged by transparent pixels.

When adding files to the audio namespace, Ren'Py now scans for flac files.

Say statements used as menu captions can now take permanent and temporary image attributes, just like say statements elsewhere.

All position properties can now be supplied as gui variables to buttons. For example:

define gui.navigation_button_text_hover_yoffset = -3

now works.

The behavior of modal frames has been changed. A modal frame now blocks mouse events when inside the frame, and blocks focus from being transferred to displayables fully behind the frame, while allowing focus to be given to other displayables.

The new config.main_menu_stop_channels variable controls the channels that are stopped when entering the main menu.

Layered images are now offered the full size of the screen whenever rendered. Previously, when a layered image was used inside a layout (like hbox, vbox, side, and others), the space offered to the layered image could change, and relative positions could also change. (This is unlikely, but happened at least once.) The new offer_screen property of layered images controls this behavior.

A Character() defined with interact false, or otherwise used in a non-interactive way will now cause an automatic voice line to play, if the relevant file exists.

When window auto displays the window before a say or menu-with-caption statement, Ren'Py will automatically determine if the character to speak uses NVL or ADV, and will display the correct window. Previously, the last character in a say statement was used.

The activate_sound plays when activating a drag displayable.

The VariableValue(), FieldValue(), and DictValue() Bar Values can now call Return(), to cause the interaction to return a specific value.

The adjust_spacing property is now set to False for dialogue and narration in new games. This might cause the spacing of text to change, when the game is resized, in exchange for keeping it stable when extend is used.

Playing or stopping music on a channel now unpauses that channel.

The new preferences.audio_when_minimized preference now enables the audio of the game to be paused when the window is minimized.

The default for outline_scaling is now "linear".

The version of SDL used by Ren'Py has been upgraded to 2.0.20 on non-web platforms.

Many translations have been updated.

The jEdit editor has been removed, as the Ren'Py integration was largely obsolete. However, if the version from 7.4.0 is unpacked, it should be selectable in the launcher.

Versioning

Ren'Py's full version numbers are now of the form major.minor.patch.YYMMDDCCnu, where:

YY is the two digit year of the latest commit.
MM is the month of the commit.
DD is the day of the commit
CC is the commit number on that day
n is present if this is a nightly build.
u is present if this is an unofficial build.

7.4.11

The gui.variant Decorator

A new gui.variant decorator has been added to Ren'Py. This should be used to decorate a function with the name of a variant, and causes that function to be run, if the variant is active, when the game is first started, and then each time the gui is rebuilt (which happens when gui.rebuild() is called, when a gui preference is changed, or when the translation changes.)

This is expected to be used like:

init python:

    @gui.variant
    def small():

        ## Font sizes.
        gui.text_size = gui.scale(30)
        gui.name_text_size = gui.scale(36)
        # ...

as a replacement for:

init python:

    if renpy.variant("small"):
        ## Font sizes.
        gui.text_size = gui.scale(30)
        gui.name_text_size = gui.scale(36)
        # ...

Which only runs once, and lost the changes if the gui was ever rebuilt.

Fixes

The new config.mouse_focus_clickthrough variable determines if clicks that cause the game window to be focused will be processed normally.

The launcher now runs with config.mouse_focus_clickthrough true, which means that it will only take a single click to launch the game.

The caret_blink property of Input is now exposed through screen language.

When a Live2D motion contains a curve with a shorter duration then the motion it is part of, the last value of the curve is retained to the end of the motion.

Rare issues with a displayable being replaced by a displayable of a different type are now guarded against. This should only occur when a game is updated between saves.

Modal displayables now prevent pauses from ending.

An issue that could cause images to not display in some cases (when a displayable was invalidated) has been fixed.

Starting a movie no longer causes paused sounds to unpause.

AudioData objects are no longer stored in the persistent data. Such objects are removed when persistent data is loaded, if present.

Platform variables like renpy.android and renpy.ios are now set to follow the emulated platform, when Ren'Py is emulating ios or android.

When in the iOS and Android emulator, the mobile rollback side is used.

Ren'Py will now always run an unhovered action when a displayable (or its replacement) remains shown, and the focus changes. Previously, the unhovered action would not run when the loss of focus was caused by showing a second screen.

When config.log is true, the selected choice is now logged properly.

The new gui.variant() function makes it possible to work around an issue in the standard gui where the calling gui.rebuild() would cause gui variants to reset.

The web browser now checks for progressively downloaded images once per frame, allowing images to be loaded into the middle of an animation.

Live2D now uses saturation arithmetic to combine motion fadeins and fadeouts, such that if the fadein contributes 80% of a parameter value, and the fadeout contributes 20% of the value, 100% of the value comes from the two motions. (Previously, the fadein and fadeout were applied independently, such that together, the fadein and fadeout would contribute 84% of the value, with the remaining 16% taken from the default.)

When fading from one sequence of Live2D motions to another, the original sequence ends when a motion fades out.

When preserving screens in the old state for a transition, the later_at_list and camera lists are taken from the old state, preventing unexpected changes.

The gl_depth property now causes Ren'Py to use GL_LEQUALS, which more closely matches Ren'Py's semantics.

The 4-component constructor for matrices has been fixed.

Ren'Py now cleans out the android build directories when producing a Android App Bundle (AAB) file, preventing problems that might be caused when packaging multiple games, or a single game where files are deleted.

Live2d now properly handles seamless animation when the same motion is repeated in a displayable. (For example, show eileen m1 m1 m2 where m1 is seamless.)

Mouse motion is now tracked on Chrome OS devices. This prevents the mouse cursor from being hidden between clicks.

An issue with windows partially rendering on ChromeOS has been resolved.

An issue with transcludes in screens has been fixed.

An issue that could prevent a transform with both perspective and mesh true from displaying has been fixed.

Buttons now only propagate transform state to direct children, not to children accessed through ImageReferences.

The repeat_ modifier can now be applied to gamepad events.

A new config.debug_prediction variable has been split out of config.debug_image_cache. This controls the logging of prediction errors to the console and log.txt, making the latter variable act as documented.

Translations

The German, Indonesian, Polish, and Russian translations have been updated.

7.4.10

Fixes

This released fixes an issue that prevented large images (larger than maximum texture size, 4096x4069 on most platforms) from being displayed by the gl2 renderer.

Dialogue lines that end with the {nw} tag now do not wait for voice to finish.

Dialogue lines that contain {fast} (including those created with the extend character) sustain the voice from the previous statement.

These supplement a change introduced in 7.4.9 (that missed the changelog), where timed {w} and {p} text tags will no longer wait for voice to stop playing before advancing.

The focus_mask property can be slow, but several changes to have been included to fix pathological cases of slowness. While it's best to avoid it if possible (the default will change to None for drags, where it's True now, in 7.5), this should allow for some speedups where it is True.

Live2D support no longer logs to log.txt by default. That logging can be restored with config.log_live2d_loading.

A problem with automatically determining the Android store has been fixed.

Translations

The Indonesian and Polish translations were updated.

7.4.9

Android

This release features major changes to Ren'Py's Android support, starting with support for the Android App Bundle format, now required for your game to be uploaded to Google Play.

As bundles use different signing keys than APKs, it will be necessary to uninstall and reinstall the game when switching from APKs to Bundles for testing.

When run on Google Play, Ren'Py will use Play Asset Delivery to deliver the game data to the player's device. This should have the same 2 GB limit of previous versions of Ren'Py, with each file in your game automatically assigned to one of four 500 MB asset packs. If the games is started before all of the asset packs have been delivered, Ren'Py will wait for delivery to finish before starting.

A new android-downloading.jpg file is used in place of android-presplash.jpg when Play Asset Delivery is downloading the game's assets. This screen is overlayed with a progress bar.

Ren'Py still supports building 2GB APKs that can be sideloaded onto devices, and supplied to other app stores.

Ren'Py now builds against version 30 of the Android SDK.

Ren'Py supports wireless debugging on Android 11 devices.

A number of questions have been removed from the Android configuration process, simplifying the process. Most notably, Ren'Py now automatically manages the numeric version of the package, so it's no longer required to increment that version with each build.

Ren'Py will now look for archives in the external files directory, and automatically use the archives if found. This makes it possible to distribute patches, updates, and additional asset to users.

The inclusion of Pyjnius, a library for calling the Android API, is now documented.

The new build.android_permissions variable, renpy.check_permission() function, and renpy.request_permission() function provide a way to request permissions on Android beyond those that Ren'Py users itself.

When creating Android keys, Ren'Py will back them up to the same place it backs up script files. This isn't a substitute for making your own backups.

An issue that could cause black screenshots on Android and other platforms has been (hopefully) fixed.

The permissions of saves and log.txt are now explicitly managed on Android to make these files group-readable, ensuring the player can access logs and files.

iOS

The iOS build process has been updated create a project that is more complete after the initial generation, with the launch screen set up and no unused schemas.

