vrengames

New Ren'py Shader Support - Experimenting!

Added 2021-05-05 09:33:07 +0000 UTC

A little over a year ago I added the first implementation of Lab Rats 2's "animation" system. I use the word animation lightly, as it's really just a way of warping and distorting sections of a flat image over time. That system was built on experimental 3rd party code, and it required a fair amount of inefficient hacking to get it working. The end result was the ability to use openGL shaders (short programs that run on your GPU and manipulate images) to move and modify character images. At the time I noticed that the Ren'py rendering code had references to it's own shader support, but at the time it hadn't been fully implemented and was mostly placeholder stuff.

At the start of this year Ren'py 7.4 was released, and it includes native rendering support for running openGL shaders! The jankiness of the current animation system makes it slow, unreliable, and difficult to make changes to (in addition to flat out not working on Android), so it seems like a good idea to start experimenting with the new Ren'py shader support to see how much work would be needed to change over to it.

If all goes well I'll have a dev log up in a few days with my findings!