If everyone hates RPGM and Unity, why are Most Viewed Threads (Last 30 Days?) mostly that?

[Winterfire]

Sometimes, depending on what you're doing, you may notice the "checkerboard" of transparency between images. This can happen as images shift from one to the other.

There are times when doing this simply won't look right, or you may get unintended side effects as well. At least this has been my experience.

That's why I generally use "scene allblk" (allblk is the name of the image to display in this case) to add a solid black image, clearing all images at the start and end of each event.

That is completely unnecessary as the checkerboard only appears from the editor (When playing the game from Ren'Py launcher), when you build the game, the checkerboard is replaced with a pure black screen.

 

[Winterfire]

I don't have to worry about that as much because:
-I use image compression.
-I clear the images shown every 5-10 images anyway.
-Always clear the images before displaying a video.

Also, keep in mind that image compression is only good for the game size... In memory, what counts is the width and height.
If I recall correctly, pytom once mentioned it was width * height * 2, but could have been *4 too... Can't recall.
However, even in the best case scenario, 10 4k images could prove to be quite challenging for potato pcs.

 

[Talamae]

Real talk: On some level, I know I'm seeking justifications for shitty AAA industry practices that I don't even have the scale to walk the walk of. Picking an engine based on what's popular? Madness. Nonsense. We all know it. That would be as stupid as making a game about incest or bestiality when you're not into incest or bestiality, just because the numbers look better. Maybe the only real solution is to make a small, self-contained demo in each engine, (With a narrative throughline and at least one sex scene, of course! I'm not a monster!) then see what kind of response each gets

Personally. I think this "Real Talk" segment here is a great idea, if you have the time and resources, play with each and see what you want to do, and see how people react to it.

I typically stay away from Ren'Py games, but that's just a preference thing. Though, the ones I did try really hurt with how some of them felt so rushed and thrown together. There were many with interesting premises that utterly died. The idea was there, but it never seemed fully designed or put together. Or, the premise was referenced, but never really developed or integrated.

I am sure there are some excellent ones out there, I just probably have not found them yet. (Though the rendered designs often seem kinda wonky too, like uncanny valley but not at the same time.)

 

[anne O'nymous]

Is there a list of best practices for RenPy? Or at least some common rookie mistakes newbies should be aware of?

In itself it's not a question of "best practice", and more a question of respect for the players. Plus, the sole mistake here is to haven't effectively read the documentation, and took the time to understand it. Therefore using a statement without understand what it do ; in fact using two statements, since he also misunderstood scene.
In this particular case, only devs who stopped the reading at the end of the "Quickstart" section tend to do this error. The others have read at least the part regarding the image displaying, and understood that they need to use scene to show an image covering all the game window.

That's alot to unpack, needless to say I will just point out that I really don't need that sort of lecture.

The fact that you said it prove that you need it.

You don't have or need to use scene strictly for this kind of thing.

Reason why I said that you should, "at least hide it before you quit the label, to make clear that the image need to be manually removed."

For me, I tend to use scene to add an all black background , followed by using show to display images.

Do you even understand what show is doing ?

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:

If an image with the same image tag is already showing on the layer, the new image replaces it. Otherwise, the image is placed above all other images in the layer.

Since in your example, the image is named "first_background", it's clear that you don't rely on tags to names your images. Therefore, each time you show a new image, it will pile up on top of all the previous.
Not only this add a totally useless load for the RAM, but it also add a totally useless load for the CPU and, on top of that, will slow down the game. Indeed, since Ren'Py have no way to know if the image will be, or not, totally recovered, and instead expect it to not be, each time it will proceed the whole screen, it will display all the images, one after the other, until the last one.

This was only to serve for an example of how easy it is to set something up using Ren'py, not really a guide post or commentary on how to program.

And as I said, it was only a comment to stop idiotic behavior to be spread.

If I recall correctly, pytom once mentioned it was width * height * 2, but could have been *4 too...

