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About

I'm working on porting the Ren'Py framework to the HTML5 web browser - so you can publish 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 game.zip as explained below.
(this is purely local to your browser, nothing is sent to us)

Download

To publish your game:
(will be integrated with the Ren'Py launcher eventually)

• Get renpyweb-7.1.3.1092-20181202.zip and extract it somewhere in your disk
• Take the game/ directory from a game Distribution generated by Ren'Py 7.1.3 and prepare it: remove unnecessary files, customize game/presplash.png, and at this point I recommend you remove music and videos.
• Take the renpy/common/ directory from the same game Distribution (optionally only keep the .rpyc and .rpymc files). This is necessary to optimize the game start-up.
• Zip the game/ and renpy/common/ directories in a game.zip archive (only game/ and renpy/common/, not lib/, renpy.exe, etc.). You game.zip should contain 2 top-level directories game/ and renpy/.
• Add this game.zip (without extracting it) in the RenPyWeb directory.
• If your web host supports gzip compression, compress all the large individual files, e.g. compress index.wasm to index.wasm.gz.
• 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...).
• Note: all the game is downloaded before the game starts, but background download of images/sounds is in the roadmap.
• Give feedback!

Examples:
beuc.itch.io/the-question-web
You can also include more than one game and select them using ?game=xxx.zip
renpy.beuc.net/play/?game=the_question.zip
renpy.beuc.net/play/?game=tutorial.zip
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 (lower perfs / threadless for now)
• Run unmodified Ren'Py games
• WebAssembly support for Firefox (+fall-back to asm.js for other/older browsers)
• WebAssembly support for Chrome/Chromium
• Download resources in background / on-demand (e.g. images and musics; currently RenPyWeb requires downloading the whole game on startup)
• Alternate port with experimental browser features (SharedArrayBuffer and threading) so as to get greater 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.
• Sound support
• Fix music not looping until new interaction
• Video/movie support
• WebP image support
• Fix image prediction
• Fix auto-save
• Fix opening web links
• Test and improve compatibility with popular game hosts (on-going)
• Fallback HTTP compression when gzip is broken (e.g. itch.io) (not LZ4 for file packages, but gzip fallback for .wasm/.js)
• More responsive game loading
• Splash screen
• Don't unnecessarily recompile/rebuild cache on start-up (very long)
• Optimize memory usage if possible (in particular for mobile) (on-going)
• Load game from an URL
• Load your own game locally
• Deal with preferred/max screen size (e.g. 1080p game running in smaller browser window)
• Define Screen variants (phone, small/medium/large...); add "web" variant?
• Design full-window game area with overlays for status/errors (rather than top/side bars)
• Fix full-screen toggle which goes wrong sometimes
• Fix 1 touch = 2 clicks on mobile
• Fix Chromium crash with large (>= 108MB) files
• Quit game cleanly (no error; kill sound)
• Clearer error messages (in particular for mobile where there's no JavaScript console)
• Clearer error when loading a full ren'py game
• Import/export savegames, screenshots, log.txt
• Upgrade Ren'Py 7.0 -> 7.1.3
• Report and fix Emscripten bugs (ongoing)
• Make all changes generic (clean-up) and merge them to Pygame_SDL2 and Ren'Py (ongoing)

Status reports

2018 week 49 (2018-12-09)

• Bug reporting fest:
  • Ren'Py: suggest alleviating screen size constraints esp. for mobile platforms #1661
  • Ren'Py: fix for static modules #1660
  • Ren'Py: minor lint #1662
  • SDL2: fix for duplicate touch events accepted at last #64
  • Emscripten: investigated and reproduced Chromium crash report with large (>110MB) files #7630
  • Emscripten: suggest fix for the itch.io keyword bug #7631
• Upgrade to Emscripten 1.38.21

2018 week 48 (2018-12-02)

• Improved design:
  • The game now adapts to the screen size
    (from large desktops to medium laptops to tiny mobile phones)
  • Cleaner status messages that auto-hide
    All screen space for the game :)
    I plan to add a square drop-down menu at the top-left to import/export savegames and logs in the future, let me know if you've got other design ideas.
• Screenshots: typing 's' now automatically prompts a screenshot download!
• Fixed "The_Question" demo whose latest updates uses fonts from the Ren'Py launcher #1656
• Technology (SDL2) bug fixes:
  • convincing the maintainer some more about duplicate events ;) #64
  • fix issue when exiting fullscreen with the Escape key #65
  • tracking down issue with resizing the screen #66

2018 week 47 (2018-11-25)

• Bug fixes and clean-ups:
  • Fix duplicate click events on touch devices; SDL2 bug #64
  • Fix fatal error when attempting to open a local URL (such as Help/README.html in old-style VNs)
  • Disable memory growth on asmjs target to avoid performance drop
  • Non-RenPyWeb: better error handling in RAPT #20
  • Separate and rename Python/Ren'Py archives for clarity; further optimize (trim) them
• Upgrade to Ren'Py 7.1.3.1092
• (Unconclusive) experiments with taming the popup blocker and with the Chrome audio stutter :/
• Experiment with faster, threads-based, alternate port: new browsers are becoming ready for it, but a lot of work is still needed in the lower-level Emscripten project.
  I would need your support to progress on this faster port.

2018 week 46 (2018-11-18)

• Optimized start-up time by avoiding recompiling Python snippets from .rpyc files; you need to ship renpy/common/ in your game.zip file to leverage this (discussion at #1647). RenPyWeb now can run unmodified renpy/common/ files. Also the browser is more responsive during game loading.
• Better mobile support by optimizing memory on start-up (Firefox 63 runs reasonably well).
• Quit the game cleanly: no crash, and stop audio #1639; also found a bug in Ren'Py in the process #1642
• More code clean-up; optimized out unnecessary libraries SDL2_mixer and SDL2_ttf.
• SDL2: patch audio issue #4176 #63
• Emscripten: clarified cryptic error message in Emscripten and improved documentation #7516 #7523 #7524 #7526; reported bug when using pristine SDL2 #7525; upgraded to 1.38.17.
• Clarified Roadmap - feedback welcome.

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 :)