renpy/CHANGELOG.txt

New in 4.4.2
------------

Improved the configurability of the say and menu statements, also
changing the way they work. Say statements without a speaker specified
are routed through the narrator character, while all menu statements
are routed through the menu function. Customizing these functions can
customize how Ren'Py interacts with the user, making it a much more
flexible engine.

As part of this, we changed the way character objects work. They are
now called directly to display dialogue, rather than having the say
method called on them.

If your game uses variables named "narrator" or "menu", you will need
to rename them.

Changed the way spaces are handled by the text widget. Specifically,
they are no longer merged, so it's possible to include spaces in
dialogue and thoughts. Please note that the parser still merges
adjacent spaces, unless you escape them with a backslash.

Added a new widget, ui.sizer, that can shrink the amount of space
allocated to its child.

Added two new text properties, first_indent and rest_indent. These
properties control how many pixels of indentation to put before each
line of text. 

Added a function, color, that can translate a hex triple or quadruple
into a Ren'Py color.

New in 4.4.1
------------

4.4.1 is being released to test some sound fixes, and so it isn't
really isn't that complete or well-tested.

Fixed some longstanding bugs with midi music on Windows. First of all,
we now ship with the 1.2.6 version of SDL_mixer, which fixes a bug in
1.2.5. That bug caused panning to go to the hard left. We also try to
read the windows midi device volumes, and set our volume to match the
first one we can read. This should prevent really loud midi music from
happening.

Also, increased the size of the sound buffer to 4096 samples, to
prevent skipping.

Some new features:

Now, adding interact=False to a Character object will prevent an
interaction from occuring.

Implemented functions to get the amount of time elapsed during the
game, renpy.clear_game_runtime() and renpy.get_game_runtime(). 


New in 4.4
----------

Added a number of features to allow Ren'Py to support statistics-based
dating simulations. The first is a new ui.bar() widget, which allows
the display of a bar graph. The demo has been enhanced to include a
stats and schedule screen, to show how this could be used. You can get
to it by asking how to write your own games in the demo, or you can
follow the below link to get a screenshot.

[url]http://www.bishoujo.us/hosted/screenshot.jpg[/url]

Another feature that has been added were 'jump expression' and 'call
expression' statements, allowing computed jumps and calls. Together
with an imporoved scheduler and yet-to-be written event dispatcher,
this provides the foundation for SBDSes. 

Now, setting a property on a style also sets the hover_ and idle_
variants of that property. This makes changing a property of an
inherited style a bit saner. In addition, hover now propagates to all
children of a button. This means that hover will now work with the
styles in the file chooser.

Added support for layering images. This support (invoked by passing a
tuple as an image filename) allows a single image to be constructed
from multiple image files, saving disk space while still keeping
performance.

Improved skipping. Now, along with control causing skipping of seen
dialogue, TAB toggles skip mode. An indicator displays to let you know
that skip mode is enabled. Finally, if a game author wants to disable
skipping, he can set config.allow_skipping to false. 

(The following were also in 4.3.2, which was a private release to
test the fixes for UTF-8 support.)

There were two bugs with UTF-8 support. The first was that we didn't
understand the byte-order mark, and choked on the syntax error. The
second was that the error-reporting code wasn't passing unicode errors
through properly, so one couldn't even see the real error. Both are
now fixed.

Improved the reporting of errors that occur during script loading and
interpreter initialization by no longer giving a line number when none
is appropriate.

Ren'Py now uses the name of the executable to choose the directory to
read the script from. It does this by looking at the name of the
executable that was used to run Ren'Py. It strips off the extension,
and anything preceding the first underscore in the name, if such a
thing exists. It then looks to see if that directory exists, and if it
does, uses it. For example, if the program is named "run_en.exe", the
"en" directory is used, while if the program is named "homestay.exe",
the directory "homestay" is used.

The config variable config.searchpath is a list of directory that are
searched for image files and other media (but not scripts, since all
scripts are loaded before the variable can be set). This allows
multiple game directories to share images, music, and other data files.

Once again, I redid the file chooser and default styles. The new file
chooser displays 10 entries in two columns, with each entry being
shown with an image. The files are now orginized into numbered slots,
and it's possible to save in a slot without saving in all previous
slots. There were also some changes to the non-user-visible parts of
loading and saving.

Speed Enhancements:

We now precompile python blocks in Ren'Py scripts, and store the
compiled code in the .rpyc files. This makes loading an unmodified
script significantly faster. On my system, this more than halved the
time it took for the demo script to load. On the dowside, when a
script is changed, it now can take somewhat longer for it to begin
running, as all the changed code needs to be recompiled. Overall,
it's a win, provided you ship the .rpyc files to your users.