As always, it's necessary to create a new iOS project each time Ren'Py is updated.

The inclusion of Pyobjus with Ren'Py is now documented. The Pyobjus library allows games to call APIs on iOS and macOS.

Updater

The Ren'Py updater has been improved. It is now possible to download updates over https, though doing so is less efficient, as the entire update file will need to be download rather than just the required changes.

It is possible to opt into a daily check for updates in the launcher preferences. This will cause Ren'Py to check once a day for updates, and highlight the update button if one exists.

Camera/Perspective Improvements

Using the camera statement in non-trivial manners, such as to apply perspective, could cause problems with several transitions, most notably the move transitions. This has been fixed, and so these transitions should work.

Operations that required the taking of a subsurface (for example, the slide and wipe transitions, or the use of viewports) didn't work when applied to a perspective transform. This has been fixed, but it does require a render to texture operation to work, leaving it up to the creator to decide if the performance penalty is desirable.

Accessibility

The shift+A Accessibility menu now supports enabling high contrast text, which converts all text to light-on-black. This is intended to assist player who need higher contrast to experience a game.

Descriptive text (the alt character) no longer causes the dialogue window to fade in if the descriptive text is disabled.

The order in which self-voicing reads out layers, screens, and displayables directly on a layer has changed, such that the screen and displayables that are drawn last (closest to the player) are read out first. This does not apply to displayables within a screen or layout displayable, which are still read first to last.

Modal screens cause self-voicing to stop after the contents of the screen has been read.

Transform Properties

The xsize and ysize transform properties have slightly changed in behavior, to match the corresponding style properties. While they used to accept only numbers of pixels, they now take "position" values, which means either a number of pixels expressed as an int or absolute, or a fraction of the available room expressed as a float. The old wrapper, size, is deprecated, and the new wrapper, xysize, should be used instead.

Other

The bar screen language statement now has a new property, released, that gives an action to perform when the bar is released.

It's now documented that the key screen language statement can take a list of keysyms.

On Linux, if Ren'Py detects the "C" locale, it will enable support for UTF-8 filesystems. This is intended to provide better compatibility with Steam Linux, which uses this locale.

A new Polish translation of the launcher has been added.

The music room has been updated to include a TogglePause button, that pauses and unpauses music.

There is now a --safe-mode flag, that starts Ren'Py in safe mode.

Mute now mutes movies.

An issue that caused analysis files to grow unconstrained, slowing down Ren'Py startup, has been fixed. The analysis file will be reduced in size when the game scripts are recompiled.

The hover_sound and activate_sound properties now apply to bars.

When dispatching events in ATL, if an event with a selected_ prefix is not handled, the prefix is stripped and the event is matched again. This means that a hover handler will handle the selected_hover even if the selected_hover handler does not exist, and same thing with selected_idle

Ren'Py versions can now include an optional letter at the end. The n suffix is applied to nightly builds of Ren'Py, while the u suffix is applied to unofficial builds.

The default statement is applied after each rollback.

A regression that could prevent text in buttons from changing has been fixed.

7.4.8

Fixes

This fixes a major problem that could cause rollback to corrupt lists, dictionaries, sets, and objects. Everyone that uses 7.4.7 is recommended to upgrade.

A crash that could be caused by non-integer outlines has been fixed.

The correct size of a viewport is used for edge and mouse wheel scrolling.

Game controller detection has been fixed.

Features

It is now possible, using PauseAction() or renpy.music.set_pause(), to pause a channel that's playing video.

The default channel for movies can now be set with config.single_movie_channel.

Changes

When in developer mode, errors parameterizing an image will be reported to the developer, rather than causing a placeholder (the gray ghost girl) to appear.

The text window will not be shown before being hidden by the centered and vcentered characters.

Rolling back to a place where the shift+O console caused a change in the state of the game will not cause the effects of the console to be reverted. Rolling back one step further will.

7.4.7

Web and Web Audio

The way that the web platform plays audio has been rewritten. Instead of using ffmpeg as Ren'Py does on other platform, the web version of Ren'Py will hand sound files off to the browser's builtin audio player. This is often multithreaded, and so prevents the skipping and crackling that had been occurring with the web port.

The file formats that are supported on the web platform are now the formats supported in browsers. This is Opus, Ogg, and MP3 in modern web browsers, and just MP3 in Safari. (But see the Safari issues below.)

The new config.audio_filename_callback makes it possible to adjust audio filenames on play, on the web and on other platforms.

Self-voicing, with the 'v' key, now works on the web platform if the browser supports it.

Support for Ren'Py is limited on webkit-based browsers, due to https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=227421 . This seems to affect Safari on macOS, especially the M1, as well all web browsers on iOS. As there is no way to fix this issue in Ren'Py, the web shell has been modified to report the issue.

iOS

The iOS build is now compiled with a more modern version of Clang, allowing it to run on the 12th generation iPhone and 2nd generation iPhone SE without the pillarboxing (or worse, both pillarboxing and letterboxing) that would otherwise be required.

Ren'Py can compile for the iOS simulator on M1 macs, but the simulator itself may cause runtime issues.

Input

The input displayable now supports a number of new quality of life features. Specifically, the following new features now work:

Jumping a word to the left. (Ctrl-Left, Alt-Left on Macintosh.)
Jumping a word to the right. (Ctrl-Right, Alt-Right on Macintosh.)
Deleting a word. (Ctrl-Backspace, Alt-Backspace on Macintosh.)
Deleting the line. (Windows-Backspace, Command-Backspace on Macintosh.)

In addition, Command-Left and Command-Right on Macintosh now navigate to the start and end of the line, in addition to the usual Home and End keys.

The input caret now blinks to draw attention. The blink rate is controlled by the config.input_caret_blink variable.

Other

The Preferences() function can now return actions that allow access to the renderer and accessibility menus.

The new renpy.set_focus() function makes it possible to set the focused displayable, though mouse motions might immediately change the focus.

In layered images, transform properties given to attributes now take precedence to those given in groups. Previously, it was possible for the attributes to conflict, such as when align was given to the group and xalign was given to the attribute.

It is now possible to roll back past variables set in the console.

The new mark_label_seen() and mark_label_unseen() make it possible to manipulate the set of seen labels.

The new mark_audio_seen() and mark_audio_unseen() make it possible to manipulate the set of seen audio files.

The new mark_image_seen() and mark_image_unseen() make it possible to manipulate the set of seen images.

ATL transforms in screens now start when first shown, rather than when the screen containing the transform is first shown.

The new config.autosave_on_input variabel controls if autosaving occurs on input.

Ren'Py will now report an error when a positional argument follows a keyword argument.

It is now possible to use floating point numbers for xsize and ysize, and have the result be correct. Previously, the floating point numbers would be applied twice, so a xsize() of .5 would represent 1/4 of the available width, rather than the correct 1/2 as it does now.

The persistent._clear() method, which clears persistent data, is now documented.

The Spanish translation has been updated.

Atom has been updated.

7.4.6

Camera Statement

There is a new camera statement, intended for use with the 3D Stage system. This statement is similar to the show layer statement, except that the layer name is not required, and it is not cleared when a scene statement is run.

This statement lets you write:

camera:
    perspective True

to enable the 3D State system.

As part of this, the show layer and scene statements have been reverted to their behavior in 7.4.4 and earlier, where the scene statement clears the list of transforms.

Model Displayable

The new Model displayable serves as a way to create models for use with the model-based renderer. Right now, the class is able to create 2D models with multiple textures, making it possible to create custom transforms that work like some of the built-in transforms do.

This displayable doesn't support 3D, yet, but that's expected in the future.

Other Improvements

The Atom text editor has been updated, and the language-renpy plugin associated with it has been updated to support the new keywords introduced in recent versions of Ren'Py.

Using a controller immediately hides the mouse cursor.

Fixes

A mistake in the build process meant that a change to fix compilation on iOS that had been in the nightly didn't make it into the Ren'Py release.

An issue where a modal screen would not block time events when the Ren'Py window lost focus has been fixed.

The number of iterations of the blur shader has been limited, which ensures that Ren'Py is compatible with more webgl devices.

Ren'Py will re-compile the Python files in the renpy/ directory, when the Force Recompile option is checked. This ensures that if those files are recompiled for some reason, the path to Ren'Py on the creator's system will not be included.

ATL will now skip to the first frame to be displayed when using the animation timebase.

Ren'Py will no longer pauses without timeouts after a rollback.

7.4.5

Model-Based Renderer

The model-based renderer is now the default for games that are released with Ren'Py 7.4.5. To disable it for your game, please set config.gl2 to False.

When the model-based renderer is being used, Ren'Py now supports a "3D Stage". This adds a third dimension to shown images, allowing for perspective correct zooming and motion, the rotation and translation of displayables in 3D, and many other new effects. Please see the 3D Stage documentation for more information.

