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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 (7.3.0.155 / 2019-05-26)

(start-up may be long, let it load for half a minute)

(Shitf+O for dev console, F3 for perfs)

Download

RenPyWeb is now integrated in the official Ren'Py launcher (development version)!
Can you fetch it at nightly.renpy.org/current/. Leave feedback!

Development: contributions much welcome. Check the official Ren'Py repository at:
github.com/renpy/renpyweb

Plug: I also develop the Ren'Py Translator ToolKit for PO files - give it a try :)

For the stable versio of Ren'Py (7.2.2), there's a also separate devkit without Launcher integration:

• Get renpyweb-7.2.2.491-20190429.zip and extract it somewhere in your disk
• Take the game/ directory from a game Distribution generated by Ren'Py 7.2.2 and prepare it: remove unnecessary files, customize web-presplash.png, see the Size section below.
• 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.). Your game.zip should contain 2 top-level directories game/ and renpy/. Example game.zip.
• Add this game.zip (without extracting it) in the RenPyWeb directory.
• Optional: if your web host supports gzip compression, compress all the large individual files, e.g. compress pyapp.data to pyadd.data.gz (but don't (re)compress .zip and .gz files).
• 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...).

Examples:
beuc.itch.io/the-question-web
newgrounds.com/portal/view/729314
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-else.net/game.zip is blocked so a user cannot be tricked into running a malicious game)

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.

Games

Here are a few public games that use RenPyWeb.

This list of games is not curated, use at your own risk.

• Little Mauve Riding Hood: self-hosting
• National Civil Defence Cadet Corps (NCDCC): itch.io
• Planet Stronghold [demo]: newgrounds
• Les libératrices du code [intro, french]: github
• ALLBLACK Ch.1/2/3: itch.io
• Ren'Py/HTML5 games at itch.io
• NSFW / Adult games (click to unhide if you're 18+)

Let me know if you made a web version of your game :)

F.A.Q

RenPyWeb's goal is to run your game without additional work. However the web is a very different environment so here are a couple things to know.

Size: RenPyWeb currently needs to download the full game before playing, so you'll need to optimize your game if you want your players to be patient enough to play it (100-150MB tops)!
I'm thinking of download and cache strategies that will help with that (see roadmap). But even then this is the web, things need to be lighter.
Solutions include: using layered images, making a lower-res or lossy/jpg version, use the .webp image format, dropping (some) audio, drop videos (not supported yet), splitting in chapters, etc.
Note on Python environment: the RenPyWeb Python environment is minimal for size reasons. You may ship additional Python modules in your Ren'Py game. Alternatively you can try placing additional .pyo files (e.g. from your Ren'Py SDK) in /lib/python2.7 in your game.zip.

Savegame: user savegames are linked to the webpage domain.
Ideally, provide a stable (sub)domain - like this page.
Some hosts may change your domain on new upload, causing previous savegames to become unreachable.
In addition, a game can read/modify savegames from other games hosted at the same domain. Ren'Py will ignore them, but a malicous game developer could do bad things.
For itch.io (hosts at XXX.ssl.hwcdn.net, previously at commondatastorage.googleapis.com) it's not clear how often the domain may change: see How to save data? and HTML5 game : Save data locally.
For newgrounds all games are hosted at uploads.ungrounded.net so other games could read your player's data. NG passes the user identity and session as querystring, though that only helps for logged-in users.
Last, if the user blocked 3rd-party cookies (by default in Debian Chromium) and running the game in a iframe (most web game hosts), savegames are lost on reload (discuss).
In doubt, remind players to export their savegames from RenPyWeb's top-left menu.

