"renpy.free_memory()"
Did this really work or do anything?
I can add it before and after the animations if there is a chance it will help to get rid of the memory problems.
Yes. After running around the island for a few hours, Memory showed as 900,000 K. That command lowered memory to about 350,000 K.
Though I hadn't come across any animations yet. This seems to be just from images loading as new content was required to display the scene. Even just doing an action like "Give Heather a hug" raised the memory, but doesn't want to release it.
Something like the new beach scene with the lifeguard adds 200,000 K to the memory load but never let it go.
Maybe set it up to trigger the command every few hours that the MC experiences? Or during "time of day" changes ("morning", "afternoon", "evening", "late evening", "night").