To facilitate the 3D Stage, the scene statement no longer clears transforms applied to a layer as a whole with show layer or renpy.layer_at_list().

The new Swing() transition is usable when the model-based renderer is enabled. This causes the scene to rotate around the vertical or horizontal axis, in three dimensions, and to be replaced with a previous scene.

The new blend transform property allows the blend function to be specified. The blend function controls how a pixel being drawn is combined to the pixel it is being drawn to.In addition to the "normal" and "add" blend functions that Ren'Py already supported, new "multiply", "min", and "max" functions have been added.

Mouse

There have been a number of changes and improvements to the hardware mouse support, and it's now documented that GPUs have limits to the size of the hardware mouse that can be supported.

A new variable config.mouse_displayable and displayable, MouseDisplayable(), now can be used to replace the hardware mouse with a software one, similar to the way it was done in Ren'Py 7.3 and earlier.

Features

A new function, renpy.screenshot_to_bytes(), takes a screenshot and stores it in a bytes object that can be passed to im.Data(). While these objects are large, it is possible to store them in regular and persistent saves.

The new renpy.music.get_loop() function returns a list of sound files that are set to be looped on a channel, making it possible to store and replay them.

The renpy.input() function and the input displayable take a new mask parameter, that specifies a string that masks out characters that would be shown to the player. This can be used to hide the text of a password.

There is now a dark theme for the launcher.

The new config.adjust_attributes callback allows you to intercept image attributes when show, and replace them with a list of your own. For example, it's possible to use this to rewrite eileen happy to eileen happy_eyes happy_mouth, which interacts well with LayeredImage.

When running lint from the command line, the --error-code option can be given to cause Ren'Py to return with an error code if lint fails.

Layer transitions can now persist past the end of an interaction.

Ren'Py avoids pausing right after a rollback, so that the rollback tries to finish at a more interactive statement.

When playing a sound, it is possible to sync the start time of an audio file in one channel with the time of the audio file in another channel.

Android

Several packages that are required to build on Android are now included as part of Ren'Py. This fixes errors that are related to Bintray being shut down, that prevented new installs of Ren'Py 7.4.4 from being able to build for Android.

The way Ren'Py displays the presplash screen on Android has been changed. The presplash is now displayed by the Java bootstrap, in a new layer on top of the OpenGL layer. This is a new approach compared to Ren'Py 7.4, where the presplash was displayed using SDL's 2D rendering. This change appears to improve compatibility with Android devices, and prevent instances of black screens on start.

As part of this change, the way Ren'Py scales the presplash image has been changed. Ren'Py will now scale-to-fit the presplash image inside the available area.

An issue that prevented blur from working properly on certain Android devices has been fixed.

An issue playing some less-used video and audio file formats on Android has been fixed.

The Android fixes will require you to regenerate your Android project, by answering the Android Configuration question "Do you want to automatically update the Java source code?" with "Yes."

Other Platforms

The Web Platform beta has been updated.

A regression in Mobile Safari for iOS 14.5.1 and later prevents Ren'Py from starting on that platform. As the issue is with Mobile Safari, no workaround is possible, and a message is displayed prompting the player to contact Apple. This regression affects other iOS browsers that are shells for Mobile Safari, like Chrome and Firefox.

Building for iOS has been fixed.

Support for Steam on macOS has been fixed.

Signing and Notarizing macOS applications has been fixed.

Other Fixes

The default level-of-detail bias has been set to -0.5, and can be changed with config.gl_lod_bias. This is used to bias Ren'Py into scaling down, rather than scaling up, but the previous bias would cause Ren'Py to create jagged edges on images.

There have been a number of improvements to the way Ren'Py handles modal screens.

7.4.4

The old-game directory

To help creators that make multiple releases of their games (as with early access or Patreon releases), Ren'Py now supports an old-game directory, which can be a copy of the game directory from the previous release. Ren'Py will use the information found in the .rpyc files in this directory when it generates .rpyc files. As the .rpyc files are used when loading games, this will tend to help Ren'Py load games created by multiple developers.

For more information, see the documentation.

Fixes

A crash that could occur with gestures or controllers has been fixed.

A crash that occurred when generating web distributions on windows has been fixed.

The persistent backend for achievements now supports the clearing of progress.

Live2D now resets opacities with other parameters.

Ren'Py does not change the size of a maximized window when reloading.

Other

There is a new GL property, blend_func that is supported by the model-based renderer. This allows the customization of the GL blend function, allowing Ren'Py to start to support new blend modes.

Live2D now supports the additive and multiply blend modes.

Using default or define with the renpy namespace will now produce an error.

A number of previously-undocumented methods on the preferences object have been documented. These methods make it possible to get or set the current value of the volume and the current value of mute.

7.4.3

Windows

The code for changing icons has been rewritten, to produce executables that do not include any extraneous data other than the software and the icons being added. This should prevent some antivirus programs from producing false positives.

Ren'Py is now linked against the Universal C Runtime on Windows. This may raise the version of Windows that Ren'Py runs on to Windows Vista with certain hotfixes. This both modernizes Ren'Py, and should prevent some antivirus programs from producing false positives.

Ren'Py will now disable Threaded Optimization on Nvidia GPUs. Threaded Optimization interacted poorly with Ren'Py, causing pauses in places where Ren'Py did not expect pauses to occur. This could manifest as audio glitches that this change fixes.

Ren'Py will automatically use the ANGLE library to emulate OpenGL ES using DirectX, if DirectX is available and OpenGL is not. This had not worked properly in Ren'Py 7.4. The window may appear and disappear multiple times as Ren'Py tries different video systems, this is expected.

Android

The non-model-based renderer now properly deallocates textures when Android causes a render context to change. This prevents visual glitches that would randomly occur, often during Dissolves.

Ren'Py now checks that it has focus when the game actually starts. This fixes an issue where, if the player switched out of the application before the game could fully start. Now, if Ren'Py has lost focus at game start, it will save and quit, then re-launch when the player returns to the game.

In general, compatibility with Android devices has been improved.

Features

Added config.main_menu_music_fadein, a way of fading in the main menu music.

The new renpy.get_zorder_list() and renpy.change_zorder() allow the zorder of images and screens to be manipulated after being shown.

Windows and frames can now take the modal style property. This is similar to the modal property of screens, but only applies when the mouse is within the boundaries of the window or frame. This can be used to ensure the player can't click a button behind the window, while allowing buttons that are not obstructed to be used.

The Live2D() displayable now takes an update_function parameter, which makes it possible to update parameters directly.

Ren'Py now supports the display of Emoji and other characters from outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, if the fonts in use support the characters. Right now, the emoji are displayed using the font rendering system, which produces monochrome glyphs.

The FontGroup class can now be used to remap characters inside a font.

Displayables in the mask portion of a AlphaMask() are now focusable, allowing new effects.

The player can now choose to ingore image files that cannot be loaded.

The new renpy.get_sdl_dll() and renpy.get_sdl_window_pointer() functions make it possible to access the SDL DLL using ctypes. This may make it possible to implement functionality that is in SDL, but Ren'Py does not provide access to.

Clicking now ends a transition introduced with renpy.transition(), or statements that have a with clause.

renpy.translate_string() is now a documented function that provides the ability to translate a string to a selected language.

It is now possible to create a hide_windows label, that provides a way to customize the hiding of windows that occurs when middle-clicking or pressing the h key.

New properties, like the mesh_pad transform property and the gl_pixel_perfect gl property, make it possible to perform pixel perfect rendering after applying a shader to text.

The renpy.input() function now takes properties beginning with show_, that are passed to the input screen.

The Color class now has an rgba property, that returns an rgba tuple.

Old Features

The default_mouse variable was introduced in Ren'Py 7.4, as a way to allow the mouse cursor to be changed without changing config.mouse at runtime, as changing config variables at runtime isn't supported.

Other Fixes

An issue that prevented multiple modal screens from being processed correctly has been fixed. This would manifest as focus problems.

Lint now produces files with Windows-style newlines, on Windows.

SDL error messages are decoded using the system encoding on Windows, making them more readable.

Issues with quoting unicode characters in Python have been fixed.

Values of the blur transform property between 0 and 1 now work properly.

The {done} text tag now works as defined.

Ren'Py is better at checking for GL load failures and falling back to older libraries.

Apps built for macOS should enable HighDPI mode.

Translations

The Ren'Py documentation has been translated into both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, courtesy of 被诅咒的章鱼 and 逆转咸鱼.

The French translations have been updated.

7.4.2

Fixes and Changes

The new config.context_fadeout_music and config.context_fadein_music variables make it possible to fade out and in music when a game is loaded or other context changes cause the music to change.

Ren'Py now searches for Live2D motion and expression files using the extensions (.motion3.json and .exp3.json), rather than using directory names.

The new build.include_i686 variable determines if the 32-bit versions of Ren'Py are included in the build. Not including 32-bit binaries can reduced download size and prevent overzealous antivirus programs from incorrectly reporting distributions as infected.