It's *4 since each pixel is represented by a DWORD red-green-blue-alpha. Therefore with the usual 1920x1080, each image take 8MB of space. Since he said he use scene every 10-12 images, it's grow up to a bit less than 100MB just for the cache.
By itself it's not much for the RAM, but even when they are displayed as it, each image is proceeded by Ren'Py. While the image is 1920x1080, the game window have the same size only in full screen. This mean that each images is firstly resized to match the game window size. Therefore, before his next scene, Ren'Py, and the computer, is proceeding 100MB of data when it should only proceed 8MB.

Of course, it's not much in this particular case... Except that the "troubleshooting" section of the forum regularly show that there's still a lot of people playing Ren'Py games on 10+, when not 15+, years old computers. I don't want to imagine the load of their CPU.
Anyway, even if it don't send the CPU in overload, it's not a reason to promote such bad practice, especially when explaining so wrongly why it's supposed to not be one.

 

[anne O'nymous]

There were many with interesting premises that utterly died. The idea was there, but it never seemed fully designed or put together. Or, the premise was referenced, but never really developed or integrated.

It's the main problem with Ren'Py.
Globally speaking it permit to do as much as Unity ; I say "globally speaking" because, while it's true in theory, in practice there's a limit due to Python being not only a script language, but also one of the slowest.

This "near to no limit" base lead a lot of devs starts with big ideas, having seen them in more professional games. But then, they hurt the knowledge wall. Yes, professionals can do this or that with Ren'Py (like Winged Cloud that, 6 years ago, put old school 3D dungeons in Sakura Dungeon), but they are professionals. Therefore they know how to do it, and their code will be hardly understandable by pure amateurs.
And this also apply to more basics game mechanism really. The author of Pact With a Witch struggle since two years with his interactive sex scene. Basically, you click on a body part, choose one of the action that pop-up, and some computation with a bit of randomization will give you a result shown on the screen ; do good enough for long enough, and the girl will climax. It's something that Flash games already had in the 00's, and not too difficult to implement... if you're a programmer. But if you're an amateur like him, there's a lot of small bugs that stack and are difficult to identify and solve.

To this, is added the lack of knowledge regarding Ren'Py languages. There's the example of the show/scene above, but the most significant is the "blocking screen" used for free roaming.
One day, a dev that haven't read the documentation, found a way to do this:

label whatever
    show screen Whatever
    pause
    jump whatever

But there's a lot of contexts where this will break the game, or make it really difficult to play ; a quick look at the documentation would have shown that call screen Whatever do what the dev wanted to achieve.
And now there's way to many devs who are doing the same, because they saw it "done this way" in another game. But like they don't know why it's done that way, and that is should be done otherwise, they also don't know how to solve the issue when people start to complain that it don't works, or that the game have a strange behavior.
All this being multiplied by 1000 since Ren'Py have a really big base of users, and therefore tons of "ready to use" code, easy to find, but hard to understand, harder to adapt to your particular situation, and near to impossible to fix if you don't have a codding background.

Most of unfulfilled promises with Ren'Py games come from this.
The dev saw it, tried it, found a problem, and never found how to solve this problem. And like they face the issue in real time, instead of developing the whole game mechanisms before they even start to write the game itself, they just drop the idea ; "sorry, but in fact I don't know how to do it". Except that they don't say that, they just expect that the players will forgot about their promises.

Engines like Unity encounter the same kind of problem, with a small difference that change everything.
While there's also a large base of users, and therefore tons of "ready to use" code, you rarely add game mechanism on the fly. The nature of the engine make it that you generally start by creating the game structure, what mean that you'll see if you effectively can do it before you even start making promises.
Plus, it's an engine more professional, therefore many amateurs don't use it, fearing that they'll not be able to use it.

 

[Dice13K]

Well... in my opinion, I think that if a game is good, then whatever it is on is irrelevant. I don't think I've played a good game, for example: Harem Hotel, and thought "man, if only Harem Hotel was on Unity, then it would be good."
Good games are good games. If you enjoy it, you enjoy it. I'm completely out of my depths when it comes to any technical stuff, so I have no comments there; I only have my experience playing games.