Did another round of profiling, and found that styles were
significanly slowing the system down. So I rewrote them to be much
faster. This change shouldn't be user-visible, except that your game
will feel a bit peppier.

Added a 1-entry cache for solid fill surfaces. If your game uses them,
this might make it go faster. 

New in 4.3.1
------------

New, but undocumented, in 4.3 was the console.exe windows binary. This
is a windows executable that opens a windows console. This could be
useful if one wants to have a script that prints debugging information
to standard output, as in:

[code]
$ a = 1
$ print "a =", a
[/code]

There is now a new style property, enable_hover. This must be set to
True for a widget to respond to hovering by changing its
style. However, if it's set to False, no style change/redraw occurs,
making Ren'Py snappier. It defaults to True.

Ren'Py is now built with psyco, the python specializing compiler. This
makes program startup a bit slower, but in return the running time
once it's loaded should be faster.

A new config variable, config.window_icon, allows the user to specify
an image file to use for the window icon. Counterintuitively, this
should probably be a PNG, as the ICO format is not supported by the
SDL_image library.

Game menu navigations and preference buttons now have their own
styles, allowing their look to be customized.

A bug that prevented the reloading of persistent data on windows has
been fixed.

New in 4.3
----------

Now, when the library first starts up, it tries calling the
"splashscreen" label, if it exists. The splashscreen will not be
called in the case of a full reset (known to the user as a return to
the main menu).

Added a new text property, antialias, that controls the antialiasing
of text. Also made the font property optionally take a comma-separated
list of font names, which are searched for in the 

Added a new class, DynamicCharacter, which is now the preferred way of
having a character with a changable and/or user-input name.

A new random number generator has been implemented as
renpy.random. This random number generator cooperates with rollback,
always producing the same random numbers when a rollback occurs.

Added a set of UI functions, that allow the user to build up a user
interface themselves. These could be useful when implementing more
complex games, such as those that require the user to schedule a day
in advance. Also new is a new imagebutton, a button consisting of two
images.

Sticky postions have been implemented. Enabling this (using the
variable config.sticky_positions) cause the at clause corresponding to
a given character to be remembered, allowing the character to change
emotion without changing places on the screen (or requiring a second
at clause).

Rewrote the implementation of preferences, to clean up the code. Moved
it into its own file, preferences.rpy. Also, made it possible for a
user to add his own preferences into the system, although that isn't
really recommended.

The various imagemap functions now have a new parameter, unselected,
which gives an image to use when a hotspot is present but not
hovered. This lets us distinguish between between hotspots that are
present and exist, and hotspots that are totally absent. This could be
used to implement something like an image gallery that only displays
unlocked images.

Implemented config.keymap, which allows the changing of keys and mouse
buttons that trigger various Ren'Py events.

There's now a new look for loading and saving games, that allows 10
saves to be presented at once. I strongly recommend removing the 
library.file_page_length line at the start of your game scripts, if
it exists.

Fixed a bug in sound.init that lead to crashes in some cases.

Fixed a bug in ast.Node.predict that was causing an exception when
config.debug was turned on.

New in 4.2
----------

Ren'Py now ships with a common directory that is used to store the
library files, as well as the files needed by a minimal game. (Such as
a default font.) The idea here is to allow one to copy a game
directory from one version of Ren'Py to another, and have it just
work.

One can upgrade from 4.1 to 4.2 by deleting script.rpy, script.rpyc,
library.rpy, and library.rpyc, and then copying in the game
directory. 

We've also eliminated the default background images. To go back to the
images used with Ren'Py 4.1, add the following lines to your script,
and copy the images out of the 4.1 distribution, or your 4.1 based
game. 

[code]
init:
    $ style.mm_root_window.background = Image("mainmenu.jpg")
    $ style.gm_root_window.background = Image("gamemenu.jpg")
    $ style.window.background = Frame("frame.png", 125, 25)
[/code]

Fixed several bugs with the archiver. This version just might actually
work on Windows. 

Added a new variable, config.hard_rollback_limit, which limits the
number of steps the user can rollback the game, interactively. This
limit now defaults to 10 steps. (suggested by Grey) 

Added a second parameter to renpy.pause, that allows us to pause until
a particular offset in the background music is reached. (suggested by
Alessio)

Added keyboard mouse controls that can be used to move the mouse
around on the game and main menus. This allows us to manipulate the 
game and main menus without having to touch the mouse. This is mostly
for completeness. (suggested by Alessio)

Changed the way in which overlays work. We now have the variable
config.overlay_functions, which contains a list of functions, each of
which returns a list of displayables that will be added to the
screen. (sorta-kinda suggested by Alessio)

Removed renpy.set_overlay, since config.overlay_functions is a more 
flexible way of doing the same thing.