The new build.change_icon_i686 will prevent the icon for the i686 version from being changed. This may prevent antivirus programs from incorrect detections.

Ren'Py will no longer disable the screen saver or prevent the system from going to sleep when a game is running.

A macOS issue with the operating system's fullscreen (invoked using the gree button) disabling resizing, and hence preventing the window from being restored to it's normal size, has been resolved.

A crash on raspberry pi displaying a webp image has been fixed.

This release fixes missing files caused by a mistake in the build process:

The say.vbs file was missing, preventing self-voicing from working on Windows.
Various files required to support ANGLE were missing, which prevented DirectX rendering from working.

Android

There is a known issue with Samsung devices with the magnification shortcut enabled, where the game may become unresponsive. I'm working on a fix, but didn't want to delay the release for this.

The detection of the JVM on macOS is more robust, and less likely to be confused by a browser plug-in.

Ren'Py now recommends the use of AdoptOpenJDK as a source for the JVM.

7.4.1

Pause Statement Changes

The behavior of the pause statement with a time has changed, so that:

pause 1.0

is now equivalent to:

$ renpy.pause(1.0)

and not:

with Pause(1.0)

This means that other features that expect a real pause will work during the pause statement.

Modal screens no longer block the pause statement, or renpy.pause(). this means that a pause can end even if a modal screen is displayed above it.

Say Statement Id Clause

The say statement has now grown an id clause, that lets you specify the old say statement id. This is useful for changing a say statement in the original language, such as to fix an obvious typo, without needing to update all the translations.

To use it, just add id to the say statement, followed by the statement id:

e "This used to have a typo." id start_61b861a2

Live2D

Live2D support has a default_fade argument added, which can change the default duration of fades at the start and end of motions and expressions.

An issue with Live2D that manifested as a tuple error has been fixed.

Controller Blocklist

The Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, when connected to a computer by USB, requires an initialization sequence to be sent to cause it to act as a Joystick, and not return incorrect data.

Ren'Py 7.4.0 attempted to send this sequence, but doing so required directly accessing the USB bus, which was causing crashes and long pauses on some computer. We've decided that this functionality is too prone to compatibility problems to include in Ren'Py.

As a result, the Switch Pro Controller has been added to a new controller blocklist, and will not function in Ren'Py.

macOS

The minimum supported version of macOS is now 10.10 (Yosemite). Ren'Py 7.4 did not run on this version, so this represents a restoration of support for this version.

Choosing the projects directory was broken on macOS 11.0 (Big Sur). This has been fixed.

Pyobjus is now part of the macOS build of Ren'Py, in addition to the iOS build. This library makes it possible to access Cocoa APIs.

Android

There have been reports that prereleases of Ren'Py 7.4.1 will not run properly on older Android devices, like the Samsung Galaxy S5. We are attempting to acquire an example of a device exhibiting the problem, and will make a new release as required.

Translations

The Spanish translation has been updated.

Other Fixes

An issue that could cause crashes on movies of certain sizes when Ren'Py was run on a computer that supports SSE3 has been fixed.

Movie playback now uses multiple cores for video decoding, as it did in previous versions of Ren'Py.

An issue that could cause the size of the Ren'Py window to increase when run on Windows with a non-100% DPI has been fixed.

Ren'Py will no longer give a performance warning when an unsupported renderer is selected, such as when using the GL or ANGLE renderer on a game that requires gl2.

An issue that would, in some cases, prevent say attributes from being shown has been fixed.

An issue preventing MultiPersistent files from working on computers that do not use UTF-8 at the default file encoding has been fixed.

The flags for compiling Python when rpy python 3 is enabled have been improved.

An issue that prevented triple-quoted strings (like the strings used for gui.about) from being evaluated correctly has been fixed.

Ren'Py now detects its path during certain reloads.

Ren'Py will determine of all functions a renderer requires can be dynamically loaded, and will try different renderers if this is not the case.

Timers that are created after the start of a statement now properly participate in the rollback system, and will fire if the game rolls back to a point where the timer has not fired.

Ren'Py now allows the screensaver to activate while a Ren'Py game is running.

A problem with dynamic variables not remaining dynamic during a rollback has been fixed.

When given a size, the hbox and vbox displayables now position children in the same way those children were positioned in Ren'Py 7.4.

The new mipmap style property applies to the Dissolve(), ImageDissolve(), and AlphaDissolve() transitions, the AlphaMask(), Movie(), and Text() displayables, and text in general. This property controls if mipmaps are generated for the textures created by these displayables. Avoiding creating mipmaps may improve rendering performance on slower computers, but can lead to artifacts when scaling down. When not specified, this property defaults to config.mipmap_dissolves, config.mipmap_movies, or config.mipmap_text, as appropriate.

The toggle version of self-voicing preferences have been changed to provide a better selected state.

Lint now once again reports statistics by translation.

7.4.0

Model-Based Renderer

This release includes a new model-based renderer, the component of Ren'Py that is responsible for drawing text and images to the user's display, supplementing (with the intent of eventually replacing) the original OpenGL renderer added in Ren'Py 6.10. This renderer takes better advantage of the hardware present in modern GPUS (both dedicated graphics cards and GPUs integrated into processors) to improve performance and increase capability. This renderer supports desktop computers that support either OpenGL 2.2 or DirectX 9.0c or 11, and mobile devices and embedded systems that support OpenGL ES 3.

The biggest change in the model-based renderer is that Ren'Py is no longer limited to drawing rectangular images in a 2-dimensional plane. Instead, Ren'Py has been converted to use meshes made up of triangles in a three-dimensional space. While existing rectangular sprites are displayed in the same way, this opens up Ren'Py to non-rectangular meshes, and eventually full three dimensional geometry.

In addition to mesh geometry, model-based renderering supports shaders, both shaders included with Ren'Py, and shaders specified by creators as part of their game. Shaders are small programs that run on the GPU, that can process geometry and pixel data, to allow for all sorts of graphical effects.

The model-based renderer implements a new fast texture loading system, which moves an expensive part of texture loading, alpha premultiplication, from the CPU to the GPU.

The model-based renderer also creates mipmaps for each texture that is loaded into the GPU. A mipmap is a series of smaller versions of the texture, stored on the GPU. By creating and utilizing mipmaps, Ren'Py is now able to shrink images below 50% of the original size, without the appearance of the aliasing artifacts. This is especially relevant when assets meant for 4K monitors are used on 1080P and smaller displays.

For this release, the Model-Based Renderer is opt in, with that opt-in controlled by the config.gl2 variable. As we gain more experience with it, it is intended to be come the default Ren'Py renderer.

Live2D

One of the features enabled by the model-based renderer is support for displaying sprites made in Live2D. Ren'Py requires you to download Live2D Cubism separately, as you'll need to execute a contract with Live2D, Inc. before distributing a game that uses their technology.

Ren'Py supports the display of Live2D models, complete with the ability to change expression and to queue up one or more motions. This is integrated into Ren'Py's image attribute system. Ren'Py also supports fading from one motion to another when an attribute changes.

Matrixcolor and Blur

The model-based renderer enables new functionality in transforms, such as matrixcolor and blur.

Transforms (including ATL Transforms) now support a new matrixcolor property, which either a matrix or an object that creates a matrix that changes in time, and uses it to recolor everything that is a child of the transform.

While previous versions of Ren'Py supported the im.MatrixColor() image manipulator, the new property is much improved. The image manipulator would often take a large fraction of a second, making it too slow for real-time use, and was limited to single images. The new transform property is fast enough that it can be changed every frame if necessary, and can be applied to any displayable. It's now possible to apply a Transform using matrixcolor to a layer, to recolor the entire layer - making it possible to push your game into sepia or black-and-white without needing a separate set of images.

There are a few difference between the image manipulator and the transform property versions of matrixcolor, as the new version uses 4x4 matrices and premultiplied alpha color, so the new property can't use the same matrices. Instead, there are number of new ColorMatrix objects that need to be used.

Transforms also support a new blur property, which blurs the child of the displayable by the given number of pixels.

Python 2/Python 3 Compatibility Mode

While Ren'Py is not yet supported on Python 3, this release of Ren'Py includes several features to allow you to begin writing scripts that will work on both Python 2 and Python 3.

First, Ren'Py now uses future to provide standard library compatibility. It's now possible to import modules using their Python 3 names, when a renaming has occured.

When a .rpy file begins with the new rpy python 3 statement, the file is compiled in a Python 3 compatibility mode. The two changes this causes are:

Ren'Py will compile the file in a mode that attempts to emulate Python 3 semantics, including the change to division. In Python 3, 1/2 is equal to .5, and not 0. Since this changes the type of the expression, this can change the position of displayables. 1//2 keeps the original semantics.
Ren'Py will change the behavior of dict so that the items, keys, and values methods return views, rather than lists, when called directly from that .rpy file. These match the Python 3 semantics for these methods, but need to be explicitly turned into a list before being saved or participating in rollback.