Why can't we all just get along?

 

[FromOtherSpace]

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[CurvyLinesEverywhere]

Why can't we all just get along?

Because people on the internet are wrong about something!

In this case, though, the Wrong Person is me, so I wholeheartedly encourage you all to keep telling me why I'm wrong.

Though, the ones I did try really hurt with how some of them felt so rushed and thrown together. There were many with interesting premises that utterly died. The idea was there, but it never seemed fully designed or put together. Or, the premise was referenced, but never really developed or integrated.

I would love a list of titles that you felt flopped on their execution of the core idea.

 

[CurvyLinesEverywhere]

My "deep dive" ended up being more of a shallow skip of a stone across 20 successive ponds, but here's what I learned about genre, engine, and popularity on F95zone based on this non-scientific cursory glance at a tiny sub-sample of games selected for me by a computer sorting them by frequency of arbitrary forum posts:

1. [Unreal Engine] Wicked Island [v0.3 Beta] [RawDarkness]
   Benefits from Unreal because: Realtime 3D camera, Survival gameplay
   
   
2. [Others] [Completed] Apartment Story [Final] [pH Studio]
   Benefits from custom engine because: Landlord Sim / Management gameplay
   
   
3. [RPGM] [Completed] Paize Knightess Ellen and the Dungeon Town of Sodom [v1.10] [dHR-ken]
   Benefits from RPG because: RPG setting, map exploration, minigames
   
   
4. [H T M L] [Completed] Battle Quest [v1.0.1]
   Benefits from HTML because: Small text? intuitive navigation? dev fiat? probably relatively simple to program because HTML does so much automatically? The trade-off is less control over the end-user experience, and it will never not feel like a webpage. (I.E. lacks Greun Transfer.)
   
   
5. [VN] [Unity] [Completed] Housewife [Final] [RetsymTheNam]
   Benefits from HTML because: i҉n҉s҉t҉r҉u҉c҉t҉i҉o҉n҉s҉ u҉n҉c҉l҉e҉a҉r҉; c҉a҉n҉n҉o҉t҉ r҉e҉a҉d҉ p҉r҉o҉m҉o҉t҉i҉o҉n҉a҉l҉ i҉m҉a҉g҉e҉s҉
   
   
6. [VN] [Ren'Py] Miri's Corruption [v0.1.3] [LewdAnnieMay]
   Benefits from Ren’Py because: basic VN. Made entirely using modded Skyrim screenshots. Lower margins, but even sketchier legality than the average DAZ game.
   
   
7. [Unity] My Days in Bel Air [v1.0.7] [Deep Games]
   Benefits from Unity because: Unclear. Entirely pre-rendered with a few custom UIs. Money/Grinding mechanic. Could easily be a RenPy game.
   
   
8. [RPGM] [Completed] I Want to Have Sex with My Mom [Final] [Oroboy]
   Benefits from RPGM because: Unlear. Dev experience? Making tile maps and sprites was easier than making house background images?
   
   
9. [VN] [Ren'Py] Ahsoka in Exxxile [v1.0] [Apulaz]
   Benefits from Ren’Py because: Simple, straightforward VN. Side note: really strong 3D toon aesthetic with this one,likely mimicking Clone Wars or something.
   
   
10. [RPGM] [Completed] Get Violated By EVERY Girl You Encounter RPG ~MAX Volume!~ [v1.0.3] [B-bishop]
    Benefits from RPGM because: Super unclear. Every single screenshot is either incredibly lush yet simple 2D art including full-screen BGs, or else a black screen crashing on mobile with a ridiculously over-complicated controller map. I suspect it's just a VN.
    
    
11. [RPGM] [Completed] Slave Training - Elite Female Student Council in a School of Delinquents [Final] [No Future]
    Benefits from RPGM because: Battles & walkabout mode. Also, it has to be said: nice UI window frame. Not essential, but appreciated. Then you hit that one spitroast picture that was clearly a 3D paintover, and the carefully-honed facade of quality suddenly shatters.
    
