About
I'm working on porting the Ren'Py framework to the web browser - so you can play Visual Novel games online :)
Donate and help the development go faster!
Test the current version
(start-up be long, let it load for a minute)
(Shitf+O for dev console, F3 for perfs)
Or test your own local game: provide a .zip containing a game/ folder
(this is purely local to your browser, nothing is sent to us)
Download
To publish your game:
- Get renpyweb-20181112.zip and extract it somewhere in your disk
- Take the game/ directory from a game Distribution generated by Ren'Py and prepare it: remove unnecessary files, customize game/presplash.png...
- If your web host supports gzip compression, compress all the large individual files, e.g. compress index.wasm to index.wasm.gz
- Zip this game/ directory in a game.zip archive (only game/, not lib, renpy.exe, etc.)
- Add the game.zip (without extracting it) in the RenPyWeb directory
- Publish the RenPyWeb directory to your favorite web host (can be a plain HTTP directory, like this website, or gaming hosts such as itch.io, newgrounds...)
- Give feedback!
Examples:
https://beuc.itch.io/the-question-web.
You can also include more than one game and select them using ?game=xxx.zip
https://renpy.beuc.net/play/?game=the_question.zip
https://renpy.beuc.net/play/?game=tutorial.zip
https://renpy.beuc.net/play/?game=https://somewhere.net/game.zip
Testing locally: with Firefox, just double-click on index.html. With Chromium, you need a local webserver; python3 -m http.server 8080 in the RenPyWeb directory, or install XAMPP.
Feedback
Feedback welcome!
Patreon -
e-mail -
Lemma Soft Forums -
itch.io
Roadmap
(in no definite order)
- Python port for the browser, with Cython support
- Size-optimized minimal Python environment
- Pygame_SDL2 basic port for the browser
- Reconcile asynchronous browser execution with Ren'Py synchronous model (with lower perfs for now)
- Report and fix Emscripten bugs (ongoing)
- Run unmodified Ren'Py games
- WebAssembly support for Firefox (+fall-back to asm.js for other/older browsers)
- WebAssembly support for Chrome/Chromium
- Initial sound support
- Load game from an URL
- Load your own game locally
- Fix freezes (rollback + music change?)
- Fix music not looping until new interaction
- Fix image prediction
- Fix auto-save
- Fix opening web links
- Fix keyboard focus on itch.io
- More responsive game loading (on-going); splash screen
- On-demand resource download (currently requires downloading the whole game on startup)
- Alternate port with
experimental browser features (SharedArrayBuffer and threading)
so as to get great performances, and to be ready when those
feature become default in browsers.
This is the only fix I currently know to sound performances. This requires improving emscriptem too. - Optimize memory usage if possible (in particular for mobile)
- WebP image support
- Define Screen variants (phone, small/medium/large...); add "web" variant?
- Fallback compression when gzip is broken (e.g. itch.io) (not LZ4 for file packages, but gzip fallback for .wasm/.js)
- Video/movie support
- Quit game cleanly (no error; kill sound)
- Don't unnecessarily recompile/rebuild cache on start-up (very long)
- Clearer error messages (in particular for mobile where there's no JavaScript console)
- Clearer error when loading a full ren'py game (no /game: done; thread/subprocess import error in unpatched common/00updater.rpy: to do)
- Import/export savegames
- Deal with preferred/max screen size (e.g. 1080p game running in smaller browser window)
- Fix-up full-screen toggle which goes wrong sometimes
- Design full-window game area with overlays for status/errors (rather than top/side bars)
- WebP image support
- Game restart crashes with debug builds (unclean emterpreter stack?)
- Upgrade Ren'Py 7.0 -> 7.1.1
- Make all changes generic (clean-up) and merge them to Pygame_SDL2 and Ren'Py (ongoing)
Status reports
2018 week 45 (2018-11-11)
- Downloadable version for game developers with instructions
- Fixed itch.io integration issues:
- fix issues with lost keyboard focus
- automatically download and play game.zip if no game is given in URL (instead of displaying the "Open local Game" button)
- only one index.html file otherwise itch.io selects the slower asmjs fallback by default
- smaller uploads: the asmjs/ fallback now can use the same game files (instead of requiring duplicates or .zip-unfriendly symlinks)
- updated https://beuc.itch.io/the-question-web accordingly
- Pushed 2 more patches to standard Ren'Py (#1631, #1632)
- Not web-related but I made a couple fixes to the French translation (#11624, #1625, #1630) and reported a minor info-leak (#1628)
2018 week 44 (2018-11-04)
- WebP image support
- More detailed/clearer error messages
- Autosave fixed
- More testing (resulting in more entries in the roadmap ;))
- More Python-Emscripten integration (technically: emscripten.async_call with argument)
- Upgraded Emscripten to 1.38.16
2018 week 43 (2018-10-29)
- Updated RenPyWeb logo to mention RenPyWeb works on MS Edge
- Updated to Ren'Py 7.1.1
- Started structuring patch sets
- Sent a few patches for consideration to Ren'Py and Pygame_SDL2 (1 2 3)
- Started separating Python-related effort to python-emscripten
2018 week 42 (2018-10-21)
- Presplash image (doc)
- Image prediction now working
- Open web links in a new tab (you'll get a popup warning though, I don't think that can be bypassed)
- emscripten: now can query current WebGL attributes (notably alpha/transparency): #7243, commit
- Audio optimization tests. My current opinion is we'll need multithreading support to get better perfs; this requires me to contribute more with the Emscripten project (see multithreading label) as well as incoming support in the browsers (more precisely "SharedArrayBuffer" - Chrome starts enabling it but it doesn't work for me yet, and in Firefox you can enable it with a few clicks).
- SharedArrayBuffer experiments
2018 week 41 (2018-10-14)
- Improve performances (WASM support) for Chrome/Chromium
- Contribute transparency (alpha) fix in official Emscripten #7227/#7242
- Start structuring the compilation process to test multiple emscripten versions/patches
2018 week 40 (2018-10-07)
- Better performance for Firefox (not Chrome due to WebAssembly size limitations)
- Initial sound support
- Load your own game locally! (provide a .zip containing a game/ folder)
- Load game from an URL: The Question Tutorial
2018 week 39 (2018-09-30)
- The base engine works with Firefox; it works with Chromium too though it required some performances compromise
- Sound is currently disabled (working on it)
- Game was not modified, just repacked. Ren'Py however was butchered a little bit ;)
- Game must be entirely downloaded first
- Game performances were improved enough for playability. Better performances are possible but require more work
- itch.io downloads are way larger than here due to long-standing compression issues (#394); work-arounds could be implemented with some work
- Official Python 2.7 ported for the web, but without threads
- Some fixes were included in Emscripten though not all yet
Before
- A hell lot of experiments :)