Upgraded Libraries and Platform Support

For Ren'Py 7.4, the build system was redone, replacing the multiple build systems needed to build Ren'Py with a single build platform that handles every platform except for webasm. The change in build system also involved updating all of the libraries that Ren'Py uses to newer versions.

As a result of this, the list of platforms that Ren'Py officially supports has changed slightly. Here's the latest list of what is supported:

Platform	CPU	Note
Linux	x86_64	Raised minimum version to Ubuntu 16.04
Linux	i686	Raised minimum version to Ubuntu 16.04
Linux	i686	Raised minimum version to Ubuntu 16.04
Linux	armv7l	Intended to support Raspberry Pi, uses Raspian Buster
Windows	x86_64	A new port to 64-bit Windows Vista and later.
Windows	i686	Raised minimum version to Windows Vista.
macOS	x86_64	macOS 10.10+
Android	armv7a	Android 4.4 KitKat
Android	arm64	Android 5.0 Lollipop
Android	x86_64	Android 5.0 Lollipop
iOS	arm64	All 64-bit iOS devices, iOS 11.0+
iOS	x86_64	The 64-bit iOS simulator, iOS 11.0+
Web	webasm	Modern web browsers

The biggest new platform that Ren'Py supports is the 64-bit Windows platform, which means that Ren'Py is available in 64-bits on all major desktop and mobile platforms. The new renpy.bits variable can be used to determine if Ren'Py is running on a 32 or 64-bit platform, if necessary. (For example, to set config.image_cache_size_mb appropriately.)

The one platform that loses support in this release is 32-bit (armv7l) iOS devices. These devices are no longer supported by Apple, and do not support the level of OpenGL ES that Ren'Py requires.

Web

Ren'Py now runs significantly faster in the browser, thanks to new compilation techniques.

A game built for the web platform can now download image and audio files from the web server as the game is played. The download begins when the image or sound is predicted. This can reduce the initial time it takes before the game begins running, as well as memory usage.

When running inside a web browser on a touch-screen device, Ren'Py will display a touch-based keyboard, to compensate for web browsers having difficulty displaying keyboard entry for wasm-based games.

The splash screen displayed while loading can use the WebP format, including animated WebP.

More Python modules are provided, making the Python environment closer to native Ren'Py ports.

Support for iOS browsers was improved.

Steam

It is now possible to install Steam support from the Ren'Py launcher, by choosing "preferences", "Install libraries", "Install Steam Support".

The new config.steam_appid variable automatically creates the steam_appid.txt file for you. This needs to be set by a define statement, or in a python early block.

Translations

The Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean translations have been updated, and now use a unified font.

There is a new Simplified Chinese translation of the tutorial game, courtesy of Neoteus.

Depreciations and Removals

As described above, Ren'Py no longer support Windows XP.

As described above, Ren'Py no longer supports 32-bit iOS devices.

The choice of downloading the Editra text editor has been removed from Ren'Py. Editra hadn't been updated in over 5 years, and the website it was originally distributed from has disappeared.

While not completely removed, the software renderer has been simplified and removed as an option for gameplay. Its purposes is now limited to informing players about issues that prevent display of graphics with a GPU-based renderer.

Miscellaneous

Support for controllers has been improved. Repeat is now supported on controllers, and the libraries that Ren'Py uses have been compiled to support many of the more popular game controllers.

Ren'Py now uses software playback of movies on Android and iOS devices, meaning the same files can be used on all platforms that support video playback.

Defining a mouse cursor using config.mouse now uses SDL2's color cursor API, which generally results in hardware acceleration and reduced mouse movement lag.

The define statement can now be used to set a key in a dictionary.

# Ren'Py was started in 2004.
define age["eileen"] = 2020 - 2004

The define statement can take += and |=, to apply the appropriate update operators.

define config.keymap['dismiss'] += [ 'K_KP_PLUS' ]

# This assumes endings is a set.
define endings |= { "best" }

It is now possible to specify a relative audio channel whenever an audio is file is played, using the new volume clause to play and queue.

The new fit property of transforms provides for different ways of making an image fit size with a different aspect ratio. For example, it can be scaled to be contained fully within the given size, or to make sure that it completely covers the given size.

The xpan and ypan transform properties no longer double the size of the displayable they are applied to, making them easier to combine with positioning transform properties.

The renpy.input() function can now take regular expressions when determining what is and is not allowed.

Grids now take margin style properties, that is applied outside the grid, and inside a containing viewport.

Ren'Py support an {alt} text tag, that causes the text to be spoken during self-voicing, but not displayed. It also supports a {noalt} text tag that does the opposite.

The launcher window can now be resized if necessary. A button has been added to the launcher preferences to restore the default size.

The new build.mac_info_plist variable makes it easier to customize the mac app.

The requests library, is bundled with Ren'Py, making accessing the web much easier.

Pressing PAUSE on your keyboard brings the player to the game menu, finally giving that key a function.

7.3.5

Fixes

On desktop platforms, the presplash screen has been reworked so that it will not cause the window to become nonresponsive if clicked.

The iOS port has been updated to include modules that have been newly added to Ren'Py, allowing the compilation of iOS apps.

Other Changes

The audio directory, which automatically defines names in the audio namespace, has been made visible in the launcher, and is added to newly-created projects.

The new config.exception_handler callback allows an application to replace Ren'Py's exception handling system in its entirety.

7.3.4

Fixes

This release fixes major graphics glitches that were introduced in 7.3.3.

On Windows, textures would fail to be reloaded when switching from fullscreen to windowed mode or vice-versa. This would cause the wrong texture to be displayed.
On all platforms, graphical glitches could occur when Flatten() was used.

Other Changes

Dynamic images can now include "[prefix_]" everywhere, and especially when add has been used to add a dynamic image to buttons, drags, and similar focusable objects.

Creator-defined screen language statements may now take if statements as children.

The drag and drop system has been improved to better interact with updated screens.

7.3.3

Audio

Ren'Py now supports an audio directory, which automatically defines names in the audio namespace. This makes it possible to have a file named game/audio/overture.ogg, and play it using:

play music overture

The new AudioData() class allows you to provide compressed audio data to Ren'Py, either generated programatically or taken from a source other than a file. To support this, the Python wave and sunau modules are now packaged with Ren'Py.

An issue with enabling the mixing of mono sound files has been fixed. This issue caused many WAV files not to play. (We still don't recommend the use of WAV files.)

Platforms

Ren'Py is now distributed as a signed and notarized binary on the Mac. As this process takes a very long time to accomplish, the ability to sign macOS binaries has been removed from Ren'Py itself, in favor of external scripts that take care of the signing and notarization process.

The minimum version supported by the Android port has been lowered to Android 19 (Android 4.4 KitKat).

The web port of Ren'Py has seen a number of changes:

Screen variants are now detected and set.
Fullscreen support has been improved, though the user may need to click to enable fullscreen.
Leaving the web page is detected, so persistent data may be saved.
'game.zip' can now be renamed. 'DEFAULT_GAME_FILENAME' in index.html controls this.
Portable HTTP requests (native+renpyweb): see https://github.com/renpy/renpyweb/blob/master/utils/asyncrequest.rpy
Enable networking in Python web port for testing WebSockets, transparently available through the Python 'socket' module
HTTP Cache-Control allows for smoother game updates.
The pygame.draw module is now included, allowing Canvas support.
WebGL compatibility has been improved.

Other Changes

During profiling conducted for the GL Rewrite project, it became clear that the switch to framebuffer objects in 7.3.0 was the cause of certain performance regressions. By changing how FBOs are used, Ren'Py performance has been improved.

The renpy.input() function can now be given the name of a screen that is used to prompt the user for input.

The creation of list, dicts, and sets inside of screen language is now analyzed correctly. This will allow more displayables to be analyzed as constant, improving screen performance.

The notify screen is now hidden on rollback.

The NVL mode screen indicates that it shows the window, which prevents problems when window show is in effect.

When a Call() with from_current set to true occurs during a multi-part statement (like a menu with dialogue), control is restored to the first part of that multi-part statement (thus causing the dialogue to be displayed).

More functions now use a tag's default layer.

The renpy.is_init_phase() function has been added.

Automatic voice now works for dialogue that is part of a menu statement.

Support for GLES1 has been dropped. (It hadn't been used for years.)

The SelectedIf() and SensitiveIf() actions can now take other actions as arguments.

Many BarValues now take a force_step argument, which forces changes to the bar to be rounded to the nearest step value.

Frame() now allows the tile argument to be the string "integer", which tiles the contents of the frame an integer number of times.

Character() now allows the name argument to be a function or callable object when dynamic is true.

Translations

The Korean and Spanish translations have been updated.

7.3.2

Fixes

Fix a regression in the platform variables, caused by the previous release.

Translations

Update the Spanish translation.