    
12. [VN] [Ren'Py] Surviving With My Daughter [v1.0] [Golden Bunny]
    Benefits from Ren’Py because: High-effort Daz VN with a sci-fi aesthetic. Doesn’t look special. Does look like ads for Daz models. And in a way? That’s special. It might be more fair to say that this is a Daz VN that elevates Daz VNs through sheer consistency of effort.
    
    
13. [Unity] [Completed] How to Build an Elven Village [v1.1.0] [Champon]
    Benefits from Unity because: 3D customization and bespoke gameplay? This one is hard, though, because the characters and text are all sprite-based. Literally everything in it could be done using RPGM, if only the backgrounds weren’t 3D. I’m very curious whether this is the exception that proves the rule– did being in 3D give this simple sprite-based game a boost? Or was it just that the dev was more comfortable with Unity?
    
    
14. [Unity] [Completed] Turning Bitch [Final] [NowaJoestar]
    Benefits from Unity because: In a 2-scene VN? It’s as unclear to me as that JPEG of the lorax yelling about a pentagon.
    
    
15. [H T M L] My Girlfriend's Abroad [v1.0] [rickrick69]
    Benefits from HTML because: Uhhhh… only HTML has the raw power to display photos of real humans??? I’m memeing now. Not a good sign. I think this might be Task Fatigue kicking in… Apologies in advance if I start taking the piss out of the later entries on this list. As long as I don't come across any particularly horrific nightmare fuel, I'm sure I'll be fine.
    
    
16. [Unity] [Completed] My Erotic Summer Vacation ~Memories of a Rural Summer~ [Final] [dieselmine]
    Benefits from Unity because: Completely unnecessary 3D Walkabout mode. Although… it does have the effect of making this look like a premium offering on DLSite instead of a student project on DLSite. Is this evidence of engine choice making the game better without adding to the gameplay? Or just making it more marketable without really changing the game’s quality? Now that I think about it, Unity's free. RPGM isn't. Maybe that was the deciding factor.
    
    
17. [RPGM] [Completed] Nightmare Finale [Final] [Tsuyoi Ko]
    Benefits from RPGM because: Ooooh… An H spoof of one of those RPGM horror games? Yeah, no. I have no idea if they’re doing it right, whatever it is that they’re doing, but I respect them for doing it. The same sprites in RenPy or Unity would somehow carry less weight. That’s just the cultural landscape we live in. RPG Maker makes pixel games scarier, purely through association. (Of course, it it's trying to be sexy, not scary, then I take it all back.)
    
    
18. [Others] [Completed] H mugen [Final] [rule-thirty-four]
    Benefits from Mugen because: Yup, that’s a fighting game with sex in it, all right.
    
    
19. [Others] [Completed] Midori in a Pinch: Pixel Art Uncharted Territory [Final] [Pinkgold]
    Benefits from Custom Engine because: Yup, that’s an action/platformer with sex in it, all right.
    
    
20. [Unity] [Completed] Refuge Roadtrip [Final] [retsymthenam]
    Benefits from Unity because: Ow. My brain. I’m pretty sure this is only made the list because everybody’s mocking the preview images. Thank you, retsymthenam. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways. I now realize that there is no correlation between a game’s quality and user interest on F95-zone. Thank you for freeing me.

 

[anne O'nymous]

While you may feel I need your counsel - I don't.

Look again what I wrote. At no time I cared about you for other thing than the idiotic behavior you spread. Everything else is clearly intended to both people who would read this discussion and players of their games.

[...] you have a bit more technical than applied knowledge [...]

*laugh really hard*

 

[Luderos]

Actually, now that I think about it, my first game should almost certainly be not only RenPy, but the simplest RenPy setup possible, because that way most of the systems design work is already done for me.

I was thinking maximalist design, when I really don't have the chops to do that yet.

Thinking back to all those GDC videos I've seen over the years, that's actually a surprisingly common rookie mistake, I've heard.

