Animation Progress - Trailblazing!

It's a rather boring progress update for the last couple of days, as they have been dominated by documentation reading and experimentation. I have continued to work on core of the soon-to-be animation system, which revolves around turning a Ren'py displayable into a static image. This static image can then be manipulated by shaders, which give me direct access to pixel-by-pixel control if I want it.

The bad news first: as best as I can find I am one of a very few number of people who have tried to take a general Ren'py displayable and turn it into a static image. As such, there is very little information available about how to go about doing this, and most of it is painfully inconclusive. This classic xkcd comic pretty perfectly sums up my experience so far. I have had to dive into the renpy source code and follow trails of function calls to figure what does what, where I can pull the displayable information from, and how I can format it in the way I need.

Now the good news: Success is within my grasp! I currently have the system producing a standard .png file of any arbitrary displayable. The sole remaining hurdle is that the file produced has a flat black background and not a transparent one, which is needed so that the character can be rendered over top of the background properly. My current most promising lead for resolving this makes us of the Ren'py software rendering mode. When in software rendering mode Ren'py does all of it's drawing calcultions in python and on the CPU, which is painfully slow but supported by anything that supports python in the first place. When using software rendering mode I am able to render an arbitrary displayable with the transparent background I want. In thoery I can make a few modifications and give myself access to the software rendering pipeline to generate my desired static image.

I hope in a day or two I'll be able to report complete success, hopefully with some demo gif's, and in the days after that I can start setting up some basic idle animations for characters.