7.3.1

Changes

Descriptive text (text that is intended to be show when self-voicing is enabled, so that scenes can be described to the vision impaired) has been updated. Descriptive text is now accessed using the alt character (the old sv character has been retained as an alias.) It's also now possible to display descriptive text using a custom character, rather than the narrator.

Ren'Py now always initializes the media playback system, so that a movie can be played even if no audio will be played.

The default property of most displayables, which is used to choose a displayable to be focused by default, has been renamed to default_focus so that it does not conflict with the default statement. It also now takes an integer, with the displayable with the highest focus number getting focus.

The Flatten() displayable now passes positions from the child.

Seeded random number generators created with renpy.random.Random now support rollback.

When emulating Android or iOS, the platform variables (like renpy.android, renpy.ios, renpy.windows, and renpy.mobile) are set properly.

Renpyweb now stores the date and time that a save file was created.

Fixes

This release fixes a fairly major issue that could cause screens that interpolate text to not update, or update improperly.

This release properly runs the image prediction routine from the image prediction thread.

A problem with the {clear} text tag has been fixed.

The config.end_game_transition, which was not working properly in most circumstances, has been fixed.

Translations

The Russian, Korean, and Spanish translations were updated.

7.3.0

Renpyweb

Courtesy of Sylvain Beucler, Ren'Py now can generate distributions for the HTML5 web platforms, capable of running on modern web browsers that support the Web Assembly standard. This is intended for small games and demonstrations of larger games, as right now the implementation downloads the full game to the web browser before running any of it.

Web support is marked as beta, as there are cases where problem with the web platform (most notably, a lack of threading) cause problems such as sound glitches if an image takes too long to load. As a result, it is possible to have a Ren'Py game that works well on all other platforms, but not in the web browser. As web browsers themselves improve, we will improve our implementation and eventually remove the beta tag.

Building a web distribution can be done from the new "Web" button on the Ren'Py launcher. The launcher now includes a small web server, that can be used to launch the game in a creator's web browser for test purposes.

Creator-Defined Statements

Ren'Py's creator-defined statements, and the Lexer objects that are used by them, have been extended to improve the functionality in many ways. With respect to the Lexer:

It is now possible to ask the Lexer object to parse a single line as a Ren'Py statement, or all the lines remaining in the block as Ren'Py statements.
It is now possible to ask the lexer to catch errors, so as to limit the scope of errors to a part of a creator-defined statement rather than the whole statement.

The renpy.register_statement() function has new arguments to enable new functionality.

Statement prediction can be controlled by the predict_all and predict_next arguments, which predict all possible next statements or take a function that determines what will run next, respectively.
The new post_execute argument lets one specify an execute function that is run as the next statement - the one after the creator-defined statement. This allows a pattern where a statement runs, executes the block inside it, and then runs something after the block to clean it up. (For example, an event that serves as a label, and then jumps back to a dispatcher when it is done.)
The new post_label argument lets one specify a function to supply the a label that goes after the creator-defined statement, which can function like the from clause to the call statement.

Ren'Py now stores the result of parsing a creator-defined statement in the .rpyc files. While this allows for more complex syntax and faster startup, it means that it may be necessary to force a recompile if you change a creator-defined statement's parse function

Screen Language Improvements

It is now possible to supply an as clause to a screen language displayable. This is especially useful with drags, as it lets the screen capture the drag object and call methods on it as necessary.

The on statement can now take a list of events.

A screen now takes a sensitive property, which determines if it is possible to interact with the screen at all.

Ren'Py will now produce an error when a non-constant property follows a Python statement, inside screen language. (This was very rare, and almost always a mistake.)

Text Improvements

Ren'Py now includes support for self-closing custom text tags, which are custom text tags that do not require as closing text tag.

Ren'Py now supports three new flags that can be applied when formatting text:

"[varname!u]" forces the text to upper-case.
"[varname!l]" forces the text to lower-case.
"[varname!c]" forces the first letter of the text to upper-case, capitalizing it.

Android and iOS Improvements

Ren'Py now uses Framebuffer Objects on any device that claims to support it. As a result focus_mask now works on Android and iOS.

Ren'Py now produces 64-bit arm binaries for Android. These will be required by the Google Play store later this year.

Text input on Android was rewritten again, to fix problems where the user was unable to advance. Completion was eliminated, as it was the source of the problems. While languages that require input methods will need a larger rewrite to function, Ren'Py should now properly handle all direct input keyboards.

Translations

The Ren'Py launcher and sample project have been translated into Turkish by Arda Güler.

The Ren'Py tutorial game has been translated into Spanish by Moshibit.

French, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish translations have been updated for this release.

Other Improvements

The side displayable now renders its children in the order they are provided in the control string.

The say statement, menu statement, and renpy.call_screen statements now take a _mode argument, which specifies the mode Ren'Py goes into when these statements occur.

The renpy.show_screen() and renpy.call_screen() functions now take a zorder argument.

Ren'Py will now play a mono sound file with the same volume as a stereo sound file, rather than sending half the energy to each ear.

The new config.load_failed_label specifies a label that is jumped to when a load fails because Ren'Py can no longer find the current statement. This makes it possible to a game to implement its own recovery mechanism.

The new config.notify variable makes it possible to intercept the notification system and do your own thing.

The interface of config.say_attribute_transition_callback has been changed in an incompatible way, to allow sets of old and new tags to be given.

Action and BarValue now support a get_tooltip method, which allows the object to supply a default tooltip.

Fixes

A problem that could cause Ren'Py to drop certain characters, especially accent markers in Arabic, has been fixed.

The filename of the internal copy of OpenDyslexic has been changed so as not to cause problems with copies distributed with games.

7.2.2

Ren'Py now supports a new Accessibility menu, which can be accessed by pressing the "a" key. This menu, which is intended to be used by players, let's the player override the game font, change the scaling and spacing of text, and enable self-voicing.

Ren'Py will now allow files in the public game directory (/mnt/sdcard/Android/package/files/game) to override those included with the game proper. This has been listed as a feature in 7.2.0, but didn't work right.

Ren'Py will now include temporary image attributes in the say statements generated as part of the translation process.

When uploading to itch.io, Ren'Py now downloads butler itself. This means there is no longer a dependence on the location or structure of the Itch app, as there was before.

The bar values DictValue(), FieldValue(), VariableValue(), and ScreenVariableValue() all take a new action parameter, which gives an action that is performed each time the value changes.

The rollback system has been optimized to reduce the amount of garbage that needs to be collected.

7.2.1

iOS Improvements

Ren'Py will now set the version field for the iOS application when generating a project.

Ren'Py will now look for the files ios-icon.png and ios-launchimage.png, and use them to generate the icon and launch image in the sizes required for iOS.

Other Improvements

The renpy.in_rollback() function returns True when in the rollback that occurs immediately after a load. This makes it possible to use:

python:
    if not renpy.in_rollback():
        renpy.run(ShowMenu('save'))

To display a save menu during an initial playthough, but not during loading or rollback.

config.say_attribute_transition_callback now exists, making it possible to select the transition to use on a per-say-statement basis.

The new RENPY_SEARCHPATH environment variable makes it possible to override config.searchpath on launch.

Fixes

Ren'Py has been audited to make sure that the semantics of == and != match, whenever == was redefined.

There was a fix to problems that might occur when a transform is added to a screen using the add statement.

The way extend processes arguments was changed to ensure that newer arguments take priority over arguments given to the statement being extended.

Ren'Py now properly considers the scope when comparing dynamic images for equality. This fixes an issue that prevented some dynamic images from updating when part of a screen.

A crash when config.save_dump is true on macOS has been fixed.

A crash when config.profile is true has been fixed.

Ren'Py now explicitly asks for text (as opposed to email, password, phone number etc) input on Android when the keyboard is displayed.

An issue has been fixed that prevented roll-forward from working through a menu statement.

Fixes a bug that prevents roll-forward through a menu.

7.2.0

Menu Arguments

Ren'Py now has support for menu arguments. Arguments can be passed to a choice menu as a whole, or to the individual choices within the menu, using the syntax:

menu ("jfk", screen="airport"):

    "Chicago, IL" (200):
        jump chicago_trip

    "Dallas, TX" (150, sale=True):
        jump dallas_trip

    "Hot Springs, AR" (300) if secret_unlocked:
        jump hot_springs_trip

Menu arguments passed to the menu itself become arguments to the screen, except the screen argument which selects the screen, and the nvl argument, which - if present - selects the NVL-mode menu. The arguments to the choices become arguments to the items passed to the menu screen.

Temporary Say Attributes

Ren'Py now supports temporary say attributes. Just like regular say attributes, these are included as part of the say statement. However, these temporary say attributes are reverted once the dialogue has finished. For example, in the script:

show eileen happy

e "I'm happy."

e @ vhappy "I'm really happy!"

e "I'm still happy."

In the first line and last line of dialogues, Eileen is using her happy emotion. The vhappy emotion is shown before the second line of dialogue, and replaced with the previous emotion (happy in this case), before it.

Text

There have been a number of text changes that affect text when a window is scaled to a non-default size:

The text is now aligned on its baseline, rather than at the top of the text. This is relevant when an absolute outline offset is used.
It is now possible to choose how the outline scales when the window is scaled. This is done with the outline_scaling style property.

When positioning a Text object, the yanchor property can be renpy.BASELINE. When it is, the anchor is set to the baseline of the first line of the text.

Statements

The new window auto show and window auto hide statements allow automatic dialogue window management to continue while showing or hiding the dialogue window.

The show screen and hide screen statements now take a with clause, that works the same way it does with show and hide.

The screen language use statement now can take an expression clause, that makes it take an expression rather than a literal screen name. This allows a variable to be used when selecting the screen that is included. See Use for more details.

Changes

The new renpy.is_skipping() function reports if Ren'Py is currently skipping.

The input displayable now takes a new copypaste property, which when true allows copying with ctrl+C and pasting with ctrl+V. This is enabled in the console and launcher.

Preference("display", "window") now avoids creating a window bigger than the screen, and will be selected if the current window size is the maximum window size, if the size selected with gui.init() is bigger than the maximum window size.

Creator defined statements now have a few more lexer methods available, making it possible to to parse arguments, image name components, labels, and delimited python.

The renpy.force_autosave() function takes a new argument, that causes the autosave to block until it completes.

The ctc screen now takes a number of new parameters, if required.

The new im.Blur() image manipulator can blur an image. Thanks to Mal Graty for contributing it.

LayeredImage groups now support a multiple property, which allows multiple attributes in the same group to be displayed at the same time. This is useful because it allows the auto-definition function of a group to be applied to non-conflicting images.

Ren'Py will remain fullscreen when the mouse changes desktops, and will avoid shrinking a maximized window during a reload.

The config.allow_duplicate_labels variable can be defined or set in an init python block to allow duplicate labels to be defined in a game.

The Movie() displayable can now be told not to loop, and displays the associated static image when it stops looping. It also can take an image that is displayed before the movie proper starts.

Android Changes

The downloading of the Android SDK has been updated to fix a change in the provided tools that prevented things from downloading.

An explicit action is now given to the keyboard, to make sure the enter key works.

Ren'Py now uses the Amazon payment APIs when sideloaded onto a device made by Amazon, allowing their payment system to be tested on a dual-store APK.

Ren'Py will now allow files in the public game directory (/mnt/sdcard/Android/package/files/game) to override those included with the game proper.

Fixes

A bug preventing Ren'Py from displaying zero or negative-width characters (such as certain diacritics) has been fixed.

An issue that prevented Ren'Py from updating a displayable that was added to a screen with transform properties has been fixed.

The order of drags within a drag group is now preserved when an interaction restart occurs.

Size-changing properties like xysize now apply to a Drag and not the space it can move around in.

A bug that could cause a transparent, black, or gray line to appear on the bottom line of a screen during a dissolve has been fixed.

A regression in support for imagefonts has been fixed.

Creating a new file from the navigation menu of the launcher now works.

Menu sets now work again.

Ren'Py will no longer crash if an incomparable type is given to Function() and other actions.

A case where rolling forward would fail is now fixed.

A problem that prevented the Steam overlay from showing up on macOS was fixed.

7.1.3

This was a quick re-release of 7.1.2 in order to fix a single bug, which was that a test change had been left in causing config.default_language to be set on initial startup.

7.1.2

Improvements

Ren'Py's screen language now support the inclusion of anonymous ATL transforms. It's now possible to write:

screen hello_title():
    text "Hello.":
        at transform:
            align (0.5, 0.5) alpha 0.0
            linear 0.5 alpha 1.0

The new SetLocalVariable() and ToggleLocalVariable() actions make it possible to set variables inside used screens.

The new config.menu_include_disabled variable determines if menus should include entries disabled by an if clause.

Shift-keybindings (like Shift+I and Shift+R) now work in the Android emulation mode.

Ren'Py now better reports errors in text tags that require a value but are not given one.

The new _version variable indicates the version of the game itself that was used when a new game is first created. This only stores the version at game creation - after that, it's up to the creator to keep it updated.

The Movie() displayable now supports a new mode the color data and alpha mask data are placed side-by-side in the same file. This prevents issues where a main and mask movie could go out of sync.

The FilePageNext() and FilePagePrevious() functions now take arguments that control if the they can bring the player to the auto or quick save pages.

The new config.skip_sounds variables determines if Ren'Py will skip non-looping audio files that are played while Ren'Py is skipping.

Translations

Ren'Py now has the ability to automatically detect the locale of the user's system, and use it to set the language. Please see config.enable_language_autodetect and the Translation documentation for how this works.

The French, German, Korean, Russian, and Simplified Chinese translations have been updated.

Fixes

A Windows-specific bug that caused RTL (the support for languages like Arabic and Hebrew) to corrupt the second half of text strings has been fixed. This should prevent garbage characters from being displayed when rendering those languages.

Ren'Py will now report an error if a game accesses an image that does not exist, but has as a prefix an image that does exist. Before this change, if eileen happy exists and eileen happy unknown was shown, the additional attribute would be ignored.

Lint has been improved to deal with images that take attributes that are not in the image name, like layered images.

Ren'Py generates choice menu images that are suitable for use on the phone.

Android Fixes

As Ren'Py's new Android support only worked well on a 64-bit version of Java 8, we make that 64-bit requirement explicit.

7.1.1

History Fix

This release fixes an issue with Ren'Py's history screen. The problem occurred when a line of dialogue contained a quoted square bracket, so something like:

"I [[think] I'm having a problem."

When this occurs, the string "I [think] I'm having a problem." is added to the history. Ren'Py would then display that in history, substitute the think variable, and crash.

This is fixed by adding substitute False to the history screen. This is done to new projects, but for existing ones you'll need to make the fix yourself. Here's the new history screen:

screen history():

    tag menu

    ## Avoid predicting this screen, as it can be very large.
    predict False

    use game_menu(_("History"), scroll=("vpgrid" if gui.history_height else "viewport"), yinitial=1.0):

        style_prefix "history"

        for h in _history_list:

            window:

                ## This lays things out properly if history_height is None.
                has fixed:
                    yfit True

                if h.who:

                    label h.who:
                        style "history_name"
                        substitute False

                        ## Take the color of the who text from the Character, if set.
                        if "color" in h.who_args:
                            text_color h.who_args["color"]

                $ what = renpy.filter_text_tags(h.what, allow=gui.history_allow_tags)
                text what substitute False

        if not _history_list:
            label _("The dialogue history is empty.")

The new lines are the ones with substitute False on them. You'll want to make this change to your history screen to prevent his problem from happening.

Android Improvements

Ren'Py now sets the amount of memory used by the Android build tool to the Google-set default of 1536 megabytes. To change this, edit rapt/project/gradle.properties. To make sure you're capable of building larger games, please make sure your computer has a 64-bit version of Java 8.

Ren'Py explicitly tells Android to pass the Enter key to an input.

Ren'Py now crops and sizes the icon correctly for versions of Android below Android 8 (Oreo).

Ren'Py gives a different numeric version number to the x86_64 apk. This will allow both x86_64 and armeabi-v7a builds to be uploaded to Google Play and other stores, rather than having to first created one build and then the other, manually changing the version numbers between.

Other Improvements

Ren'Py now handles the (lack of) drawing of zero width characters itself, preventing such characters from appearing as squares in text if the font does not support the zero width character.

Ren'Py supports the use of non-breaking space and zero-width non-breaking space characters to prevent images in text from being wrapped.

Ren'Py supports the a new "nestled-close" value for the ctc_position parameter of Character(). This value prevents there from being a break between the click-to-continue indicator and the other lines.

Drags (in drag-and-drop) now support alternate clicks. (Right clicks on desktop and long-clicks on touch platforms.)

Fixes

The SetVariable() and ToggleVariable() functions have been extended to accept namespaces and fields. So it's now possible to have actions like SetVariable("hero.strength", hero.strength + 1) or ToggleVariable("persistent.alternate_perspective").

Automatic management of the dialogue window (as enabled by the window auto statement) now considers if an in-game menu has a dialogue or caption associated with it, and handles that appropriately.

The source code to the embedded version of fribidi that Ren'Py is expected to build with is now included in the -source archive.

There have been a number of fixes to the voice sustain preference to make it work better with history and the voice replay action.

7.1

Android

This release sees a major rewrite of Ren'Py's support for Android to modernize it. This is required so Ren'Py games can be uploaded to the Google Play store. Some of these changes may require you to update a game's files. Most notably, the format of icons has changed, so the icons will need to be redone.

