this engine is playable but clunky, renpy is so much better cause its lightweight, as far as I can tell this engine has no benefits over renpy to warrant how sluggish it is
thats not to say one day it wont be better but yes the game would be better on renpy, if only because of how fast everything happens in it, from loading and saving, animation and especially skipping
its fine if you only do one playthrough but this game has choices and branches so its important for replay-ability
this is coming from a user on a 5k USD PC, so its not a hardware issue
In what ways is the engine sluggish and clunky? I even tested it on a macbook air from 2012 with an atom processor in it and it runs flawlessly though it takes a few seconds for the game to start when you launch it. Not sure what you mean with animatiosn and skipping. The skipping was limited on purpose just because people tend to skip through the entire game in in a few minutes and call it too short of an update. When i turn off the limiter it skips as fast as your PC can handle but then its too easy to skip past something. Ren'py doesnt particularly load or save any faster, for me it's borderline instant, pressing last choice is instant for me? And not sure what your feedback is on the animations they are just video clips played back it has nothing to do with the engine.
Again we provide the last choice feature which no other game has and that helps with trying different paths immensly.
Sounds like you got something going on with your PC if it runs this bad as you are saying, doesnt matter if its 5K, something aint right if we have this working on a potato. I also tested it on another ultra small PC that i use for travels which is also on an atom CPU 1.7ghz no dedicated graphics. Ram usage and CPU usage is very low in the game.
Granted in renpy you rightclick to open the save menu, but that is only neccessary because you have to save at basically every choice, in this game you don't have to do that, if you do that it's just a bad habit from ren'py, and you would be far better off not thinking so much about and just enjoying the game instead of worrying you are messing up choices along the way, but you can't even go backwards in most ren'py games, such a basic feature most VN's dont even seem to have, to go back.
Edit: another thing is that so many renpy games out there don't even carry over your saves between updates, which i would take for granted. So many exuses about making changes between updates making saves break, if you do things right you can convert old saves to new saves without the player knowing about it. We've been running the same save file support from 0.4.0 chapter 1 to 1.0 revamp, then we revised the game so much we decided its better to let people play it over again, and entire chapter 2 has just worked with your previous saves.
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