2d light effects in renpy

minami chan

Newbie
Aug 5, 2022
19
36
Hi all,

I am planning for a visual novel game as my next project. I searched the forum and many people suggest Renpy. However, when I read the engine's document, there is no mention about special effects such as light, glow, blur, particles etc. that available in other engine such as Unity or Godot. I am new to Renpy so may be there are tutorials about these effects I have not found. If you know some good tutorial about that for Renpy, please let me know.

Thank you for your help.
 

clowns234

Engaged Member
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May 2, 2021
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You can show an item in a render then have it transition to that item glowing in the next render (or next several renders if you want a more animated effect).
 

Winterfire

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Sep 27, 2018
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Ren'Py is much simpler and cannot be compared to Unity and Godot. There are no colliders, lights, or any other such thing out of the box, you'd have to either code everything you need from scratch and/or use shaders, depending on what you need.

However, if you are making a Visual Novel, you do not need all that stuff. It is just text and images.
You can blur and use particles in-engine if you need, on images.
 
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anne O'nymous

I'm not grumpy, I'm just coded that way.
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Jun 10, 2017
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Ren'Py is much simpler and cannot be compared to Unity and Godot. There are no colliders, lights, or any other such thing out of the box, you'd have to either code everything you need from scratch and/or use shaders, depending on what you need.
There's more than it looks, but effectively not in the same way than Unity and Godot...

Yet Unity/Godot lights and effects wouldn't have much more effect on plane renders than Ren'Py equivalent. Because, if it need to be compared (by OP, not by you), then it need to be compared fairly.



You can show an item in a render then have it transition to that item glowing in the next render (or next several renders if you want a more animated effect).
Renders aren't always needed:

/!\ Need Ren'py 7.4 (from memory) or higher /!\
Python:
define config.gl2 = True

transform lostYourGlasses( child ):
    child
    blur 20

transform dimLight( child ):
    child
    matrixcolor Matrix( [ 0.2, 0, 0, 0,
                          0, 0.2, 0, 0,
                          0, 0, 0.2, 0,
                          0, 0, 0, 1 ] )

label start:
    scene whatever at lostYourGlasses
    "blablabla"
    scene whatever at dimLight
    "END"


I should pass more time on being ready to works on my game, and less on giving away all my tricks...
 

osanaiko

Engaged Member
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Jul 4, 2017
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The first release of Nothing Is Forever used various Renpy plugins to add dynamic lighting effects (seemed to be related to LibGL). However the feedback from a number of players is that is caused crashes, so the Dev decided to remove it starting from chapter 3 (i think). MrSilverLust could perhaps share more info (once he escapes his current release hell! :ROFLMAO:)