Also keep in mind that most GDC talks are about projects with teams, often VERY big ones. Overscoping is problem at all sizes, but you're especially vulnerable to it as a one man show. Simply stated, picking Unity over RenPy multiplies the number of things you need to learn. We all like learning things, but there are only so many hours in the day. A day (or a week or a month...) spent figuring out how to do something is a day spent not making your game. It can easily change your project from a few months to a few years. Ask me how I know.

 

[CurvyLinesEverywhere]

Ask me how I know.

Why on Earth is that sentence not a link to your abandoned project? You can't half-ass an ominous tale of warning and regret, my friend. And if your project was eventually released, well, that's even worse! You're leaving free real estate for shameless self-promotion on the table, here.

 

[Luderos]

Why on Earth is that sentence not a link to your abandoned project? You can't half-ass an ominous tale of warning and regret, my friend. And if your project was eventually released, well, that's even worse! You're leaving free real estate for shameless self-promotion on the table, here.

Haha, not abandoned, just so much slower than I ever imagined

For reference:
https://f95zone.to/threads/down-on-the-farm-3d-breeding-rpg-development-thread.57211/

It's been a long time since the last update since I basically restarted from scratch. At some point after the last update it became clear that the direction I was taking with the tech just wasn't going to work when scaling up to a full game. It was ok for a demo if you had the right machine, but it seriously fell apart on some, even fairly high-end boxes. Probably still a few months from a new update/relaunch, but after that, it should (crosses so many fingers!) be in a place where I'm mostly working on content instead of tech.

Probably the biggest issue, as far as cautionary tales go, is not knowing the extent to which something does or doesn't work until you're neck deep in it. You can be a very long way along one path before realizing that path doesn't sufficiently work with all of the other paths you need to go down. If you're better and/or more experienced, this will be less of an issue of course. All the more reason to start really, really, really small. It's hard though because the better you are, the more you want to accomplish. You would think that devs would learn not to do that, but it's the same thing happens to giant teams with giant budgets.

 

[Fatalmasterpiece]

I simply don't understand why everyone says Renpy is easier than Unity. Even for slideshow VNs, Unity is easier. Sure you can get instant results with Renpy but the moment you try to do anything more complex than a simple image and text, you enter this quagmire of coding that constantly breaks with a single character out of place. Even building an interface is a technical challenge. Tutorials for Renpy are often not up to date, not well made or require knowledge of coding to even begin to grasp the fundamentals of.

Unity in perspective has thousands of tools online that make game building without any coding really simple and many many well made tutorials. You can just go into the asset store and buy an interface that's ready to go and customize it. I'll agree it takes longer to get ahold of but once you do it is a far better tool. It's the difference between a nail and hammer and a pneumatic nail gun. Sure the hammer will do the job and is "easier" to set up than the machine but once you have that nail gun running it is far easier to do the job.

Spend 6 months learning Renpy and you'll have a very nice slideshow with text.
Spend 6 months with Unity and you can pretty much do anything you can imagine, including a much nicer slideshow with text.

 

[Luderos]

Spend 6 months learning Renpy and you'll have a very nice slideshow with text.
Spend 6 months with Unity and you can pretty much do anything you can imagine, including a much nicer slideshow with text.

That's the problem I think. After 6 months with RenPy, you can have a nice VN. After 6 months with Unity, you don't just want a VN anymore because you can imagine all the other things you could do. So then you plan to do lots of other stuff, which will take longer, often much longer.

I'll agree though, that if you grab something like Naninovel, you can have a VN up and running with a similar amount of effort as in RenPy, although arguably, you also end up violating a lot of players' expectations and don't really gain much for the trouble.

 

[lawfullame]

From a player's perspective, I clearly prefer Ren'Py over Unity for visual novels. VNs using Ren'Py load fast, there's easy text skipping when I want to try multiple branches, there's rollback, save and load work with almost no delay.

Maybe these things are possible in Unity, but most VNs using Unity don't have these features.
But of course, in 3D games, Ren'py would hardly replace Unity.

