Native Shaders and Ren'py Version Update
Added 2021-05-15 11:10:50 +0000 UTCShortly before the public release of v0.40 I spent a few days experimenting with the native shader support Ren'py 7.4 introduced. I found that native shaders ran significantly faster, and would let me cut out a huge amount of janky, bug prone code.
I've spent the last week moving LR2 over to the new version of Ren'py and reimplementing the shaders/display code. The move from Ren'py 7.3.5 to 7.4.4 was painless, and most of the time was spent porting over the old shader effects in a way that integrated nicely with the new format Ren'py uses. An unexpected benefit to this change is that Ren'py now renders text much more correctly and consistently. Small differences in character size use to result in UI elements shifting around slightly as text changed, but this has been fixed.
I was expecting this to be a more time consuming effort than it has ended up being, so there's plenty of time left in the update cycle for me to get some more work done adding new content to LR2. Tomorrow I will be putting up a poll for patrons to vote on what they'd like me to focus on for the next two weeks of development, so check back in for that!