Network: browser outgoing connections are secured by Same-origin policy. In addition, the browser can only perform XHR and WebSocket (i.e. no direct TCP/IP or UDP/IP connections).
WebSockets are initiated transparently when you make a TCP/IP connection from Python, but you need a specific server, or a service proxy (cf. Introduction to Emscripten Sockets) on the developer's server side.
Dev notes: more generally if your game waits on a connection (which may take several seconds) this will freeze the game (graphics and sound, as there's no threading). We probably need an asynchronous Python lib for HTTP connections (i.e. a "grequests"-like rather than "requests"-like), based on WebSockets. Alternatively the game could use XHR through Emscripten-specific functions such as emscripten_async_wget (which I didn't expose yet in RenPyWeb/python-emscripten) and is asynchronous. emscripten_wget is synchronous and requires -s ASYNCIFY=1 which is deprecated/broken. emscripten_fetch has similar features & restrictions.
Suggestions welcome :)

Mobile: mobile browsers are a bit behind when it comes to web technologies, and RenPyWeb currently may not work well on these.
Another issue is the lack of text input, which is common to mobile games in general; if you require the user to enter text, you may need to implement a virtual keyboard in Ren'Py itself. If you know a technique to display use the virtual keyboard in mobile games, please share :)

Presplash: add a web-presplash.png or web-presplash.jpg at the top-level of your game (above, not inside, your game directory, along with android-presplash.*).

Web hosts format: zip all the files from the build directory (so index.html, game.zip, index.wasm.gz, etc. are at the top-level of your zip archive). For itch.io, tick "This file will be played in the browser" when uploading.

Feedback

Feedback welcome!
Patreon - e-mail - Lemma Soft Forums - itch.io - newgrounds

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
• Sound support without jitter
• Video/movie support
• renpy.movie_cutscene hardware support (i.e. handled by the browser; fullscreen probably tricky)
• WebP image support
• Fix image prediction
• Fix auto-save
• Save persistent (seen texts) when exiting the webpage
• 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)
• Add "web" variant
• Detect and define more variants (pc/phone, small/medium/large...)
• Design full-window game area with overlays for status/errors (rather than top/side bars)
• Fix full-screen toggle which goes wrong sometimes + handle config.default_fullscreen=True on start-up
• Fix alpha support for imagebutton and imagemap (flicker)
• Fix 1 touch = 2 clicks on mobile
• Bring/mask virtual keyboard on text input in mobile devices (if possible?)
• Detect browser language
• 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, log.txt
• Simple HTTP requests from Ren'Py
• Upgrade Ren'Py -> 7.2.2
• Consider switching to the new gl2 (gles2?) display backend (since webgl maps to GLES2)
• Report and fix Emscripten bugs (ongoing)
• Make all changes generic (clean-up) and merge them to Pygame_SDL2 and Ren'Py (ongoing)

Status reports

2019 week 25 (2019-06-23)

• More on savegame issue (discuss): this concerns players who disable third-party cookies (and forks that do it by default such as Debian Chromium) only.
  These players are now warned, no work-around AFAICS.
• Source code: properly tag renpyweb 7.3.0.271.
• Emscripten: more work to officially integrate browser language detection #8751
• Answer user feedback (thanks!), more entries in the Games section

2019 week 24 (2019-06-16)

• Ren'Py 7.3.0 may be released today! This is the first official version with built-in RenPyWeb support :)
• Investigate savegame issue with Chromium and iframe in a different domain (discuss). Typically, itch and newgrounds. Honestly I'm surprised nobody reported this before? Meanwhile I added a warning for players when saving fails. No issues with Firefox.
• Provide clear message for old browsers: "Unsupported browser - please upgrade! (WebAssembly support needed)"
• Move game/presplash.png to web-presplash.png (png or jpg)
• Update documentation
• Emscripten: follow-up on default language detection #8751 discuss
• More entries in the Games section

2019 week 23 (2019-06-09)

• I noticed a RenPyWeb slow-down/lock-up issue with Ren'Py's June 1st pre-release, due to build issues. A new (fixed) one is available.
• emscripten: expose browser language #8751, allowing you to leverage config.enable_language_autodetect

2019 week 22 (2019-06-02)