The minimum version of Android that Ren'Py will run on has been raised to Android 19 (aka 4.4 KitKat), while it targets Android 28 (aka 9 Pie).

The x86_64 architecture has been added, while x86 has been dropped. (Some x86 devices may be able to run the arm platform version through binary translation layers.)

Monologue Mode

It's now possible to write multiple blocks of dialogue or narration at once, using triple-quoted strings. For example:

e """
This is one block of dialogue.

And this is a second block.
"""

will create two blocks of dialogue. See Monologue Mode for more info.

There is also a new {clear} text tag that works with monologue. When the {clear} tag is part of a line by itself, it is the equivalent of the nvl clear statement. See NVL Monlologue Mode for more about this.

Say-With-Attribute Change

There has been a change to the way a say-with-attributes is handled when there is not an image with the tag displaying. Previously, Ren'Py would use the attributes given in the most recent say-with-attributes statement to selected the side image to show.

Now, Ren'Py will use the provided attributes and existing attributes to resolve the side image. This makes a say-with-attributes that occurs when an image is not showing work the same way as when it is. When the attributes do not select a single side image, Ren'Py will select the image with all of the given attributes, and the most possible of the existing attributes.

The rationale for this change is to help with side images that are defined as layered images, where providing only the attributes that change makes sense.

Updater Changes

The updater for Ren'Py itself now asks you to select the update channel each time you go to update. The purpose of this is to make it clear which channel you're updating to each time you update, so you don't accidentally update to a prerelease or nightly version after a release comes out.

As part of this, you might see the Prerelease channel missing for some updates. That's normal – unlike in previous versions, the channel only appears when there are prereleases available.

Translations

The Ren'Py launcher, template game, and The Question have been translated into the Latin script of Malay by Muhammad Nur Hidayat Yasuyoshi.

The Korean translation has been significantly updated.

It is now possible to translate the strings used by RAPT into non-English languages.

Other

Ren'Py can now automatically save the game upon quit, in a reliable fashion. (As compared to the previous autosave, which could fail or be cycled out.) This is controlled by the _quit_slot variable.

File actions (like FileSave(), FileLoad(), and FileAction()) can now take a slot=True argument. When this is given, the action loads a named slot, without involving the page.

The developer menu (accessed through Shift+D) can now display a screen that shows the attributes associated with displayed and hidden images.

Added renpy.transform_text(), a function to transform text without touching text tags or interpolation.

Buttons created using the make_buttons method of a Gallery object now inherit from the empty style, and not button. This prevents properties from the button style from causing problems.

The code to finish displaying text is now called from the event method, as if the mouse button was clicked. This helps prevent interaction ends when menus are up.

Displayable prefixes are supported when evaluating auto images in imagebuttons and image maps.

A bug that caused an error in an NVL-mode statement if the next statement was an NVL-mode statement with an undefined character name has been fixed.

When two ATL transforms are nested, the state from both is propagated, not just the outermost.

Ren'Py now updates dynamic images that are used in windows, bars, and frames. (And derived displayables, like buttons and imagemaps.)

An issue that caused Ren'Py to consume 100% of a core when modal True was given has been fixed.

Ren'Py now includes a copy of fribidi, rather than requiring an OS-installed version.

The new box_wrap_spacing allows control of the spacing between rows or columns introduced by box_wrap.

The adjust_spacing style property can now take "horizontal" and "vertical" as values, causing text spacing to be adjusted in only the specified direction.

LayerdImageProxy can now take an interpolated string.

The new config.context_callback is called when starting the game or entering a new context, like a menu context. It can be used to stop voice or sounds from playing when entering that context.

The Drag() displayable (and the screen language equivalent, drag) have grown a new activated property. This is callback that is called when the user first clicks the mouse on a drag. (Before it starts moving.)

7.0

Ren'Py 7.0 marks the completion of over a decade of development since Ren'Py 6 that brought features like ATL, Screen Language, OpenGL and DirectX acceleration, support for the Android and iOS platforms, Translation, Accessibility, and so much more.

For releases between 6.0 and 7.0, see the other entries in this changelog, and the older changelog on the Ren'Py website. The rest of this entry contains the differences between 7.0 and 6.99.14.3.

Layered Images

A layered image is a new way of defining images for use in Ren'Py. It's intended to be used with a sprite that has been created in Photoshop or some other program as a series of layers. The layered image system can use the attributes the image was displayed with and Python conditions to determine what layers to display.

Layered images are intended to be a replacement for the use of Composite() and ConditionSwitch() to define layered images. It includes a language that makes defining such images simpler, and Ren'Py can generate portions of the definitions from appropriately named files. It also integrates better with the rest of Ren'Py, as attributes can be predicted in ways that a ConditionSwitch cannot, and layered images work with the interactive director.

Dict Transitions

Dict Transitions makes it possible to use the with statement and certain other functions to apply transitions to one or more layers. Ren'Py will not pause for these transitions to occur. Dict transitions make it possible – and even convenient – to have a transition apply to the sprites alone while dialogue is being displayed.

Changes

The old tutorial and old templates are no longer included with Ren'Py. They can still be used with new version of Ren'Py if copied into this or later versions.

The new Scroll() action makes it possible to have buttons that change the position of a viewport or the value of a bar.

The Dissolve(), ImageDissolve(), and AlphaDissolve() transitions now respect the alpha channels of their source displayables, as if given the alpha=True argument. As omitting the alpha channel is no longer an optimization, this change allows the same transitions to be used in more places.

Automatic image definitions now take place at init level 0, rather than an init level of greater than 999. This allows renpy.has_image() to be used in init blocks.

The interactive director now has a button that allows you to choose if it is displayed at the top or the bottom of the screen.

The screen language for statement now takes an index clause:

for i index i.name in party:
    ...

When provided, it should return a unique value that can map information like button and transform state to the object it originates from.

There is now alternate ruby text, allowing two kinds of ruby text to be displayed at once (such as a translation and pronunciation guide).

The new displayable prefix system make it possible to define your own displayables that can be accessed using strings, the same way that images, image files, and solids have a string form.

Ren'Py now supports creating .zip files that have single files (such as .rpa files) that are larger than 2GB. As this requires the use of the Zip64 standard, unpacking such files may not be supported on some platforms, most notably Windows XP.

The new renpy.get_hidden_tags() function returns the set of tags that have attributes but or otherwise hidden, while the renpy.get_showing_tags() function can return a list of tags in sorted order.

Showing a movie sprite a second time will now replay the movie from the start, for consistency with ATL and other animations.

The documentation has received an editing pass, courtesy of Craig P. Donson.

Translations

The Ren'Py tutorial and The Question now have French translations, thanks to Alexandre Tranchant.

The Japanese and Russian translations have been updated.

Fixes

This fixes a regression that prevented screens from handling the hide or replaced events when the screen was not being shown. (This might be the case when the player is skipping through the game.)

An issue that caused the interactive director to be translated into Russian when the default (English) language was being used has been fixed.

The Composite(), Crop() and Tile() displayables are now actually available under their new names.

An issue that could cause Ren'Py to roll back to an incorrect place when accessing the console has been fixed. This could cause the console to display incorrect data, while in the console itself.

Older Changelogs

The changelogs for some Ren'Py 6 versions can be found here, with older changelogs being found at:

https://www.renpy.org/dl/6.10.2/CHANGELOG.txt

Changelog (Ren'Py 7.x-)

8.4.0

Requirement and Dependency Changes

Features

Other Changes

8.3.4 / 7.8.4

Fixes

Other Changes

8.3.3 / 7.8.3

Fixes

Other Changes

8.3.2 / 7.8.2

Fixes

8.3.1 / 7.8.1

Fixes

Other Changes

8.3.0 / 7.8.0

Audio Filters

Text Shaders

Other Shader Changes

Visual Studio Code

Launcher Changes

Window Statement Changes

Screenshots and Paper Dolls

Steam

Android

Features

Other Changes

8.2.3 / 7.7.3

8.2.2 / 7.7.2

Accessibility

NVL-Mode and Window

Fixes

Other

8.2.1 / 7.7.1

Text

Updater

Live2D

Fetch

Other Changes

Other Fixes

8.2.0 / 7.7.0

Harfbuzz Integration

Emoji-Related Text Improvements

Variable Fonts

Font Hinting

Text Interpolation Improvements

Speech Bubble Improvements

Position types and ATL interpolation

Developer Tools

Data Actions

HTTPS/HTTP Fetch

Accessibility

__future__ in python

Translation Improvements

Scene, Show, and Hide Transition

Android

Web

Updater

Translations

Features

Launcher Changes

Other Changes

8.1.3 / 7.6.3

Changes

Fixes

8.1.2 / 7.6.2

Changes

Fixes

8.1.1 / 7.6.1

Android

Fixes

Other Changes

8.1 / 7.6

Documentation Improvements and Fixes

Ren'Py Sync

Speech Bubble Dialogue

Platform Improvements

Web

Macintosh

future in python