Saturday 17 September 2016

BPM in Ren'Py - Timing animations to your musics tempo


I keep meaning to write this up as a blog post! I'm sure somebody will find it useful, either directly, or make them think about some other possibilities when making VNs!

I decided I wanted to have backgrounds flicker in time with my games music and went about it in quite a long-winded manner. Now I have worked out a better way to achieve this type of effect, so I thought I would share it!



Using your music tempo / BPM in Ren'Py


Say you have some music at 130bpm and it is in a 4/4 time signature, what you want for a timed animation is the amount of time in seconds for 1 beat. Really, once you have a beat you can easily find the length of a bar and of half a beat, etc. with some simple math!

To work this out within Ren'Py you can add:


init -1 python:

    the_bpm = 130 #change the number to your musics bpm

    one_beat = 60 / float(the_bpm)



To the top of your script.rpy file.






Now python has worked out our time in seconds for one beat to be something like 0.4615384615384615 for this example and saved it as a variable called "one_beat". I also went ahead and got some more timings based on that with the following:


    two_beat = one_beat * 2

    three_beat = one_beat * 3



    one_eighth = one_beat / 2

    one_sixteenth = one_beat / 4



    one_bar = one_beat * 4

    two_bar = one_bar * 2

    four_bar = one_bar * 4

    eight_bar = one_bar * 8



Which in my script I placed under the code further up where we declare the BPM and work out the length of one beat.

Now when I create an animation with ATL I can use any of these variables instead of typing in 0.4615384615384615 or whatever! E.g.


image bpm-ani:

    "bpm ex fr1.png" with Dissolve(one_beat, alpha=True)

    pause two_beat

    "bpm ex fr2.png" with Dissolve(one_beat, alpha=True)

    pause two_beat

    "bpm ex fr3.png" with Dissolve(one_beat, alpha=True)

    pause two_beat

    "bpm ex fr4.png" with Dissolve(one_beat, alpha=True)

    pause two_beat

    repeat






Now (for the first time in the history of this blog!) I'll add a video to show what this looks AND SOUNDS like! :D


Ren'py ATL to BPM / tempo animation example from sleepy agents on Vimeo.

Here is a link to view the full rpy script file: http://projects.sleepyagents.co.uk/example-script-for-bpm-tempo-in-renpy/
(note: the indent spaces would actually be 4 spaces, not 1, in the actual rpy file)



But what about different time signatures!? Can I just have what I need in a separate .py file which I can re-use in other projects!?

Oh yeah! LydianChord made this handy tool!
https://alexh.itch.io/music-timing-calculator

Which has the directions for use on the page. It's just a matter of pasting a .py file into your base game folder and adding this into your script:

init python:
    from music_timing_calculator import MusicTimingCalculator
    
    calc = MusicTimingCalculator(tempo=120, beats_per_measure=4, num_measures=16)
    
    # Now you can use calc.one_beat, calc.one_measure, calc.song_length
    # and calc.song_length_min in your code


remembering to change the numbers on this line:

calc = MusicTimingCalculator(tempo=120, beats_per_measure=4, num_measures=16)





So that they are correct for your music. I'm planning on using this tool for future projects!



OK that was quite a long post! Just keep in mind some things in ren'py will already have a default time in seconds attached to them, e.g. dissolve takes 0.5 seconds unless you specify it's time. So you may need to look at how to change those in certain scenarios.

Have fun and let me know if you make anything with this!

^^

@sleepyagents

Apartment Complex released for PC/Mac/Linux - android APK also available

Just a quick post to mention that my latest game, Apartment Complex, is now out. It has actually been for 2 weeks, but I've just got around to posting it here!



It's a short point-and-click / visual novel that takes place at about 5am after a heavy night.

I wanted to get a bit better at things like imagemaps/hotspots and animations, so it was good to have a project that focused on these a bit.

There is a bit more information about the game on the itch.io page, linked above.

And for discussions there is a Lemmasoft Forum thread here: https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=40125

Or feel free to send me a message on twitter @sleepyagents

Saturday 16 July 2016

Apartment Complex in development for SuNoFes

Just a quick one!

I am taking part in SuNoFes again this year - more info on the jam here: sunofes.org

My game is going to be called Apartment Complex.

I've been working on BGs and I have nearly 2 finished, I think I'll need at least another 4 though! There's lots to do, but I'm quite busy with work this summer, so I might need to find a quicker approach to some of the assets to get it all done by the end of August.

I'll try to write another update in a week or two. At that stage I will probably also create a work in progress thread on the Lemmasoft Forum.

That's all for now!

Tuesday 5 April 2016

Sunday 6 March 2016

NaNoRenO project - Connection Pools

Oh I should post something on my blog to say I'm doing nano:

I'm doing NaNoRenO again this year!

The game is called Connection Pools, it's got a sci-fi vibe. I really don't want to say too much about it, because I think it might ruin the fun a bit!

Instead I'll post a little wip art and the link to the LSF wip thread and leave it at that for now.

Connection Pools WIP art
Connection Pools WIP art

WIP thread: http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=37463

Sunday 7 February 2016

Easing / Warpers in Ren'Py

Version 6.99.8 of Ren'Py which was released in December 2015 includes these cool new warpers for making animations look smoother/more natural and/or more interesting!

You can see what sort of effect you get on this site:

http://easings.net/

And here is the Ren'Py documentation:
http://www.renpy.org/doc/html/atl.html#warpers

I thought I'd share a little bit of example code for using the cool new warpers in Ren'Py.

--

Here is my code using the easein_back movement:

I have this in my Script file, with the other images I am declaring:

image onion_ani:
    "onion.png"
    xpos 250
    ypos 750
    easein_back 2.5 xpos 550 ypos 500


And then in the game it's just a matter of showing the image:

    show onion_ani
    pause (4.0)
    hide onion_ani with dissolve


The code after the image declaration shows the image at the location provided by xpos and ypos (in this case 250 and 750) then using the nice easein_back movement it goes to the new xpos and ypos ( the 2.5 you see in my example is the amount of time in seconds this takes and the 550 and 500 are the new positions).

Later after "label start:" (i.e. somewhere in the main script of the game) it's shown with the show statement. In my example I also added a 4 second pause and the hide statement, they aren't needed at all for this, but I've included them just in case it helps anybody out at all.

---

It should have been fairly obvious to me that "easein_back" should go in place of "ease". But... I've never really used "ease" - all my old ATL code uses "linear", which is why I spent a while figuring out how to use these functions! I know I always get on better with code examples than I do with documentation (especially when I'm trying to do something quickly!).

Thanks to nyaatrap on lemmasoft forums for the original post http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=35749

And of course to renpytom (https://twitter.com/renpytom) for including them and Robert Penner (http://robertpenner.com/easing/) who, like, invented the original code :D