• Start fixing fullscreen support: different control and authorization model, as well as glitches in low-level parts makes it long to investigate and fix, I'll need to continue later
• Upscale presplash screen if the browser window is larger (downscaling was already supported)
• Launcher: shortcut to web build directory
• Automate the_question and tutorial fix-ups required for stand-alone (web) publishing
• New Caveat section on mobile browsers
• Ren'Py Translator ToolKit: ignore voice statements in translate blocks, support unicode in original text, minor fixes
• Clarify "show text" is not directly scanned for translation #1848

2019 week 21 (2019-05-26)

• Upgrade to emscripten 1.38.32 #8650
• Track and list more public RenPyWeb games
• Translation improvements in Ren'Py #1827 #1834 #1837
• Improvements and bugfixes on Ren'Py Translator ToolKit: regroup dialogs and menus translations, more stable sort, slight GUI improvements, documentation, clean-ups

2019 week 20 (2019-05-19)

• First version of the Ren'Py Translator ToolKit

2019 week 19 (2019-05-12)

• Add a "web" screen variant and remove "pc" (by Renpytom). I expect that we'll add back variants in the future depending on the detected web environment (pc/mobile, screen size...)
• Document that ASMJS support was dropped along with the merge in Ren'Py, to focus on (newer) WebAssembly and avoid multiplying targets to test
• Do not minify index.html so it can be customized more easily
• Start investigating virtual keyboard for mobile browsers #80
• Link some public RenPyWeb games (with a NSFW spoiler block) at the RenPyWeb homepage

2019 week 18 (2019-05-05)

• Renpytom integrated RenPyWeb in the official Ren'Py launcher! Please test the current development SDK at http://nightly.renpy.org/current/
• Fix flickering in imagemap/imagebutton with alpha
• More investigation on networking, following user requests
• Request no minification for index.html so you can modify it more easily #8547
• Fix rebuild error #8546
• Minor build fixes
• 2019-05-06: for a various reasons, the ASMJS fallback was missing in this release (replaced with WebAssembly support). Following discussion with Renpytom we decided not to support ASMJS further - let us know if that's a problem for you.

2019 week 17 (2019-04-28)

• More audio tuning to avoid a jitter/silence right after playing a sound
• Size/start-up optimization: drop video codecs since video support is currently not implemented (-25% for index.wasm)
• Start investigating flickering in imagemap/imagebutton with alpha (reported by a new user, thanks!); AFAICS there is a related issue in mobile versions
• Minor fixes to Ren'Py web integration (not ready yet)
• WebGL tuning: using FrameBufferObjects for RenderToTexture

2019 week 16 (2019-04-21)

• Renpytom has been working some more on RenPyWeb integration in official Ren'Py. This week's release is probably one of the last with the current game.zip layout, the next ones should be generated by the Ren'Py launcher directly!
• Hot-fix bug release on the 16th: disable LZ4 compression as this causes problems #8450. Impacted files will soon be moved to game.zip anyway.
• Size optimization: fallback gzip decompression of the index.wasm file (15MB->4MB) when the web host doesn't do it (itch.io/newgrounds...)
• Size-optimize base Ren'Py files some more (removed 1MB)
• Warn player when unzipping game.zip fails (instead of trying to load an incomplete game)
• Improve this webpage's documentation
• Update to Emscripten 1.38.30
• zee.js: refresh prebuilts with Emscripten 1.38.30 #7
• python-emscripten: now builds fully in parallel
• python-emscripten: LZ4 compression support for pythonhome.data

2019 week 15 (2019-04-14)

• Improved sound at last! Sound jitter should be mostly fixed, feedback welcome.
• Work-around chromium's (controversed) autoplay policy, as Newgrounds users reported sound was sometimes muted #6511
• Freshen-up zee.js, laying ground for index.wasm compression (15MB->4MB) on Itch & Newgrounds. Spammed the project tracker ;) #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6
  Kuddos to kripken for starting this project and staying such a responsive maintainer.

