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Rolled out R9.5 which is focused on engine improvements.
🕑 Added 2023-06-15 10:51:37 +0000 UTCAs usual, replaced all the previous links with the new version.
Last month a new version of Ren'py sdk was released by the big boss Renpytom, which brings many improvements and functionalities to the engine. It took me one week to switch to it as the project is a bit borderline for ren'py and many things tend to break which need to be fixed after a sdk update, and I also took the opportunity to further optimize the game, here are the technical changes:
- Audio side was reworked by Renpytom to a great extent which makes the audio behaves as you would expect, that means not linearly like in the past but in terms of db which is much more natural, and how our ears work (and also how windows sound slider work for example). The audio sliders in the game behave normally for the first time, and you can hear a difference along the full spectrum of the sliders now. The second important thing is ren'py before this sdk update had audio doing a lot of clicks/scratch noises when two sounds were playing on the same channel close to each other, this is something I would hear all the time while testing the game as Divimera tends to use a ton of sounds and I'm sure you did without necessarily realizing it. This is now fixed and the audio across Divimera is just perfectly smooth now thanks to the new sdk, you will never hear a weird distortion or click noise on anything, this makes me incredibly happy.
- I have now the ability to center the windows of the game and I took advantage of that functionality in R9.5, so no more awkward windows being recentered and going offscreen. Every time you will trigger a resize, the windows will be recentered in the middle.
- General stability fixes for Android, overall should see fewer crashes as some improvements were made engine-wise.
- Support for Avif, which is an image format that can be way smaller than Webp for the same quality. Right now I don't plan to use it as the encode time takes days compared to Webp, so it isn't suited for ongoing development but once the game is finished and there is no more change, this is something that I plan to use to make the game really small in size.
- Took the opportunity to tackle optimizations a bit as well, and reworked some of the codes for some of the in-game screens and menu, the game should feel much more responsive now, and I believe almost all lags are gone outside of the mini-game which I will try to improve later down the road.
