Single user is unable to see image in Renpy game.

[strenif]

This is an odd one but we have one user who's reporting that images arn't loading in the game.


No one but them has this issue. We've had them redownload the game, reboot, delete persistent file.
They say that other renpy games work fine.
Not sure what else to suggest to them next. They are a supporter so we'd like to get them up and running again.
Anyone got any ideas?

 

[79flavors]

I downloaded what I think is the latest file here on F95.
https://f95zone.to/threads/a-family-venture-v0-09-v1-beta-willtylor.24965/
Named: AFamilyVenture-0.09_V1-Beta_supporter-pc.zip
Then ran the 64bit Windows version.

I checked all 7 places where you use that video and they all work fine.

You're doing some stuff in less than ideal ways, but I'll mention those only in passing. Feel free to ignore all of those points.

You've got an unnecessary definition for image bg MomMbateVideo01F01 = "MomMbateVideo01F01.webp", but as a bg tagged image, that shouldn't cause an issue (and didn't for me).

So whatever is going on for that player is nothing to do with your game's code. (Unless it's one of the other versions of your game that I haven't tested).
Either it's a mod, their setup or they don't want to admit they've been fucking around with it.
Their screenshot features the checkered background, so they are running in developer mode.

Spoiler: Some offtopic observations

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Good luck with your game and dealing with your problematic supporter's (non)issue.
And more than that, have fun writing your game.

 

[osanaiko]

79flavors fantastic advice in the spoiler

 

[79flavors]

This is an odd one but we have one user who's reporting that images aren't loading in the game.
[...]
No one but them has this issue. We've had them redownload the game, reboot, delete persistent file.
They say that other renpy games work fine.

Just another thought. Is it just THIS image they are having problems with or all images within the game?
Is it just videos or all images?

I'm reminded of a recent problem someone had playing video content in game. In their case, it was their own game.
https://f95zone.to/threads/renpy-videos-wont-play-and-i-dont-know-why.193875/

The solution turned out to be simply installing the latest graphics drivers.

Though I did post a whole thing about video codecs too. If it's just videos that are issue, I'm going to think codec before video drivers. Although the user might want to do both. At the very least, it won't do any harm to update the graphics drivers and install a bunch of codecs they may never need.

 

[strenif]

Just another thought. Is it just THIS image they are having problems with or all images within the game?
Is it just videos or all images?

I'm reminded of a recent problem someone had playing video content in game. In their case, it was their own game.
https://f95zone.to/threads/renpy-videos-wont-play-and-i-dont-know-why.193875/

The solution turned out to be simply installing the latest graphics drivers.

Though I did post a whole thing about video codecs too. If it's just videos that are issue, I'm going to think codec before video drivers. Although the user might want to do both. At the very least, it won't do any harm to update the graphics drivers and install a bunch of codecs they may never need.

Seems to be both images and videos both. Outside of the splash screen at the start of opening the game nothing displays for them. They ended up playing the game on a emulation website. Hopefully the next build we put out will resolve the issue.

That's a great tip on the pause command. I've been playing around with pacing images or text out and renpy.pause() was differently not working for me.
For the replay system, I'll have to look into that.

 

[Turning Tricks]

This is an odd one but we have one user who's reporting that images arn't loading in the game.
View attachment 3769882

No one but them has this issue. We've had them redownload the game, reboot, delete persistent file.
They say that other renpy games work fine.
Not sure what else to suggest to them next. They are a supporter so we'd like to get them up and running again.
Anyone got any ideas?

First of all... I love this game! It was one I played a lot and had a big influence on me starting my own project.

At first, I was leaning towards 79flavors assessment that this is probably due to using mods or breaking into the dev console. For a while, I thought it might be a codec issue with webp because IIRC Win 10 had poor webp native support, but I see that the splashscreen is a webm, so that theory was out the window.

But then I saw the resources this game uses... it's running at 543 MB for me on the very first scene!



That's pretty heavy! My own two VN's sit around 140-150 mb's usually.

Also, I noticed the actual splashscreen vid has been defined as an image and it's 14.9 MB all on it's own! That's a pretty heavy hit before you even start the game, especially on lower end computers. No idea what your subscriber's system is though.

Renpy has issues with it's image predictor when multiple videos are loaded, and I am guessing that by defining all these videos, that might aggravate the condition, so that - maybe - renpy has basically choked out because of the predictor being overrun and/or the available image cache being filled? I only found one instance of the image cache being changed in this game, but that is for a previous version. IIRC, the default image cache size in Renpy is 300MB, so if the game is sucking up 542 MB sitting idle on the first render, could that have something to do with this issue?

Finally, off topic... but I 100% agree about the hard pauses being bad. I made the same mistake myself recently. I thought I was being clever when I had these little pseudo animations of my MC drinking beer. I'd have him raise the beer, pause for a second then lower it and it looked really cool (IMO). It was another attempt of mine to make the scenes more dynamic (along with eye blinking etc). However, I neglected to think about people who played multiple times or on multiple paths and these hard pauses break the CTRL skip feature, so players can't CTRL past scenes they have seen already. I changed them all to normal renpy pauses and it works a lot better now. The fact that this game forces everyone to watch a 13 second splash screen with no way to skip it, is a bit of a bummer. At the very least, you should set a persistent variable to track if they saw it already and allow them to skip it on future playthroughs. I do that with my disclaimer screens. First time through, they have to read them for a set number of seconds, then they don't seen them again.

 

[Turning Tricks]

BTW, just for shits & giggles, I ran a LINT on your project. There was several duplicate defines, a couple of unreachable variable statements and a ton of errors to do with the translations. Here's the log file to review....

LINT log file

 

[79flavors]

That's a great tip on the pause command. I've been playing around with pacing images or text [...]

In the past I've found that it's generally a good idea to make sure there is some dialogue immediately after any video and to make the pause about 0.5 to 1.5 shorter than the video length (about 15% of the video length). That way, (almost) the full video will play, and will likely finish while the player is reading the dialogue that follows it.

Video immediately followed by scene is hard to get right. Also keep in mind that with dissolve or with fade will add about 0.5 seconds - but the upside is that players will rarely see a black screen before the video shows, as the image transitions from the previous scene to the current one (the video).

 

[strenif]

In the past I've found that it's generally a good idea to make sure there is some dialogue immediately after any video and to make the pause about 0.5 to 1.5 shorter than the video length (about 15% of the video length). That way, (almost) the full video will play, and will likely finish while the player is reading the dialogue that follows it.

Video immediately followed by scene is hard to get right. Also keep in mind that with dissolve or with fade will add about 0.5 seconds - but the upside is that players will rarely see a black screen before the video shows, as the image transitions from the previous scene to the current one (the video).

Good advice.

I know just enough to script out scenes but best practices I'm way to green to know yet.

What we really need to fix though is our event tracking system. Most of our player issues come from them not being sure what to do next, and our current setup works but really could use improving. We've just been so focused on creating content that we havn't taken the time to scrap it and start over.