The trouble with RPGM is that many RPGM games have too much walking and too little actual content. Unofficial Ren'Py remakes of some games are much more popular than the RPGM original.
But there are RPGM games I like.
If the world is full of interactive elements, characters that are used in a meaningful way, and it's not just NPCs saying one sentence, then a RPGM game can be great engine for your game.

 

[Meaning Less]

I simply don't understand why everyone says Renpy is easier than Unity.

Because it already has most basic features required for a vn pre-implemented and you barely need to write code to make use of them.

This also explains why so many people hate unity, there are two main reasons:
1. Not all basic features are implemented by default, so users are relying that the dev implemented those feature and unfortunetely many don't, simple things are often missing like rollback, log, skipping, manual save and more.

2. Renpy is easier to modify, many users even those with no knowledge are savy enough to dive into the renpy code and do minor edits to the code, both to fix bugs as well to customize their experience and create mods.

 

[baneini]

From a player's perspective, I clearly prefer Ren'Py over Unity for visual novels. VNs using Ren'Py load fast, there's easy text skipping when I want to try multiple branches, there's rollback, save and load work with almost no delay.

Maybe these things are possible in Unity, but most VNs using Unity don't have these features.
But of course, in 3D games, Ren'py would hardly replace Unity.

Indeed 3d unity projects must first achieve feature parity with renpy to create an experience the player might prefer over traditional 2d renpy or rpgm game experiences.
The question is are they trying to make a good experience or practice an engine. The bad experiences people have is due to the latter being common.

 

[Fatalmasterpiece]

That's the problem I think. After 6 months with RenPy, you can have a nice VN. After 6 months with Unity, you don't just want a VN anymore because you can imagine all the other things you could do. So then you plan to do lots of other stuff, which will take longer, often much longer.

I'll agree though, that if you grab something like Naninovel, you can have a VN up and running with a similar amount of effort as in RenPy, although arguably, you also end up violating a lot of players' expectations and don't really gain much for the trouble.

The problem with a "nice VN" is that there are so many of them that never achieve anything. So you make a nice, basic VN and IMO it gets forgotten quickly. This is why so many of these go for specific fetishes like the "land lady" trend because they have to in order to get any following. But these aren't good games, or at least anything special. Personally I decided I didn't want to make yet another BaDIK/College Kings clone to add to the pile and would rather try to make a unique, subjectively "good" game that I could be proud of. Even if it takes a lot longer and people are disappointed, at least *you* are not disappointed in yourself.

Idk, looking at your game DOTF, maybe you had the same thought because it looks like you're making something very nice that you could be proud of which is much better than a typical VN

Because it already has most basic features required for a vn pre-implemented and you barely need to write code to make use of them.

This also explains why so many people hate unity, there are two main reasons:
1. Not all basic features are implemented by default, so users are relying that the dev implemented those feature and unfortunetely many don't, simple things are often missing like rollback, log, skipping, manual save and more.

2. Renpy is easier to modify, many users even those with no knowledge are savy enough to dive into the renpy code and do minor edits to the code, both to fix bugs as well to customize their experience and create mods.

You're right but the asset store has most of that covered. In my experience, Renpy was much harder to learn, I think it has to do with learning styles. Staring at a pile of code causes complete mental burnout for some people. After spending about 4 months trying to code Renpy, simply moving the text box was a technical feat that felt unachievable. In Unity you can download something like Dialogue System and be up and running in a few days.

 

[lawfullame]

Indeed 3d unity projects must first achieve feature parity with renpy to create an experience the player might prefer over traditional 2d renpy or rpgm game experiences.
The question is are they trying to make a good experience or practice an engine. The bad experiences people have is due to the latter being common.

I would say that https://f95zone.to/threads/house-party-v0-22-0-eek-games.1209/ is an example of a good use of Unity.

I know, this is a game by a larger professional team, unlike most Visual Novels.
But there are some good games by one developer using Unity. For example https://f95zone.to/threads/milky-ways-v0-88-beta-kerni.33000/