2019 week 14 (2019-04-07)

• Add playable test on Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/729314
• Start-up time optimization by adding more download compression methods
  • Add web server configuration for compressed JavaScript/Python code assets
  • Alternate compression (LZ4) of Python assets for hosts that don't support it (itch.io, newgrounds...)
  • Complain that zee.js (gzip in JavaScript) doesn't run anymore #1
• Document the current sound jitter, comments welcome: README.md
• Panic when Renpytom started moving things around in the renpyweb repo ;)

2019 week 13 (2019-03-31)

• Ren'Py 7.2.1 and 7.2.2 support
• New Caveats section on game size

2019 week 12 (2019-03-25)

• Discussion with Renpytom on RenPyWeb integration
• Emscripten build script by Renpytom
• Build system fixes

2019 week 9 (2019-03-03)

• Ren'Py 7.2 support
• Keep investigating pesky random crashes - found a bug in the debugger instead #8229 ;) (see also cf. #6724)
• Document network/socket caveats
• Next steps: Renpytom plans to work on integrating RenPyWeb in the Ren'Py launcher during March; keep RenPyWeb stable meanwhile

2019 week 8 (2019-02-24)

• Upgrade Ren'Py to current 7.1.4.0 pre-release (including my first direct commit)
• Upgrade Emscripten to 1.38.28 (merged #8054 and #8056)
• python-webbrowser: escape URLs to avoid potential JavaScript error/execution
• Improve build system and documentation
• Renpytom plans to work on official integration as soon as the 7.1.4 is ready!
• Update default splash screen :) What do you think?

2019 week 6 (2019-02-10)

• Upgrade Ren'Py to new 7.1.4 official pre-release
• Upgrade Emscripten to 1.38.27
  • Fix broken EMCC_LOCAL_PORTS #8054
  • Follow up and provide patch for Emterpreter white-listing #7988 #8056
• Disable downloading game.zip from another website for security (XSS-like)

2019 week 5 (2019-02-03)

• Publish consolidated source at the official Ren'Py GitHub: github.com/renpy/renpyweb
  • Clean-up build system
  • Bundle multiple pygame-example variants to quickly experiment
• python-emscripten fixes beuc.net/python-emscripten/python
• Emscripten:
  • Document dynamic linking wiki discuss #7974 #1
  • Follow-up on Emterpreter/SDL2 integration #70
  • Try to make EMTERPRETIFY_WHITELIST more stable #7988

2019 week 4 (2019-01-27)

• Difficult upgrade to Emscripten 1.38.25:
  • Investigate Emscripten/SDL2 gamepad-related breakage #7840
  • Investigate Emscripten/SDL2port/SDL_AddTimer breakage #67
  • More breakages for my other GNU FreeDink project XD
• Fix Chrome crash with large files, improve .zip extraction speed and memory usage #7630
• Push for Emterpreter (async) support in SDL2 #70 discussion
• Investigate video support:
  • Document (roadmap) the need for 2 levels of video support: fullscreen w/ hardware acceleration, displayable w/o hardware acceleration
  • Failed experiments, in the current Ren'Py, hard to sync the separate audio and video processing without threading
  • Hardware video detection slight inconsistency #1698
  • Doc improvement for videos #1697

2019 week 3 (2019-01-20)

• Follow-up on Chromium crash with large files #913861
• Doc fixes #1685 #1689

2018 week 52 (2018-12-30)

• Start cleaning-up the chaosbuild system, especially the Python port
• Discuss how to use asynchronous features more cleanly (no patch) at emscripten-discuss
• Fix browser detection #1675
• With more such clean-up I hope to properly include this in Ren'Py

2018 week 50 (2018-12-16)

• New context (pop-up) menu:
  • Saves import/export using ZIP format
  • Access to Ren'Py log (useful for debugging and performance analysis)
• Bugs reports and follow-ups:
  • Chromium: crash with large files #7630 / #913861
  • Emscripten: investigate random crashes: emterpreter+fpcast discussion + made more Python functions asynchronous
  • Emscripten: root-cause of the itch.io/iframe focus issue #7631
  • Ren'Py screen size constraints #1661
  • Ren'Py: suggest full-screen toggle rather than destroy/recreate window #1665
  • Ren'Py: persistent data sync #1631

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.
• Investigated how to optimize downloads with unfriendly CDNs (discuss)
• 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 :)