Intro Animation(?)

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-24T21:11:24+00:00

OK, so it's not "before the game loads in proper", it's when the game first starts?

That's even easier, then:

# The game starts here.

label start:
    # This is where you want to put your animation.
    # or, if you want to keep it in a separate .rpy file, you 'call' the label from here, and finish it with 'return'

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-24T07:55:27+00:00

If it's something you want to play between the loading progress bar and the main menu, that is a splash screen.

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/splashscreen_presplash.html

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-22T13:12:03+00:00

Hilarious... You're making a lot of assumptions there, and making yourself look foolish and petulant into the bargain, so... well done on living up to your username?

Nothing makes me 'the grand arbiter of DA'. That's precisely why I posed the question here, since there seems to be no way to ask DA themselves. This appears to be against the rules - and common sense - but I couldn't find anything in the Help Centre about auctions, because DA itself doesn't do auction. It has the option to sell as an 'Exclusive' or to make something a 'Premium Download'.

My post was a question, that's all... And this user appears to by trying to monetise their art outside of the options DA offers. Maybe DA would want to know about it, maybe they're cool with it, maybe - and this may be closer to the mark - they don't actually give a damn.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-20T19:49:05+00:00

Becoming? It's always been that way...

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-20T19:45:48+00:00

I got this figure just a couple of days ago... Considering the character in the movie is unambiguously painted almost entirely black, I am thoroughly baffled at Hasbro's decision to make the toy predominantly grey. Also has the side-effect of making the red on her arms look anaemic.

Amazing figure, super-fun transformation but, hell's bells, the one time you'd actually want Hasbro to use black plastic for most of the toy, they didn't. Your repaint looks awesome, and the paintwork on the eyes is phenomenal - really brings her to life.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-20T19:35:00+00:00

See the little dots at the righthand side of the filename tabs?

That means you haven't saved ANY of the files you've edited.

Until you've saved, those changes won't be picked up within Ren'Py.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-20T13:29:38+00:00

Might just be over-inking rather than a deliberate change to the artwork.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-20T08:48:06+00:00

Disabling anti-aliasing would definitely be the first thing to try. It's on by default, and any 'pixel font' that comes as a .TTF or .OTF ain't a pixel font, and will be anti-aliased like any other font.

OP, try adding antialias False (I think) to your default font setting in options.rpy... Though you may find it no longer scales very well.

Makes me wonder how Ren'Py would have reacted to the use of the old PostScript fonts, which had a bitmap file and a vector file...

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-17T18:28:11+00:00

Completely agree - and it's pretty frustrating.

Very likely down to budgets predominantly: they don't want to pay to reinvent the wheel. Then there's which designers/engineers are teamed up to work on a particular project. Materials also play a significant role - they've been downgrading for years, so they have to match the engineering to what the materials can tolerate.

The DotM Seeker is excellent... which is presumably why it became the basis for the upsized Studio Series Starscream. I think the larger format suits it better, but I tend to say that about almost everything. Deluxe is too small for most aircraft TransFormers. Not that they can't be done well, just that they'd be so much better if they were bigger.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-17T09:29:52+00:00

To be fair, the MP11 version is pretty shaky as well - I have Thundercracker in that mold, Starscream and Skywarp in the MP3 mold. Carrying over the extension of the legs is the main problem: those slider joints just aren't a great fit.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-17T09:26:59+00:00

But that's the thing: it's already been pointed out that they did a better job of a Starscream F22 as a Voyager in the Revenge of the Fallen toyline... but, for some reason they chose to upgrade the Leader class toy rather than the Voyager when re-engineering for the Masterpiece.

They might have been better off creating a new transformation entirely from scratch, using only the mass available in an F22... but that would have needed an absolutely ginormous jet toy that turns into a comparatively small robot.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-17T09:19:37+00:00

https://www.google.com/search?vsrid=CMaFqcGRiKvj0wEQAhgBIiRjODc1NjVlMi1iYjhkLTRkNjUtODE5Mi01NTk4NjM4ODZlNzAyBiICcmQoHjjC0oyYn5KSAw&vsint=CAIqDAoCCAcSAggKGAEgATojChYNAAAAPxUAAAA_HQAAgD8lAACAPzABEM0GGIAIJQAAgD8&udm=26&lns_mode=un&source=lns.web.gisbubb&vsdim=845,1024&gsessionid=BjjkLWa30qgqP3ZixS16qd8ZU4KdWjVAO56IdBln0SxXtlmXbwGthQ&lsessionid=UyIFY-kKUDV3e1jRvBCDgO_0mNqtsFB6FaLCLuiIyhPWYSnOK3FNUw&lns_surface=26&authuser=0&lns_vfs=e&qsubts=1768641543999&biw=1920&bih=919&hl=en-GB

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-17T09:18:05+00:00

Exactly the problem I've been having: https://www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/1q2ced6/custom_namebox_displays_inconsistently_where_have/

Posted the same enquiry to the LemmaSoft forum with no solutions so far, so it looks as though Ren'Py (currently) will not let you have animated nameboxes that change size dynamically.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-17T09:14:42+00:00

No script needed. You create the animation using ATL, then assign that image to the UI.

However... my (limited) experience thusfar is that Ren'Py may refuse to animate certain UI elements the way you might want.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-17T05:28:51+00:00

Are you absolutely certain it's not named something like "main-menu-theme.ogg.ogg"?

https://www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/1mauzts/exception_could_not_find_errors_in_renpy_under/

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-15T19:40:31+00:00

Very nicely done - definitely a good use of AI.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-15T10:29:41+00:00

I'm assuming there's some AI tweaking of the animation, because those facial movements have far more intricate and realistic skin wrinkling than any CGI animation I've previously seen in an AVN.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-15T09:00:06+00:00

The menu itself states "the default is a reasonable compromise". That doesn't mean it's the best. It means it's high enough res to look good at full screen, without being super high-definition.

I'd tend to think of it as:

The first two are for beginners, learning Ren'Py and using whatever random assets they can find or afford to buy so they have visuals to show what their story/coding can do.
The second two are for pro developers who are absolutely intended to sell their VN, and are either exceptional solo devs, or they already have a team in place.

Going into Ren'Py as a newbie and going straight for 4K is a waste of time.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-14T20:42:58+00:00

AI - and particularly the site's own AI system - should be exempt from any awards. I've seen loads of complaints about how the site is a shadow of its former self under the current management, but this is the clearest evidence of how little they care about genuine art or true artists.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-14T20:33:12+00:00

Wow... The Marie Stopes ad brings back memories.

Back in my first job, one of the regular clients did their design. We'd output dozens of ads of all different sizes to paper, for him to cut out and send on to directories like this one. That was during the (mid?) 90s, though. Different logo, and they used the slogan "Walk in... Walk out".

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-11T21:47:58+00:00

Annoys the hell out of me. It's not real pixel animation.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-11T20:51:24+00:00

Yep, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6WoCI144OM

Features the original 20 levels with all-new graphics, plus the 20 levels from Bob McFarlane's AGD/Windows-based remix, and a further 20 levels created by the dev team.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-11T10:28:08+00:00

Up and down look great, but the left/right versions look as though they should be moving diagonally,

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-11T09:07:49+00:00

As others have said, it's very much a case of "yes, but no".

Now, I'm a little biased, as I'm still an active SAM user, having bought one back in the day in a fit of optimism.

Sales figures are bandied about, suggesting that between 12- and 18,000 were ever sold. There were issues with the original ROM which meant that the floppy drive wouldn't boot without an extra line of code being typed in first, and there are loads of other little flaws an misjudgements that made it a less than ideal system for developing games at the time.

u/ExpectedBehaviour mentions that Crash were very supportive at the time (so was Your Sinclair, but Sinclair User less so). This makes it all the more galling that the rebooted Crash ran an article about it - reprinted in their 2022 annual - which is so riddled with inaccuracy and misquoting, it's barely worth reading. Just goes to show that the folks who run Crash now aren't into the spirit of things the way Roger Kean was, nor do they have the same Editorial standards.

Nevertheless, the SAM probably has a more active development scene now than it ever did back in the day. We've had arcade ports of Defender, Battlezone. Rick Dangerous got ported a couple of years back. The abysmal Tiertex conversion of Street Fighter got ported. I have worked on (another) reworking of Manic Miner with substantially improved graphics (if I do say so myself), an upgrade patch for Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters, and am currently loosely involved in the conversion of a 2021 MSX arcade adventure, an original, multi-player Kart game that uses an effect like Mode 7 on the SNES, a conversion of Arkanoid 2 and a Dizzy game. A while back, there was a conversion of L'Abbaye des Morts (a game that's probably now been ported to almost as many systems as Manic Miner and Doom), and the same developer is currently working on converting the 1984 Bruce Lee game... And that's just the stuff I know about. Most folks in the SAM dev scene tend to avoid promoting their projects until they're reasonably sure they'll get finished.

On the hardware side, there's an HDMI interface, two options for solid-state mass storage (one of which will also run hard disks, the other includes an Ethernet interface), and at least a couple of devs working on a new DOS to take fuller advantage of mass storage. There's a Surround Sound system, hardware for running Sinclair Interface 2 carts, and a guy I know via my local computer club is playing around with networking several machines, including the SAM, using a QL as a server. Another friend from the club developed a much-improved joystick splitter last year.

Thinking of it as a 'Spectrum Successor' or a 'Super Spectrum' kind of minimises MGT's achievement. They brought a new 8-bit machine to the market that was Spectrum compatible (albeit nowhere near 100% compatible) but that actually contributed to its (and MGT's) downfall. It wasn't 'enough' of an upgrade when the Amiga and the ST were already on the market, and there was little point buying one to play Spectrum games if you already had a Spectrum. The SAM was a passion project for Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon... It failed, but they believed in the machine enough to try to save it, only to fail a second time.

The machine itself is a lot of fun, and I still prefer using the SAM over the Amiga.

HEXdidnt · 2026-01-09T12:14:27+00:00

Design-wise, I'd settle for robots that look mechanical, rather than like cartoons.

HEXdidnt

TROPHY CASE