Now, defining the label main_menu allows you to totally replace the
main menu with something of your own devising. Changed the
documentation to reflect this, as well as the changes in startup that
happened in 4.1.

Added a program called "add_from", which adds from clauses to all bare
call statements found in the program. 

Replaced the menu_selected and menu_unselected styles with a single
menu_choice style which participates in the hover protocol. This may
change user code, if you change the menu colors. To fix this, replace
style.menu_selected.color with style.menu_choice.hover_color, and 
style.menu_unselected.color with style.menu_choice.idle_color.

Added the ability to play sound effects, by calling the renpy.play
function. Added a preference that allows the user to control if 
sound effects are played or not.

Added sound styles, which are used to define the sounds that are
played when buttons, imagemaps, and menu choices are hovered and
activated. (By default, no such sounds are played.)

Implemented that annoying thing where text is typed on the screen one
character at a time. Also added a preference that allows the user to
disable it. Used all the restraint I could muster to avoid defaulting
that preference to off.

Added the ability to fade out music when changing music
tracks. This is controlled by the config.fade_music variable.
(suggested by Alessio) 

Added parameterized images, and the ability to show text as image
using a command like:

[code]
show text "American Bishoujo Presents..."
[/code]

Added a Move function, which can be used in at to allow an image to be
moved on the screen. This is best used when the image is smaller than
the screen. (suggested by Alessio)

Changed the format of archive files, to make them somewhat harder to
reverse-engineer. This requires the user to regenerate the archive
files. To make this easier, we now ship a batch file (called
archive_images.bat) that automatically archives the images found in
the game directory.

Added a new function renpy.wait that is equivalent to the wait
statement, and made it and renpy.pause return True if they are
interrupted, or False if the run to their natural completions. This
now makes it possible to jump somewhere else when the user click,
rather than blindly going to the next label. For example:

[code]
# Actually, this runs before the library main menu.
label main_menu:
    scene black

    show text "American Bishoujo\nPresents" \
         at Move((0.5, 0.0), (0.5, 0.5), 3.0,
                 xanchor='center', yanchor='bottom')

    if renpy.pause(6):
        jump _library_main_menu

    show text "A PyTom Game" at Position(xpos=0.5, ypos=0.5,
                                         xanchor="center", yanchor="bottom")

    if renpy.with(fade) or renpy.pause(4):
        jump _library_main_menu

    $ renpy.transition(fade)
    jump _library_main_menu
[code]



Updated renpy-mode.el to add imenu support, so (X)Emacs users can use
the speedbar to jump around in a script. If you don't know what this
means, you probably don't care.

Improved the comments in the demo script, to make it a better
example. Added a syntax-highlighted version of the demo script to the
tutorial, to make it easier on peoples eyes.



New in 4.1
----------

Added the ability to customize the main menu by giving a list of
buttons on the main menu and the labels that they jump the user to.

Added the ability to center-click to hide any displayed text or menus.

Added the ability to have a color mouse that we can move around the
screen. 

Added a persistent object, which has fields that are persistent across
games. Made the preferences part of this object, so that they are
persisted across sessions. For simplicity's sake, made seen_ever part
of that persistent object.

Added a special character called "centered", which causes the text it
displays to be centered in the screen without any window. Added two
new styles (centered_window and centered_text), which are used for
this, and a new property, textalign, which controls the horizontal
alignment of text within the Text object itself.

Keywords are now special in all contexts. So you can no longer include
keywords in image names. Sorry.

Improved parse error messages. They now include the text of the
line and a caret indication the location in the line where the parse
error occurred.

Added a with clause to say statements and menus. This lets one display
dialogue, thoughts, or menus using a transition. In conjunction with
this, changed a bit the semantics of with statements, and with clauses
on show, hide, and scene statements. Rewrote the section on
transitions in the documentation to reflect the new reality.

Added the ability to translate the text of the game menu. Together
with the ability to change the main menu, this makes Ren'Py fully
localizable, except for error messages. Check out the Localization
section in the tutorial for more details.

Added confirmations for quitting and overwriting a save game. This
also includes quitting by trying to close the window.

Added a preferences screen, which lets users change the Ren'Py
preferences. Right now, this includes Windowed/Fullscreen, Music
Enabled/Disabled, CTRL Skips Unread/All messages, and Transitions
controls which transitions are performed.

Added a Pan function which can be used in an at clause. This allows us
to pan over a background image.