Ren'py actually requires more memory than you would think.* The ease
of use and robust feautures outweigh this though. The most intensive
things for a visual novel would be if you wanted to use some particle
effects or something. Honestly the jedit editor it comes packaged with
seens to tax old machine more than any of the actual games made with
Renpy :p
*as in, according to PyTom (the dev) you couldn't do a direct port of
Renpy to the NDS. Most PCs from the past decade, or reasonably powered
Android phone, or cracked Nook, etc can run at least the normal stuff
fine. At least in my experiences.
Noel
On Nov 23, 2011, at 11:52 AM, Christopher Night
<[email protected]> wrote:
I don't know why you would be concerned about performance in a
visual novel game. Aren't they pretty undemanding? I haven't played
these games very much, but isn't it just a series of still images
(no animations) and a simple GUI?
You might want to look at a pyweek entry called Gregor Samsa. I know
that team put some effort into optimizing things and wound up with a
respectable framerate even on mobile devices running Android:
http://www.pyweek.org/e/tihoas/
But again, I feel like performance is the least of your concerns if
that's your kind of game. If there's some specific thing you're
expecting to cause low performance, maybe you can ask about it
specifically.
Good luck!
-Christopher
On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Nick Arnoeyts <[email protected]
> wrote:
Alright. Thanks for your reply everyone.
I'm currently still working on a Ren'py project, but I'm probably
going to try pygame once that's finished. I'm mostly making visual
novels, though, so it's possible that I'm staying with ren'py until
I reach its limits.
yours truly
armornick
2011/11/23 stabbingfinger <[email protected]>
Hi, Armor Nick.
Some common bottlenecks I've encountered:
rendering many images per frame
brute force collision checking
computationally intensive logic and AI
real-time image transformation
heavy usage of images with SRCALPHA
2D and 2.5D layering
particles
These are easy limits to hit early on especially in scrollers,
platformers, and bullet hell type games, or when you start adding
environment and GFX.
But there are clever techniques that pygamers have developed to deal
with them in the form of cookbook recipes, libraries, and modules.
Many issues can be easily mitigated by selecting a culling technique
or two to reduce the number of things processed each game loop.
Some people popping into IRC lately seem easily frustrated by these
challenges, wanting an inefficient workload to just perform well. I
can understand the sentiment. But I personally get an immense amount
of pleasure from conquering these challenges. :)
When I started pygame three years ago I was told you can't do a
scrolling action-RPG: it's too much work for the CPU. Since then,
computers became a significantly faster and several people have
produced reasonably impressive action-RPGs, as well as other genre.
For some examples one only has to look among the top places at pyweek.org
, where pygame competes with the likes of pyglet, cocos2d, and
rabbyt, all of which have the proclaimed advantage of 3D
acceleration. It's become clear to me that for most hobby games the
only real limitation is the resourcefulness of the programmer.
I personally haven't yet hit a wall with Python or pygame that
forced me to look at another framework or a natively compiled
language, and I've done a few relatively ambitious projects.
That may seem like a biased representation of Python's and pygame's
capabilities, but I assure you it's not. A few times a year my eyes
wander to other game development libraries or engines, but I keep
coming right back to pygame.
Hope that perspective helps.
Gumm
On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 6:08 AM, Chris Smith <[email protected]>
wrote:
You can use Renpy for graphic novels. SNES RPG's would be no
problem. For AI and other things, python might be slow but you will
probably be surprised how far you can go with it. It'll certainly be
easier than going the C++ route (although I'm not a C++ fan, to be
honest... I'd use Lisp if I needed the code to be faster).
On 23 November 2011 21:47, Nick Arnoeyts <[email protected]>
wrote:
I'm actually not quite sure what I'm going to write yet. Either an
RPG in the style of SNES-era Final Fantasy, or a visual novel (if
you know Higurashi or Clannad). I'm not (yet) interested in 3D and I
would certainly do something like that in C++.
Pygame is probably fast enough for the graphics, but I was wondering
how performance would be for AI and other calculations.
yours truly
armornick
2011/11/23 Chris Smith <[email protected]>
You can't really compare the language C++ with the library Python.
You could compare C++ / SDL with Python / Pygame, and probably C++
would be faster (but maybe by not as much as you think)... but it
would certainly take a lot more time to write the code.
As to what you can do with Pygame, well it is a 2D library that I
find fast enough for most things. In some ways I think Pygame is a
little 'old-school': Pygame does not do a lot for you, but it gets
out of the way, and perhaps most importantly, it's small enough to
fit in my mind but big enough to do what I want.
Unless you develop as part of a team you need 3D, you are unlikely
to choose a project that Pygame cannot handle in some way.
Perhaps you could tell us more about what you wanted to write...
that would make it easier to tell you if Pygame could do this for you.
Chris
On 23 November 2011 21:07, Nick Arnoeyts <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hey everyone
I was wondering what the limits of pygame performance are. What is
the absolute maximum kind of game that can be written with it, and
what kinds of things are better done in pure C++ than python?
This is probably a question that's asked periodically on the mailing
list, so I apologize in advance.
Yours truly
Armor Nick
