Hi everyone,
I'm new here, but not that new to VNs and development in general. I'm a programmer by trade and I have written a program that I hope many of you will find useful: A renPy debugger.
I have the file hosted
You must be registered to see the links
where I hope to raise some funds to create my own game and help pay for my rent in these trying times.# What does the renPyDebugger do?
In essence I have come to realize that renPy has a lot of potential for human errors - worse yet errors that are syntactically correct but will cause issues while playing the game:
- Background images used in the code but not available in the /images/ folder. This will report errors and also raise a note whenever a similar spelling is detected to help with typos.
- Characters referenced but not defined, again with similar spelling note (right now this will only report upper/lowercase similarities, but I want to extend this)
- Variable names used but not declared (including those defined in inline-ifs in menus and such!)
- Warning for variables that are declared but never used
- Warnings for unreachable code (labels that are defined but never jumped to)
- Error for jumps that are defined but the associated label does not exist.
- Error for images that are different from the game's resolution (common error for all the people who render in 4k and downscale to 1080p)
# Upcoming features:
- Check for sounds, voices, music that are referenced in the script but are missing in folder.
- Make image checker work with space-separated image names (who in their right minds uses this?! Use underscores, people!). I still want to support that though since it's officially viable
- Do some light checking for misspelled variable names (for example underscore instead of camelCase notation and such). Maybe I can even implement a typo correction library or something, but that is definitely something I'll put behind other improvements.
- Report mismatched variable types (for example trying to assign "test" to a boolean)
- Report overly large images (there is really no need to have 16mb full-sized renders.)
- Report common errors like lower-case "True" in booleans
- Make script compatible with customized RenPy installations that have images in other folders etc. 90% of people probably use the default structure and this script works fine with that, but if your game uses customly written python this will not work well yet. I will work on that for the next release as soon as I figure out a good way to exclude python code from the renpy code.
- Your suggestions!
# installation:
Just place the downloaded file into your /game/ folder and run it, it will create a text file containing your errors and warnings in the same folder.
# Outro
I sincerely hope that I can save you guys a lot of time with this script, I know it has made my own life drastically easier as I work on games and now I sat down to convert the script into a real program that other people can use without a lot of hassle. Please let me know if you have any feature requests or stumble over a bug. Oh, and have fun, have a nice day!
Last edited: